Every Great Product---伟大产品背后的那些伟大的女性产品经理

编者注

在产品经理人群中，通常被认为是男性的天下，在2017年，中国女性产品经理只占27.59%（数据来源于《2017年中国产品管理者现状》调查报告），而在国外，要比国内的情况好一些，女性产品经理也只有40%（数据来源于《2018年美国产品管理者调查报告》）。

当然，如果放到一个较长的时期看，女性产品经理的比例还是在不断增长，这也充分说明在产品经理这个圈子里，女性产品经理已经开始成为一个不可忽视，也不能忽视的群体。

尽管我们说女性从事产品管理工作有这样或那样的优势，但我们还是更多在阐述她们的劣势，但事实上，我们能看到的很多伟大的产品其实都是这些女性产品经理的杰作。

坚韧、创新、变革、这些似乎和女性不太沾边的产品经理特质，其实在她们的身上也会体现的淋漓尽致。

这篇长文并非我原创，而是我偶尔看到的一篇国外的讲稿，原标题是《Every Great Product》（每个伟大的产品），但是我在读完该文后，发现文中所举的案例竟然都是女性产品经理的作品，因此，我对该文进行了重新的整理，并把名字改成了《伟大产品背后的那些伟大的女性产品经理》，我希望从这个视角来说明我的一个观点：性别不会阻挡女性成为一个优秀的产品经理。

在本文中，一共会展示五位优秀的女性产品经理，分别是：

WORD FOR MAC – Martina Lauchengco

NETFLIX – Kate Arnold

GOOGLE ADWORDS – Jane Manning

APPLE ITUNES – Camille Hearst

ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD – Lea Hickman

同时，为了更好的让大家阅读，我对原文进行了简单的翻译，当然，翻译水平有限，英文好的朋友可以自行翻译阅读，英文不好的朋友就凑合着看吧。

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When I first decided to start The Silicon Valley Product Group, I had just left eBay and had some very strong opinions about what makes great product teams, and great product cultures, and while there were more than a few important thinkers and leaders on these topics, one area that I felt was under-represented was the role of product management.So one of the very first things I did was to sit down and write an essay about what I believed about this role. I titled the paper, “Behind Every Great Product” and it was inspired by the classic Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz.The paper proved popular and helped many teams to get a better understanding of just what product was all about.

当我首次决定开始硅谷产品组的时候，我刚刚离开易趣，并且在什么会造就一个伟大的产品团队和伟大的产品文化上有一些非常强烈的观点，尽管对于这些话题有不少重要的意见领袖，我感觉依然有一个领域还不是很有代表性，这个就是产品管理的作用。所以我做的第一件事就是坐下来写一篇关于我对这个作用的看法的文章。我把这篇论文命名为“每一个伟大的产品背后”，它的灵感来自于本·霍洛维茨(Ben Horowitz)的经典产品经理/糟糕产品经理。这篇论文被证明很受欢迎，并帮助许多团队更好地了解产品是什么。

Now, more than a decade later, I’d like to revisit this topic.There are three main reasons for this:

现在，十多年后，我想重新讨论这个话题。有三个主要原因:

First, even though I personally spend a good deal of my time writing and coaching and teaching about product management, there’s little question that there remains considerable confusion about this role. There are multiple reasons for this but it’s simply too important to continue.

首先，尽管我个人花了大量时间撰写、指导和教授产品管理，但毫无疑问，这个角色仍然存在相当大的困惑。原因有很多，但继续下去太重要了。

Second, I’ve learned a lot in the years since I first wrote about this. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many impressive teams and product managers from a broad range of leading tech companies, and this has helped me to get a better sense of the what is essential to the role, and to success.

第二，从开始写文章到现在，我也学到了很多。我曾有机会与来自众多顶尖科技公司的，令人印象深刻的团队和产品经理共事，这让我对这个角色和成功的要素有了更好的认识。

Third, I argue that the role is now more essential than ever. I see this role as absolutely critical to success, and very often is the difference between success and failure.

第三，我认为，现在这个角色比以往任何时候都更重要。我认为这个角色对成功是至关重要的，在成功和失败之间也常常是存在差异的。

What has not changed is my overarching belief that behind every great product, there is someone, usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly, that is playing this critical role.They usually have the title “product manager” but they might be a startup co-founder or the CEO, or they might be in another role on the team and stepped up because they saw the need.The title is not important; the work they do is.

没有改变的是，我始终坚信，在每一个伟大的产品背后，总有一个人，通常是幕后的人，不知疲倦地工作着，在扮演着关键的角色。他们通常有“产品经理”的头衔，但他们可能是创业公司的联合创始人或首席执行官，或者他们可能是团队中的另一个角色，因为他们看到了需要而站出来。职位名称不重要；他们做的工作才重要。

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success:

产品经理有三种工作方式，我认为其中只有一种能成功：

They can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO. In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEO’s tell me this is the model they’re in and it’s not working. If you think the product manager job is what’s described in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class, you almost certainly fall into this category.

他们可以将每一个问题和决策向上传达到首席执行官。在这个模型中，产品经理实际上是一个backlog管理员。很多CEO都告诉我他们就是这种模式，但这是行不通的。如果您认为产品经理的工作就是认证的Scrum PO要求的话，几乎可以确定您就属于这一类。

They can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then just let them fight it out – this is design by committee and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. This is very common in large companies, and in this model, the product manager is really a project manager and roadmap administrator.

他们可以召集所有的利益相关者开会，然后让他们去解决——这是委员会的设计，除了平庸之辈之外，很少会有别的结果。这在大公司中非常常见，在这个模型中，产品经理实际上是一个项目经理和路线图管理员。

The product manager can do his or her job.

产品经理能够做他或她的工作。

So my intention here is to show you great examples of this third way of working.

我的目的是通过很好的例子向你们展示第三种工作方式。

Normally I do this by explaining the critical responsibilities and the necessary character traits and skills, but in this article I will be taking a very different approach. I want to instead introduce you to real people.

通常我是通过解释重要的责任和必要的性格特征和技能来阐述这一点的，但是在本文中，我将采用一种非常不同的方法。我想把真实的人介绍给你。

Anyone that’s ever worked in product for any amount of time knows that creating products is never easy, but I selected these particular examples to illustrate the very difficult but essential contribution that comes from a strong product manager.

