Tipping the hat without promising the farm
I, like many other consultants, base my livelihood on the Salesforce.com platform. It’s an interesting relationship–I can suggest where the platform goes, but I surely don’t have much influence. Salesforce.com is now a Billion dollar company with 1 Million users. My voice is a small one.
Because of this relationship, I gleefully devour any crumbs of insight that dribble out of the Company. And Tom Tobin is my favorite conveyor of those crumbs. As he demonstrated again today in this post about reporting features, he gives us the story on where Reporting and Analytics are right now, and more importantly, where it likely is and isn’t going. The “isn’t going” info is often more valuable than the “going” info, by the way.
I think the trick that Tom has mastered is how to talk about the road map without promising features. He does this by honestly telling you what is potentially easy and what is hard. Also, he shares with you what requests are the most interesting to him. He doesn’t promise this feature or that, but knowing what he’s thinking about helps me to know where he’s thinking of taking the platform.
As SaaS becomes more prevalent, this is a seemingly important skill set to build. Especially in an organization that listens to it’s Users and also is trying to foster a community of developers. I would suggest that this ability of subtly pointing the direction a platform is going in public, without requiring an NDA, is one that modern Product Managers should get good at.
