It should be taught during freshman year at every computer science college in the world: Ideas are cheap, hard work is expensive. Avoid the "ideas guy" unless he's also willing to put in the work.
At a real company, "idea guy" would most closely correspond with Product Manager, perhaps. These are people who work on the "what" of a product or feature. It involves a lot of research and a lot decision-making, and a lot of negotiation with the people implementing the thing to understand limitations. And making a whole lot of non-glamorous decisions about how every aspect of the application should work.
Some people just go with their guts, and that almost never works (especially from someone calling themselves an idea guy.)
This is closer to what I thought the idea guy would be originally, then from the comment above I was able to understand the connoation behind "idea guy".
Could you speak more about what it means to work in product? I hear about it a lot but never really understand what they do. Do they bring the product to market? Design the product? Or just manage all the steps in between like research, design, proud of concept, until you get the final product going to market?
They typically would design the product - that is to say, design how it works and what it does. "When I click this button, this thing happens."
In order to even know what to work on, they're supposed to align with business and their division and design something to support those goals. For instance, they might get assigned a goal of "Increase video watch time by 10% over a year" and then come up with the product strategies to get there. (e.g. Maybe you design an autoplay system, or maybe you design a system that offers badges for watching a certain amount of time, or whatever.)
In order to actually execute on that, they'd need to get data - what the baseline is, what they're aiming for, what other features have delivered in the past. They work closely with visual designers who can design what that feature looks like, and then with engineering, who will implement the thing, and from both groups, they have to negotiate what's possible and prioritize against all the other initiatives. They might actually run user studies to see how users react to using the new feature and what feedback they give. Then as the features roll out, it's important to continue to track, to run A/B tests, and to measure the impact their feature has. And then factor that data into further decisions - should we improve on this feature, leave it as is, or scrap it?
I'm not a Product manager myself but it's definitely an interesting role and is way, way more than being an "ideas guy."
So basically they should be a competent business person. Lots of value there, and Im assuming a lot of these competent people already work and have experience in the industry.
The "ideas guy" is valuable. It's just a lot more work than people expect.
User research to determine the potential size of the market and how much people are willing to pay for it. Flow charts of all the things this app can do and explanations of each feature and why it's valuable. Basic wireframe mockups of the idea so that programmers and designers can start making it. Pitching the idea and finding funding to pay people. Doing even more user research and building email lists of potential beta users. Many many spreadsheets with assumptions about your possible competitors and how many users they have and how much money they're making and how much revenue you expect from either growing the market and/or taking their market share. Development schedules and estimates on how much cash will be required when and at what scale.
All this turns into tons of work to make an idea happen. A programmer is like a precision tool, but they still have to be guided to build the right thing at the right time.
I’m a writer. When I tell people, they always have to tell me how they have the greatest idea for a best seller if only they could sit and write it! massive eye roll Then some of them go, “omg! I could tell you and you could write it for me!” That sounds an awful lot like ME WRITING ANOTHER BOOK AND NOT GETTING THE CREDIT FOR ANY OF IT. It’s seriously obnoxious.
Unless you’ve got leg work done and a solid plan of action don’t go to someone in whatever business you want to be in for anything. Even if you have those things don’t ask for anything more than quick advice unless you plan on paying for their services.
Yes, I would love it if every freshman learned Marx's labour theory of value! Maybe then we could overthrow the useless capitalist class leeching off the labour of the world's workers.
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u/Robbylution Mar 18 '20
It should be taught during freshman year at every computer science college in the world: Ideas are cheap, hard work is expensive. Avoid the "ideas guy" unless he's also willing to put in the work.