Shared Narrative #3

In Shared Narrative #2, we were talking about insights from the book Work Rules by Laszlo Bock, who is the former Senior Vice President of People Ops at Google Inc. The book offers a lot of insight about aligning everyone in the company towards the same goal.

Another book we read this week (we started reading it a while back) is Inspired: How to Create Tech Product Customers Love by Marty Cagan, who is the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG).

Insights from two books in one week. One is People Ops, another Product Management. This was intentional because we strive to combine Product Management and People Ops. People are the ones who do the works. The relationship between employers and employees is important to determine the success of most, if not all, companies.

On the other hand, Product Management often comes across as ambiguous. Most people would agree about the importance of Product Management, especially those in tech companies. But, only few know exactly or appreciate the role Product Manager plays in a company.

We think the book Inspired does an incredible job in explaining Product Management, specifically the elements of product team, their role, and their importance. This book offers a lot of insights accompanied by real examples and lessons from top tech companies.

Let’s get to it:

1. The best product team has 3 principles at work:

• Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business — sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc).
• Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially. They have finally moved beyond the old model in which a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design, and engineering work side by side, in a give-and-take way, to come up with technology-powered solutions that our customers love and that work for our business.
• It’s all about solving problems, not implementing features. Strong teams know it’s not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It’s about business results.

2. The role of product managers

Product managers need to do two things: discover the product to be built and to deliver that product to market. In other words: discovery and delivery.

Product Discovery — The purpose of product discovery is to quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. The output of product discovery is a validated product backlog. Specifically, this means getting answers to four critical questions:

• ​Will the user buy this or choose to use it?
• Can the user figure out how to use this?
• Can our engineers build this?
• Can our stakeholders support this?

Product delivery — the purpose is to build and deliver production-quality technology products. This means the necessary scale, performance, reliability, fault tolerance, security, privacy, internalization, and localization have been performed, and the product works as advertised.

3. The importance of product designer

We need design, not just as a service to make our product beautiful, but to discover the right product. Once the product managers get a designer dedicated to their product team, here are three keys to a successful and healthy relationship with their designer:

• Include your designer from the very inception of every idea.
• Include your designer in as many customer and user interactions as possible. Learn about the users and customers together.
• Encourage your designer to iterate early and often. The best way product managers can encourage this is to not get all nitpicky about design details with the very early iterations.

4. Finding the right chemistry with the engineers

• Product managers should share very openly what they know about their customers — especially their pain — the data, and their business constraints. It’s PM’s job to bring this information to their engineers and then to discuss the various potential solutions to these problems.
• It is product manager’s job to make sure their engineers feel like missionaries and not mercenaries. What’s the difference? Mercenaries build whatever they’re told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. Product Managers do this by involving their engineers deeply in the customer pain they are trying to solve and in the business problems they face.

Want to find out more . . .

Check out our website to find out why we set up Product Narrative.

Or you can read past editions of Shared Narrative here: #1, #2

Visit our blog to read more articles and writings like this.

Have a great day!

— The Product Narrative Team

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