Creative Product Management – A Story of Open Source Success

Prescience, brilliance, or just incredible fortune; Google’s decision to enter the mobile marketplace with an open-source operating system, based on another open-source operating system, is quite likely the reason why they are now blowing the doors off their rivals who famously keep their software tightly locked down. This system, Android, owes some of its success to a thriving third-party developer community, and this community has some success stories of their own.

Steve Kondik was a not-so-typical late night tinkerer who was more than just a little pleased with Google’s decision to go open-source. On May 25th, 2009, he innocently posted his custom version of Android on the well-known Android forum, XDA. What followed is a lesson in creative, albeit organic, product management.

Steve learned that uploading his code to XDA quickly created a pool of users who would provide him feedback in near real-time. These users would also take Steve’s code and change or expand upon it, and then post their changes. It was game on. As Steve himself puts it:

Sometimes I would upload multiple versions in a single day to fix bugs. And the competition was fierce – lots of original work, and also mods of your mod, and mods of your mod’s mod. It was a lot of fun. We all shared the same idea – there was a product we wanted, nobody would make it, so we did it ourselves at any cost. This idea became the ethos of our community.

Steve began publishing his new work on Github, other developers began contributing directly to his work, and a team was born. Named after Steve’s whimsical XDA username, CyanogenMod became a team, within a community, in the midst of an open-source success story. (Steve calls it a revolution…)

Open Source: Product Management on Steroids

Open source product management inherently results in building what the users want, rather than building towards a potentially misguided company vision. Coupled with the ability to make their own changes, this results in the ultimate customer development feedback loop.

Years of collaboration using Github for the code, and XDA for the community support, was product management genius. The team became so efficient that a new version of their code was (and is) published every single night—a very rare occurrence in any industry. It did not go unnoticed.

In late 2012, Steve was introduced to some potential investors in Silicon Valley; it went well. A meeting was scheduled, papers were signed, a large sum of money was designated, and on December 12th, 2012, Cyanogen Inc. was born. Less than a year later, Oppo, a Chinese cell phone company announced the very first factory phone with Cyanogen.

This story is far from over but probably never would have gotten off of the ground floor had Steve not made the product management decisions that he did. ProdPad can assist you in making some of these very same decisions, allowing your team to collaborate in real time, edit, submit new ideas and feature requests, stay up-to-date on progress, and more.

Is your team going to be the next great success story? Why not? Contact us for more information and follow us on @ProdPad for news and updates.