#7–Life finds a way
SCENE — Inside Jurassic Park. Owners and scientists are giving a tour of the lab in to important guests. The scientists have explained that all the dinosaurs have been created as females so they can't mate and populations are controlled. Dr. Ian Malcolm, a chaos theorist, is one of the guests.
DR. MALCOLM: If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously.
PARK SCIENTIST: Are you implying that a population made entirely of female animals will breed?
DR. MALCOLM: No. I'm simply saying that life finds a way.
Product Managers must never underestimate the ability of users to “find a way,” aka. break their product. Not only users, but also tools or partners you integrate with – i.e. Do not underestimate the likelihood of partners to fail and break your product.
Product Managers, with most having glory-seeking personalities (whether they admit it or not), are tempted to move on to new, exciting features rather than defining tests and edge cases. And while there's no glory in building guardrails, you'll wish you had them when your product is careening off a cliff on Christmas Day.
A related note about automated testing. In software, there’s a utopia sometimes sought after where automated test coverage is 100%, bugs are found at compile time, and developers can leave the testing to computers. But like all utopias, they are mirages and chasing them is dangerous. It makes you do things like fire all the QA people and stop thinking critically about the Cost/Value trade-offs of each test. Also, automated testing only tests what you've imagined could fail, not what the chaos of the world could bring. In other words, engineers writing automated tests are like engineers designing dinosaur theme parks, and we know how those turn out.
Instead, a healthy balance of automated tests, human-powered QA, and in-app analytics are a better way to go. A beta program – if you're large enough to manage it – is a great addition, and I was tempting to say consider sandboxing your apps but then I remembered Jurassic Park was set on an island and they got off that in Jurassic World. Just be careful out there I guess.