Product management: how to remove barriers and increase collaboration
It’s been over a week since Mind The Product, though I remember discussing an important topic with a few product managers from a scale-up company who reached out for advice.
Their main challenge was lack of customer discovery and interaction within their organisation, further undermined by a delivery-focussed product lead. We’ve all heard it before, “we just need to build X. JFDI.” (ouch), followed by a series of vanity metrics around why X was a success.
The underlying challenge here, in my opinion, is the role of a product team in communicating what product management is and how it fits into their organisation.
This, in part, is the role of a product leader. It’s more and more common to see Product taking a seat at the exec table, such as Chief Product Officer or Head of Product. This should help promote the role of product management to the rest of the company — including the need for customer discovery. Even with product leadership in place product management is sometimes seen as a delivery function and, in this instance, their organisation’s product leader seems very experienced in the industry sector but not so experienced in product management.
One recommendation I gave, was to choose a model and reference this as a way of explaining the importance of customer discovery and interaction. Not only does it gain buy-in from people, it enables the wider team to visualise a process and come along that journey with you. There are plenty of models, but here are a few that have worked for me…
Dan Olsen — Lean Product Playbook
The first one is taken from Dan Olsen’s Lean Product Playbook. His model is a pyramid in which customer (segment) and under-served needs (problem scenarios) are the foundation. The value proposition, features and UX are built on top of this. Using this pyramid with stakeholders is a way to help them visualise product management and discuss the importance of understanding both customer and needs. This enables you to label existing research and ask tough questions such as “do we have enough understanding of the customer and their underserved needs to be confident in our value proposition?” and “which people are we interacting with that represent the customer, so that we can test the value proposition effectively?”. One negative to be aware of, is the diagram doesn’t promote the ongoing nature of customer discovery or the experimental and iterative journey of testing product-market fit. It also doesn’t reflect alternatives to problem scenarios or the need to call out any assumptions we’re making.
Alexander Cowan — Venture Design Process
Another great option is Alexander Cowan’s Venture Design Process. Here we’re looking at personas, problem scenarios and alternatives before we get into experimentation, prototyping or delivery. Again, it helps point to the fact we’re working on personas right now — we’re not ready to test or build. And when we do, it will be an iterative process of testing and learning. The model illustrates a journey, and so helps stakeholders and the wider team come on that journey with you. Beware, I feel one disadvantage is the diagram suggests Personas and Problems are stages that, once passed, are not returned to. Discovery is an ongoing process and these artefacts should be updated as you continue to learn in the testing/building phase.
The Double Diamond Model
Lastly, but certainly not the only other option, the Double Diamond model. I like this, as finding The Right Problem on the left hand side of the model gives weight to the importance of problem prior to finding The Right Solution. We’re not talking about solutions yet, we’re focussed on the problem space. There are many versions of this diagram, though the benefit of the version below is, it shows you go back and forth and iterate rather than just one sweep left to right. I also love the concept of convergent and divergent thinking as this brings out the real gold in discovery and ideation.
In summary
There isn’t a right or wrong answer on which model to use, however visualising a process is extremely valuable within a cross-functional team. It can remove barriers and gain buy-in for lesser valued aspects of product management. Most of all it promotes collaboration by providing clarity to the team on how we’re going about designing and developing our product. I would recommend you choose a model you’re confident in using, take time to understand the pitfalls and to be able to describe the activities that take place in each stage.
Finally, for those of you who are interested in the psychology of influence, using someone else’s model, like the above, is a form of Social Proof — a good technique to help gain buy-in from tough stakeholders.
Which models are (and aren’t!) working for you? And which other ways of communicating the importance of customer discovery and interaction?
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