任何曾在产品领域工作过的人都知道，创建产品从来都不容易，但是我选择了这些例子来说明一个强大的产品经理所做出的非常困难，但非常重要的贡献。

The products are all iconic, and everyone that reads this will know of every product I describe, but few people know the actual product managers behind these products. And fewer still know the back stories behind these successful products.

这些产品都是标志性的，阅读本文的每个人都会知道我所描述的每一个产品，但很少有人知道这些产品背后的真正的产品经理。很少有人知道这些成功产品背后的故事。

I don’t think these stories have ever been shared publicly before, and they are stories that I believe deserve to be told.

我认为这些故事以前从未公开分享过，我相信这些故事应该被告知。

These stories will hopefully show you several examples of product managers doing their job and doing it well.

这些故事将会向你展示产品经理做他们的工作，并做好的几个例子。

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WORD FOR MAC – Martina Lauchengco

为客户做正确的事

In 1993, Word 6.0 was the biggest release, feature-wise, Microsoft had ever produced up until then.

在1993年，Word 6.0是微软迄今为止发布的最大的版本。

In addition to all the new features, the team had another very large objective.Their code base had diverged and it was extremely slow and costly for Microsoft to be implementing Word separately for each platform: Windows, DOS and Mac.This code convergence effort was supposed to save Microsoft substantial development time, and also - they tried to convince themselves - improve the offering since Word would have the same features on every platform.

除了所有的新特性之外，这个团队还有另外一个很大的目标。对于微软来说，他们的代码库分化是极其缓慢而昂贵的，微软要实现为WORD分割到每个平台：Windows, DOS and Mac。代码融合努力被期望应该节省大量开发时间，同时，他们也试图让自己相信，改善提供的WORD会在每一个平台上有相同的特性。

It also meant that there was great pressure to get the release out so they could start to gain the efficiencies of a single code base.

这也意味着发布版本的压力很大，因此他们可以开始获得单个代码库的效率。

At the time, Word for Mac was a relatively small market. It was only $60M vs. Windows which at that point was more than a $1B market.

当时，Mac的Word市场规模相对较小。与Windows相比，只有6000万美元，而windows超过了10亿美元。

If you remember back then, Windows machines absolutely dominated, and even the future of Apple was not a sure thing.

如果你还记得当时的情况，Windows电脑绝对是主流，而Apple未来是什么样都不知道。

However, the Mac community was also very vocal, with passionate fans of their platform, and is also important to note that this community had very little love for Microsoft.

不过，Mac社区也有非凡的声音，在这个平台上有热情的粉丝，而且值得注意的是，这个社区对微软几乎没有什么好感。

PowerMacs were just hitting the market, which had significantly faster chips and more memory. Most of the team were using those new computers because the Word 6.0 beta in it's early days was just too slow on regular Macs.

PowerMacs刚刚进入市场，它拥有更快的芯片和更多的内存。这个团队的大多数人都在使用这些新电脑，因为在早期，Word 6.0 beta在普通的mac电脑上太慢了。

Of course, most of the Mac user base was not on new PowerMacs, they were on 'regular' Macs -- hardware upgrade cycles were much slower then.

当然，大多数Mac用户都不在新的PowerMacs上，而是在“常规”Mac上——硬件升级周期要慢得多。

So when Microsoft released the most "full-featured word processor ever for the Mac" that crawled on their Macs -- we're talking literally two minutes to startup-- the community immediately started posting in newsgroups that Microsoft was actually trying to "kill the Mac."

因此，当微软发布了有史以来最“功能齐全的Mac文字处理软件”，在他们的Mac电脑上爬行时——我们不夸张的说，软件两分钟后才启动——社区立即开始在新闻组中发帖，称微软实际上是在“杀死Mac”。

Hate mail started streaming in from everywhere - including emails directly to Bill Gates who would forward them on to the team with messages like "this is depressing MSFT's stock price. Fix it."

仇恨邮件开始从四面八方涌来——包括直接发给比尔•盖茨的邮件，盖茨会把这些邮件转发给团队，并附上诸如“这压低了微软金融时报的股价”之类的信息。修复它。”

Enter Martina Lauchengco, a young product manager recently out of Stanford, whose job it was to help turn this around.

刚从斯坦福大学毕业的年轻产品经理Martina Lauchengco，他的工作就是帮助扭转局面。

The team quickly learned that while it may be a worthwhile objective to get to a common code base, it’s an empty victory if the product that results is not good. Moreover, users choose their devices and platforms because they value what's different, not the same.

团队很快认识到，虽然获得一个通用代码库可能是一个有价值的目标，但如果产品的结果不好的话，那将是一个无意义的胜利。此外，用户选择他们的设备和平台是因为他们看重不同的东西，而不是相同的东西。

From the customer’s point of view, they would rather wait a little longer and have a better platform-specific solution, than simultaneously ship a generic product on all platforms.

从客户的角度来看，他们宁愿等待更长一点的时间并拥有更好的特定于平台的解决方案，也不愿在所有平台上同时发布通用产品。

The team ended up focusing hard on performance, and taking advantage of what the Mac could do.

这个团队最终专注于性能，并利用了Mac的优势。

They looked at things like when and how to load fonts since Mac users tended to have so many more than Windows users, and ensuring all Mac keyboard shortcuts still worked.

他们研究了诸如何时以及如何加载字体的问题，因为Mac用户的字体往往比Windows用户多，并且确保所有Mac键盘快捷键仍然有效。

They focused on things like Word Count which is used 10 times a day by every press person to make sure that it was lightning fast, as the press used the feature as their performance barometer. They even made it faster than the feature on Windows.

他们把注意力集中在诸如Word Count之类的事情上，这是因为每个新闻工作者每天都要使用10次，必须确保其速度极快，因为媒体将这一功能作为他们的表现晴雨表。他们甚至让它比Windows上的功能还快。

The result was that in a couple of months, they produced a 6.1 release that was sent to every registered user with an apology letter - signed by Martina - along with a discount coupon for future purchases.

结果是，在几个月后，他们制作了一个6.1版本发送给每个注册用户，并伴有Martina签名的一封道歉信，以及未来购买的折扣券。

The release succeeded in fixing the perception problems, but more importantly, it genuinely made the version dramatically better for the Macintosh - a product the Mac team could actually be proud of, and what the team felt they should have delivered to market in the first place.

