PUX Despegar! With Marty Cagan in São Paulo
For a great part of the argentinean people, there’s a month each four years, when all conversations turn around soccer. The World Cup fever turns a match between Morocco and Iran into the final of the Champions League. Everyone has to watch it, you need to know all the results, who converted the goals and who’s leading it. The World Cup started on june the 14th, with Russia winning by five goals on the opening game, and while the fever run wild across Argentina and the world, we cross over the frontier of Brazil, to join Marty Cagan and other Product Management professionals of Latin America on the past weekend.
In this article we’ll share a bit of what we saw there and our most important reflections.
Marty Cagan, one of the creators of Product, was in São Paulo for his “How to create products Customers Love” workshop. He invited us to refresh our methodologies and techniques, for knowing new paths. At this process we took this chance to use our time to think together on how to make a better product, a better Despegar.com.
The first day was rough. It started at 9 am and just after breakfast we were already sitting at our table. At 10 am was Argentina’s first match at the World Cup against Iceland. With some smartphones supported against water glasses, we streamed the match watching it with the corner of the eye, screaming silently the goal and eating away the anger of the draw.
While we had our attention divided, Marty was presenting what would be two days of this workshop.
The presentation started with an interesting reflection on the quality of the Product Managers (PMs) in the world. On one hand, there’s more and more companies tied into Product, and they need more people for those roles. On the other hand, a solid PM formation is hard to build, with Google’s Associate Product Manager Program (APM) taking 2 years for form a ‘rockstar’, and companies do not have that amount of time. So they end up adapting Product Owner or Product Management trainings to form the PMs they need.
This situation has a real impact on the capacity of innovation and quality of products that the users enjoy. And that’s because those who form part of this group come here from a different formation, with different books under our arms and a different sum of experiences. A complex background for finding new professionals that can join the teams.
This workshop was an express tour through the commandments responsibility analysis and the portfolio of tools we have to launch products that make people fall in love. This help us a lot to order one of our tasks as PMs in Despegar, which is to form new PMs. Also was a good exercise to do some retrospective view and analyse where we stand, what we are using, and what techniques we should bring in. Is good to do this kind of review exercise once a year to cement the professional growth and give ourselves chances to improve.
The Root Cause of Product Failure (video) was the starting point for the two-days meeting. Marty’s focus was on how to improve the flow of ideas until they reach production, replacing the tools that tend to fail with different methodologies or techniques, according to the situation.
Before starting with the tools, we checked up some concepts we took home to reflect on the structure of the subjects that involve a good PM’s responsibilities.
- Knowledge of the Customer: a good PM must be a referent from the client inside the company.
- Knowledge of the Data: the different tools we could have to manage information would let us generate more insights, justify decision-making and knowing users more.
- Knowledge of the Business: we should be the voice of the business inside the work cell, which in our case is compose of UX and Development.
- Knowledge of the Industry: it’s important that we know the context in which our business moves. In our case, the travel industry has many referents of Market Research, such as Skift or Phocuswright that keep us up-to-date. But is also important to be informed about industry news, regulations and other movements.
One of the subjects that caught my attention from this division of subjects is how helpful it can be to improve the training we do for new Product Managers, giving a more clean and simple structure to information.
We end day one with a review of the importance of vision and strategy for the PM and how the OKR can be a great tool for replacing roadmaps and project initiatives, giving us much more flexibility for Discovery.
Day two came with a lot of promises to check several techniques but also it was the second most anticipated match in the World Cup for everyone present, between Brazil and Switzerland. We started expecting an auditorium empty of brazilian people, whom will rank the match over the conference, but we were surprised to find a full house, of course with all laptops streaming the game.
During all day we talk about different technique groups and Discovery principles:
- Framing Techniques
- Planning Techniques
- Ideations Techniques
- Prototyping Techniques
- Testing Techniques
We also got some good tips on how to guide the organization of a transformation, to the use of this techniques, which many times is the hardest part.
Personally I knew a lot of this subjects but some were new to me. Some came just at the right time to recapture and start implementing them. Others I didn’t saw the reason to put in practice, but the refresher was welcome to have in mind a lot of available techniques that can simplify several of our daily tasks. This are the ones that made me reflect the most and I’m gonna try to have in mind during my next projects.
Press Release
Is a very simple tool with it’s focus in narrating a project or initiative to the team. It’s about creating a news style article telling the latest developments about what the project is providing to the product.
I think this is a good communication tool that can force us to justify our initiatives better, and with the focus into creating excitement in the team, that can lead to better quality when the project is out in production.
Startup Canvas
There’s not much secrets about Startup Canvas that you haven’t seen in any other Canvas, but I was inspired to have this tool much more present when thinking about our product’s team goals, training new members, telling a better story when presenting stories/initiatives/projects and having much more clarity about our responsibilities.
If you don’t know Startup Canvas I recommend you reading this Steve Mullen article.
Customer Discovery
In Marty Cagan’s article you can find a better definition of what is the tool of Customer Discovery.
Two things made me think about this technique. The first one was the concept of Reference Customers, which deals with a client who has not being influenced directly with incentives to become a client, but who does it naturally. I was attracted to think from the perspective of that client who’s unaffected by a strong campaign like Cyber Monday, by a discount coupon or an exclusive benefit. If you can keep this clients, who come naturally, your product would end up being much more strong.
The second thing is just to get 6 of this clients to recommend the app, to make them tell why they use this app, platform or this new feature. References from happy customers that are not influenced can be extremely powerful, both for boost new projects and to understand what these Reference Customers see as important.
Discovery Coaching
The last topic that make me think about it was Discovery Coaching, taking the idea of a Scrum Master and replicating it for the Discovery stage in Product, to create that figure as a coach, an enabler in the Discovery stage of the Product. In particular we have excellent Discovery Coaches at Despegar, without knowing that they cover that function. I think this concept can help us improve this enabler figures that seem naturally to boost the work we do around Discovery.
Knowing Marty was an amazing experience and a great pleasure. It was two intense days, of 9 hours talking about Product each day, with the World Cup in the middle and two very important matches for everyone present there, both with the same results. But it was mainly a productive space to re-think procedures, stop the ball and think about how we are working, sharing experiences among ourselves and discuss techniques and frameworks we can start to use or not use in situations where they slow down processes or even hinder them.
To sum up, the best of this two days was the teamwork we made between the 10 Product Managers that took part, our reflections on this new things and the retrospective view of our current work. Now it’s our turn to share this ideas and reflections with the rest of the PUX team and move on suffering from this World Cup fever.
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If you reach this article and don’t know who Marty Cagan is, I recommend you to watch some of his talks, read some of his articles or even one of this two books.
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