Make purpose the driver and data the navigator
Prioritization is probably one of the most important tasks of a Product Manager. The most common obstacle is not that you lack good ideas to work on, but rather you have too many of them and you don’t know where to start.
One of the typical pieces of advice is to have a data-driven approach to product management. To be guided by data. But I don’t believe this is what most people mean when they give this advice. I agree that your decisions should be backed up by data, but data should not be the only driver. Data is just one of the assets you should look at when making prioritization decisions. So how do we prioritize at Docplanner?
Let the purpose drive
Everyone should always remember what the purpose of what we’re doing is. At the company level, this can be our mission statement. We are making the healthcare experience more human. But at a team or project level, you should also have the ultimate reason why you’re doing what you’re doing. Try to answer the question — why does this team/project exist?
At my previous job, we became so obsessed about everyone understanding the purpose that we ended up covering the columns with a sign asking “¿para qué?”, Spanish for “why?”. A why of purpose, not a why of causality. We were not asking what triggered the decision, but what are we trying to achieve.
We create our teams around purposes. They are like mini-startups inside a startup, and we strive to give them all the competencies to be autonomous in pursuing their mission and achieving their goals. We believe that giving a vast amount of autonomy to the teams and involving everyone in the discussions about purpose and goals is the key to success.
For instance, we have a team focused on helping patients book an appointment with a doctor. Their mission is to provide patients all the information and tools they need to book online without a hassle. Nowadays, booking a hotel over the phone sounds like a blast from the past, but in healthcare, we’re still in the process of moving the bookings online.
Then, of course, we have a way to measure their progress. Let’s say this is the conversion rate of the booking flow — that is, how many patients that visit a doctor’s profile end up booking an appointment. This conversion is their north star metric. But if they become too obsessed about this metric and forget about the mission they have, bad things will happen. I was recently listening to the Intercom on Product podcast episode “Rethinking outcomes over outputs,” where they shared a very similar opinion. Solving customers’ problems should always be the driver.
For example, if we focus only on raising the conversion rate metric, we may start hiding negative opinions or insurance companies’ coverage, or stop requiring to validate the contact details… We can do whatever to make the user book a visit. Then the patients would have negative surprises when reaching the doctor, or they would not even show up. This situation doesn’t sound healthy.
I always say that you should be able to stop anyone in your company on a corridor and get correct answers to these two questions:
- What are the purpose and goals of our company?
- How are you and your team contributing to them right now?
Let data help you navigate
Once it’s clear that you should never forget about the purpose and the problem you’re trying to solve, you need a clear way to know whether or not you’re going in the right direction. That is where data can help you. Decide on a simple metric to tell you how good you’re doing on your mission. I’d recommend you to have one north star metric and link all your actions/teams to it. In our case, we could choose bookings as our primary metric. Then we can structure teams around it that have different strategies to raise that metric.
In the picture, you can see the team focused on increasing the conversion rate (CVR) and how it contributes to the global bookings goal. This way, every team at Docplanner knows how they’re contributing to the global vision and how much their team contribution is relevant to it.
Have a transparent insights bank
For a long time, I’ve been advocating against product roadmaps. Maybe the word roadmap has a negative connotation to me. What we do instead of a roadmap is having a ranked insights bank. We start by stating all of our hypotheses on our users' and customers' problems that we could potentially solve.
For each of these problems, we calculate the estimated impact that solving the problem would have on the primary metric. We do it to make sure we’re always working on the most relevant ideas. We use ICE scoring, but you can use any tool that makes sense to you. The tool is not the important part of this process. You should never become too obsessed about the exact mathematical formula that makes your ranking perfectly objective. The most important part, in my opinion, is the conversations you have around what’s the rationale to calculate the impact, the confidence, or the effort. This internal challenging brings us much value. It also makes sure that on one side, everyone takes responsibility for prioritization, and on the other side that we capture as much of our knowledge as possible. Product managers should not be left alone in the prioritization task. One of our product managers even ended up building Elimpse, a tool to help us organize better and share our insights banks.
Measure, learn, build
Yes, I messed up with the order of the Lean Startup motto. I prefer the order of the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). You should never start by doing stuff. First, know the context, then determine your strategy, your next actions, and finally, take some actions. Remember that the aim of these actions should be to collect more knowledge about the context, the market, the customers, and the users. The argument on how to design proper experiments to maximize learning could take at least another article. :)
