Product Management is like roulette, except the house doesn’t always win.
To play roulette you place bets on where you think the ball will land, simple. The different bets available to you carry different probabilities of winning and the rewards vary accordingly.
Choices
As a roulette player, there are a number of choices that can be made:
- The size of each bet
- Where the chips are placed
- Your strategy e.g. Do you spread your chips around or focus a specific area? Do you change your bet on the next spin?
Product Managers have to make similar choices when building products.
Outcomes
The results of Product Management and Development can also be compared to the roulette table.
Imagine each spin of the roulette wheel is a cycle (sprint, release etc) of product development. The work that gets done in the next cycle is chosen based on a number of factors:
- Priority
- Cost & Opportunity cost
- Customer demand
- Technical debt
- Long term vision
- And more….
In most cases, roulette players will have a limited amount of funds they can bet with, their aim is to increase their funds by winning bets.
Similarly, Product teams have limited resource and therefore should constantly be looking to work on the areas that move the needle towards your goal.
How your table (backlog) looks before each cycle should be directly linked to a goal you have defined. Every bet you place should be traceable back to a hypothesis that you expect to impact your goal.
The goal can be different for every team/product, but it doesn’t matter if your goal is revenue, engagement, user growth, loading speed….you should place your chips on the area that will impact your goal. This is tough as releasing new features can be addictive, but sometimes UX improvements, experimentation and performance can be better for your goal than a shiny new feature.
Without a goal to aim towards you are trusting the success of your product to luck. As with roulette, if you keep betting on the wrong things you will run out of time and money.
Risk & Reward
Just like the odds in roulette, working on different areas of a product brings different risks and varied rewards. Something like a complex security improvement might require significant resources to build but all you get in return is a tick on a checklist that allows you access to an IT department. Conversely, a small tweak to your onboarding might only require a few hours of development but could remove a huge pain point for all your potential new users.
Here are a couple of simple models you can use to help find the best value bets and deliver value to customers quickly:
Low hanging fruit
Categorise your backlog items according to the resource they require and the value you think they will add to users (based on your research). Place your bets on the top right quadrant followed by the top left. Ignore anything in the bottom half.
The Kano Model
Categorise your backlog items according to their type (Delighter, Core feature, Basic need) and then assess their presence/absence against customer satisfaction. Make sure your customers basic needs are covered then use the Low Hanging Fruit model to implement delighters alongside your core product development to make your product sticky and loveable.
Summary
- Just like roulette, Product Managers must assess what bets to place and the outcomes they hope to achieve with each one.
- Don’t trust to luck. Every bet comes with a cost (resource) so the potential reward should justify the outlay.
- Prioritise ruthlessly. Product Managers should only focus on bets that move the needle towards a predefined goal.
- Learn after every spin (development cycle). Double down on areas that are bringing the desired results and don’t be afraid to scrap features that aren’t adding value to users.
