Page not found – A product management blog by Jock Busuttil https://imanageproducts.com A product management blog by Jock Busuttil Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:53:03 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://imanageproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/i-manage-products-logo-100x100.png Page not found – A product management blog by Jock Busuttil https://imanageproducts.com 32 32 I want to update my pricing strategy. Where do I start? https://imanageproducts.com/i-want-to-update-my-pricing-strategy-where-do-i-start/ https://imanageproducts.com/i-want-to-update-my-pricing-strategy-where-do-i-start/#respond Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:38:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=10156 Read more ›]]>

Hi Jock,

My product currently has one tier of per-seat pricing for all customers. I want to change my pricing strategy to cater differently for SMEs and enterprise customers. Where do I start?

Thanks,

M

Hi M,

There’s lots to consider about pricing strategies, so here’s a potted summary of a few things to think about.

Kano model

Given you want to differentiate your pricing for different user / customer segments, one starting point to consider is the Kano model. This is a way to assess how different features of your product are valued in different ways by users. Remember that all features become less delightful (and move towards being expected or baseline) over time.

When the iPhone launched, a touchscreen was unexpected and delightful. A few years later, a mobile phone without a touchscreen was considered unacceptable. And to come full circle, some people would now regard a phone without a touchscreen as delightful (albeit quirky or retro), particularly if they’re trying to cut down screen time or curb a social media addiction.

Further reading on the Kano model

Unexpected delights – a geek’s guide to the Kano model – I Manage Products

I Didn’t Know I Needed That!: Finding Features to Satisfy Your Customers – Mike Cohn

Pricing strategies

It’s also worth thinking about why you want to change your pricing strategy. What is the desired effect of the change? How will you know whether the changes have worked?

Are you trying to solve a problem that users / customers / partners experience?

Are you trying to solve a problem facing your organisation?

Be careful about making changes to your pricing solely to benefit your organisation. Your customers will quickly figure out whether the changes benefit them also, or whether they end up worse off as a result. A couple of years ago, Clip Studio Pro was a notable example of how such a change in pricing strategy can cause a PR uproar. Reddit also annoyed and alienated its user base with pricing model changes, leading to protests for most of 2023.

Pricing is a connected system, so think about the outcomes in terms of finding a way to achieve one thing without adversely affecting another thing.

Further reading on pricing strategies

Don’t Just Roll The Dice – Neil Davidson

Subscription Pricing Models: 4 Strategies for Growth in 2023 – Price Intelligently

How to Price a Product – From One SaaS PM to Another – Janna Bastow

Software pricing demystified – Rich Mironov

Price elasticity

Another concept to think about is price elasticity. In simple terms this means is how sensitive your customers are to changes in price. Customers may tolerate a certain increase in price, but at some point they will start to consider the price too high, and will seek an alternative (or do without).

The tolerance to price changes customers have is also related to how much they need the product. If the product is a must-have, their tolerance will be probably be greater. If the product is a discretionary purchase, then less so.

It is possible to run experiments to test the effectiveness of your pricing, but it’s generally thought to be not a great idea to split (A/B) test different prices for the same product to different groups of customers. If anyone sees both prices, the customers who paid the higher price will understandably feel ripped off.

Further reading on price elasticity

A Refresher on Price Elasticity – Amy Gallo

My product management toolkit (28): testing price sensitivity – Marc Abraham

Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From – Peep Laja

Units of value

Pricing is simply a way for two parties to agree on the value of a product or service by exchanging it for something of known value (money). Another thing to consider is how each segment of your customers thinks about their usage of your product. What are their units of value when they use your product?

Does your product add value to specific individuals, meaning a per-seat licence may be appropriate, or to the organisation as a whole, in which case, a site licence may work better?

Or is it more of a utility, like electricity or water, where it doesn’t matter who uses it and when, what matters is how much is consumed?

Does the customer derive value from the product all the time, or only occasionally? If all the time, a subscription model may make more sense, but if only once a year (say to do your annual taxes), then maybe a one-off fee each time would make better sense.

If the needs and typical usage of different segments of your customer vary a great deal, for example SME (small to medium size companies) versus enterprise customers, you may need to offer different pricing models to suit each.

Further reading on units of value

How (Industrial) Hardware Is Different from (B2B) Software – Rich Mironov

Product or Feature? – Rich Mironov

I hope you find the articles I’ve linked for you helpful. Pricing is fun, but there’s a lot to unpack :-)

Cheers,

Jock

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How do I make my product roadmap a better communication tool? https://imanageproducts.com/how-do-i-make-my-product-roadmap-a-better-communication-tool/ https://imanageproducts.com/how-do-i-make-my-product-roadmap-a-better-communication-tool/#respond Wed, 14 Feb 2024 10:09:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=10148 Read more ›]]>

Hi Jock,

My product roadmap is not getting the right information across to other people in my company. In particular, my customer success and marketing teams are struggling to plan their work for upcoming product releases. I’m also not sure how I can show my roadmap’s relationship to the half-yearly OKRs we set. How can I improve it?

Thanks,

J

Hi J,

First and foremost, your product roadmap is a communication tool, so if people are taking away the wrong message or not getting the information they need from it, then it may be worth rethinking how you present the information.

Extract a release plan

It sounds like your customer success and marketing teams need advance warning about certain releases needed by key customers, or releases worth highlighting to the market more generally. You may wish to pull out a subset of the roadmap as a release plan specifically for these audience. It would be characterised as the most certain bits of delivery, filtered by relevance to external audiences, expected to drop in a relatively short timeframe (maybe 1-2 months at most).

Use OKRs as roadmap themes

We also talked about how your 6-monthly OKRs (objectives and key results) effectively set the two main focuses (or themes) for the next 6 months of your roadmap. I’ve seen teams colour-code their roadmap items to correspond to the current themes. That way, they can glance at the roadmap and see that they’re working mainly on the blue theme (OKR 1) right now, and a little bit of the red theme (OKR 2), then later on the balance shifts the other way. You can also add housekeeping stuff like bugfixing or refactoring into the roadmap as a separate, more long-lived theme.

Show everything your team is working on, and why

With that in mind, it’s reasonable for a roadmap to include whatever the team is actually working on, whether it’s a timeboxed discovery or experiment to learn or test something out, or delivery of ‘shippable’ product. What matters is that there’s a clear ‘why’ for each item on the roadmap. You should be able to point to any roadmap item and describe how it answers a question or delivers something that in turn helps the team move closer to their OKRs, which in turn (hopefully) aligns with what the company is trying to achieve in the next 6-12 months.

Think in outcomes and bets

Another way of thinking about roadmap items is that they are all outcome-based, meaning we’re expecting something to change for a particular group of people as a result of completing that roadmap item (again whether those people are a segment of users or the team itself increasing its knowledge).

But the roadmap items are also bets on the future – we’re effectively saying that we’re doing the item because we reckon/bet that it will cause a particular outcome. Some of those bets are on what we think we know (hence discovery and experiments), others are bets on how we can help our users to do something more effectively, or at all.

Our confidence (likelihood of success) will differ for each roadmap item. Usually we want a balanced portfolio of bets – some low risk/low return, some high risk/high return, some in the middle.

Final thoughts

In summary, the roadmap should a way of abstracting the detailed work of the team so we can more easily tell the story of our team’s current and planned future focus (themes), progress to-date, confidence (risk) & learning, and alignment of learning and delivery with higher level goals and strategy.

Cheers,

Jock

Further reading

Tom’s Roadmap Heuristics – a work in progress – Tom Dolan

Make the most of your roadmap – Scott Colfer

How we made the GOV.UK roadmap – Jen Allum

PRODUCTHEAD: Outcome-driven product roadmaps – I Manage Products

PRODUCTHEAD: Place your bets, please – I Manage Products

The secret behind meaningful product roadmaps – I Manage Products

The secrets of meaningful product roadmaps (redux) – I Manage Products

Can I pick your brain about product roadmaps? – I Manage Products

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How can I keep track of all these product metrics? https://imanageproducts.com/how-can-i-keep-track-of-all-these-product-metrics/ https://imanageproducts.com/how-can-i-keep-track-of-all-these-product-metrics/#respond Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:15:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9891 Read more ›]]>

Hi Jock,

Do you have any advice on productivity tools for tracking product metrics? I’m seeking guidance on streamlining feedback and metrics management. Juggling continuous discovery insights, team feedback, and metric tracking has become increasingly overwhelming.

