Pivot Product Hits | 25th August 2016
A roundup of the week’s best Product Management content: Why good Product Managers do Continuous Discovery, why great Products aren’t always good businesses and what PMs can learn from rock bands!
What playing in a rock band taught me about Product Management
Product Teams and rock bands are both trying to create something new, build an audience and sell their product, says TaskRabbit’s John Vars.
In Summary: Being a Product Manager seems worlds apart from being a guitarist in a rock band. But, on closer inspection, there are striking similarities. A veteran of a number of bands, John shares his top rock tips for Product Managers.
The best way to become a great live band is to play a lot of gigs. It doesn’t really matter who’s in the in audience. So it goes in Product Management. Too often we wait too long to ship because we want something to be perfect. But being iterative and thinking of each release as a way to learn and incorporate feedback is the best way to go. Ship often. Play lots of gigs.
In a band, it’s usual for the songwriter to be the only one who actually knows what the song is about. Drummers often have no clue, so invent their own lyrics. When Product Managers fail to explain the context of a new feature, engineers won’t understand why they are doing it. Good Product Managers take time to provide this detail.
Many bands get exploited because they don’t understand the music business. All artists need to grasp the basics and have a network of professionals around them. As a Product Manager, you may have the most amazing product, but if you don’t understand how that fits into the greater business strategy you’re at a huge disadvantage.
Good Product Managers do Continuous Discovery!
Part 13 of MAA1’s Product Management toolkit.
In Summary: Enthusiastically endorsing Marty Cagan’s concept of ‘Dual Track Agile’, MAA1 strongly believes that ‘continuous discovery’ helps mitigate the risk of an unsuccessful release by giving Product Managers customer feedback ‘early and often.’
Instead of doing ‘big research’ at the start and end of each product development cycle, a Dual Track approach means you’re constantly discovering and validating customer needs.
Running in parallel with development sprints, each discovery cycle should provide a tested set of customer needs, user stories and/or wireframes which can be converted into working software the following sprint.
Product Roadmap vs Release Plan
What’s the difference? asks Roman Pichler.
In Summary: The product roadmap is a high-level plan that sketches out the major stages of a road trip, including overnight stops. The release plan then states how each stage is likely to unfold.
A release plan is an ‘Agile Project Plan’ that forecasts how a major release should be developed. It usually covers no more than the next 3 to 6 months.
A product roadmap, on the other hand, communicates how a product will evolve across several major releases. It describes the journey you want to take your product on over a 12–18 month horizon.
Roman believes the release plan should be derived from the roadmap with help from the product backlog.
Survival is the best Product Strategy!
Great products don’t always make good businesses, says Intercom’s Des Traynor.
In Summary: The ‘product-first’ philosophy of most startups has caused many to overlook what’s required to create a sustainable business. Solving a customer problem with a good product doesn’t magically create a successful software business.
By analysing the type of problem a product solves, Des can usually identify which products will struggle and which are built to last.
Specific axes are key to this analysis: low frequency / low impact problems are rarely good candidates for sustainable businesses. Likewise, low priced / hi-touch products challenge the fundamentals of unit economics, no matter how good their user experience is.
Finally, it’s easier to build products that solve your own problems than to try to solve the problems of others. Products match problems, so the clearer you understand the problem, the clearer your solution will be too.
Good Product Managers fire their customers!
The Pareto Principle in action.
In Summary: The importance of ‘firing your customers’ has a rich heritage. Steve Blank wrote about why it’s important in 2008 and, last week, Rich Mironov and Michael Seibel added their support to his point of view.
Rich Mironov examines the 4 different types of customers (or prospects) we usually encounter in the B2B space — from happy, engaged evangelists to the hopelessly random — and underscores how disproportionately valuable some types are when compared to others.
Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel focusses on customers in the B2C space and the questions Product Managers need to ask themselves when deciding whether to pivot towards a new customer segment. Sometimes this is the correct thing to do, as with his own startup, Justin.tv.
Both emphasise the ‘right way’ to retire a customer (with courtesy and honesty, of course) to ensure your product solves one problem really well rather than half a dozen badly.
What is your Product’s unit of value?
A hierarchy of customer needs from Bain.
In Summary: What consumers truly value can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. The amount of value in a particular product or service always lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones.
The good folks at Bain have identified 30 ‘elements of value’. These elements fall into 4 categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are inwardly focused, addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, life-changing motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s fitness products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world.
These elements of value can help Product Managers creatively add value to their brands, products and services and gain an edge with consumers.
How to ace your Product Management interview
All the way up, says Sachin Rekhi.
In Summary: Sachin has interviewed hundreds of Product Management candidates at LinkedIn. In this post he gives an overview of the kinds of competencies he typically sees being tested in interviews.
The first competency is domain knowledge drawn from experience. The more senior the role, the more extensive the list of activities the candidate should be familiar with. Next up is familiarity with the company you are joining: do you know the products, the business and the people?
Most tech companies put a premium on case interviews and Sachin is no exception. He rotates between different examples but all deliver a design challenge to which the candidate is expected to outline how they would measure success, suggest improvements and determine if improvements had worked.
Finally, it’s essential for a candidate to have their own questions prepared. This demonstrates their passion for the role as well as their specific focus within the product.
Minimum Valuable Problem!
You get more value from conversations about why someone will use a product than discussions around how the product will work, says Scott Selhorst from Tyner Blain.
In Summary: When people talk about product they are usually talking about things that get built. For Scott, that’s not nearly as valuable in assuring product-market fit as talking about the problem they are solving. He feels you get more value from discussing how the product will be used than discussing how much it costs to make the product.
Your minimum viable product may be solving half of a problem. The minimum valuable problem is one you completely solve. You may only solve it for a small group of users but, for those customers in that situation, you have completely solved it.
Defining the minimum valuable problem is defining the minimum viable product.
3 myths about the future of UX
The goal of VR is for everyone to do what they want and live as they want, not recreate the same issues they have in reality, says Unity’s Greg Madison.
In Summary: Greg works in Unity’s Labs, designing the virtual and augmented reality interfaces of tomorrow. Years of observing people interacting with technology and a deep knowledge of ergonomics have made him sceptical about the future that many are predicting.
First up, he doesn’t believe movies will become 360 degree immersive experiences. Narrative is maintained by focussing people’s attention in certain places. Instead, entertainment will be more like ‘extended 180 degrees’, with viewers able to zoom in on areas of interest.
He also doubts the future of work will be VR; mainly because wearing a headset for 8 hours is disorienting and tiring. Even those who do use it will be sitting not standing; desk-based work habits die hard.
Despite the groundbreaking controllers promised by Oculus, Greg doubts the mouse will be replaced anytime soon. Already 30 years old, it’s still the device that allows the most reach with the least amount of effort.
Product Quote of the week
“You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of others and understand their points of view. That doesn’t mean you have to be consensus-driven; in fact, I think being consensus-driven is death from a Product Management standpoint.”
Hunter Walk is everywhere right now.
Originally published at Pivot Product Hits.
