There was a ceramics class where half the class was told they had to create one dish for the semester and the quality of that dish would be the basis of the grade. The other half the class was told their grade would be based on how many dishes they made, but quality didn’t matter.
The first group spent the semester designing the perfect dish. They spent weeks picking out just the right material. They agonized over sketches of their designs. They argued over colors and styles.
The second group just made dishes. They made 3 the first week. The second week, they were able to move faster and made 8. Those 8 weren’t any better than the first 3. But a few weeks in, they knew how to make dishes and their designs were improving.
At the end of the semester,the first group had one pretty good dish. But the second group had dozens of amazing dishes.
Because they got more reps in actually creating dishes, they started making really nice ones. The others had a good theory of what would make a good dish, but only had one shot at turning that theory into reality.
The first group’s dish was a cup. It was pretty good, but the teacher had hoped for a bowl. The second group had cups, plates, bowls, and statues.
In product management, you’ll never plan your way to a perfect product. But by running lots of reps, you’ll make lots of fantastic ones.
See also: Design This, Bug Costs, Bug categorization, Online Publishing Discussion List
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]]>See also: Input metrics lead to outcomes, Lagging Outcomes, How I use OKRs, Making sense of metrics
Tagged as: inputmetrics micromanagement okrs
]]>Companies are using internal product platforms to speed up development, make user experiences consistent, reduce operational costs, and support various environments, including mobile. One of the key differences in product management of an internal platform is who your end users are. They adopt and use your product for different reasons than an external customer would.
It's tempting to view the product managers and engineers using the platform as your customers. As product managers, we spend most of the time thinking about customers, so it’s natural for an internal product to think of fellow employees as their customers.
But the concept of a customer comes with assumptions and context that can slow your success as a platform team There’s a huge difference between an actual customer and these internal “customers.”
(891 words)See also: Evaluative and generative product development, Building the Customer-Informed Product, Ask One Question To Help You Reach Product-Market Fit, Domain expertise in Product Management
Tagged as: customers partners platform product productmanagement
]]>"You have launched a new feature in your product. How do you measure the success of the feature?"
If you don't know the answer to this before you build features, you're probably building the wrong things.
You're building features to solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on that feature at all?
Starting with features instead of problems is a tragically common problem among product managers. They may be building capabilities for problems their customers don't have. They may be building the wrong solution for their customer problem. Or they may be building small, insignificant things that don't have large impacts on their business or customers.
You have a hypothesis that creating this feature will generate a certain outcome. Was that outcome created? Was the hypothesis correct? Trying to figure out after the fact a way to measure success means that you weren't focused on the outcome when you were creating the feature. The shipping of the feature itself was viewed as the goal. This isn't a good way to build products.
Product teams should be discussing product outcomes. They should review their releases to see if the feature worked. Did it create the expected outcome? Why or why not? What experiments could you run (iterations) to learn if there are better ways to solve that problem?
There are some signs that your product teams are feature-focused instead of outcome-focused.
See also: Feature Voting Is Harmful To Your Product, Dysfunctions of output-oriented software teams, Ask One Question To Help You Reach Product-Market Fit, Lagging Outcomes
Tagged as: kpis measurement outcomes productmanagement success
]]>See also: Stretching your team, Tyranny of Outcomes, Lagging Outcomes, Input metrics lead to outcomes
Tagged as: christinawodtke goals management okrs
]]>Nine months later, they only had one customer. What went wrong?
One of the biggest oversights was that they were so focused on building the code that. Made up the product, they forgot about the rest of what makes a product work. Marketing first got involved when the product was almost done. Support didn’t have any tools to help customers and didn’t really understand the product.
But most importantly, this new product from a sales-driven company didn’t think they needed sales. Sales didn’t see the product before it launched. They didn’t have input into price models. No one told them what was different about the new product.
So sales sabotaged the new product. Probably not on purpose. There might not have been meetings where sales teams said, “let’s make sure no one buys the new product.” But when a prospective customer asked a sales person how they could buy the new product, sales always steered them away. Steered them toward the products they understood. The ones where they knew how to price it, demo it, where they knew the customer would be well supported.
“Why won’t sales let people buy this,” the product team lamented. But why would they? Sales had a new product dropped in their lap with no input, no context, and no warning. It’s not surprising they just kept doing what they normally did.
The product team thought they had a green field product. Build whatever you want, however you want. But they failed to think about the context they were operating in. They failed to keep the rest of the company involved while they built the product.
The result was something that sales didn’t know what to do with, marketing couldn’t explain to customers, support couldn’t operate, and finance couldn’t bill for. The team had only built the code, not the whole product.
The product was a failure from the start, the team just didn’t realize it yet.
See also: The Trap of The Sales-Led Product, How the Sales organization in a large company slows innovation, The rest of the world is not like you, Wireless Adoption
Tagged as: marketing productmanagement sales support
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