How do other teams effectively prioritize and process this information? I’m particularly interested in recommendations for tools, routines, and methodologies for focusing on the most critical data points. Any insights or best practices would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

H

Hi H,

It certainly feels like we’re being asked to track more and more metrics these days. The idea underpinning this is that we can only work to change something we’re actively measuring. But we we’re usually not trying to change that many things at the same time. So one of the ways we can reduce our workload is to focus on tracking only the most important things we’re trying to change right now (rather than trying to measure everything, all the time).

One meaningful metric at a time

Some writers such as Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz (Lean Analytics) talk about ‘the one metric that matters’. In their North Star playbook, John Cutler and Jason Scherschligt also talk about a single, meaningful metric, and then a handful of contributing inputs that tend to move the North Star metric in the right direction.

Operational metrics

But what about operational metrics, tracking the day-to-day stuff to catch when it’s not working as it should? This could be anything ranging from SaaS product uptime and performance, all the way through to whether the team has had sufficient user research interactions this month. Unless we’re actively trying to improve something in this area, we ideally want to track this passively (and automatically if possible), and only do something if an operating metric drops out of its desired normal operating range.

So if the website goes down or is responding too slowly, we get an alert. If the team isn’t getting out and talking to users often enough, this (hopefully) gets noticed in daily/weekly catch-ups and then we temporarily apply a bit more focus on improving that particular metric again. And once things are back to the desired state, we don’t need to give them as much attention again.

When unsure, start with a line in the sand

The thing is that for many of the things (at least to begin with), we simply don’t have enough detail to be able to quantify it, except in general terms.

So in discovery, right at the beginning when we’re trying to find an opportunity to investigate further (but we don’t know what it’s going to be yet), we might set ourselves the metric of interviewing at least 5 users in a particular segment each week. The problem we’re trying to solve is lack of insights, so we measure how frequently we’re speaking to people with the hope of uncovering insights.

Why 5 interviews a week? It’s simply a realistic starting point we’ve guessed. Not too few, because that would mean we’re not likely to uncover insights very quickly; not too many because we have other work we need to be doing at the same time. Perhaps when we’ve become more experienced at running discovery interviews, we may decide that we can reasonably manage 8 interviews a week. All we’ve done is to use our practical experience to refine our initial guess. But now at least we have some actual data to inform the change.

So the point is that sometimes we just need to start with a reasonable guess, gather some evidence, then revisit our guess to make it more accurate in the light of the actual experience.

Automate and streamline metric gathering where possible

In terms of practical ways to reduce the effort, try to automate measurement where possible. If it’s a manual measurement, keep the process of recording the metric as lightweight as possible to ensure people actually do it.

How the digital team at HM Revenue & Customs in the UK keeps track of their user research
(Credit: David Travis, Userfocus)

I think you mentioned you’re already using ProdPad. There are probably ways to automate collection of relevant metrics using their API, particularly given they integrate with Zapier, which in turn connects with many other apps. Many of the teams I have worked with in the past have also used Grafana to track and alert on the operational metrics I mentioned earlier.

Hopefully that gives you some ideas, let me know if you need more.

Cheers,

Jock

Further reading

PRODUCTHEAD: A primer on analytics for beginners – I Manage Products

PRODUCTHEAD: The joy of metrics – I Manage Products

PRODUCTHEAD: How product teams can measure discovery – I Manage Products

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Getting your first job as a product manager https://imanageproducts.com/getting-your-first-job-as-a-product-manager/ https://imanageproducts.com/getting-your-first-job-as-a-product-manager/#respond Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:21:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9665 Read more ›]]> Getting your first job as a product manager can seem impossible. Thankfully it’s not! I share my advice on how to break into a career in product management.

In this article

People are often put off trying to become a product manager because they pull up the job adverts and run into a chicken-and-egg problem: they all need you to have product management experience to secure a job, but you don’t yet have a product management job to gain that experience.

Don’t let this discourage you!

Almost all of the most successful product people I’ve met didn’t plan to become a product manager to begin with. Many were promoted internally into the role. Even then, while some realised it matched up fairly well with what they were already doing, others had to Google what a product manager was and adapt quickly.

Nowadays, the role is much better understood, and there are many communities of professionals worldwide waiting to offer you their help. In this article I’ll share my advice on ways to break into your first job in product management.

Identifying and filling your skill gaps

Benchmark your current skills

Talent Map Demo - soft skills self-assessment
A fictitious product management skills self-assessment example

I’m guessing you already appreciate what a product manager is and does. (If not, read my book and the rest of this blog. It’s product management all the way down.)

The fact that you’re looking for a product manager job in the first place hopefully indicates that there’s a good overlap between your current set of skills and the skills you’ll need as a product manager. Nevertheless, it’s entirely expected that you’ll have gaps.

To help you figure out the main gaps and where you need to focus your learning, I’ve put together a free self-assessment survey that takes you through the fundamental skills of a product manager. I’ve also written about the approach if you’d like more information first.

If you do take the survey, send me a message afterwards to confirm who you are and I’ll share with you (yes, still for free) a Google doc that benchmarks your results against an average taken from a range of your product manager peers. This will highlight the fundamental skills you need to work on. And of course, your survey results will remain confidential.

Product management training

Then to go about filling some of those skills gaps, there’s plenty of product management training available. I offer live and recorded training specifically about becoming a product manager, and landing and starting your product manager job.

At the beginning of each of my courses, I remind people that they’re not going to emerge after only a day or two of training as a fully-formed product manager, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

Working Products 2019 workshop
Hard at work at one of my training workshops (Working Products 2019)

There are lots of ways to do product management well, but context matters. So rather than teaching a specific process or technique, which would only work in certain situations, I help people to start thinking about the ‘why’ of product management first. Once that’s understood, then the techniques (the ‘how’) can follow.

A good outcome for my trainees is for them to realise how much more there is to learn (there always is). But because they now understand the ‘why’, the ‘how’ becomes much easier to figure out and apply to their situation.

Internal promotion

Shaking hands (Photo by Fauxels on Pexels.com)
Photo by Fauxels on Pexels.com

Internal job moves should in theory be the best outcome for both you and the organisation you work for. After all, it can be much simpler to segue from one job to another within the same company, and your company retains your accumulated knowledge and experience, while saving on recruitment and onboarding costs.

There are however pros and cons to this approach. On the positive side:

  • You don’t have the same level of risk as you remain employed for the duration
  • You retain the working relationships you’ve built up and don’t have to start over
  • Any employment benefits you’ve accrued will remain with you

However, on the down side:

  • By definition, you’re letting your company know you’re no longer satisfied by your current role and want to move
  • You’re probably good at your existing role, so this may create a disincentive for the line manager who will be ‘losing’ you to recommend you for the promotion (yes, people can be that petty sometimes)
  • You might be ‘typecast’ in your current role — if you’re known as (for example) a really good tech support person, then you’ll have to work extra hard to stop everyone forever associating you with that role
  • If you’re not successful, this can sour your relationship with the company, and you’ll probably end up leaving anyway
  • Negotiating a salary increase can be harder — unscrupulous companies will often make you an incremental salary offer based on what you’re currently earning, rather than what the market rate for a product manager is

Other ways into product management

Shadowing

If internal promotion isn’t an option, it’s still a good idea to spend some time shadowing the product managers in your organisation if you can. And if you have them, shadow your user researchers, designers and senior developers / engineers also. You’re going to be working closely with these professions in particular, so the more you understand about them, the better.

Photo of a man and woman using a laptop computer
Photo by Elevate Digital on Pexels.com

If you don’t have product people to shadow at your organisation, try reaching out via the various product management communities to see if someone would be willing to let you shadow or intern with them.

Associate product manager positions

When looking for your first product manager role, seek out organisations that advertise associate product manager roles. These are structured a little like an apprenticeship, and should not require previous product management experience, so you can build up your skills and experience safely and with support from a more experienced practitioner.

Some organisations may also have a specific career development programme or academy to help people move into the profession. I’ve compiled a short list of these to get you started in the further reading section (#notsponsored).

A product owner role is a dead end

Yellow dead end sign during day time
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’m just going to come out and say it. A product owner role is a dead end for a career in product management.

Throughout most of my career as a product manager, there’s been a ferocious debate raging about whether a product manager and a product owner are the same thing. They’re not.

I used to be more charitable in my view about this, but with the benefit of hindsight I’ve become more polarised. I’ve found that most organisations that advertise a product owner role are looking for a very specific, process-oriented position. More often than not, these organisations expect product owners to be backlog jockeys, solely to keep the delivery team fed with user stories prescribed to them by a more senior stakeholder.

