When product developers become salespeople…
…wonderful things happen for the product!
Creating a product vision is a challenge for every product manager. What’s also challenging is sharing that vision with the team and ensuring they’re on the same page.
As product manager of Mingle, I found both overwhelming, but I gradually figured out the former. To achieve the latter, I recently ran a week-long workshop with my team, and sought Lubaina’s help to facilitate it. A very specific part of the workshop stands out for me for its effectiveness — our version of Shark Tank — a reality show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of investors.
This idea was Lubaina’s spontaneous stroke of brilliance, and it worked rather beautifully.
Who and how?
We had six developers, a tester and a support specialist participate.
This exercise was part of a workshop that was one week long. The intent of the workshop was to kick off a new direction for our product. I wanted the whole tech team to understand the target audience, the problem we were aiming to solve, and how our competition was doing in the space. Together, we went over the insights from research interviews, interviewed someone who fit our typical user archetype, and participated in a competitor awareness exercise. We also explored each of the feature ideas that had emerged through research.
The next step was to figure out which features would be most valuable to our target segment, and how we’d pitch the product. That’s where Shark Tank came in.
We split the participant group into pairs, gave them about 2 hours to themselves, and asked them to pitch the product to an anonymous panel. They had to pick 8 or 10 features that they thought were most valuable to the target user, and string together a product story that would sell. We called this set of features the critical path.
What came of it?
We learnt that putting all of the tech team in a salesperson’s shoes is very useful because:
They empathize with the buyer
The team begins to think for themselves what might be the best value proposition for a person who has to make the decision to buy. They think about what might be most appealing to the buyer, what problems it would help them solve, and what words to use in their pitch that would attract their attention.
They develop a perspective that is different from the technology of the product
In their day jobs, the team is thinking about how to implement the product features — the technology choices, the architecture, and the infrastructure needs. Understanding the customer’s perspective helps them balance these decisions better, and also empathize with the urgency to go to market. They make better trade-offs.
They add a skill — the art of persuasion
Developers can afford to be heads-down at work, executing the requirements they are given. Having to sell the product to someone could be out of their comfort zone. Learning to put themselves out there and make a compelling sale is useful — they become great ambassadors for the product!
They are empowered to make decisions everyday
Product developers and testers have decisions to make on the job everyday — on design, on usability, on technical implementation, and so much more. If they fully understand what value we’re looking to add to the users’ lives, these decisions are balanced and user-centric, and the team will have confidence in them.
They hold on to what they learnt for much longer
When a workshop to share the vision is complete, and the team goes back to their daily job, it’s easy for them to fall back into older patterns and forget the context they’d gained. By creating and selling the vision themselves, they retain this context much longer and apply it straight away at work.
They own the product till it reaches the users
Once the team has been part of framing the value proposition of the product, they’ve invested a bit of themselves in it. Their job no longer ends at writing code and testing it — they want to follow up, get it to production and see what users think of it.
As a sole product manager, this exercise was hugely useful to me. I started the workshop with a set of features in mind that I thought would be most valuable to the target user. However, I was second guessing myself and was looking for validation. The fact that the team arrived at close to the same feature set and a similar pitch organically, without being biased, helped me feel comfortable with the ideas I’d held close for so long. (We also validated the features with users; more on that later!)
It is also really helpful that the team has built empathy for the user. Understanding the user isn’t just the product manager’s prerogative. I like that anyone on the team is able to challenge any assumptions that I or anyone else makes while taking key decisions. Together, we build better products.
An exercise is effective when run well. When Lubaina and I retrospected on what made this one successful, we realized there were many factors:
- We gave the pairs limited time to figure out their pitch. Constraints bring focus, and bring out the best ideas in everyone.
- We kept the panel anonymous until the end. The proposals the pairs came back with were not biased by who they would be pitched to, but by what was truly going to be most valuable in the product.
- The panel had folks who’d sold products for many years, and they brought their insights and experience in sales to the activity, making the process of pitching a two-way exchange of thoughts.
- Everyone in the room had worked together closely for several months. There was high safety, enabling confidence in everyone to try their hand at something that was out of their comfort zone.
All in all, we found the Shark Tank exercise very useful and memorable. It enabled everyone who builds the product to be part of creating the vision and begin investing in its success. It needed minimal preparation to carry out, and taught me that reality shows can be a great source of inspiration at work :-)
