Test-n-Tell.com - making product decisions

Travelling as a product manager is always fun. You are trying so many products that any trip becomes a market research exercise. Especially useful is to travel to different continents to see and try local products. That what happened to me when I landed in Tokyo.

Values-driven, data-informed. That seemed to be the trend in this year's Mind the Product conference. More than 1700 product professionals gathered in London this year for what currently is the biggest product conference in the world.

Lately, going through fellow PMs profiles, I noticed that we almost exclusively talk about stuff we've built and practically never about things that we avoided building.

- We're discontinuing the product effectively on...
- Noooo, I love this product. Please! Why?!
That's my usual reaction when one of my favourite products is killed. Google Reader, Pebble, iGoogle, iPad mini, Google Inbox... yeah, Google has been a real "serial killer" when it comes to discontinuing products and services.

Here's the email I've just received:
Hey {first name},
Circling back here, to keep this short, I see {product I am seeling} helping you and the {my company} team... It's the third email I received from that person whom I don't know, never met and whose product I don't need.