They have limited influence on the direction of the product, often with no access or incentive to research user needs. They’re a servant of the process, whether it’s Scrum or SAFe or something else. They’re not expected to question whether there’s any value to users in the thing they’re building.

In other words, product owners are given no opportunity to develop their product management muscles. Once you find yourself in this role, it’s really hard to escape. This is why I’ve come to regard the product owner role as a dead end. Avoid.

Once you’re a product manager

Keanu Reeves knows kung fu in The Matrix
Keanu Reeves knows kung fu in The Matrix

When you’ve successfully made your way into a product management role, well done! Now the learning really starts.

You’re going to be expected to become good at the ‘technical’ aspects of being a product manager, such as your product’s vision, strategy, roadmap, pricing, research, design, delivery and user experience, but the real challenge is actually all the associated messy people stuff.

Your ability to progress up the career ladder as a product manager will depend on your ability to bring the right products from idea to market, in the right way, and to enable them to be successful by whatever measures your organisation expects.

But to do all this, you are going to need to work well with your users, your delivery team, your stakeholders, partners and suppliers, and possibly your organisation’s senior management team. There’s a lot of people involved, and not all of them are going to see things in the same way.

Your success as a product manager is predicated on your ability to work well with people, even if you don’t always see eye-to-eye on things. Anyone can learn how to craft a product roadmap — it’s just a technique. But learning how to work well with people is a lifelong quest.

Further reading

Inclusion in this resource list does not imply endorsement, nor am I receiving any remuneration for including them.

Product management communities

ProductTank — product management meetups both live and online in most major cities worldwide

Product in the (A)Ether — product management support network for existing PMs and those seeking to get into product management

List of Slack groups for product managers on ProdPad’s blog

List of product manager communities on ProductPlan’s blog

List of online and offline product communities on The Hive Index

Associate product manager programmes

Typically organisations offer associate product manager roles in conjunction with structured buddying, mentoring and training to help you fill the skill gaps and gain hands-on experience.

Understandably, there are well-established APM (or equivalent) programmes at the usual suspects: Google, Meta, Microsoft, LinkedIn and, err, Uber. Whether you feel inclined to join any of them is a different question :-)

Schmidt Futures has an APM programme and is geared towards social good.

This list of APM programmes by Exponent also seems useful.

In the UK, Civil Service Jobs has finally added text search to their service, so you can now search for associate product manager roles in the public sector.

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Force multipliers https://imanageproducts.com/force-multipliers/ https://imanageproducts.com/force-multipliers/#respond Wed, 06 Sep 2023 09:23:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9608 Read more ›]]> I seek out “force multipliers” to extract multiple benefits from the same work, like my very own workplace fusion reaction. Can you find your own?

In this article

Recently I was explaining to a client why I focus my efforts on finding “force multipliers”. These are what I call activities that allow us to extract multiple benefits from a single piece of work. You could think of it a little like a workplace fusion reaction, where the output ends up far greater than the input effort.

This concept excited my client, and so I wondered whether it was something I simply took for granted and assumed everyone did. If force multipliers are a new concept to you, read on.

If, like me, this is something you’ve been doing automatically for years, then there will be few surprises for you. I won’t mind if you stop here :-)

Still here? Good!

I’ve been running most aspects of my business, Product People, for over a decade now. I’m forever juggling the tasks of running the business, seeking new clients and actually delivering the work. For me it’s about being efficient, nimble, and getting as much return as I can from the effort I invest.

If you work by yourself, or in a relatively small organisation, you’re probably also constrained by the time you have to do things. You can of course increase your productivity by being incrementally more efficient at certain tasks, however the much bigger wins come from finding things that multiply the return on your effort.

And so I always seek out “force multipliers”. These are the activities I can do once, which then yield several useful outputs in parallel. This saves me time overall, and lets me punch well above my weight.

Simple examples of force multipliers

Standard software (versus bespoke)

Creating a piece of standard software is an example of a force multiplier. Once you’ve gone to the effort and expense of shipping the first unit, or onboarding your first user, every additional unit or user should require minimal additional effort and expense.

The potential return on your product is not limited in the same way as doing a custom job for every single customer (where you incur the same fulfilment cost every time).

Training delivery

My product management training also acts as a force multiplier in two different ways.

1. Once a course is written, I can deliver the same training course to several clients for minimal additional writing effort.

2. The course delivery itself is a force multiplier for each client because several people can attend. This is more efficient (and cheaper for the client) than training each product person individually through 1-2-1 coaching.

Writing a talk

Another force multiplier for me is when I’m asked to give a talk. The talk itself may only be 15-20 minutes long, so at face value it may seem disproportionate to spend several hours researching and writing it. However, the process provides me with lots of other benefits in parallel.

I’m usually asked to speak about a particular topic within product management, so this constraint helps me to get writing and avoid the blank page paralysis that can accompany a less specific brief.

The research forces me to dig deeper into a topic, to uncover alternative viewpoints which I can talk about, rather than only providing my own opinion. So I learn more, and broaden my own perspective in the process.

Then when I give the talk, I usually record my own audio, then transcribe it. I can then tidy this up and edit it into one large article or several smaller ones. The best articles I discovered during my research typically form the basis of a weekly edition of my PRODUCTHEAD newsletter.

Lastly, quotes from the articles end up as a tweet post, toot, skeet or thread on whichever microblogging site we’ve all fragmented onto this week.

Seeing as I’ve already invested the effort in creating the original content, I try to benefit from it in as many ways as possible. Each subsequent step is like an added bonus for me, something of value for minimal additional effort, as compared with tackling each as a standalone task.

Time and again I observe organisations investing hours to generate words as part of their business as usual. These come in the form of reports, status updates and research findings and so on. And yet the same organisations also struggle to find the time to engage with their users and customers through regular blog posts or email updates. While not everything is going to be suitable for external publication, there’s always the potential to repurpose some of the work that’s happening anyway.

Distribution channels

If you sell things directly from your website, you’re probably already working on search engine optimisation (SEO) to have your site rank higher in organic results. While there are advantages to encouraging your customers to purchase directly from you, you have to work hard to build that inbound traffic.

In addition (or instead), you could go where people are already looking. Which online retailers typically show up in the top search engine results when people search for products in your category? What would it take to get those retailers to sell your products through their site? Would their commission be offset by the corresponding increase in sales?

For simplicity, let’s assume the other sites that rank higher in search were to bring in the same amount of sales as your own direct channel. Each additional site multiplies your reach for relatively little effort in comparison with achieving the same growth through your own site.

Doing so doesn’t stop you from continuing to build traffic via your direct channel. And over time you can look objectively at the performance of the additional channels to determine whether it’s worth your while continuing with them.

Final thoughts

There are untapped force multipliers waiting for you to take advantage of them if you know where to look. Seek out the opportunities to tweak what you’re doing to receive multiple benefits from a single activity, or to seek partnerships that will amplify what you’re doing to a wider audience with minimal extra effort on your part.

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91: How to sharpen up your vision and strategy https://imanageproducts.com/91-how-to-sharpen-up-your-vision-and-strategy/ https://imanageproducts.com/91-how-to-sharpen-up-your-vision-and-strategy/#respond Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:14:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9569 Read more ›]]> I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned the hard way about product management. You can catch up on the previous entries if you like.

You can help your company to sharpen up its vision and strategy with these straightforward questions and worked examples.

In this article

Introduction

Whether you’re joining an organisation as a relatively junior product manager or as a member of the senior management team, a good starting point for orienting yourself is the corporate vision and strategy. They set the context and direction you need for the product strategy and tactics.

When the vision and strategy are focused and clear, they allow product managers to prioritise and filter the possible options for their products more easily by assessing how well each option aligns with the broader strategy.

When they’re less coherent, product managers will still strive to make the best possible decisions, but the resulting actions will not be as coordinated, losing the multiplicative advantage that coordinated actions bring.

A few disclaimers

I’m not for a moment claiming I’ve invented some magic new framework (that would be terribly out of character for me). I’m humbly standing on the shoulders of giants, Richard Rumelt (Good Strategy, Bad Strategy) and Geoffrey A. Moore (Crossing The Chasm) in particular, as well as several others for the approaches outlined in this article.

Also, this is not the only way to examine your vision and strategy — you can and should use other methods also to assess them from different perspectives.

The prompts I suggest you ask later are not going to list out for you the exact set of moves you need to make to win the market with your products. You’re still going to have to go out and do the hard user research to turn your guesses and assumptions into evidence and facts.

However, the questions I suggest below will dovetail nicely into whatever other methods you are using to figure your overarching strategy. Then you can dive into the detail of making bets on how you’re actually going to achieve it.

