Buried Treasure

As product folks, we spend so much (too much?) time focusing on what to build next. The product roadmap is heavily skewed towards the shiny future. Our customer comms is focused on upcoming feature messaging. Teams obsess over the adoption of new capabilities. We over-index seller and support enablement on the latest and greatest. But if you step back and think about your product portfolio holistically, what’s already out there vs yet-to-be-built-and-released probably follows an 80/20 split.

In a way, your existing product is buried treasure. And it’s being buried by your future product.

Listening to a podcast on short-form writing recently, this patten came through clearly in the publishing industry.

“We greatly overvalue recency. Your job is to persuade the reader that today’s newspaper is the product, and yesterday’s newspaper is for cat litter. We’re still hostage to that mindset.”

And it’s not just blog posts / newsletter articles / Tweets that fall prey to this, it’s long-form writi…