USE THE PRODUCT!

When I split the bamboo for my first handmade fly rod, I had this naive idea that the hard part would be the big gestures like splitting the cane in a way that would leave enough material to make all the pieces. Once I got through that step, the repetitive steps of planing and sanding were going to be my undoing—progress is slow, but one wrong movement and the whole thing gets scrapped. Almost fifty hours later I had learned that the craft lives in ability to get lost in the process and take each step for what it is — the small, exact actions that add up to making something amazing. Splitting the cane straight. Hand-planing strips until they were sized to meet an exact template. Fitting the strips together to form a tapered octagon that half as thick as a toothpick at the smallest edge. Sanding, gluing, more sanding. Fitting the the reel seat, adding the guides, and then, applying thin coats of varnish and waiting between them.

Getting ahead of yourself or loosing focus on the step can be a real problem. Sometimes in product management, we have a mindset to just ship a product to production and fix it later with a post release bug fix. There are some products where that is absolutely the right approach—first to market is a must have and customer expectations are flexible enough to accept a product that can be improved. In the case of a bamboo fly rod, that is not the case—if it is not right, then it won’t cast properly, or will not have the ample strength to survive a battle with a fish, and you will be left with nothing to show for the hard work of product development.

That being said, there also is and impulse to treat a finished rod as a piece of art: a thing to show. Same thing can be said for certain products — the development cycle can take forever becuase the product manager wants it to be perfect. Endless analysis, refinement, demos, retooling. Then when the product finally does ship, it is too late, too expensive, too feature rich for customers; just too much.

Products like the fishing rod are developed for a purpose, and while there is a huge amount of pride that goes into the development, it is the outcome where the thrill really comes. Product management needs to balance the development of the best possible product (with “best” defined relative to the !) with the outcomes that the product delivers for customers.

To complete the circle, that fly rod I made was a tool, engineered to perform. The first time I fished it, it felt alive in the hand; different from the other graphite rods I was used to fishing with. And then finally, last month it put a fish in the net! The satisfaction wasn’t in the exactness of the rod production or the quality of sanding.. It was in the union of design, discipline, and use.

Here’s the main takeaway: build with intention, test with humility, and then put the thing to work. When you do, you’ll learn faster, you’ll notice the gaps sooner, and the product will repay the effort with joy.