Does everyone see the same vision and strategy?

Different organisations will have better and worse starting points when it comes to vision and strategy. As part of your company induction, you’ll hopefully have the chance to meet with various members of your senior management team, department heads and other.

As my friend Helen Holmes always reminds me:

“The state of being new is this absolutely incredible gift, especially to a product manager, because you can reach out to anybody and just say, I’m new, please help me.”

Helen Holmes, author and freelance product director

Ask them to describe the vision and corporate strategy to you from their perspective, and how their department or team typically works. If you need to, clarify whether they’re describing the company’s vision and strategy, or those of their own department or team.

While I can’t simply ask these questions directly, these are what I’m really trying to find out the answers to:

What are the organisation’s vision and overall strategy?

How well aligned is the senior management team on these? (understanding and action)

How focused are the organisations’s goals on outputs (revenue, margin, market share etc.) rather than user outcomes?

What targets and incentives are teams and departments using to track their performance?

How well understood are the organisation’s vision and strategy by the product team?

How is my product (or product line, or portfolio) helping to move the organisation closer to its vision?

I think of it like a discovery exercise, because I don’t yet know what I don’t know. Through these conversations, I’m trying to piece together a picture of how well defined the corporate vision and strategy are, and how the well aligned the organisation is to them through the activities they’re engaged in.

I reserve judgement because I’m still figuring out the context. However weird or dysfunctional things may appear on first blush, I always remind myself that the organisation is nevertheless conducting business sufficiently well to keep the lights on.

What I typically end up is a shortlist of things centred around product management and the product team that stood out for one reason or another, with open questions to find out why they’re happening that way.

Next I review how well the various descriptions of the company vision and strategy I’ve been hearing match up with each other. If they’re all pretty well aligned, that’s an encouraging start.

I’ve written before about the problems that can arise from an absent or poorly aligned vision and strategy.

Your degree of influence

Even if you found yourself in a fairly senior position in the organisation, chances are you wouldn’t simply be able to dictate a clearer vision and corporate strategy. Instead, you could focus on what is more in your sphere of control (your own product strategy), and hopefully set a good enough example to influence the wider corporate strategy.

I’ve seen examples of this approach working in the past. Years ago, a former colleague introduced software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to the company we were both working at, creating a multi-million revenue stream, and shifting corporate strategy as a result. But it took him several dedicated years and was very much a hard-won victory.

Another approach is to give the senior management team a method for examining the existing vision and strategy that will highlight any vagueness or incoherence. That way, it’s not you having to convince them, rather they’re able to draw the same conclusions for themselves. (Whether that changes their approach is an entirely different matter.)

When I do this, I like to frame this activity as a set of questions for them to ask. They’re based on helpful methods other writers and product people have shared.

Sharpening the vision

The corporate vision can sometimes be a little fluffy and vague. To avoid triggering defensive reactions, you may need to distinguish between the vision statement you’re seeking and the snappy soundbite that may feature prominently on the office walls, corporate website and marketing materials (and which would cost $$$ to change).

Ideally, the vision we’re looking for should succinctly describe the far-off, hard-to-achieve change in the world we want for our users. These questions help to expose potential fluffiness:

Who is the vision framed to benefit? The users or the business?

Does the vision describe what the organisation is already doing? (not far-off or hard enough)

Does the vision describe something we want to achieve that is currently considered impractical or not easily attainable?

How specific is the vision? Would a more general goal make it harder and further off? Would a more specific goal reduce distractions and provide focus?

What would be a ridiculous extreme for the current vision? Why shouldn’t that be the vision?

IKEA’s vision statement

IKEA retail store
IKEA retail store (Photo by Alexeander Isreb on Pexels)

IKEA’s vision is:

To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low, that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

Source: IKEA

IKEA’s vision statement focuses on benefiting users (affordability). While it does describe what it’s currently doing, the goal (as many people as possible) is still off in the distance. We may take it for granted given IKEA’s pervasiveness, but few competitors are able to do what IKEA does, with the same consistency and scale.

The vision relates to a broad enough category (home furnishings) that there’s plenty of room for different coordinated approaches, without being overly general.

X’s vision statement

Now let’s look at the vision statement for X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

Source: Linda Yaccarino on Twitter, uhhh, X

X’s vision is not explicitly framed around user needs. Instead it talks about solutions aimed at the user for their unspecified needs. It’s not clear what problem X is solving for people. It describes partly what the business is already doing, and some things that it’s not yet.

What Yaccarino is describing is complex, but is arguably something that other companies have already achieved — see Tencent and WeChat for details. As such, the goal of the vision appears to be to create a ‘me-too’ super-app, very much an output (the stuff the business builds or attains) rather than an outcome benefiting users. The ‘why’ is missing.

What are we currently doing?

Next we move one layer down in detail and describe in general terms how the organisation is operating right now. We want a description that reflects current reality rather the aspirations. Geoffrey A. Moore suggests a structure for a product’s elevator pitch in his book Crossing the Chasm. With a little adaptation, we can also use it to describe what the organisation does (or at least one of its main business units):

For <target customer>

who <target statement of need or opportunity>,

we offer (a range of) <main product categories>

that <key user benefits / reasons to buy>.

Unlike <primary competitive alternative>,

our products <statement of differentiation>.

Source: Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore (with adaptions)

Once we’ve formulated that description of what the organisation is currently doing, we can ask:

How well does it align with the vision?

If we kept doing things as we are currently, would we be happy with the pace of progress towards achieving the vision?

If we know, what would we need to do differently to get towards the vision more quickly? (stop, start, do more of, do less of)

Let’s create one for IKEA:

For home owners and renters

who need to furnish their home, often for the first time

IKEA offers a range of home furnishing products and homewares

that is well-designed, functional and affordable, and promotes sustainability.

Unlike other home furnishings retailers

our products keep costs low by being sold direct to customers, flat-packed, from large retail warehouses, without compromising on quality. We reinvest part of our net income to keep low-price product ranges as affordable as possible. We operate a franchise model to ensure brand consistency and quality while increasing our international reach.

Is what IKEA is doing aligned well with its vision? Yes!

Honing the strategy

So far we’ve established and sharpened up the vision, which gives us the end goal and the compelling reasons for wanting to get there. We’re not quite done with the vision, because we’ll need to revisit it later on. We’ve also looked at what we’re currently doing, and how well that’s moving us in the right direction.

A geographical roadmap with a pin in it

Next we’re going to look at the strategy. Strategy describes the moves we’re going to make to help us achieve our vision more effectively. If you think of your vision like a holiday destination, your strategy would determine the choices and trade-offs you’re going to make when deciding how to get there.

I might wish to choose comfort over saving money, or scenic routes over getting to the destination quicker, or to take the ferry because I want to avoid disruption at airports. I still want to end up at my destination, but my travel strategy should reflect how I’m going to do so, and the reasons why I’ve decided to do it that way.

Targets alone do not a strategy make

Now by contrast, what would happen if my travel ‘strategy’ was just a list of things I want to check off a list? I might want to visit certain places of interest along the way, or even to ensure I’m averaging a particular speed throughout the journey to get there on time.

While these may suggest some strategic choices, by themselves they don’t really tell me how I’m going to reach my destination and why I’ve decided to get there that way.

This is precisely the problem with having solely a bunch of targets and calling them a ‘strategy’. They describe specific things we might want do on the journey, but we still need a coherent strategy to contextualise whether we should be doing them in the first place (the ‘why’), and if so, how to string them all together on the way to achieving the vision (the ‘how’).

To be clear, I’m not saying that having targets is bad. Rather I’m suggesting that we first need to figure out the why and how of the strategy, then we can then identify the checkpoints that will indicate if we’re moving in the right direction and at the right speed.

This sets the stage for defining your leading metrics later on, a topic I’ve covered before in editions of PRODUCTHEAD before (“The joy of metrics” and “John Cutler’s North Star Metric”).

Actual strategy is hard

The thing is, of course it’s pretty easy to define my travel strategy. Most of us make travel plans fairly often, and the trade-offs between the options are common knowledge. Creating a strategy for a business is clearly much more complex.

An illustration by W. Heath Robinson featuring a steam-powered tricycle
An illustration by W. Heath Robinson featuring a steam-powered tricycle

When we set off on vacation, it’s not as if we first have to chart a new map and invent a novel mode of transport to get us there. In the modern world of travel, everything is so much more certain.