这个版本成功地解决了感知问题，但更重要的是，它真正让这个面向Macintosh的版本戏剧般的变好了——这是Mac团队实际上可以为之自豪的一个产品，也是团队认为他们应该首先交付给市场的产品。

This is a good example of how hard it can be to do the right thing for the customer, often in the face of pretty massive pressures, but that’s exactly what strong product managers figure out how to do.

这是一个很好的例子，说明为客户做正确的事情是多么的困难，通常是面对巨大的压力，但这正是强大的产品经理想要做的。

In subsequent years, not only did Microsoft once again decide to diverge the code base, they completely separated the teams into different buildings and business units, and had them fully embrace all things Mac. Strategically it was a complete 180.

在接下来的几年里，微软不仅再次决定将代码库分开，还将团队完全分割成不同的构建和商业单元，并让他们完全接受Mac的一切。从战略上讲，这是一个180度大转弯。

It’s hard to estimate just how important this was to both Microsoft and to Apple.Even today, more than 20 years later, many businesses and consumers consider Word and the rest of Office absolutely essential to being able to use their Mac for business and personal use.What started then became a multi-billion dollar win for both Apple and Microsoft. There are more than 1 billion Macs and PC’s running Office around the world.

很难估计这对微软和苹果来说有多重要。即使在20多年后的今天，许多企业和消费者仍然认为Word和其它的Office组件对于能够将Mac用于商业和个人用途是绝对必要的。从那时开始，苹果和微软都赢得了数十亿美元的胜利。全世界有超过10亿台mac电脑和个人电脑在运行着Office。

Martina has gone on to have a remarkable career, in both product management and product marketing.From Microsoft she went on to Netscape, where she was responsible for marketing of the Netscape Browser, and then LoudCloud, and now I’m happy to say she’s been my partner at SVPG for over a decade, and she also teaches marketing at UC Berkeley.

玛蒂娜在产品管理和产品营销方面都取得了卓越的成就。从微软到网景，她负责网景浏览器的营销，然后是LoudCloud，现在我很高兴地说她是我在SVPG已经超过十年的合作伙伴。她也在加州大学伯克利分校教授市场营销。

Let me also add that there’s little as powerful as a marketing person that’s also strong at product. The combination is amazing.

我还要补充一点，强有力的营销人员在产品上也是强大的。结合是惊人的。

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NETFLIX – Kate Arnold

Netflix is one of my all-time favorite products and companies.

Netflix是我最喜欢的产品和公司之一。

But back in 1999, a then very young Netflix based in Los Gatos with less than 20 employees, was on the edge of going bust. They had a couple experienced co-founders, including the now legendary Reed Hastings, but the problem was that they were stuck at about 300,000 customers.

但回到1999年，当时只有不到20名员工的年轻的Netflix公司，正处于破产的边缘。他们有几位经验丰富的联合创始人，包括现在的传奇人物里德·黑斯廷斯(Reed Hastings)，但问题是他们的客户只有30万左右。

They were essentially providing the same general pay-per-rental experience that Blockbuster provided, just an online version of this.There were, as always, some early adopters, and some people lived in places that didn’t have a video store, but in truth there wasn’t much of a reason to do this via the postal service when you could just stop by the local Blockbuster store. People would rent once, and then quickly forget about the service, and didn’t seem very willing to change.The team knew that the service wasn’t better enough to get people to change.

本质上来说，他们提供的是类似百视达的按租付费体验，只不过是在线版而已。和通常一样，也有一些早期的尝试者，有些人住在没有音像店的地方，但事实上，当你可以去当地的百视达商店(Blockbuster store)时，就没有什么理由需要通过邮递服务来这么做。人们会租一次，然后很快就忘记了服务，似乎不太愿意改变。这个团队知道，这项服务还不足以让人们改变。

Even worse, DVD sales were starting to lag, and a Hollywood backlash further muddied the situation. Then there were challenges with fulfillment logistics, difficulty maintaining DVD quality, and trying to figure out how to do all this in a way that covered costs and generated some cash.

更糟糕的是，DVD销售开始放缓，而好莱坞的反弹进一步使情况变得更糟。然后还有后勤保障方面的挑战，难以维持DVD质量，以及如何以一种覆盖成本并产生一些现金的方式来完成这些工作。

Kate Arnold was the product manager for this small team, and the team knew they needed to do something different.

Kate Arnold是这个小团队的产品经理，团队知道他们需要做一些不同的事情。

One of many tests they tried was to move to a subscription service.Get people to sign up for a month, and offer them unlimited movies.Would that be perceived as “better enough” to get them to change their media consumption behavior?

他们尝试的众多测试之一是转向订阅服务。让人们注册一个月，并提供无限制的电影。这会不会被认为“足够好”，让他们改变媒体消费行为?

The good news was that yes, actually, this really did appeal to people. A flat monthly fee and all the videos they could consume sounded pretty great.

好消息是，事实上，这确实吸引了人们。一个固定的月费和所有他们可以消费的视频听起来非常棒。

The bad news is that the team created some real problems for themselves.No surprise that Netflix customers wanted to rent mostly newly released feature films, yet these were much more expensive for Netflix to stock, and they would need to stock so many copies of these, that they’d very likely run out of money fast.

坏消息是这个团队给自己制造了一些真正的问题。毫无疑问，Netflix的客户想要租借大部分新发行的故事片，但Netflix的库存太昂贵了，而且他们需要储存这么多的拷贝，他们很可能很快就会用光钱。

So the product challenge became how were they going to make sure Netflix customers could watch a set of movies they would love, yet wouldn’t bankrupt the company?

因此，产品的挑战变成了他们如何确保Netflix的客户能够看一套他们喜欢的电影，同时又不会让公司破产?

They knew they needed to somehow get customers to want a blend of expensive and less expensive titles.Necessity being the mother of invention, this is where the queue, the ratings system, and the recommendation engine all came from.Those were the technology-powered innovations that enabled the new, much more desirable business model.

他们知道他们需要以某种方式让客户获得一种兼有昂贵和便宜的混合物。需要是发明之母，这就是队列、评级系统和推荐引擎的来源。这些都是技术驱动的创新，使新的、更理想的商业模式得以实现。

So the team got to work. In three month’s time, the team redesigned the site, introducing the queue, the rating system, and the recommendations engine all in support of Netflix being a subscription service.

