So.. How do you measure your Success in Product again?
3 mayor takeaways from the product management meetup in Vancouver.
On October 2017, I went to my first Product Management meetup in Vancouver, an incredible experience! I got a lot of insights and knowledge. At this moment, I am introducing myself as a “Product Manager in the making”, which basically means I have the experience as a product developer for the manufacturing industry, the training and theoretical readings of SAAS and I am looking forward to my first opportunity as Product Manager in the tech industry.
The meetup was brought to us by the Product management association of BC. The format was a Panel fireside chat with 4 very experienced Product Managers that brought insights, tips, vivid examples and a perfect mix of different product manager styles.
They all agreed on the 3 major takeaways that I have for you on this post.
1- Data is key, if you are not using it, you should start at least gathering some.
2- Get up and go talk to your customers, data alone gives you lemons.
3- Nothing beats observation if you want to innovate.
Lets dive deeper on each:
Data is Key
Three out of four panelist agreed in one thing, and they consistently reflected on it again and again. You have to have data in order to understand what worked and what didn’t. Also what direction should we as PMs drive the team, what to prioritize from the backlog and what questions to ask to our customers during an interview.
There was a moment of tension in the air when a question was asked from the audience: “Please raise your hand if you have access to data within your organization?” and only a small percentage raised their hand (I was not one of them).
How do you get data when you have no access to it? Stewart, one of the panelist, intervened: He went thru this, and had to build a network of collaboration into the core of the company. He even focused a series of sprints to build channels for data to stream by itself from now to the future going, the developers loved the challenge!
Michelle, explained how she had to knock on doors within the company and create data streams from other teams to the product team, and by doing this currently her team has pipes of data that they choose to listen and record into.
Data alone is nothing
The fourth panelist stopped and stirred the conversation to a more thoughtful insight: Data alone is history if you are not talking to your customers.
Alan (This fourth panelist) explained: Sure data will help you know what happened, but if you are only doing this with it, you are only looking into the past. How he uses data is quite something: It helps him direct the conversation with customers to a more enriching experience for both, knowing what worked and what not prior hand, so he can use his customers time more effectively.
Mark added to this takeaway answering the question “How do you get non-product (Specially tech support) teams to gather data?” Mark pointed out how the product team collaborates with customer service and brief them on how to ask the right questions that will help them uncover problems instead of simple “feature requests”.
Shut up and Observe your customer
Observing how the panel fireside conversation was heading into one direction “Speak to your customers”, I felt there was something missing. If there is something I have learned from lean manufacturing is that in a customer interview, people will talk about how they interact with your product, but they won’t know how to tell you what they want to do with it. In a more simple way:
Customers will point you the obvious things to address(Low hanging fruits), but a successful product is focused in getting them the fruits they are willing to pay for.
So out of this curiosity, I asked “How much time do a PM spends asking questions and how much (percentage wise) does he/she spends observing the customer?” the answer to this question was my major takeaway of the night.
Two panelists (Alan Albert and Michelle Dunlea) stood up their chair, got a dry erase marker and started drawing on the whiteboard (Amen for whiteboards!)
While Michelle was working on her diagram to convey the message, Alan basically nailed the message I was trying to convey with my question in a simple two circles Venn diagram:
Allan Explains: Your customer cares about your product, they really do, but most of the time they will talk to you about is how they interact with it (Anyone is familiar with a “feature request”?). This isn’t necessary a bad thing, but they care way more than that!
Observation is a great too when you combine it with the right questions. what does your customer do that seems way off? Are they so used to do it that they don’t notice the annoyance of what they are doing?. The closer you get these two circles together, the faster you will achieve product success.
Let’s see how Michelle explained the “PM Strategic Approach” with this diagram:
Michelle explains how a typical conversation with a customer will go towards both quadrants at the bottom. She continues: Most product managers focused the workload based in the low-left quadrant (The low hanging fruits), where the fix is easy and it creates a quick win that not necessarily impacts the customer’s perspective.
She emphasizes in how a successful Product needs to have a balanced mix of all four quadrants. This requires more observation in how the customer interacts not only with our product, but on their daily life struggles around the problem that they are trying to solve.
Note: The picture above was edited with Michelle Dunlea’s feedback on this post for accuracy.
I have to thank all four panelist: Mark Hazlett from Clio, Michelle Dunlea from Hootsuite, Alan Albert from Marketfit, Stewart Rogers from Lambda Solutions for sharing their experiences and knowledge.
Huge thank you to Christine Hoh, who volunteered as moderator for the night, her company Eat Super Snaps has humble starts but the company has a huge potential to grow!
Anything you would add to these takeaways? Or even something you think I may have missed from the product meetup? feel free to leave a comment!
Side note: if you are a Product Manager in the Vancouver area, get into the slack community: https://productofvancouver.slack.com/ you are missing from Coffee pairing (my favorite thing) and a bunch of things more.
Connect with me on Twitter: @lespinalrivera and follow our community of developers in Surrey: @surreycodecamp.
