Entry #002: Set Clear Problem Spaces To Empower Your Product Team
This entry describes the experience, learnings, and benefits we got from defining clear problem spaces across adjacent product teams.
As companies grow, new management comes into play, new ideas are born, and team structures demand change. Tony Fadell, Creator of the iPod and Founder of Nest, articulates it pretty well in his book Build:
Growth will break your company. As more people join, your organizational design and communication style need to keep up, or you risk alienating the team and cratering your culture. — Tony Fadell @ Build
This section is not about how to structure your teams, but instead, when it happens, why you should define clear problem spaces.
What is a problem space anyways? The Product Index defines it as: “problem space is where the needs of your target customer live. These can be anything from pain points, desires, or jobs to be done.”
Defining problem spaces seems so obvious and logical, however, many product teams do not do it. I thought I would share my reflection on how defining a clear problem space has benefited our team.
Empowers anyone to be creative
Ideas come from everywhere, not only from product managers — however, most of the time, team structures constrain the flow of ideas across the team. So, you need to find your antidotes to these constraints, and one of them is clear problem spaces. The goal and purpose of defining the problem space are so everyone in the team, PMs, EMs, Engineers, and Marketing; you name it, are fully aligned and have a good understanding of the problem the team is trying to solve. Once alignment is achieved, and priorities are clear individual contributors will naturally start sharing ideas about how to achieve that goal. Now, as a PM, your role is to marinate your team’s ideas and empower individuals to test the underlying assumptions, but that is a topic for another time.
Provides clarity to stakeholders
An assumption that I mistakenly made quite often is to think that everyone in the organization knows what every team does; spoiler alert, that is not true. It is important to clearly articulate your team’s problem space in a straightforward sentence, for example, “increase organic traffic in our logged-out experiences.” or “improve activation within the mobile app experience.” Clear problem spaces for technology companies usually have two elements, one (or two related) metrics and a confined area. Every time a new stakeholder has a new idea they want to discuss, it is clear which team is in charge of that metric and user experience.
Allows PMs to understand the problem deeply.
Teams often have vastly different priorities from quarter to quarter (or even month to month), especially in early-stage startups. From my experience, this allows early PMs to be exposed to many other problems/solutions and gain great experience. However, it limits the PM’s ability to understand the business’s complex problems and market dynamics fully. So, by the time they grasp the user’s pain points, the context and focus of the team have changed. By having deliberate problem spaces, the new product manager can still benefit from being involved in multiple projects within the same problem. This way, as time progresses, the more projects the PM is involved in will deepen their understanding of the problem and generate new insights and ideas which can be carried over and exploited in future projects.
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