The Trio of Product Management
Whenever I am asked, “What is your biggest take-away in your journey to becoming a product manager?”, I am now able to answer, “make sure you wrap your teams’ conversation around The Trio of Product Management”, or “产品管理的三驾马车” in Chinese. The Trio are, user value, business logic and engineering viability. This blog post outlined my journey and discovery on The Trio of Product Management, how use them to drive your product teams’ collaboration, and answer the many ‘why’ that follow.
The Journey
Everything I did on product management started in 2009 when I worked on my 1st product, a receipt printer with a web API.
Initially, I tried to approach product management like software engineering. I tried to adopt the Agile Methodology in managing team work, which worked well only for our software team. We’ve been struggling to get sales via online marketing and only by chance we figured out a sizable deal with Danone Waters in (Guangzhou) China, our 1st big corp client. We were then able to iterate our product and scale our sales with this client alone. By then, I realized that there is a bigger cycle above the Agile workflows within the software team, user value identification, and how to drive the product to offer such identified user value.
It’s not easy for a small team (7 people) to run sales with big corporate clients. We spent almost a year from start to finish, and get paid, by delivering product and service to our 1st corporation client. Our financials was in a dire mode as a result because of the lengthy sales cycle with big corp. This prompted me to think, “Where did we go wrong?”
It’s the business logic part in iterating a product. In our case, it was the sales channels, our market funnel (which was too small), and the pricing. We didn’t have a sales VP. CEO and I were both engineering minded folks who believed that we were able to become good sales. But we were not. We were just trying our luck in whatever resources at our disposal at the time.
Since we started out as a team of software and hardware engineers on a for-developer product, evaluating engineering viability had never been an issue, until we realized that we could have spent way too much resources in perfecting product edges or features that didn’t matter the most. This alone could have contributed to delayed releases and pro-longed time-to-market cycles.
Fast forward to late 2012, we met Wilson Wang, who owns and runs ifanr.com, a tech media covering China’s consumer trends on tech products. He came up with a new idea, a vending machine that allows mobile phone (WeChat) users to instantly print a photo from their phone. Then we decided to join force to build a startup around this idea. By the time we started this product as our main business, I, as a product manager, was able to empathize with user value, business logic, and engineering, The Trio of Product Management. I called myself Jack-of-All-Trade in my teams, and was able to put together team reporting routine that help all functions to empathize each other’s work. I was able to offer founders/top leadership the whole picture of a product and the service delivery to clients, and how to manage the iterative design, development, and delivery of the product’s value to our customers and end-users.
It so happened that I came across Andrew Chen and his essays on product management and startup growth (hacking). I felt great resonance with Andrew’s insights on managing growth, product, and were able to look at entire product cycle from the highest level possible.
The Practice
Let’s assume that your product company have 3 teams, sales or user growth, product and engineering (software development). To effectively drive your teams’ daily conversations, which in turn drives your teams to make great products, make sure your agenda in the all-hands meetings are structured around The Trio of Product Management.
In EACH and EVERY all-hands meeting, you shall encourage your 3 teams to share their perspectives, around The Trio, user value, business imperative/logic and engineering viability.
Here is how the magic happens. Your sales or user growth managers are typically good at capturing the latest on user value that your next version could offer. Your CEO or product director/manager may be able to elaborate on all of the The Trio. Your engineering lead can elaborate on the engineering viability or tech solution on design or requirements in question. Make sure all of them are listening in over what others think or say, and drive all members to empathize one another.
As face-to-face meeting is increasingly expensive nowadays, if your agenda are not urgent or has lower priority, you could share it via Slack and wiki, so that all your teams can finish the empathy exercise over the design/topics. Most important of all, make sure all members leave their comments or thoughts on the same wiki page.
Overtime, or during the typical cycle of your product’s iteration period, say every 3 months, honoring The Trio while communicating product plans among your 3 teams is absolute key to drive your team to make your NEXT BIG THING happen.
The Playbook (The SCRUM How-to)
To integrate The Trio into your teams’ day-to-day product work, it’s key to have a Playbook that guides them on the how-to. Since each team operates in different corporate context, here I only outline the general thoughts and steps.
SCRUM is probably the most practical Agile framework, and it’s the one I’m promoting among teams at ifanr.com. I took below steps to get them started with SCRUM,
- Identify key business domains towards which I can apply SCRUM and The Trio, for example, corporate clients project(s) that have been lasting at least for 1 year and repeating.
- Identify key members, PO (Product Owner), SM (Scrum Master, myself in ifanr.com’s case), and Dev Team (all members involved in actually building the products for customers).
- Get to know each and every key member and her expertise domain, personal traits, and current job roles.
- Identify the over-lapping areas for growth shared by both the company and a given member, to ensure enough personal buy-in over the SCRUM practices I’d like her to adopt.
- Get things rolling. Act, observe, adjust my action, observe…keep adjusting.
I started practicing Chinese Martial Arts (or Chinese Kong Fu) as a kid. One can never become a Kong Fu master without enough practicing. It’s not just the Muscle Memory, it’s about connecting your action, results and output, with your learning on all above.
Wish you a great time in learning and practicing The Trio of Product Management.
Notes: Chinese version