In contrast, figuring our the strategy for your organisation, or even just a single product, means having to cope with lots of uncertainty. It’s not a case of choosing a strategy from a set of well-known options — we might first have to discover what those options are, and occasionally invent a few new ones for ourselves.

Even if we do have a sense of the options available to us, we don’t necessarily know what trade-offs we need to make by choosing one over another. That’s why strategy is hard.

A little help, please

Thankfully we have many useful ways to frame our thinking. In particular I like Simon Wardley’s mapping technique, which is powerful for understanding the strategic landscape and gameplay, but has a steeper learning curve than other methods if you want to derive the most benefit.

Fareed Mosavat and Casey Winters from Reforge have written about the broad categories of strategic play, and Gibson Biddle’s DHM model (Delightful, Hard to copy, Margin-enhancing) may also provide food for thought.

Lucy Spence has an excellent article which builds upon Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers to help you figure out how to establish a defensible, hard-to-copy advantage over competitors. (With dragons!) She suggests thinking about how for each ‘power’ the organisation could defend itself from threats, expand into new markets, or innovate.

I also like John Cutler’s North Star playbook and Martin Eriksson’s Decision Stack, which both help especially with coherence and alignment between high-level goals all the way through to day-to-day actions.

But for focusing in on the strategy itself in this article, I’m relying on Richard Rumelt’s approach as described in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

Defining a good strategy

Rumelt writes that bad strategy is characterised in four ways:

Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments.

Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognise or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it.

Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.

Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

He later describes the kernel of a good strategy as containing three elements:

A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

So the questions we need at this stage are easy to ask, but more difficult to answer:

Diagnosis questions

What’s going on?

What are the problems and challenges facing our target customers? How do we know?

What are the problems and challenges facing our organisation? How do we know?

For each set, which are critical (tangible threat to our business) and non-critical?

Guiding policy questions

What broadly are we going to do about it?

For each critical problem, what general approach would align with our vision?

What other things could we try?

Coherent action questions

What will we actually do?

For each of our guiding policies, what are we going to do and not do?

IKEA’s COVID strategy

Let’s look at IKEA again, some of the challenges it faced in the last few years, and how it responded.

Diagnosis

COVID is forcing much of our customer base to spend more time at home: working, exercising, homeschooling, as well as needing to disconnect sometimes. Our customers need to adapt their homes for these different purposes.

Mandated store closures, stay-at-home orders and health factors because of COVID are putting the livelihoods of our 166K+ staff and franchisees at risk

COVID and other factors are contributing to global rises in supply chain costs

Guiding policy

Rework our product lines in response to our customers’ change in needs.

Enable e-commerce as primary retail method

Find ways to keep our retail stores open in some capacity to allow us to keep operating

Support our staff’s livelihoods by finding safe ways to keep them working, avoiding furlough or redundancies

Avoid making life harder for our customers by passing on increases in supply chain costs via price rises

Coherent actions

Let’s rework our existing product lines and introduce new ones to facilitate our customers’ emphasis on different activities: socialising and personal space, hygiene and bringing outdoor space to the home in some form.

Partly to permit continued retail operations and partly to allow many of our staff to continue working safely despite the pandemic, let’s convert as many stores as we can into ‘click-and-collect’ e-commerce fulfilment centres. (A good example of a force multiplier.)

Let’s establish neighbourhood pick-up points to allow customers to collect purchased items without having to visit a store.

Where stores need to close because of government mandate, let’s waive rent and service charges for our franchisees to help them also weather the pandemic.

Let’s absorb the supply chain cost increases so that we don’t have to raise prices for our customers.

IKEA did all these things in response to the pandemic, including absorbing EUR €250 million supply chain cost increases in financial year 2021 without raising prices for its customers.

Sources:

IKEA talks opportunities and challenges of retailing in 2022”, Insight DIY, 31 December 2021 (retrieved 25 July 2023)

IKEA grants €26m to protect the health and livelihoods of communities, co-workers, suppliers and consumers impacted by coronavirus”, Ingka Group, 27 March 2020 (retrieved 25 July 2023)

IKEA’s “Life at home” report 2020 (PDF)

IKEA’s “Life at home” report 2021

Re-vision

For our diagnosis we identified the biggest problems and challenges facing our target customers, and hopefully did some research to figure out whether they were as critical as we thought. For our guiding policy we also thought about the broad moves we needed to make in response.

Before diving into any more detail, now is a good time to reflect back on the vision we sharpened up earlier.

This brings us to one of the biggest questions we need to ask: does what we’ve figured out so far suggest that we should be aiming to get to a different destination? In other words, do our diagnosis and guiding policy suggest we change our vision for the organisation?

We should not take this question lightly because it’s a doozy — it fundamentally changes where we want to get to and why. Lots of people in the organisation may be invested in achieving the current vision, and a dramatic change could alienate them.

Likewise the knock-on effects potentially mean changing up a lot of what the organisation is currently doing. This kind of change is going to be costly in various ways, and productivity is going to tank while the organisation reorients itself. All good reasons why the vision shouldn’t change that often.

But we still have to ask the question.

In our IKEA example, its strategy and vision were already well aligned, so there was no reason to change the vision. And when COVID forced a dramatic strategic detour, that alignment made it easier to determine the right guiding policies and subsequent actions.

Final thoughts

It’s not easy to sharpen up your vision and strategy. You have the challenge of wading through the assumptions, opinions and received wisdom to uncover hard evidence through research. It’s also easy for people to be reluctant to change something into which they’ve already invested time and effort.

By asking these questions, the hope is that your senior management team will come to realise when they need to improve the vision and strategy. And when they they do, they’ll have a structure to help them.

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https://imanageproducts.com/91-how-to-sharpen-up-your-vision-and-strategy/feed/ 0 Jock Busuttil
90: Always have a plan B https://imanageproducts.com/90-always-have-a-plan-b/ https://imanageproducts.com/90-always-have-a-plan-b/#respond Wed, 14 Jun 2023 09:17:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9264 Read more ›]]> I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned the hard way about product management. You can catch up on the previous entries if you like.

Have you ever wondered why product managers say “it depends” quite so often?

In this article

It’s all a bit complicated

The best product managers I’ve observed continually weigh up the impact of many different shifting factors, and know what they will do next as a result. When considering what to do next with their product, they could be thinking about the likely net outcome of any or all of the following things all together:

How quickly can the delivery team fix a nasty bug that’s affecting customers? What if they can’t?

How would that timescale shift if one of the more capable developers were to postpone their annual leave? How likely is that to happen?

How receptive would the senior stakeholder be to accepting a delay to release?

What if the team were to swap out the buggy component for an alternative? How much time would be needed? Would it be technically feasible in the first place? Would doing so just introduce new and different problems?

How much would each course of action affect users positively and negatively?

How much would each course of action affect the business positively and negatively?

The product manager will be re-evaluating these probability calculations in their mind, possibly explaining why their brow always looks so furrowed. But to the outsider who’s unaware of this complex web of factors, the decision-making process will look rather opaque.

It may seem to them that the product manager is prone to changing their mind. Rather, what’s happening is that the product manager is noting changes in one more more of the factors that contribute to their decision, and that shift has been sufficient to nudge their chosen course of action. The goal is to achieve the best possible compromise given the circumstances.

Or it may seem to them that the product manager is ignoring an obvious course of action, when in reality, the product manager has considered and discounted it as an option, because there’s a bunch of hidden downside associated with it. Pulling on one thread could cause the whole thing to unravel in less than obvious ways.

So it’s no wonder our favourite response to a question is “it depends”. It really does.

Always have a plan B

Desmond Llewelyn's Q talks to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond
Q imparts wisdom to James Bond (Credit: Danjaq / Eon Productions / MGM / United Artists)

[Q] Now, pay attention 007. I’ve always tried to teach you two things. First, never let them see you bleed.

[JAMES BOND] And the second?

[Q] Always have an escape plan.

The World Is Not Enough (1999), Danjaq / Eon Productions / MGM / United Artists

When I’m thinking about a course of action, I’m really asking myself a couple of questions:

How likely is this thing to happen?

What would I do differently if this thing happened?

Really what I’m doing is formulating my plan B (and C and D and so on). But I can’t plan for every eventuality, so I also need to consider the likelihood of needing to use that alternate plan.

I recently had to deliver some training remotely whilst away from my usual studio. My biggest concern was that the internet connection there would be too slow or unreliable to livestream my training.

I asked myself what if that turned out to be the case. What would I do differently? So I made sure I had a plan B in the form of a personal wi-fi hotspot with plenty of data allowance. From tests I conducted beforehand, I knew that there might be a drop in the quality of the streamed video, but it wouldn’t be that noticeable when streaming slides for the most part.

