How to become better at building great products, no matter the company you’re in

On June 30th 2023, the Kampnagel venue, in one of Hamburg’s most beautiful turn of the century quarters, was packed with 750 curious people - all excited to take part in a series of outstanding talks, panel discussions and conversations.

On stage, 15 great speakers delivered their most recent insights all around how to build great products — with 30 AVIVer’s right there to learn, mix and mingle.

Among the many talks of the day, one word came up multiple times: habits. The notion of doing tiny things regularly to — in the long run — make a big difference fascinated us. So let’s dive deeper!

Teresa Torres: Your next step towards more continuous discovery will not be the same as hers

Teresa Torres, well-known for her inspirational work on product trios and her book “Continuous Discovery Habits”, shared three scenarios product companies are often in:

1. The Feature Factory

• Your organization funds projects on an annual basis
• Your leaders ask for 12-months roadmaps with delivery dates
• Your are measured on how much you deliver and by when
• Your sales teams own the customer relationship and are reluctant to let others contact them

2. The Messy Middle

• Your organization is new to OKRs or some other flavor of goal setting
• Your organizational structure is moving to product trios, but there are still some strong limiting beliefs
• Your leadership wants you to focus on outcomes, but they still ask you to deliver specific features

3. Reverting to Old Habits

• Your organization has been outcome-driven for over a year
• You work in a product trio that is empowered to reach your outcome, as long as you within the clearly-defined strategic context
• Your product trio has strong discovery habits and has a clear impact on both customer value and business value.
• Your stakeholders are starting to revert back to old habits dictating what you should build

Any of these sound familiar to you? Now, if you want to progress toward a stronger product culture, where do you start? Companies in these three categories face different challenges and “it’s rare for a single solution to fully satisfy an opportunity”, as Teresa put it.

Enter her golden rule of organizational change: Meet people where they are! No matter where your organization is at the moment, don’t overload your stakeholders with bright pictures of how everything SHOULD be. Just take the next best step into the right direction.

If you’re in a feature factory, maybe start small by regularly taking 30 minutes to identify your hidden assumptions. Building up this habit will enable you to develop valid arguments to challenge any kind of “just build this!” request. If you’re in the messy middle, try to automate recruiting for customer interviews and conduct your customer interviews along with your engineering and design peers. This will make continuous discovery easier and spread the word. If you notice signs of your surroundings reverting to old habits, make sure you focus on showing your outputs and outcomes to your stakeholders AND show them how your discovery work enabled you to get there. It will remind them why continuous discovery is so valuable.

“Organizations don’t change,” Teresa left us with, “People change”. You can be the change you want to see in your organization. Just pick one habit and get started today, and avoid trying to push for a big change tomorrow.

To get more input from Teresa: https://www.producttalk.org/

John Cutler: Substract and Hijack

“Habits are a part of a bigger picture and a critical component”, John Cutler stated early in his keynote. Is this going to get complicated? On the contrary! He led us deep into the very simple everyday things we do. Starting with taking a look at our calendars.

In fact, open up your calendar right now!

We’ll give you a second, no rush.

There they are, the things you do every day and week (aka, your habits). They clearly demonstrate your de facto values and priorities. Is doing the most valuable product work reflected in your calendar - talking to customers, thinking through hard problems, synthesizing all the learnings around customer behavior, celebrating the small victories?

If you are like many of us, then you probably feel like you don’t have time to do these things. Because there’s so much other stuff already in your calendar. Four simple hacks seem to do the trick for John:

• Kill your zombies! Any regular meetings that make you feel like a zombie — vegetating through them without understanding why you’re there? He calls them “Zombie Meetings”. Try staying away to use your time for more valuable things — and see what happens.
• No meetings in the first hour of the day! Use that fresh mind of yours to do some quality thinking!
• Stop things! Officially stop those meetings and endeavors you once started but that kind of died already anyways.
• Hi-jack! Just use an existing meeting to do something else than what’s on the agenda.

The idea is to subtract and to hi-jack!

Good habits are simple but effective behaviors to integrate, as John emphasized: “The success of your team comes down to small things you do every day.” Among the key components of work such as knowledge, skills, motivation and environment, your habits lead to long term successor failure.

John also shared essential product habits that every team might profit from doing:

• Active research calls (N times weekly)
• Whole-team research session (weekly or biweekly)
• Fly-on-the-wall sessions with sales and customer success
• 30 minute voice of customer review blocks (share insights to team)
• Collaborative synthesis and next-steps activity
• 30 minute morning writing blocks
• Maintain risks and assumptions log (adjust confidence levels)
• Commit to practice a one minute elevator pitch 10x during the week
• Maintain a rolling 12-month “honest” roadmap (with question marks to indicate where you just don’t know what you’ll be doing yet)
• Ditch the “performative” celebrations (e.g, update emails)
• Schedule monthly celebrations face to face — some reason to celebrate will come up
• Send personal “thank you, working with you on this was very inspiring” notes

In the end, you want to purposefully create habits around those things that are valuable, but often neglected in your environment. What a lot of work revolves around in most companies is: Roadmaps, Annual Plans, Estimates, Designs and Backlogs. But few organizations focus on “What happened with the product in the customer’s hands?”. The key is to build up habits that make you do more of the following: Observation, Insight, Action and Results.

Because aren’t we all doing our jobs to create truly valuable products for our customers within a positive environment?

Where is AVIV at?

Listening to these speakers, sharing what they believe are the best ways to evolve towards creating great products, we couldn’t help but wondering: “Where are we at AVIV?” Our perspective: We’re right there in the Messy Middle! One and a half years of major transformation, merging several tech product companies and hiring a ton of new people are behind us. We’re far from all having a shared understanding of what great product development looks and feels like. But, we’re getting there — at a furious pace!

If you think you might want to join the ride towards becoming Europe’s #1 real estate market place and a true tech powerhouse, then check out our jobs here.

This article is a personal recollection of the authors Max Heberer and Romain.F.