🌟 Finding the Highest Value Opportunity or Data-Driven Product Management
How do you identify the next best thing for your product? Luke Vella, Product Manager at Hotjar shared his insights on Data-Driven Product Management at our Product People community event.
One of the tough tasks of the Product Managers is that from a universe of possibilities we need to focus on “What’s the next best thing you can do for your product?”. Importantly, Product Manager cannot just make this decision on their own. Their personal decision doesn’t matter, what matters is market opinion. We want to improve the value of the product, contribute to improved product performance, and, if needed, pivot wisely.
It would also be nice to pick the next step so that the team readily buys-in so that you have less time wasted and spend more time improving. We’ll get back to this later in the article.
How does one pick the best next highest value-adding item?
This is where data-driven Product Management comes in handy.
Let’s see how Luke organizes his approach to data-driven Product Management:
- Identify opportunities. Start with a big-picture vision — what can we do? Look for opportunity areas not ideas for specific features.
- Gather data. Then look at the data and search for the areas that have potential. Do not forget to think about the costs — what might be helpful here is to ask for experience from other companies that made implementations in the same area. For each opportunity be specific with the target customer segment.
- Evaluate opportunities and select the top three. Remember that opportunity that you take on should be in alignment with the vision of the product and company. If you are not sure about the strategy, step back, and figure it out first. Other important sides to have in mind are the sustainability and the scalability of the product — new features should not compare these.
- Get buy-in from the team. If you have done #1–3 mindfully you will have a great list of three suggestions, backed up by data, showing how this new implementation will translate into value for the customers and revenue for the company. And this is where the magic happens — if you establish a strong business case, your team and stakeholders will not only buy-in, they will also become the strongest advocates for your ideas.
- Implementation and delivery. Time to act!
How to get a buy-in from the team?
Doing proper groundwork is the key to getting the team on your side and convincing people in your ideas. Luke finds that the following two frameworks help him to be mindful of the preparatory works and when presenting his suggestions to the team.
DIKW pyramid
In data-driven Product Management you start with working on data and translating it into knowledge and finally — wisdom (the next best thing you can do for your product).
This pyramid also helps you present your suggestions to the team by going down the pyramid from your exact suggestion to answering “why?”, “how do we know that?” and “based on what evidence/data?”:
UBAD framework
You want to build a strong foundation so that people will align with and eventually advocate for your idea. These are the steps you need to take:
- Make sure people understand why.
- Explain why you believe that what you will be undertaking is possible so that people develop a belief as well.
- Make sure people want and can advocate for you.
- You are taking aligned decisions together.
This is UBAD framework was originally presented by Janice Fraser at Mind the Product London 2018, and Luke has found it very useful when thinking about gaining the buy-in with the team.
Watch the full version of Luke’s talk. Read more insight from Luke in his blog.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!