And of course I turned up to the venue on the day and found they had given me duff login details, so out came the wi-fi hotspot, and off I went.

You can’t plan for every eventuality

While I think it’s tremendously important for product managers to be considering what their plan B / C / D would be if something critical came up, not everything can be anticipated. Nobody could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. However, the businesses that weathered it best were the ones who were able to formulate and execute a workable plan B quickly, then improve it as they went along.

It is important to ask “what if?” to explore possible scenarios, but some factors are more critical than others. In the case of my remote training delivery, if I didn’t have a decent internet connection, there would be no training at all, so all my other concerns and what-ifs were secondary.

Are you able to figure out the most critical factor that will affect your decision?

Don’t put it off — embrace it and practice

When we have a sense that something is going to be tricky or problematic, we may also have a tendency to put it off until later because it’s uncomfortable to deal with now. Some people will bury their head in the sand and hope it goes away. (It won’t.) Instead, hope for the best, and plan for the worst.

There are two useful analogies, one for making unlikely events mundane, and the other for orchestrating a complex series of events more easily.

Making unlikely but critical events mundane

Perspective view of a typical aircraft training circuit
A typical aircraft training circuit (Credit: StudyFlight.com)

In aviation the two riskiest, most critical aspects of a flight are typically the take-off and landing, mainly because of the combination of relatively low airspeed and proximity to the ground. Should a problem occur, the pilot has little time, height and airspeed with which to manage the emergency.

Early in their training, aircraft pilots practice ‘circuits’ to build up their experience. A circuit is a take-off, a quick loop around the perimeter of the airport, then a rolling landing and take-off again.

Once the trainee pilots become proficient, the instructor will start to introduce complicating factors. These are typically a simulated emergency of some sort.

A radio failure would mean the pilot needs to communicate with the air traffic control tower via other methods before landing safely. A stuck throttle on landing would mean a fast and shallow approach before landing. Or a particularly nasty scenario, an engine failure shortly after take-off, in which the pilot does the best they can with the height and speed available.

Rather than ignoring the risk and hoping it never happens, pilots practice over and over so that if the worst does happen, they can react quickly, evaluate the options available and take the most appropriate course of action without panicking.

Orchestrating complex events

Another analogy is when complex procedures should be rehearsed, much like staging a play. Everyone learns their lines individually, then bits of scenes are practised together. Then gradually the actors get closer to the real performance by adding in the stage directions, props and costumes, with a dress rehearsal before the opening night.

All this practice doesn’t guarantee a perfect opening night, but hopefully it serves to catch all the big screw-ups beforehand.

The James Webb Space Telescope folded up and stowed for launch in the nosecone of a rocket
James Webb Space Telescope folded and stowed for launch (Credit: NASA)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a particularly nail-biting example of this. Its design was so large that it had to be carefully folded up to fit inside the rocket before being launched into orbit. Once in orbit a million miles from Earth, 344 separate unfolding operations each had to complete successfully, otherwise the $10 billion telescope, and the 20+ years of planning and development leading to that point, would have been wasted. At that distance, there was no possibility for repairs — no plan B.

Alistair Glasse is the commissioning lead for MIRI (mid-infrared instrument), one of the four major instruments on-board the JWST.

“As commissioning lead, my role has been to ensure that the instrument we’ve built meets the needs and aspirations of astronomers and scientists. We delivered MIRI to NASA in 2012. But our involvement didn’t stop there. Since 2012, MIRI has been getting built into bigger and bigger subsystems within the observatory, so we’ve been carrying out rigorous testing at every stage.

“For example, in 2017 in Houston, we built up the entire observatory, all the instruments and the telescope, in a huge vacuum chamber. It was then cooled down to its operating temperature in space, which is around 40 kelvin (approximately -230°C), before we ran end to end tests. This was to check the instruments could be aligned and cope with the rigours of space.”

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) final rehearsals before launch”, Alistair Glasse, Project Scientist, Commissioning Lead at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, writing on the UK Research and Innovation blog

Seemingly against the odds — although really due to the intense preparation of all the teams involved — the unfolding of JWST in space went perfectly.

“After the last wing deployment, more than one person made comments like, ‘it seemed so simple; did we overstate the complexity and difficulty of the deployments?’”

“The perfection of the deployment execution and the subsequent activities reflects directly on how hard everyone worked and the diligence and sacrifice it took on the part so many people. The fact that it looked simple is a tribute to all those over the years who have worked towards Webb mission success.”

The Webb Team Looks Back on Successful Deployments”, Bill Ochs, Webb project manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Final thoughts

As product managers, we try understand the hidden complexity behind our decisions, and be sensitive to the factors that affect our decisions. It’s a good approach to consider the likelihood and impact of our what-if scenarios and have appropriate backup plans.

When faced with particularly critical risks, it is better to embrace and practice the scenarios until they become mundane, rather than hoping the risky eventuality never materialises.

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https://imanageproducts.com/90-always-have-a-plan-b/feed/ 0 Jock Busuttil
89: What games taught me about customer onboarding https://imanageproducts.com/89-what-games-taught-me-about-customer-onboarding/ https://imanageproducts.com/89-what-games-taught-me-about-customer-onboarding/#respond Wed, 03 May 2023 09:23:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9343 Read more ›]]> I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned the hard way about product management. You can catch up on the previous entries if you like.

Video games aren’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but some of the most successful games and products share a common attribute: they help the user become more skilled throughout their journey. Customer onboarding is a continual process.

In this article

Problems with typical customer onboarding

A popular user onboarding approach with products at the moment is to provide some kind of in-app walkthrough for new users. This usually signposts key parts of the user interface and briefly explains what they’re for. In combination, new users will also typically receive a series of friendly emails highlighting some of the things they can try out.

More sophisticated approaches will trigger special emails when users do or don’t do certain things. These might include completing a particular significant task or if it’s been a while since the user last logged in. These approaches are all perfectly reasonable, and certainly better than not engaging with new users at all, but I find they tend to fall down in a couple of ways.

1. You clearly want me to use your product far more than I want or need to

I get it. It’s a competitive market and companies have to fight for people’s attention. But beyond that, companies seem to wildly overestimate how often and for how long people will use their product. Wishful thinking or over-promising to investors?

Let’s face it, the only product I wish to engage with for an extended period of time is my bed. For everything else, I have a specific task to complete as quickly as possible so I can get on with something else.

Similarly, it might be days or weeks between my uses of the product. What I don’t need is a series of increasingly panicked — and almost always automated — emails from “Jerry” saying they miss me and checking I’m okay. I get it. It would really help your MAU (monthly active users) numbers if I just logged in again. Thank you for your faux concern, “Jerry”. Unsubscribe.

2. It’s all changed. Again.

On my return to an app after a lengthy gap, I’ll admit I sometimes need a gentle reminder of how it works. These days however, this is less often due to my sieve-like memory, and more to the several major product redesigns in the intervening period.

I used to use Descript on a weekly basis for editing a video podcast. Even with that usage frequency, it still seemed to change fundamentally every time I opened the app. My routine had to evolve to allow for the obligatory 30-minute download and update process that preceded any actual editing.

Recently I returned to Descript after a few months away, and it was borderline unrecognisable. I just didn’t have the energy to figure it all out yet again. Now I’m all for rapid iteration and improvement, but with each update I lost all my accumulated muscle memory and had to re-learn the app from scratch. I couldn’t have been the only user struggling to keep up, could I?

If you’re going to force users to start over practically every time they use your product, it becomes more and more attractive for them simply to start over with an alternative product that changes less often.

Alternative approaches from games

You might think that video games have it easier with user engagement than your typical office productivity tool. I don’t think that’s in fact the case.

If I have a task to do, even if the product I have to use is glitchy and painful to work with, I’ll muddle through with it because I still have to do the task in question. With a game, I don’t have to do anything — I’m playing mainly for the enjoyment and possibly the bijou hit of dopamine for completing something in-game.

For that reason — playing is optional — if a game is too hard, too easy, or just unenjoyable, I’ll stop playing. And there’s going to be very little that would entice me back again.

The most successful game producers realise this and work very hard on several aspects of the game mechanic to keep players coming back.

Initial onboarding happens in-game

The most successful games tend to incorporate the onboarding process into the story being told. In Guerilla Games’s Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) your first actions are to help the game’s protagonist, Aloy, to explore an unfamiliar environment and learn some new skills along the way. By helping her to learn, the player is also learning the basic game controls.

