Asking the ‘WHY’ for Product Management

The importance of WHY for Product Management (Reference)

In this story, we deep dive into the importance of ‘Less is more’ approach for effective product development management.

As a product guy I ask one question and that is ‘WHY’. Some of them are:

1. Why we need this Theme, Epic, feature or functionality in the product backlog?
2. Why this Theme, Epic, feature or functionality in the current quarter or in the next quarter.
3. Why this feature or functionality should be in the current sprint?
4. Why a specific measurement metrics needs to be measured for analytics?
5. Why the defined acceptance criteria only will solve user’s problems?

And there are endless WHY, which are true essence of efficient product management.

Many people are struggling in defining the WHY part only because the answer to this question only may or may not start any initiative for the product. Why the WHY part is important to get things done effectively during the product development life cycle. Let’s demystify the fundamentals.

Fundamentally the answer to WHY gives the motivation or in other words gives the purpose for any action. Benefits of knowing the purpose are:

Importance of asking Why to know Purpose for Product Management (Reference)

1. Helps you & team members together to visualise the objective with possible series of action items.
2. It acts as a bonding glue between the team members to ask specific question/s or to take initiatives.
3. It removes the assumptions among the respective stakeholders from top to bottom.
4. It becomes the important document for the future reference.
5. Most important, it gives you the confidence to START factor for any action to achieve the goal.

The answer to the WHY has the power :

1. To take the decision
2. To not to take decision
3. To answer the objective of the theme/ EPIC/ User story more effectively to identify the set of actions
4. To answer to not to start the theme/ EPIC/ User story in a particular timeline
5. To know that users are actually interested to solve this problem or not
6. Depends on the use-case, many more…

The WHY sets the:

1. Product vision
2. Product roadmap
3. Themes to take on priority
4. Research framework
5. EPICs and its scope of work
6. Definition of user story
7. Release planning

After the release, the WHY sets the,

1. Post release support activities
2. User behaviour learnings
3. Defining the product priorities
4. Themes to take on priority, and so on

This is a continuous process…

As it is said ‘Now we are in the era of Internet of value instead of Internet of information.’

Asking WHY to create Value (Reference)

1. The WHY empower the team dynamics across departments.
2. The WHY motivates the teams to add respective values from different departments.
3. The WHY gauge the success or fail measurements. It also helps to define the product matrix.
4. The WHY defines the problem statement of the user, this is to provide the best possible approach to solve it on a given time.
5. The WHY defines the revenue and the engagement model of the product.
6. The WHY validates the idea or the approach to solve the problem.

Summary

So in nutshell, the WHY has the power to drive the efficient Product Management with data-driven decisions and consent from respective stakeholders. Therefore, product’s success is directly propositions to the WHY of any issue/ query/ user story/ EPIC/ Theme/ prioritise the product roadmap.

Share your story of how answering to the WHY has helped and empowered you and your team to take meaningful actions and to achieve the business objective or the goal.