Three P’s for Starting a new Product Position
You’ve got the job — congratulations! But where do you start?
Starting a new position as a product person can be a daunting prospect. A new business, new people, new product(s) and new processes. I recently started my new product owner position at Acorn Collective and I found it helpful to go in with a ‘three P’ strategy:
- People
- Product
- Process
In this article I will outline each ‘P’. Although I present this in a numbered sequence, it doesn’t mean they can’t be tacked simultaneously. The sequence is more of an indication of priority than chronology.
I found I started with people and product, but was very careful not to touch process until I fully appreciated the first two.
Whether you are seasoned product person, or just starting out — perhaps this will help you pursuing your next venture.
Start with People
For any product person relationships are key. When relationships go downhill, so does the success of product management, or product ownership. Therefore, start with people.
Start with your team — who are the people you’ll be working most closely with? These are your new team mates, they are your partners, your allies! As a product owner this was my scrum team, including UX and CTO. Go out with the team for lunch, join them for beers. You don’t need an agenda, just treat them as you would any other colleague. You’ll soon get to know them, finding out what makes them tick.
However, don’t stop there — look for others in the business (and beyond) who are stakeholders in the product.
If you’re fortunate enough to work with a product where the users are internal, then get to know those users. Spend days and nights with them in the trenches. Watch them work — how do they use your product? Does it make their lives easier, or harder? Does it help them reach their goals, or does it hinder them? How do people talk about your product?
Seek to understand all the facts and opinions before offering your own — these guys know your product far better than you do at this stage!
But if your users aren’t internal you will need to work a bit harder. If you’re in the B2B (‘business to business’ — where a product is build and marketed to other businesses, rather than individual consumers) marketplace, seek out those in the business who interact with the users and choosers, and talk with them.
This could be the sales and / or support teams, who will undoubtedly have many interesting things to say, and axes to grind. But don’t stop there — partner with them to make opportunities to speak with real users and real choosers.
Perhaps spend some time on the support calls gathering support details to pass back to a more knowledgeable colleague, or go out on some sales calls. There is no excuse for not speaking to real users!
If you’re in a B2C (‘business to customer’) world, then it’s slightly tricker, but by no means less important — in fact it’s more important! In this world, where a product is marketed to individuals there is a great temptation to sit inside the business and dream up great ideas we think customers will want. However, this is a road to ruin, and much ink has been spilt on the virtues of speaking to customers firsthand.
Therefore, as Steve Blank would say “get out of the office” — go and meet those customers and find out what their real needs are. What satisfies them? Where are they dissatisfied? What’s important to them?
Only then will we understand what we are really meant to be building to satisfy our customers and meet the needs most important to them.
Do go back to the office though — there are people you still need to meet!
Finally, ensure you talk with leaders in the organisation. Who that is will depend on the size of the organisation. In a startup it’s very easy to get a direct line to the founder (who may well be sitting right by you, perhaps even with sleeves rolled up, cutting code…) but in a larger business it may not be so simple.
Do make every effort to meet those who are stakeholders in your product — that is those who have an interest in your product being a success, and will be looking to you for that success and a measurement of that success. Find out what their objectives and metrics are. Ensure you fully appreciate and understand the business vision from their point of view…
Join them for lunch one day, or arrange an introduction over coffee — you won’t regret it!
Then get stuck into the product
Of course having even a rudimentary grasp of your product will be very helpful speaking to the users, choosers and stakeholders. Don’t wait until you’ve spoken with everyone before you start delving into your product.
- Start with the goal of the product. Seek to understand how this fits into the overall mission of the company — is it helping them sell more units, produce more widgets or make the life of someone else better in someway.
If you’ve not already done so, can you try using it — sign up and have a play? Or can you get a demonstration — perhaps combined with a sales call?
- Identify the users whom the product is seeking to serve. How does it do so? Is it doing so? Here you can’t help but speak to the users!
- How is product success being measured? What are the metrics you need to pay attention to? How will YOU be measured?
Here you have a stellar opportunity to start adding value… Does everyone else understand this? Do your teammates know how they are being measured for product success? Does the wider business really know who the users are? Here is your opportunity to create or perpetuate shared understanding of the product across the organisation.
The tools you might choose to do this will depend on the maturity of your product and how well the target market is understood — but the more you can do now to learn, and share that learning in a sustainable fashion will help you and your product partners in bucket-loads later.
Of course, if you are technical you might also want to take a peek in the code. Some might call that rather cheeky for a product person, but I don’t see why — what is there for anyone to hide? (Apart from passwords, privates keys and other sensitive information which shouldn’t really be floating around unencrypted in a repository anyway…)
Go on, get stuck in — and ask the developers to explain what’s going on.
But never forget process
Okay, so hands up — who would have started with the process? Ah, more than I thought! Alas. But it’s tempting isn’t it. You’re a product owner, so you want to understand how the scrum process has been adopted. Or you’re a product manager and you want to understand how the road-mapping process works.
I’ve been there — and a few years back that would have been my approach as well.
The reason I now put process last is because it serves all other endeavours. True it is important, and a bad process can help build a bad product, but to be honest, people are king and the product is my baby.
Once I understand the people involved I am far better equipped to ‘manage’ or ‘own’ my product than when focussing on process first.
Therefore — how do we approach ‘process’ in its servant capacity? Open-minded and critical.
Open-minded
Get to know the processes as they stand and are currently used. Watch and observe. If you have no process (at Acorn we are starting with a blank sheet) then be open-minded to what others have to offer. Here is a rare chance to learn from others and try things you’ve never tried, or even heard of before!
Mature processes also offer us the opportunity to learn from others who have thought these things over and over and potentially refined the most efficient process they can reach at this point. I know, I know — but we’re also not a god who knows everything, nor an automatic expert on day one — so it’s best for us to be objective before we start offering opinion.
Critical
It’s great to be open-minded, but what if there are things going on which produce waste, contribute to toxic behaviour or throttle constraints? How long to wait before we opine?
Such timescales may vary depending on organisational culture, team maturity, personalities involved and your own level of experience. Here is possibly your first opportunity to exercise that empathy muscle and build on relationships you’ve begun to make.
There will be a time and a place to suggest improvements. In many lean or agile cultures, transparency and empirical inspection make this easier where feedback is welcomed and changes can be experimented with to find a more optimal path forward. In many cases though culture is driver of process — but rarely does process positively affect culture.
Get to know your processes, or help build them then patiently seek to embrace change, whether at your behest or someone else’s.
It’s likely we’ll find many things we want to change. It will be hard, and this can often become one of the hardest parts of a product person’s role when the process doesn’t support the flow we seek to achieve — but remember, as important as process and flow is, relationships are more important. Seek to build on those relationships, and partner with others in the organisation (such as DevOps, or even finance!) to find a way forward.
When people want to work together they will find a way.
At the end of the day, who’s to say these three P’s are just for a new product position? They are for product people everywhere at whatever stage of management or ownership, at whatever stage of business — be it a startup, scale-up or expanding enterprise. People will always remain the most important element, the product will always be our baby and process will be the vehicles we use to arrive at success.
This is an exciting time to be a product person — get out there and maximise the impact of your product, drawing together partners from across your organisation as you do it!
Does this resonate with you? What have I missed? What do you appreciate? Let me know your feedback below — I look forward to hearing from you!