Introductory scenes and gameplay for Guerilla Games’s Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)

Valve’s Portal 2 (2011) introduction uses dark humour both to parody other games’ onboarding sequences and to teach how to play the game, all in the context of an action set-piece which quickly sets the scene and rewards the player’s progress.

Introductory gameplay for Valve’s Portal 2 (2011)

At no point in these or many other game titles is the player’s immersive experience interrupted. You and each game’s protagonist are thrown together into the inciting events of the story, and only by learning together does the narrative progress.

The game is continually teaching players new skills

Part of the pleasure of playing a game is the gradual and comparatively frictionless it is for the player to acquire new skills. In order to progress through the game and reach the conclusion of the storyline, a player has to become more accomplished.

The game introduces new techniques to the player organically throughout the story. The player is shown how to do something, sometimes by an in-game character. The player then has a chance to practice, until some plot device occurs that hinges on the player’s ability to use that new skill competently and repeatedly, to reinforce the lesson.

This cycle of introduction, practice, reinforcement, and then combination with other techniques, means that the player become skilful enough over time to complete the game. Should the player then wish to play through the game again, they are often offered a much harder setting to present enough challenge to offset their greater skill.

An adaptive balance of challenge and reward

The process of acquiring new skills and making progress during the game is not strictly linear. Without the right blend of challenge and reward, players can be put off. Too difficult, and they give up. Too easy, and it dampens that little dopamine hit associated with achievement.

Consequently, game designers allow the game to adapt its difficulty dynamically based on the player’s ability in that session. If a player is flying through with ease, the game subtly makes things just a little harder. Similarly, if a player is repeatedly falling at the same hurdle, the game imperceptibly lowers the bar just a little for the player to stave off their frustration, regain their confidence and resume making progress.

Done well, the player almost never notices it happening. And as an interesting side-effect, this adaptive difficulty means each player’s experience of the game is entirely unique. It’s the ultimate personalisation.

What can we learn about user onboarding?

1. The user’s first impression of your product is important

If your users feel your product is not going to help them with their task, or will be too demanding to use, they’re going to choose another product.

Many games designer take extra effort to ease a new player into the game while it is the most unfamiliar to them. In the same way, the user’s first interactions with your product’s are critical to get right.

Early on, the user needs to verify that your product will enable them to achieve their primary task, and to gain the confidence that they are sufficiently skilled to be able to do so relatively easily.

2. Playtest the hell out of it and ditch the parts that don’t work

The user’s initial experiences with your product will strongly influence whether they keep using it, but you can’t drop the ball once they’ve become more invested.

A game that’s glitchy, annoying, not enjoyable to play, or fails to elicit an emotional reaction is a game that players can’t or won’t play. Game playtesters don’t simply help the publisher find game-breaking bugs, they also provide valuable feedback on aspects throughout the game that are too hard, too easy, too repetitive, as well as evaluating whether the overall story hits the right notes.

Test your product over and over, with lots and lots of users, novice and experienced alike. If some aspect of your product simply isn’t working for large swathes of real users, you’re going to have to change it or ditch it entirely. It’s not going to magically improve at launch.

3. Onboarding is really a continual process

If you can help your users to become increasingly confident with your product, and to achieve more satisfyingly complex results, you will encourage them to stick with your product for the long term.

Onboarding doesn’t end after the user’s first few interactions. As with games, your product should be progressively helping the user to learn relevant and helpful new skills at their own pace. If your product can help users to become more efficient at a few of the tasks they perform most often, they will see a real boost to their productivity.

As with games, when a user is ready to learn something new, teach them a technique, reinforce it through practice, then help the user to combine it with other techniques to perform more complicated tasks.

4. Act like people are using your product because they want to, not because they have to

Always assume that users have a choice — even if your product is the only one they can use (which is rarely the case), users can always choose not to use any product at all. They’ll either do the task manually, or not bother in the first place.

By adopting this mindset, you’ll become far more alert to the minor annoyances, difficulties and ambiguities in your product that you otherwise may be tempted to let slide. “Quality of life” improvements to your product are always worthwhile.

Even if you want to keep a new feature rudimentary to reduce development time, give it just enough polish to ensure it will help the user to succeed in their task with minimal friction.

5. Don’t overexplain

Unless you can be certain that telling genuinely adds value for your users, don’t. Show them instead.

As with most forms of entertainment, games prefer showing over telling. It helps to keep the player immersed in the game. But when a game player seems lost, this can trigger in-game dialogue or clues to help them get back on track. Games use this mechanic sparingly, because it can easily remove the challenge entirely, becomes annoying when deployed too often and ultimately breaks the immersion.

If you find yourself having to explain things to users at length in videos, in-app tooltips, emails or documentation (that nobody will read), then your product is failing to show users what they need to do.

6. Remember what users truly find rewarding

A user’s ultimate reward is to complete their task or achieve their goal quickly and easily, then move on to something else. Everything else is a distraction.

In games, the ultimate goal of the player is to complete the game or attain the highest level of skill. Even though side quests can be enjoyable, challenging and enriching in their own way, they are intentional digressions and the player almost always has the option to ignore them completely.

Products that have been ‘gamified’ often resort to giving users badges, trophies and other awards for completing certain activities. However, these activities are often distractions from the user’s main goal, and can often feel more aligned with the interests of the product’s creator than the user.

Winning a badge for filling out your user profile more completely, or referring the product to friends without any tangible remuneration other than a cutesy trophy are both examples of fake rewards. They benefit the company making the product, but provide no real value to the user.

By all means, award badges and suchlike as mementos as helpful reminders of the user’s own progress and acquisition of skill. But even if they confer bragging rights over the user’s peers, they hold little intrinsic value. The real achievement is what the product has enabled the user to do or create.

Final thoughts

At their heart, the best games seek to provide their players with entertainment, enjoyment and achievement. Why should your product be any different?

Further reading

Onboarding 101: Lessons from Game Design”, Santiago Alonso, Medium, (23 January 2017, retrieved 22 April 2023)

3 fundamental user onboarding lessons from classic Nintendo games”, Jackson Noel, Appcues blog (2016, retrieved 22 April 2023)

Games UX: Building the right onboarding experience”, Léo Brouard, UX Collective (11 November 2021, retrieved 22 April 2023)

Design better user flows by learning from proven products”, Pageflows

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Should I take a product manager job in a sales-led company? https://imanageproducts.com/should-i-take-a-product-manager-job-in-a-sales-led-company/ https://imanageproducts.com/should-i-take-a-product-manager-job-in-a-sales-led-company/#respond Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:47:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9202 Read more ›]]> Here’s a question I was asked recently:

Hi Jock,

I’m currently applying for loads of product manager jobs. I’ve received an offer from a sales-led company where the Product team reports in to Sales. Should I take the job?

Yours,

G

Hi G,

When you’re applying for any job, it’s a good idea to start by writing down a list of what you will want from a new job. (Be realistic, though.)

It might be that you’re looking for a better salary or a more senior position.

Perhaps you might want to find an organisation with a completely blank slate for you to establish a new product practice.

Equally it might be that you’re looking for an organisation with an established, mature product practice that will support and nurture your learning.

Or it might be that your priority is to find an ethical company with friendly people to work with.

Whatever your wishlist is, keep going with your job applications until you’ve found somewhere that ticks enough of your boxes to satisfy your needs. It’s tempting to settle and accept the first job offer that comes along, particularly when the job market is competitive, but do try to make your evaluation as objective as possible.

Your job interviews are your opportunity to find out as much about the organisation and its way of working as you can. You mention that you’ve received an offer from one where the product team reports into the sales team.

I’m always a little wary of organisations that have the product team reporting to sales, marketing, IT, engineering (or any other department). I’m not advocating for silos, however product management is a separate discipline and has differing drivers and goals to other disciplines.

When an organisation describes itself as being primarily led by sales, marketing, engineering, or indeed product, the role of a product manager in each type of organisation can vary wildly.

Sales-led companies will often suffer from the problem of the product being whatever the salesperson has promised to a customer, often removing agency from the product manager and their ability to establish a coherent strategy. (And it will still be the product manager’s fault if the product promised proves to be impractical to build or fails to sell.)

Marketing-led companies tend to focus on speaking to the perceived needs of the buyer, rather than the users. For marketing the focus is often on customer acquisition and conversion, rather than a more meaningful interrogation of user needs and how well the product meets those needs.

Engineering-led companies often find themselves jumping in without any significant user research and creating great technical solutions to problems that are simply not urgent, pervasive or valuable enough to be worth solving. Finding product-market fit is often the major challenge because there is no significant addressable market niche for the product they’ve created.

