Product Tonic Lab Cohort 2 — Retreat Day #2
PTL Retreat Day #2 was designed for participants to experience the 4 C’s Instructional Design Model for accelerated learning. During this session, we explored the concept of Value Creation, Management and Prioritisation process as a group.
Check-In with The Power of Your thoughts
We are invited to practice different mindfulness technique by reflecting the following question: “What was the color of your breath, and the image in your mind?” — It is interesting to find the diverse imagination that we all have!
Moving into our eco-lodge Bungalows!
Inspired by the facilitator’s recent trip to Bali — PTL members are invited to form a closer working group and check in to specially curated (virtual) eco bungalows!
Start moving your product canvas — backlog into the eco-lodge bungalows and decorate it to your needs — who would you share the bungalow with? Note : You can really visit these bungalows when visiting Bali. Check out https://www.baliecolodge.com/treehouse
This is how our canvas looks!
Part 1 Activity : Let’s talk about value!
In this activity, we highlighted components of 4 C’s Instructional Design Model which consists of : Connect, Concept, Concrete Practice and Conclusion
C1 — CONNECT
Participants are invited to discuss and share “In our experience in Product (or in the work we do), how do we measure value?”
Based on cohort’s sharing — we found out that it is mostly comes to $$$ values:
- Business impact (P&L, revenue, costs)
- Cost savings / avoidance
- Information + human resource experience + assets (what kind of assets are built)
- Useful for users — will they pay for it?
C2 — CONCEPT
Above sharing is not surprising. Here we are reminded of the fallacy from the iron triangle of traditional project management (driven by scope) and agile project management (driven by schedule) which viewed success as conformance to cost, schedule, and/or scope plan. Hence, adaptations or deviations from plan are seen as failures.
Here, we are introduced to the Agile Triangle Concept — This is an idea that was originally conceived by Jim Highsmith. He suggested that Value and Quality should be the project goals and constraints could be adjusted as the project moves forward to increase customer value. In other words, teams should focus on the releasable product rather than getting constrained by the iron triangle.
Source:
- https://www.360pmo.com/evolution-agile-triangle/
- From iron triangle to agile triangle (extended) (linkedin.com)
- https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/08/agile-triangle/
Value Management as Team Sport!
We also recognise that different teams may have different perception (and often conflicting) of how they deliver values, e.g.
- Marketing sees value from spending money to increase exposure
- Finance sees value from saving costs
Very often PO/PM will have to play the role as the Value Team Facilitator to understand different stakeholders) and “herd cats” for alignment! To do so, we need to be aware of seemingly subjective and so difficult to pin down concept of “value”
Elements of Value Pyramid
One notable heuristic model of customer value was introduced in 2016 by Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas Bloch. They researched universal building blocks that people use to define value and categorised 30 of such “elements of value” into four level hierarchical model:
- Functional value
- Emotional value
- Life changing value
- Social impact value
The model is similar to Maslow’s model in that it looks at the motivations that drive the behaviors of people as consumers. A viable product or service would likely provide value in at least one of these elements.
Reference: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value
C3 — CONCRETE PRACTICE
Having awareness of above values, participants are then invited to evaluate, vote and discuss how following products deliver their values:
- Aeropress: Take a look at the 30 values, and put one as it relates to coffee
- Product Tonic Labs as a product: what value will you ascribe to it?
This is how our votes look like:
Aeropress
PTL as Product
What did we observe from this cohort’s votes and discussions?
Based on number of votes, we observed
- Value management is not straightforward
- Find it interesting that a lot of people chose “it connects”
- Some people have a thing where it increases anxiety for them
- Levels of enjoyment vary; some people are not going to fully appreciate it!
- a LOT of people appreciate coffee for Sensory feel
- Provides access VS Self transcendence — both interpreted as providing more value to farmers
- Some surprises: Emotional part and Provides access
C4 — CONCLUDE
We wrapped up this activity and reviewed learnings from our first 4C Process : What did we learn about value?
- Our values can be situational and changes over time
- There are many values that we can offers if we know how to structure it
- By giving increased awareness of the choices, better choices are made — If value for a company is monetary, so what will be value for your life
- Value team facilitator and how values are defined differently in their roles/perspective
- Different people see different value in different aspects of the same object/experience
- different from person to person. As a PM it’s important to understand this products can achieve different things for different people; how to discover and tap into this?
Part 2 Activity: Cohort Discussion on running the Eco-Lodge
During this part of this session, facilitators shared the consideration and challenges for running PTL, particularly on the amount paid by participants and need to be budgeted / paid for mentors, co-facilitators as well as other activities. Participants are invited to discuss and share their thoughts on how some of these budgets should be allocated. Overall, the cohort come up with following prioritization:
- put excess for charities
- allocate for Cohort 2 Discretionary Fund — Community Fund : food, closing retreat IRL [in real life]. Priority for those who help put together the program (i.e. facilitators and mentors)
- allocate some fund for Cohort 3 support
Based on our experience discussing the challenging topic such as money, we observed:
- Each of us is both a value creator and also someone who is seeking to get value out of the programme
- As a “PO/PM” in the context of PTL, we will try to balance the needs of the now on each different aspect
- As a “Product Leader” in the context of PTL, we will try to balance the needs of all the different aspects given constraints of time and money
New questions then emerged: How might we use this approach for a larger product? Could this be a more sustainable biz model for other organisations?
Here are some participants’ comments & responses:
- PM expand the intersection between Value and Delivery team
- Bridging skills is essential for PL — Underlying is Trust
- Decide together might increase ownership
- Being PM is scary, why do I like it?
- Money talk remains challenging
Check-out Centering
Participants are invited to wrap up and share on how might they incorporate some of these practices into the week ahead, before we meet again in next retreat 😊
- Be more conscious of getting better rest throughout the week
- Re-start mindfulness practice: Mindful shower + sensation of body before drifting to sleep
- Hard to wake up in the morning and there’s so much variability in timing, so find pockets of time during the day to focus and practice breathing exercises to help concentrate and calm down or use night time to close off the day. e.g. open room window and mindfully listen to the outside
- Yoga for stretching, relaxation and thought centering
Attributions
This is a summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2022 that is taking place from June — October 2022
Product Tonic Lab is open source
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.
Materials in Product Tonic Meetups
This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.