所以团队开始工作了。在三个月的时间里，团队重新设计了网站，引入了队列、评级系统和推荐引擎，以支持Netflix成为一个订阅服务。

They also re-wrote the billing system to handle the monthly subscription model (a funny little side story is that they actually launched without this as they had the 30 day free trial month, which bought them the extra time they needed).

他们还重新编写了计费系统来处理每月的订阅模式(一个有趣的小故事是，他们实际上没有这样做，因为他们有30天免费试用月，这给了他们所需的额外时间)。

With so many moving pieces and interconnected efforts, the daily stand-ups included just about every person in the company.

由于有如此多的活动片段和相互联系的努力，每天的站立会议几乎包括了公司里的每个人。

Between working with the co-founders on the strategy, validating concepts with the users, assessing the analytics, driving features and functionality with the team, and working with finance on the new business model, marketing on acquisition, and the warehouse on fulfillment, you can imagine the workload Kate faced on a daily basis.

在战略上和联合创始人一起工作、和用户一起进行概念确认、评估分析、和团队一起驱动特征和功能、在新的商业模式上和财务人员一起工作、营销上的收购、库存情况，你可以想象凯特每天面对的工作量。

Yet the team got the new service up and running and used this to power and grow their business for another 7 years, until they disrupted themselves again by moving aggressively to the streaming model.

然而，该团队启动并运行了这项新服务，并将其用于推动业务增长，持续了7年，直到他们再次大举转向流媒体模式，打破了自己的传统。

Kate would be the first to credit a pretty amazing team, including some exceptional engineers, and the vision and courage of the founders, but I would argue that without a Kate driving for the technology-based solutions that could actually power this business, there’s a good chance Netflix as we know it never would have happened.

凯特会是第一个相信这个相当了不起的团队的人，包括一些杰出的工程师，以及创始人的远见和勇气，但我认为凯特没有基于技术去驱动解决方案，事实上是商业的力量，这对Netflix是一个很好的机会，正如我们知道它永远不会发生。

One other interesting little aside about early Netflix – when they were struggling for cash early on, they offered to sell themselves to Blockbuster for $50M, and Blockbuster turned them down. Today Blockbuster is in the dead pool, and Netflix is worth over $40 billion.

在早期Netflix有个趣事，当他们在早期为赚钱而挣扎时，他们提出以5000万美元的价格将自己卖给百视达，而百视达则拒绝了他们。如今，百视达已经破产，Netflix的市值超过400亿美元。

Kate is now a product leader at Shutterstock in New York City.

凯特现在是纽约Shutterstock的产品负责人。

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GOOGLE ADWORDS – Jane Manning

This next example is a favorite of mine.

下一个例子是我最喜欢的。

I’m sure all of you have heard of Google’s AdWords. You know that this product is what fuels the Google empire. To be specific, AdWords is currently 16 years old, and last year alone it generated well over $50B in revenue.

我相信你们都听过Google’s AdWords。你知道这个产品是谷歌帝国的燃料。具体来说，AdWords目前已有16年的历史，仅去年一年，它就创造了超过50亿美元的收入。

What I’m guessing most of you don’t know, however, is just how this industry-defining product actually came to be.And especially how close this product came to never happening at all.

然而，我猜你们大多数人不知道的是，这个行业定义的产品究竟是如何诞生的。特别是这个产品离我们有多近，似乎根本就没有出现过。

The year was 2000, and the hardest part about the AdWords project was simply getting agreement that they could work on it.

那是在2000年，AdWords项目最困难的部分是简单地达成了他们能够工作的协议。

The core idea had support from Larry Page, but the idea immediately encountered some pretty strong resistance from both the ad sales team, and the engineering team.

这个核心想法得到了拉里·佩奇(Larry Page)的支持，但这个想法立即遭到了广告销售团队和工程团队的强烈反对。

Jane Manning was a young engineering manager that was asked to serve as product manager for this effort to try to get it off the dime.

简·曼宁(Jane Manning)是一名年轻的工程经理，她被要求担任产品经理，以完成这项工作。

The new sales team, under Omid Kordistani, was off to a strong start selling keywords to large brands and placing the results at the top of the search results, highlighted as an ad, but still very prominent, much in the style that had been done in search results at other companies, including at Netscape where Omid came from.Sales was nervous that this idea of a self-service advertising platform would diminish the value of what the sales team was trying to sell.

新的销售团队，在Omid Kordistani的带领下，迎来了一个强劲的开局，把关键词卖给大品牌，并把结果呈现在搜索结果的顶部，作为一个广告突出显示，但仍然非常突出的是，这种风格在其它公司的搜索结果中已经这样去做了，包括Omid来自的网景。销售人员担心这种自助广告平台的想法会降低销售团队想要销售的产品的价值。

And the engineers, which had been working so hard to provide highly relevant search results, were undersandably very worried that users would be confused and frustrated by ads getting in the way of their search results.

工程师们一直在努力提供高度相关的搜索结果，他们非常担心用户会被广告妨碍搜索结果而感到困惑和沮丧。

Jane sat down with each of these people to get a deeper understanding of their concerns. Some were just plain uncomfortable with advertising.Others were worried about cannibalization.

简和这些人坐下来，深入了解他们所关心的问题。有些人只是对广告感到不自在。其他人则担心同类相食。

Once Jane understood the constraints and concerns she was able to advocate for a solution that she believed would address the issues yet enable countless small businesses to get a much more effective advertising solution. Jane also was able to persuade one of Google’s earliest and most respected engineers, Georges Harik, of the idea’s potential, and he helped to bring along other engineers.

一旦简理解了这些限制和担忧，她就能够提出一种解决方案，她认为这种解决方案可以解决这些问题，同时也能让无数的小企业获得更有效的广告解决方案。简还说服了谷歌最早也是最受尊敬的工程师之一Georges Harik，让他相信这个想法的潜力，他还帮助把其他的工程师带了过来。

The product solution they ended up with placed the AdWords-generated ads to the side of the search results, so they wouldn’t be confused with the salesperson-sold ads which were displayed on the top of the results.

