He thought why can’t everyone use the same color book to produce color. Mr. Sadow, who was at that time a vice president at a Massachusetts company that made luggage and coats, is credited with inventing rolling luggage. Finally, he was able to find a believe in his idea in the form of a manager of a Macy’s store, who ordered a few of this product. In either case, successful product managers are not only able to identify these opportunities but are also able to convince people around them of the true opportunity that lies therein. As a product manager, if you are unable to clearly articulate the vision of the product to the actual developers of the product, there is a good chance that you will not get what you want. We also need to understand that each stakeholder (customers, senior management, developers, product managers, marketing managers, sales executives) in the product management cycle speaks a different language. In order to be able to ask interesting questions, we first need to identify and attempt to Solve Interesting Problems. Understand our bias against creativity and Learn to address it: Jennifer Mueller, in her book, Creative Change, argues that we are inherently biased against creative ideas and explains why this is so. Connect and Combine: The ability to come up with creative ideas is very much like any other language that we speak or learn. Ability to come up with creative problems to solve and creative solutions/perspectives.
I personally believe that creative thinking is a critical skill that all of us need to develop among us but it is even more relevant if we want to be a product manager and give birth, grow and mature a product.
First, lets talk about a few successful products and the stories about how they became successful. We will then try to learn what did the product managers (in some cases, entrepreneurs themselves) do so that their products became successful.
10-22-38: Astoria:
This marks the date and place where the photocopiers, that we know of today, in its true sense was born.
Chester Carlson was a patent attorney in Mallory’s, while studying law. As he worked at his job, he noticed that there never seemed to be enough carbon copies of patent specification, and there seemed to be no quick or practical way of getting more. The choices were limited to sending for expensive photo copies, or having the documents retyped and then re-read for errors.
It occurred to him that it would be a good idea if he could develop a machine which could take these documents and create copies quickly and cheaply. For many months, he spent a lot of time in the New York Public library trying to read and learn everything there was to the imaging process. He realised that he would not focus on the traditional process (chemical) of copying as there were many people who were exploring that side of imaging. He decided to experiment with a little known field of photoconductivity and after years or tinkering in a makeshift lab, he and his assistant Otto Kornei were able to copy this exact picture using their machine.
It was still a struggle trying to convince someone to invest in the technology and develop it into product. It was in 1959 that the Haloid company finally was able to launch The 914 copier, which went on to become a phenomenal success. Thus started the industry that revolutionised the world.
You can read the entire history of the birth of xerography here.
Pantone Color Matching:
One an eventful day in the early 1960’s, Lawrence Herbert, the co-owner of a printing company named Pantone was fuming because a simple job ruined his entire week. In those days, every dye manufacturer used their own proprietary way to name the colors and what went into it. No two shipments of the same color would match; no two dyes, with same name and pigments from different dye manufacturers would match, which caused a lot of challenges for each printer.
He had enough of this trouble and in a fit of anger decided to do something about it. He thought why can’t everyone use the same color book to produce color. So, with this insight, he set out to imagine and develop an alternate reality for his world. All he did was to figure out a way to match a specific color to a number, which then became a global, common language that everyone in the industry would speak in. So, if someone needed a specific shade of Yellow, they would just ask for Pantone 123 (a daffodil Yellow) and irrespective of who or where in the world sold that color, it would be exactly the same.
He created a sample page to show how this would work and sent it out to ink makers. Its more than 50 years now and his catalog and system is still being used worldwide, not just by ink makers but by everyone who uses color in some way or format. This simple catalog has spawned an organization that dominates the color industry.
They are so important to the fashion & visual art industry that they predict the trends in terms of color that they see playing out in the market, based on which color seems to have had the most demand in the previous period.
They have announced that the color of the year 2017 is going to be Pantone Greenery. So, get ready to see a lot of green all around you.
The Suitcase and The Wheel:
Thousands of years ago, there were two important inventions, the wheel and the sack. As a frequent traveler, I always wonder why it took so long to put rollers on that sack to create wheeled luggage.
“It was one of my best ideas,” Bernard D. Sadow said the other day. Mr. Sadow, who was at that time a vice president at a Massachusetts company that made luggage and coats, is credited with inventing rolling luggage.
It was Bernard Sadow was waiting at the customs while coming back home from a family vacation. As he carried two heavy suitcases through the airport, he observed a worker effortlessly rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid.
Inspiration hit him and he said to his wife – ‘You know, that’s what we need for luggage,’. When he got back to work, he took casters off a wardrobe trunk and mounted them on a big travel suitcase and it worked. He was elated. He got a United States patent No. 3,653,474, for this invention.
“Rolling Luggage,” as he called it, did not take off immediately, though. He recalled the many months that he spend rolling his prototype bad on sales calls to department stores. Finally, he was able to find a believe in his…
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