Bloom or Prune: Plant Parenting Truths for Thriving Product Portfolios
Growing up, it was a Memorial Day family tradition to go to the local plant nursery, load up the car with pallets of flowers and plants and then spend the rest of the day digging holes in soil and arranging our new flora. Fast forward 20 years, I have my own plant collection along with a plant infirmary section and a propagation station. While planting is one of my hobbies, it has taught me a lot about how to be a better Product Manager.
You can’t plant and forget
Buying a new plant is really exciting. There is so much optimism and hope about how big and beautiful it will grow up to be. After you bring it home, you find a nice pot, a good spot for your new friend and take an obligatory photo. Excellent work, you are now a proud plant parent and may be tempted to start buying more plants.
The excitement around buying a new plant is the same feeling experienced when building a new product. Just like with a new plant, there is optimism and anticipation about the potential for growth and success with a new product idea. The planning and initial setup can feel like carefully picking out the right pot and location — you want to give your new idea the perfect environment to thrive. And just as you might snap a photo of your new plant, many product teams celebrate the launch of their product with a press release. However, the real work and challenge begins after that initial planting or launch. Keeping a plant healthy and helping a product grow into a mature offering requires consistent nurturing, the right resources, and making adjustments based on their evolving needs over time. The excitement of the new must be balanced with patience and diligence to create something sustainable and successful in the long run.
Just because you can propagate, doesn’t mean you should
Propagation is when you take a cutting from an existing plant to grow new baby plants. This is an oddly satisfying task because it’s an opportunity to grow something new. If successful, you will have a healthy new plant one day that you can use to beautify your home or give away as a gift. However, there is a hidden cost to propagation — time. There is a tax on your time for continued care and maintenance. This is in addition to all the other plants you already have to water and prune.
As a Product Manager, your time is fixed and extremely valuable. Just like propagating new plants adds demands for care and maintenance, taking on new projects or product lines stretches your limited bandwidth. Every new initiative requires nurturing through its various product life cycles — defining requirements, securing resources, building out an MVP. At a certain point, this sprawling product garden becomes unmanageable for one Product Manager to effectively maintain alone. Tough prioritization decisions must be made — which products get more of your time versus being de-prioritized or even sunsetted entirely. Bringing in additional product gardeners helps, but it also adds overhead. It’s tempting to keep propagating and accumulating more, but it’s critical to know which plants are worth going all-in on versus just admiring them from afar.
Once in a while, a plant needs a new environment
Sometimes a plant needs a new home. Maybe it has grown too big for its pot, its growth has plateaued, it’s competing for resources or it’s sick. As a plant parent, it’s important to identify when it’s time to change your plant’s environment. This requires careful observation over time. Changing the environment at the first sign of a yellow leaf may be too proactive while waiting for all the leaves to turn brown may be too passive. Finding the right balance is imperative.
This analogy is applicable to both your product as well as your professional career. Just like plants, products and careers need environments that foster growth and success. There may come a time when a product has outgrown its initial market. Being able to pivot a product to new customer segments provides the fertile ground it needs to truly thrive. This type of change can only be understood after proper observation of data analytics. Pivoting too early can kill a company’s strategy while pivoting too late may be the product’s demise. Similarly, your own career may stagnate if you remain in the same role or company for too long. A career move to a new organization with more opportunities and challenges can reinvigorate your growth.
Not every plant is worth saving
Even the best plant parents have to deal with a sick plant once in a while. The plant can reach old age, get a bug infestation or receive the wrong light/water levels. There is a natural urge to want to save every plant. Bringing an ailing plant back to full health is a great feeling but it requires a lot of work. Plants are extremely resilient and adaptive but not every plant is worth saving.
Just like plants, products are living things that have natural life cycles. There comes a point when resources are better spent on other projects. Cutting ties with a beloved but stagnant product is difficult, but it opens the door for new growth opportunities. Sunk costs are hard to walk away from, but clinging to the past prevents you from flourishing in the future.
Cultivate for success
Growing and nurturing plants provides an insightful analogy for product management. Just as plants require proper care, environments, and life cycle management, so too must we thoughtfully cultivate our products and professional journeys for optimal growth and success. With prioritization and effective trade-off decisions, we can prune what is no longer fruitful to make space for new, flourishing opportunities.