他们最终推出的产品解决方案是将AdWords生成的广告放在搜索结果的一边，这样他们就不会与显示在搜索结果顶部的销售人员销售的广告混淆。

Also, instead of determining placement based solely on the price paid, they would use a formula that multiplied the price paid per impression with the ad's performance (click-through-rate) to determine placement, so that the best-performing ads – the ones most likely to be most relevant to users – would rise to the top, and the worst ads would be unlikely to be displayed at all, even if they were sold at a higher price.

当然，这也不是完全基于价格来决定位置,他们会用一个公式,增加广告的价格/印象的表现(点击通过率)来确定位置,以便表现最好的广告——最有可能是最相关的用户——到顶部,以及最坏的广告不太可能显示,即使他们以更高的价格出售。

This solution clearly differentiated for the sales team, and also ensured quality search results, whether paid or organic.

这个解决方案明显地区分了销售团队，并确保了高质量的搜索结果，无论是付费的还是有机的。

Jane actually wrote the first spec for AdWords, and worked side by side with the engineers to build and launch.

简确实为AdWords写了第一个规范，并与工程师们一起构建和发布。

This is yet another example of how there are always so many good reasons for products not to get built.In the products that succeed, there is always someone like Jane behind the scenes working to get over each and every one of the objections, be they technical or business or anything else.

这是另一个例子，说明为什么总是有那么多好的原因让产品无法构建出来。在成功的产品中，总会有像简这样的人在幕后努力克服每一个异议，无论是技术上的、商业上的还是其他的。

Jane took a break to start a family and is now back at Google once again, this time helping out the YouTube team.

简休息了一下，开始了一个家庭，现在又回到了谷歌，这一次帮助了YouTube团队。

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BBC MOBILE – Alex Pressland

I have to admit to a soft spot for the BBC.They’ve been around for nearly 100 years, but they embraced technology and the Internet relatively early.I’ve seen so many amazing product people have come from the BBC, and many are now all over Europe and beyond.

我不得不承认BBC的软肋。它们尽管已经存在了近100年，但它们相对较早地接受了技术和互联网。我看到很多令人惊叹的产品都来自英国广播公司(BBC)，现在很多产品遍布欧洲和世界各地。

Back in 2003, a full four years before the debut of the iPhone, a young product manager at the BBC, Alex Pressland, had just finished leading a product effort that enabled the BBC to be one of the first media companies in the world to syndicate content. Most people at the BBC had no idea why this was important or even desirable, but Alex understood that this enabling technology could be used in new and unanticipated ways to increase reach for the BBC, a major part of the institution's mission.

早在2003年，就在iPhone问世整整四年之前，BBC年轻的产品经理亚历克斯·普雷斯兰(Alex Pressland)刚刚完成了一项产品开发工作，使BBC成为世界上第一家将内容聚合在一起的媒体公司。BBC的大多数人都不知道为什么这是重要的，甚至是值得的，但是Alex明白这项技术可以被用于新的和意想不到的方式来增加BBC的影响力，这是BBC的主要使命之一。

Because she understood the potential for IP-based syndicated content technology, Alex started searching for new and useful ways to put this technology to use.She began by looking at people in the UK that were not being reached by the BBC’s conventional broadcast media (TV’s and Radios in homes and cars).

因为她了解基于ip的联合内容技术的潜力，Alex开始寻找新的和有用的方法来使用这项技术。她首先观察了英国广播公司传统广播媒体(家庭和汽车中的电视和收音机)无法接触到的人。

One such early possibility she found were city center venues that had these large electronic billboard screens that were capable of video.But she observed that these venues were just playing the same thing you could watch on your television at home, even though the context and audience was very different.

她早期发现的一种可能性是城市中心的场馆，这些巨大的电子广告牌屏幕可以播放视频。但她注意到，这些场馆只是在播放你可以在家里的电视上看到的东西，尽管环境和观众是非常不同的。

So Alex proposed a series of experiments where she would have editorial teams assemble specific tailored content suitable for specific venues and audiences, and then she would measure the audience reach and engagement.

亚历克斯提出了一系列实验，她让编辑团队为特定的地点和受众收集特定的定制内容，然后她测量受众的范围和参与度。

While this might sound obvious today, at the time this was a very foreign concept to the BBC’s broadcast journalism culture, and there were a long list of obstacles in trying to push the BBC in this direction, not the least of which was editorial and legal.

虽然这在今天听起来似乎是显而易见的，但在当时，这对BBC的广播新闻文化来说是一个非常陌生的概念，在推动BBC向这个方向发展的过程中，有一长串障碍，其中最重要的是社论和法律。

Editorial wasn't used to the model where content would be created and then delivered in different contexts.This gets to the heart of the BBC editorial culture, and required considerable persuasion to show why this was a very good thing for both the BBC and for the audience.

社论无法采用内容在哪里创建，然后就在不同的环境中发布的模式。这触及了BBC编辑文化的核心，需要大量的说服工作才能证明这对BBC和观众来说都是一件好事。

Legal wasn't used to distribution via IP enabled devices.Imagine the stack of content licensing agreements that would need to be updated or renegotiated.

法律不允许使用通过IP支持的设备进行分发。想象一下需要更新或重新协商的内容许可协议。

The results of Alex’s experiments and early successes gave Alex the confidence to propose to the BBC leadership a new product vision and strategy which she called “BBC Out Of Home.”

Alex的实验结果和早期的成功让Alex有信心向BBC领导层提出一个新的产品愿景和策略，她称之为“BBC走出家庭”。

It’s important to note that she did this as an individual contributor product manager.

需要注意的是，她是作为一个单独贡献者的产品经理进行的。

This work ended up fueling a dramatic shift at the BBC from broadcast content to content distribution, and this work dramatically impacted reach, and soon became the basis for BBC’s Mobile efforts.Today more than 50 million people around the world depend on BBC’s mobile offering every week.

这项工作最终推动了BBC从广播内容到内容分发的戏剧性转变，这一工作极大地影响了到达，并很快成为BBC移动业务的基础。如今，全球每周有超过5000万人依赖BBC的移动服务。

This is not just a story about applying technology to solve problems, but it’s also a story about the power of force of will.Especially with large and long-established institutions, it is never easy to drive substantial change, but this is exactly what strong product managers figure out how to do.

这不仅仅是一个关于应用技术解决问题的故事，它也是一个关于意志力的力量的故事。特别是对于大型和长期建立的机构来说，推动实质性的变革从来都不是一件容易的事，但这正是强大的产品经理想要解决的问题。

Alex went on from the BBC to have a terrific career at several tech and media companies, and now runs product for Bauer Xcel Media in New York.

