3 Critical Success Factors for Product Development
Or any kind of technical delivery and organisational change
I must confess that I am excited by the power of efficient and effective product development. This is especially so in start-up businesses, where true lean, iterative and incremental product development affords the opportunity to perform early market validation and avoid making costly mistakes before running out of money!
However I remain firmly excited by the power and potential of product management to become a vehicle for transformation in a business of any size.
Picture the organisation — growing and successful — yet worn down by chasing ever increasing targets and serving more customers without (it seems) any significant development in its technology infrastructure…
Picture within that organisation a technology department, beleaguered and bewitched on all sides by the pains of a growing business yet unable to catch a breath. Problems are mounting up. The team seems to spend all day, every day in firefighting mode. There is a low-level hum of discontentment, periodically punctuated by specific challenges around the meeting table…
It’s an image I’m sure many of us are all too familiar with, whether by experience or hearsay, battle scars or reading material.
I write from a mixture of all these and want to offer three factors which I believe are critical for the success of any product development effort — in businesses large or small, start-up, scaling or established.
These factors are: trust, humility and focus.
Trust
In any team there must be a foundation of trust. Otherwise the team won’t play well together. They may seek to perform individually, but the true potential of the team will not be realised.
This is effectively illustrated by Patrick Lencioni in his leadership fable, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’. When trust is absent, there is fear of conflict which results in a lack of commitment and avoidance of accountability. All this leads to a lack of focus and inattention to results.
In my current role, for me to engage in worthwhile early stage product development and market validation there must be a foundation of trust. Between myself and the delivery team — be that developers, designers and researchers — but also between product and the rest of the business.
I’m not asking the business to rest their hopes and fears squarely on my shoulders alone. That is not what product management is about — it is a team sport — but I am asking the business to trust the product management effort. Trust our developers when they push back. Trust our designers when they want to explore new ideas. Trust our researchers when they want to spend time with customers.
I am immensely privileged to be working in a business where this trust exists. It means that whilst we may be challenged we are trusted. And likewise, whilst we may trust others in the business we are not afraid to challenge them.
We can do this because we know we are all on the same side — we have the same goals and objectives at heart — which means when we challenge or raise questions, we are not attacking the person, but the idea or opportunity (or whatever it maybe) because together with other members of the team we value success — and we are committed to move towards it!
Therefore, for any sort of product effort, or organisational transformation (involving product or not) trust is paramount.
Humility
Unfortunately however, if there is a systemic lack of trust throughout the wider business there is very little product management alone can do to fix that. Deeper issues will need fixing first — could humility be a tool to aid that healing process?
Humility is rarely spoken about in the boardroom, at developer stand-ups or in company-wide all-hands type meetings. The default vibe throughout humanity of all levels is that any sort of leadership requires some sort of higher ground assuming a hierarchical social or organisational structure.
However the concept of servant leadership is growing in familiarity as more leaders genuinely realise its potential.
Popularised within technology by the concept of the scrum master being a ‘servant leader’ — it is the concept of leaders as servants supporting their people. The traditional organisational chart is turned on its head with leaders at the bottom supporting their people, who rise in significance, imitating their leaders by operating in the same servant-minded fashion.
Servant leadership is all about empowerment and participation — so is product management.
As a product person my objective is to bring together and empower diverse teams of people solve problems and grasp opportunities. It’s my daily desire that I act as a servant leader amongst these people — stakeholders, customers and team members both external and internal — to make this a reality.
This often involves being wrong. It means I don’t always have the answers. It means it’s not always my ideas which make it to the table (in fact — it rarely is!). It means that sometimes I ask stupid questions.
But it’s all in the name of empowering the team effort driving us forwards towards success.
Therefore humility is required not only to stomach such occasions, but also foster respect and grow trust. I argue this is crucial for product management in organisations of all stages and sizes — but it strikes me it only gets harder the larger a business becomes.
Such humility takes effort, and personal capacity. It starts with the leadership and flows up into the rest of the organisation. This is what I have been fortunate to witness on a daily basis.
Focus
Finally, focus is imperative for product management to be effective. And it stems from trust and humility.
It’s likely true that in any organisation there are more ideas or opportunities than there is resource or time available to execute or even investigate. That is a fact of life. Yet it’s also true that many organisation often bite off more than they can chew!
A symptom of such voracity is the burgeoning roadmap often chewed over and dissected at great length by such organisations seeking to squeeze out every ounce of development effort for the next 1–2 years, sometimes even further.
Another symptom is the vast depth of technical debt paid down by the developers seeking to pump out feature after feature in the vain hope that someday it will be repaid…
Additionally these organisations are often marked by numerous projects running simultaneously in a ‘black box’ style approach behind the closed doors of the IT department — resulting in delivery teams with no focus scattering their effort across many work streams, throwing deliverables over the wall, working valiantly to keep each of the many projects more or less on schedule without too much slippage.
All of this is characterised not by a lack of focus, but focus on the wrong things.
As we mature in the product management community and release ourselves from the shackles and (albeit worthy) tight association with agile methodologies, it is becoming clear that focus on outcome (over output), and impact (over process) is far better way forward. The rise in popularity of management tools such as Objective and Key Results (OKR) is serving to encourage this.
And it’s here that mature product management can be most effective within organisations. Whether that is focusing founders on market validation or executives on significant needle moving changes the focus is the same — on outcome not output, impact not process.
Of course output is important: it needs to be high enough quality for example; and process is a valuable servant: it helps us work together. But they are not the focus. The focus is on real, tangible, measurable outcomes and impacts. This is what successful product management requires — otherwise it is little different from a project-based IT service management approach.
No one says this will be easy — especially where a change of focus, practice or even organisational structure is required. But I believe it is worth the effort.
It’s these three crucial factors that I am looking for wherever I work, at all levels of the business. And it is the same three factors which I propose are critical for any kind of organisational change which effective mature product management can produce.
It’s on that basis I am very aware not everyone enjoys such privileges, and in all cases none of these factors should be taken for granted. Whilst the good news is such values can be built and developed — the truth is they must also be maintained.
As product people — where can we help foster, drive and maintain these values?
As organisations seeking to improve product or technology delivery — where can you encourage, develop or build on these values?
The power and potential of these three values drives me forward — how about you?
Does this resonate with you? What have I missed? What do you appreciate? Do 👏 to share with others — and let me know your feedback below — I look forward to hearing from you!