In contrast, product-led companies hopefully understand that successful products come from a holistic approach that combines the respective strengths of sales, marketing and engineering, with product vision and strategy as the guiding hand. In other words:

by starting out by checking whether a problem is worth solving before building product;

by appreciating that the product has to satisfy the needs of both users and buyers pre- and post-sale; and

by focusing on the needs of the majority of the addressable market, not the edge-case whims of individual customers (no matter how big or vocal).

Update: “Product-led” doesn’t (and shouldn’t) mean that product managers are calling the shots and are somehow “in charge”. It’s yet another example of jargon getting in the way, in the same way as descriptions of product managers as the “CEO of the product” or the “conductor of the orchestra” are unhelpful and inaccurate. To expand on this, have a read of Emily Webber’s excellent article and Christina Wodtke’s Twitter thread.

Accepting a job at a company with a flawed understanding of product essentially puts you in a tricky situation. Whether or not you have responsibility for defining the product practice, you’ll have to show the organisation what good product management looks like (as a thought leader), while delivering a product successfully enough to demonstrate the validity of your approach (as an individual contributor).

Getting both right, AND changing the organisation’s perception of product management, will not be impossible, but will take a great deal of time and consistent effort. If you’re willing and ready to accept that challenge, then by all means accept that job offer.

Cheers,

Jock

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88: Control your narrative https://imanageproducts.com/88-control-your-narrative/ https://imanageproducts.com/88-control-your-narrative/#respond Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:24:00 +0000 https://imanageproducts.com/?p=9177 Read more ›]]> Years ago, someone once told me that “perception is reality” when it comes to reputation at work. Many years later, I’ve come to understand better that this means that there will always be a narrative about how someone works at an organisation. The narrative can be positive or negative, and can be controlled by the individual it describes, or by others.

Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my career, this has been by far one of the hardest.

In this article


Trigger warning and disclaimer

This post makes reference by analogy to abusive relationships and gaslighting. I am not a psychologist, therapist or professional counsellor. I am endeavouring to write carefully and respectfully about this topic, so please forgive me if I fall short in this regard.

If you are in any way affected by domestic abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline in the US, consult UK guidance for how to receive help, or contact an equivalent organisation in your own country.


When others control your narrative

When other people are in control of your narrative, then they can paint a picture of you that may or may not bear any relation to reality. When enough people receive that description, in the absence of (and sometimes despite) evidence to the contrary, they will begin to accept that portrait of you as fact. It’s worth noting that such a narrative can be flattering or negative, and can start out seemingly minor.

Positive examples:

“X is a safe pair of hands.”

“If you want to get a project done well, give it to X.”

Negative examples:

“Oh, X is always stirring up trouble.”

“X is not great in front of customers.”

Inadvertent reinforcement

Once a narrative about you is established, regardless of who is controlling it, it can be very difficult to shift. It will sit at the back of people’s minds, feeding into their unconscious biases and colouring their opinions in subtle ways.

For example, if the narrative is that someone is not great in front of customers, people will be less likely to bring them into meetings, or to let that person run them. (In some organisations, the sales or marketing teams can be gatekeepers to customers.) This reduced customer contact can be a serious handicap for a product manager, particularly if they didn’t have a great deal of agency in the first place (if relatively inexperienced or junior, for example).

Positive narratives can be problematic also. There always seems to be that person in an organisation who is selected to drive big, new initiatives, or bags that plum promotion, while everyone conveniently ignores their terrible previous track record.

Particularly for negative perceptions, regaining control of your narrative from this position is difficult simply because what you do and how you react can inadvertently reinforce the negative narrative. This is why they’re so pernicious. For example, once someone has a reputation for “causing trouble”, their attempts to refute that narrative can be interpreted by others as you “causing trouble” again.

It is tricky to defend against this. People unconnected with the situation can look at what is happening and how it is being explained and conclude that it is a rational (though in fact incorrect) explanation.

“I prescribe you a new job.”

Kristy Lee Hochenberger Ph.D. writes the following for Psychology Today:

Controlling the narrative can be beneficial for the manipulator for many reasons. They can decide whether they are the hero deserving praise or the victim in need of sympathy. In either situation, the accompanying actor is the villain.

Gaslighting goes a step further and convinces the other party that they are truly “crazy,” “out of control,” or “not remembering correctly.” It is a mind-manipulation tool and particularly powerful in unequal relationships, especially regarding gender and sexuality (Sweet, 2019). Regardless of purpose or execution, gaslighting is abuse and goes a step further than merely ripping out pages of a story and rewriting them. Gaslighting gives the manipulator the ability to not only control the victim but also to convince the victim that they are wrong (Spear, 2020).

Even the strongest and most emotionally stable individual can fall prey to gaslighting. As a victim of gaslighting, you most likely have a deep or long-running connection to the narcissist. Questioning yourself and your sanity isn’t a sign of a mental illness or weakness; it is a sign of abuse. Research has proven that victims (friends, lovers, co-workers, family members) will rationalize the situation (Spear, 2020). In essence, the victims play directly into the hands of the narcissist and not just support the story rewrite, but confirm the power of the narcissist.

Regaining Control of the Narrative”, Kristy Lee Hochenberger Ph.D., Psychology Today (22 February 2020, retrieved 21 February 2023)

I’ve not been in an abusive domestic relationship, however the description above captures accurately how I felt at one of my employed jobs.

I was lucky in many respects:

I had a few very close, trustworthy and objective-minded colleagues, who helped me retain some sense of self throughout. I have never forgotten what they did for me, and I continue to repay their kindness today.

I had the presence of mind to seek help from a professional career counsellor, who reassured me that I was capable and competent, and that my career wouldn’t end if I simply resigned and did something else.

I also went to see my doctor, to check whether I was, in fact, losing my mind and had been the source of the problems at work all along. He listened carefully, thought for a while and then wrote me a prescription. It read: “I prescribe you a new job.”

Shortly after that I handed in my resignation, left, decompressed, felt much better, and went on to do far more fun and interesting things with many lovely people. I’ve never looked back, and I stayed fast friends with all those colleagues that helped me out back then.

HR may be a false friend

Some parts of your organisation are meant to be professionally independent — your HR team being one. However, (at least in my experience) some HR teams can be more biased to serving the needs of the organisation first, rather than those of the employee.

As soon as an employee raises a formal complaint, the HR team may seek out the opinion of their manager and peers, not necessarily the facts, and themselves accept the narrative about the employee. They can also seek primarily to limit damage to the organisation, rather than handling the employee’s grievance respectfully and independently. I hasten to stress that not all HR teams will behave in this way.

If you find yourself in this situation, seek independent advice from someone outside of your organisation, who you can trust to have your best interests at heart: a professional career counsellor, or if things have got to that stage, an employment lawyer.

How to regain control

Regaining control of your narrative from this position is difficult simply because what you do and how you react can inadvertently reinforce the negative narrative.

What you can do:

Show your peers and managers through your actions that the way you are being portrayed is inaccurate — if this means going out of your way to work, and be seen to be working, in a way that counters the negative narrative, then so be it. Arguably this tacitly accepts the narrative, which isn’t great, because you shouldn’t have to be one that changes your behaviour. However, this is more about demonstrating that the narrative is wrong.

Demonstrate that the way you are being portrayed is inaccurate through fact-checking, record keeping and (reliable) secondary witnesses. This can be very valuable particularly if you find yourself raising a formal grievance.

Leave to work elsewhere, start from a clean slate, and mindfully control your own narrative there. Your mental well-being is far more important than any job, and this remains the case even when the tech sector job market is looking awful (as it is at the time of writing).

You can regain control your own narrative by showing and demonstrating what you’ve done, then documenting the facts and reinforcing what you’ve done in things like weeknotes, catch-ups with your manager, performance appraisals, and so on. (Use this for good, not evil.)

The idea is that if you’re spreading a consistent message to more people than anyone else with a competing message that other people then repeat and amplify, then that narrative will win out by force of numbers. But like anything else that’s to do with people, it’s rarely going to be that clear-cut.

Final thoughts

Above all, try to remember that when it comes to jobs, you still have agency, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Your prior work experience is not erased, nor do you forget all you’ve learned, by resigning from a job. Leaving a toxic work environment doesn’t make you “a quitter”.

You may feel incapable, incompetent, unemployable right now, but believe me, you’re only feeling this way because you’ve been taken a mental battering for so long. Surround yourself with loving, caring, encouraging people who can remind and prove to you that you are actually highly capable, competent and eminently employable. Then go out and prove it to yourself.

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