亚历克斯从英国广播公司跳槽到几家科技和媒体公司，并在纽约经营鲍尔Xcel媒体公司的产品。

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APPLE ITUNES – Camille Hearst

I’d love to introduce you to another very strong product manager, Camille Hearst.

我想向你们介绍另一位非常厉害的产品经理，卡米尔·赫斯特。

Camille was a product manager on the iTunes team at Apple, and as you might imagine with such a disruptive and ground-breaking product, she experienced and learned a great deal during her formative product years at Apple, especially as she was there during the years moving from the iTunes original DRM-based music, to DRM-free, was critical in helping iTunes to become truly mass market.

卡米尔是在苹果iTunes的团队中的一个产品经理，你可以想象这样一个颠覆性和突破性的产品，她经验丰富，在苹果的期间，她学到了很多格式化的产品，特别是她在这几年中，她从基于原始的drm音乐的iTunes，到免费的drm，她帮助iTunes成为真正意义上的大众市场的关键。

Moving beyond early adopters into mass market involved many different efforts, some product, some marketing, and some a blend of the two.A good example of this blend was the relationship the iTunes team engaged with the American Idol program.

超越早期的采用者进入大众市场需要许多不同的努力，一些产品，一些营销，以及两者的混合。一个很好的例子就是iTunes团队与美国偶像节目的关系。

This turned out to be one of the most dramatic and visible – yet challenging product efforts for the iTunes team.

这是iTunes团队最引人注目、最具挑战性的产品之一。

During 2008, American Idol was a cultural icon – watched by more than 25 million people twice a week, with a level of repeat engagement that was largely unrivaled.

在2008年，《美国偶像》是一个文化符号——每周有超过2500万人观看两次，其重复参与的程度是无与伦比的。

Apple saw in this an opportunity to expose an ideal target market to the power of iTunes and digital music.Not just by selling the music from the contestants featured on the show, but by making iTunes an integral part of consumer’s life.

苹果认为这是一个iTunes和数字音乐展示理想目标市场的机会。不仅通过出售节目中参赛者的音乐，还使iTunes成为消费者生活中不可分割的一部分。

However, while the potential was substantial, the challenges were significant as well.

然而，尽管潜力巨大，但挑战也十分严峻。

The VP of iTunes, Eddy Cue, and others made the business deal, but Camille worked as product manager on many of the integrations to help figure this out.

iTunes的副总裁艾迪·库伊(Eddy Cue)和其他人达成了这项商业协议，但卡米尔作为产品经理要进行整合，以帮助解决这个问题。

As just one example, the American Idol program is all about voting, and Apple quickly realized that sales of contestant’s music would very likely be strongly indicative of voting results, and while normally iTunes was designed to show trending music and highlight popular titles, in this case it was important to use extreme care to not influence the voting.

仅举一个例子,《美国偶像》有个程序是是关于投票的，苹果很快意识到选手音乐的销量很可能会强烈表明投票结果，虽然通常iTunes旨在显示热门音乐和突出受欢迎的主题，在这种情况下，最重要的是要非常小心，不要影响投票。

This was obviously critically important to the Idol producers - it would reduce or even eliminate the suspense to learn which contestants would continue to the next week.

这对《美国偶像》的制作人来说显然是至关重要的——它会减少甚至消除悬念，让选手们知道下周还会有哪些选手参赛。

The integration also allowed the team to target a very specific persona, and work to drive up engagement with this group.One of the keys was to make it easy to get to iTunes for those that didn’t yet have the app installed.

整合还允许团队以一个非常特定的角色为目标，并努力提高与这个团队的参与度。其中一个关键是让那些还没有安装应用程序的用户能够很容易地进入iTunes。

By tackling these and countless other challenges head on, Camille and her team were able to come up with technology solutions that complemented the American Idol experience, yet also injected iTunes as a key component of fan’s life.This contributed to what was in 2014, before the move to streaming, a roughly $20 billion business.

通过抓住这些无数的挑战，卡米尔和她的团队提出了技术解决方案，补充了《美国偶像》的体验，同时也将iTunes注入了粉丝生活的重要组成部分。这促成了2014年流媒体业务发展之前的局面，当时流媒体业务规模约为200亿美元。

To me this is a great example of how great product managers work to find creative solutions to very difficult problems.

对我来说，这是一个很好的例子，说明了优秀的产品经理是如何为非常困难的问题找到创造性的解决方案的。

Camille went on to join the YouTube team, and then lead product at London-based Hailo, and now I’m very happy to say that she’s the new CEO of NYC-based startup, Kit.

卡米尔后来加入了YouTube团队，并在总部位于伦敦的Hailo担任产品负责人。现在我很高兴地说，她是纽约初创公司Kit的新任首席执行官。

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ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD – Lea Hickman

It is worth noting that so far, all of these product managers demonstrated exceptional results as individual contributor product managers -- no Director or VP titles.

值得注意的是，到目前为止，所有这些产品经理都是独立贡献者形式的产品经理-没有总监或副总裁头衔-的身份展示了出色的结果。

For startups or smaller companies, often all it takes is a strong product team with a strong product manager, but in larger companies, in truth it usually takes more than that. It takes strong product leadership, in the best sense of the word, including providing a compelling product vision and strategy.

对于初创公司或小公司来说，通常只需要一个强大的产品团队和一个强大的产品经理，但对于大公司来说，实际上需要的远不止这些。它需要强大的产品领导能力，从最好的角度来说，包括提供引人注目的产品愿景和战略。

One of the absolute hardest assignments in our industry is to try to cause dramatic change in a large and successful company. It’s actually easier in many ways if the company is in serious trouble and they are feeling big pain, because that pain can be used to motivate the change.

在我们这个行业中，最困难的任务之一就是在一个大的、成功的公司里尝试引起巨大的变化。在很多方面，如果公司陷入严重的困境，并且他们感到巨大的痛苦时，事情会变得更容易，因为这种痛苦可以用来激励变革。

But of course great companies want to disrupt themselves before they’re disrupted by others.The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that, product leadership.

但是，当然，大公司想在被别人扰乱之前，先把自己搞得一团糟。亚马逊(Amazon)、Netflix、谷歌、Facebook和众多规模庞大、但正在慢慢消亡的公司之间的区别，通常就是产品领导力。

The story I’d like to tell you about here is of a product leader, Lea Hickman. In the year 2011, Lea was leading product for Adobe’s Creative Suite.

我想告诉你们的是一个产品领导者，Lea Hickman。在2011年，Lea是Adobe Creative Suite的领导者。

She had helped Adobe to build a very large and successful business for itself - on the order of $2B in annual license revenue - with its desktop–based Creative Suite.

她帮助Adobe公司建立了一个非常大、成功的业务——以每年2亿美元的许可证收入为基础——以桌面为基础的创意套件。

But Lea knew the market was changing, and the company needed to move from the old desktop-centric, annual upgrade model, to a subscription-based model supporting all the devices designers were now using – including tablets and mobile in all their many form factors.

但是Lea知道市场正在变化，公司需要从旧的桌面中心，年度升级的模型，转移到一个基于订阅的模型，支持设计师们现在所有使用的所有设备，包括平板电脑和移动设备。

More generally, Lea knew that the upgrade model was pushing the company to take the product in directions that were not good for Adobe customers and not good in the long-term for Adobe either.But change of this magnitude – revenue from Creative Suite was roughly half of Adobe’s overall $4B in annual revenue – is brutally hard.

更普遍的是，Lea认识到升级模式正在推动公司将产品推向对Adobe客户不利、对Adobe长期不利的方向。但这种规模的变化——来自Creative Suite的收入大约是Adobe全年总收入40亿美元的一半——是极其艰难的。

Realize that every bone and muscle in the corporate body works to protect that revenue, and so a transition of this magnitude means pushing the company far outside it’s comfort zone – finance, legal, marketing, sales, technology – few in the company would be left untouched.

要意识到，公司身体里的每一根骨头和每一块肌肉都在起作用，以保护公司的收入。因此，如此规模的转变意味着要把公司远远推到它的舒适区之外——金融、法律、市场营销、销售和技术——公司中很少有人会置身事外。

You can start with the typical concerns:

你可以从典型的关注点开始:

The finance staff was very worried about the revenue consequences of moving from a license model to a subscription model.

财务人员非常担心从许可证模型转移到订阅模型的收入后果。

The engineering teams were worried about from moving from a two-year release train model to continuous development and deployment.Especially while assuring quality. They were also concerned that responsibility for service availability was now going to be much higher.

工程团队担心从两年的发布培训模型过渡到持续的开发和部署。特别是确保质量。他们还担心，服务可用性的责任比现在将更高。

There were also big concerns on the sales side, it was expected that this transition would change the way the Creative Suite products were actually sold. Rather than a large reseller channel, Adobe would now have a direct relationship with their customers. While many people at Adobe generally looked forward to this aspect, the sales organization knew that this was very risky in that if things didn’t work out well, the channels would probably not be very forgiving.

在销售方面也存在很大的担忧，预计这种转变将改变创意套装产品的实际销售方式。Adobe将不再是一个大型经销商渠道，而是与客户建立直接关系。虽然Adobe的许多人一般都期待这方面的内容，但销售组织知道这是非常危险的，因为如果事情不顺利，渠道可能不会很宽容。

And don’t underestimate the emotional changes – to both customers and sales staff - of moving from “owning software” to “renting access”.

不要低估客户和销售人员从“拥有软件”到“租赁访问”的情感变化。

With over a million customers of the existing Creative Suite, Lea understood the technology adoption curve, and that there would be a segment of the customer base that would strongly resist a change of this magnitude. Lea understood that it’s not just about whether the new Creative Cloud would be “better,” it would also be different in some meaningful ways, and some people would need more time to digest this change than others.

拥有超过100万的现有创意套件的客户，Lea理解技术的导入曲线，并且有一部分客户会强烈抵制如此巨大的变化。Lea认为，这不仅仅是关于新的创意云是否会“更好”，它在某些有意义的方面也会有所不同，有些人需要更多的时间来消化这种变化。

Realize also that the Creative Suite is, as the name implies, a suite of integration applications – 15 major ones and many smaller utilities. So this meant that not just one product had to transform, but the full suite needed to transform, which dramatically increased the risk and complexity.

还可以认识到，creativesuitesuite是一套集成应用程序，包括15个主要的应用程序和许多较小的实用程序。这就意味着不止一个产品需要转换，而是整个套件需要转换，这极大地增加了风险和复杂性。

It is any wonder that most companies refuse to tackle something of this magnitude?

难怪大多数公司都拒绝解决这么大的问题?

Lea knew she had a tough job in front of her and her teams. She realized that in order for all of these inter-related pieces to be able to move together in parallel, she needed to very clearly articulate a compelling vision of the new whole as greater than the sum of the parts.

Lea知道她和她的团队面前有一份艰难的工作。她意识到，为了让所有这些相互关联的部分能够并行地移动，她需要非常清楚地表达出一种引人注目的观点，即新整体要大于各部分之和。

Lea worked with Adobe’s then CTO, Kevin Lynch, to put together some very compelling prototypes showing the power of this new foundation, and used this to rally both executives and product teams.

Lea与Adobe的CTO凯文·林奇合作，制作了一些非常有说服力的原型，展示了这个新基础的力量，并以此来召集高管和产品团队。

Lea then began a sustained and exhausting campaign to continuously communicate with leaders and stakeholders across the entire company. To Lea, there was no such thing as over-communication. A continuous stream of prototypes helped keep people excited about what this new future would bring.

然后，Lea开始了一场持续的、令人筋疲力尽的活动，不断地与整个公司的领导和利益相关者进行沟通。对Lea来说，没有过度沟通这回事。源源不断的原型帮助人们对这个新的未来感到兴奋。

Due to the success of the Creative Cloud - Adobe generated more than $1B in recurring revenue faster than anyone else has - Adobe discontinued new releases of the desktop–based Creative Suite to focus all of their innovation on the new foundation, and today more than 6 million creative professionals subscribe to, and depend on the Creative Cloud. Today, thanks in large part to this transition, Adobe has more than tripled the market cap it had before the transition – the company today is worth roughly $50 billion.

由于Creative Cloud的成功——Adobe产生超过1亿美元的经常性收入比其他人更快——Adobe停止了基于桌面的creativesuitesuite的新版本，将他们所有的创新都集中在新的基金会上，今天有超过600万的创意专业人士订阅和依赖Creative Cloud。如今，在很大程度上得益于这一转型，Adobe的市值比转型前增加了两倍多——该公司目前的市值约为500亿美元。

It is easy to see how big companies with lots of revenue at risk would hesitate to make the changes they need to not only survive, but thrive.Lea tackled these concerns and more head on with a clear and compelling vision and strategy, and clear and continuous communication to the many stakeholders.

很容易看出，那些面临巨大收入风险的大公司会多么犹豫，不愿做出改变，不仅要生存下去，还要茁壮成长。Lea负责解决这些问题，并以清晰、引人注目的愿景和策略，与众多利益相关者进行清晰、持续的沟通。

This is one of the most impressive, nearly super-human, examples I know of a product leader driving massive and meaningful change in a large and established company.

这是我所知道的最令人印象深刻、近乎超人的例子之一，一个产品领导者在一个大而有影响力的公司里推动了巨大而有意义的变革。

There’s no question in my mind that Adobe would not be where it is today without someone like Lea working tirelessly to push this change through.

毫无疑问，如果没有像Lea这样孜孜不倦地推动这一变革的人，Adobe将不会达到今天的水平。

Lea has moved from Adobe to leading product for a rapidly rising star in our space, a company and product line many of you know and love, InVision.

Lea已经离开Adobe，在一家快速成长的成为明星的企业中领导产品，这家公司就是你知道和喜爱的InVision

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SUMMARY

Now in every case I just described, each of the product managers went out of their way to emphasize to me just how amazing their team was, and how in no way was the success due to their efforts alone, but hopefully these examples help make clear to you the true and essential contribution of the product manager.

我刚才所描述的每个例子，每个产品经理以他们的办法对我强调他们的团队是多么神奇,以及不成功是因为他们的努力,但希望这些例子有助于明确你真正的产品经理的重要贡献。

The big points I hope you take away from this are:

我希望你们能从中学到的要点是：

1) Product Management is absolutely distinct from the other disciplines.It’s clearly different than the contribution of the designers, so please let’s stop having all the misguided discussions of overlap between those roles. It’s also clearly not a project manager. There is some amount of project management inevitably involved just as there is for all leadership positions, but to characterize this as a project manager is to completely miss the essence of the role. The role I would argue that the product manager is most similar to is the role of the CEO. But with the obvious difference that unlike the CEO, nobody reports to the product manager.

产品管理绝对不同于其他学科。这显然与设计师的贡献不同，所以请不要再讨论这些角色之间的重叠问题了。他显然也不是项目经理。就像所有的领导职位一样，不可避免地会涉及到一些项目管理工作，但如果将其定性为项目经理，就完全忽略了这个角色的本质。我认为产品经理最类似的角色是CEO的角色。但与CEO明显不同的是，没有人向产品经理汇报。

2) Like a CEO, the Product Manager must deeply understand all aspects of the business. The Product Manager needs to ensure a business outcome, not just ensure a product gets defined. This requires a good understanding of the many inter-related parts and constraints of the business – financial, marketing, sales, legal, partnership, service, the customer environment, the technical capabilities, the user’s experience, and figure out a solution that works for the customers as well as the business. But don't think this means an MBA is required - actually not one of the impressive product managers I described has an MBA - or that you need to have all these skills yourself; you must simply have a broad understanding of how a product can affect a business, and work with people from your team and across your company to cover everything that's important.

像CEO一样，产品经理必须深刻理解业务的各个方面。产品经理需要确保业务结果，而不仅仅是确保产品得到定义。这需要很好地理解业务的许多相互关联的部分和约束——财务、市场营销、销售、法律、合伙、服务、客户环境、技术能力、用户体验，并找出一个既适用于客户又适用于业务的解决方案。但不要认为这意味着你必须拥有MBA学位——实际上，我描述的令人印象深刻的产品经理中没有一个拥有MBA学位——也不要认为你自己需要拥有所有这些技能；你必须对产品如何影响业务有一个广泛的理解，并与团队和整个公司的人一起工作，覆盖所有重要的事情。

3) I hoped you noticed that in literally every one of these examples, the winning solutions didn't come from users or sales; rather great products require an intense collaboration with design and engineering to solve real problems for our users and customers, in ways that meet the needs of your business. In each of these examples, the users had no idea the solution they fell in love with was actually possible.

我希望你注意到，在这些例子中，获胜的解决方案并不是来自用户或销售；相当伟大的产品需要与设计和工程紧密合作，以满足您的业务需求的方式为我们的用户和客户解决真正的问题。在这些例子中，用户并不知道他们爱上的解决方案实际上是可能的。

4) Like a successful CEO, the successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative and persistent. By smart I mean using new technologies to reach new audiences or enable new business models. By creative, I mean thinking outside the normal product box of features to solve business problems. And persistent -- as in pushing companies way beyond their comfort zone with compelling evidence, constant communication and building bridges across functions in the face of stubborn resistance. Being a great product manager means having extraordinary grit.

就像一个成功的CEO，一个成功的产品经理必须是聪明、有创造力和坚持不懈的最佳版本。我所说的“聪明”指的是使用新技术来接触新用户或实现新的商业模式。所谓创造性，我指的是跳出常规产品的功能框架来解决业务问题。坚持不懈——用令人信服的证据推动公司走出舒适区，不断沟通，在面临顽固阻力时建立跨职能桥梁。成为一名优秀的产品经理意味着非凡的勇气。

5) Finally, I hope you can see that true leadership is a big part of what separates the great product people from the merely good ones. So no matter your title or level, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

最后，我希望你能明白，真正的领导力是区分优秀产品人员的重要因素。所以，不管你的头衔或级别如何，如果你渴望成功，就不要害怕领导。

I’ve shown you 6 examples of strong product managers at work as they created products that literally changed the world.

我已经向你们展示了6个强大的产品经理在工作中的例子，因为他们创造了真正改变世界的产品。

If you want to create ground breaking products at your company, I’m hoping their examples show you just what your job truly is, and what a difference great product management can make to a company's success.

如果你想在你的公司创造突破性的产品，我希望他们的例子能让你知道你真正的工作是什么，以及优秀的产品管理对公司成功的影响。