How Product Decisions Work
It’s all very simple.
But I thought I would write-up a quick post in case there are those of you out there struggling with how to either a) make product decisions or b) think a PM you are working with is taking too long.
The bottom line is this: product decisions are highly complex. In some organizations they take months to make - in others (start-ups for example) days or weeks. But that’s because they are hard choices to make and require gathering consensus. You can’t spitball your way to a successful market-driven product.
You also can’t play pump & dump strategies with features - it doesn’t work long-term (even if it you think it will) and it creates far too much make work for all of those involved.
You will end-up with a product that just is an amalgamation of cruft from all those failed attempts (regardless how small and meaningless they seem - this is a very slippery slope and once it starts) unless there are appropriate reasons in place for each of them and strategies to deal with them when they work and when they don’t work.
There is no argument with this. It happens all the time - so just stop it if you see it happening or starting to happen. It always, always ends badly.
Product decisions, when the inputs have been built up and are being used effectively take everything in to account, have the full benefit of the user in mind while still taking alignment with the overall problem and vision in to account.
The product definition, corporate strategy, user feedback, competitive analysis, analytic data, metrics, win/loss, industry research, and just ideas that are floating around in general, etc, etc… These all need to be consulted as you go. It’s the product manager’s job to track all that data and use it to make effective choices.
Again, trust me - you can’t rely too heavily on one or the other - they will always lead you astray when it comes to product. For example, if you follow what users say exactly you will end-up with features that dead-end because user’s won’t think things through entirely.
A great example is internal ideas. Everyone always knows what’s going to make the product successful - and they are always highly passionate about it. But remember, while they idea may make sense and see really great at the outset, once you start to attempt to map it against other market data, it may not align with what the market tells you.
And you ALWAYS trust the market before co-workers and yourself.
Another example is analytics. You look too hard at where users are clicking, and you may miss the underlying fundamentals - for example, maybe you have no value proposition. Analytics won’t tell you that and you could arrange a page and bucket test it now until the cows come home and it still won’t work.
When you are assessing a priority to give to something, or how to make something better, you need to take all these factors in to account.
Yes, there are circumstances where slapping stuff together may work - but ad-hoc product development, the further you go in the lifecycle, just doesn’t cut it. If it did, everyone would be able to make these decisions and know how to filter out all the noise from the data that has been gathered.
Everyone doesn’t.
So, there is an easy fix to all of this - just talk before taking action. It doesn’t have to be day long meetings - just 5-10 minutes. You’ll be amazed at what you discover is actually being done behind the scenes to improve a product when you have a PM who knows what they are doing.
Conducting Effective User Sessions
There are certain ways to gather user feedback.
Some PM’s may like the focus group / formal approach. I’m much more of a fan of doing “discounted” or informal user research. I like to be right there, asking the questions, and watching the users get frustrated when something doesn’t work or they can’t figure something out. This is the best way to experience the pain with them so you can get a sense of how urgent or severe it is and prioritize it effectively.
The Problem with Focus Groups
The way that i see it (and I’m not the only one), focus groups leave PMs open to false data. Why? Well, it’s pretty easy. Typically, getting a group of strangers together in a foreign setting (where they feel uncomfortable) and asking them questions about some product they have probably never seen nor used creates a very contrived environment.
They will feel like, and try to, answer how they think they should instead of providing the truth. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule - not every participant will do this. But it will happen more often than not, potentially leaving you with incorrect guidance from your set of users.
So what to do?
Discounted User Feedback
The way I will schedule these sessions is very simple - with individual users. Time for me to sit down with them, asking them questions and really get involved with how they are experiencing the product and what it offers. I really am interested in knowing what sucks and what’s going to make them tear their hair out.
Once you get past the “it’s OK to tell me this is awful” threshold, you’ll find the feedback you receive is really honest. And for the most part, very informative. Of course, like with all sessions similar to this you will want to always ask “why?” to ensure you fully understand what the user is saying.
These types of sessions are called “discounted” because they aren’t heavily controlled - they are informal, and that’s what you want. Think about it. What’s better? Putting a user in a weird environment where they feel like they are being tested - and having a consultant ask them the questions (who doesn’t really know the product all that well to begin with) sitting with a group of their peers, answering really specific questions. The answers to which may be perceived as making them look really smart or really stupid.
You want your users to relax so they can speak freely. That’s going to give you the best feedback.
Collecting the Data
The best way, at least in my experience, is to use both a combination of note-taking and activity models. Don’t worry - it sounds a lot harder than it is.
Really, activity models are very basic sketches of what a user is doing and where they get blocked while using the product. You can see a rough / example activity flow below.
Again, this doesn’t have to be fancy; just capture the user activity (each major step) and then note where they got blocked / frozen so you can look for patterns throughout all user research that’s executed - and hopefully find & solve some problems.
Asking the Questions
The key to all this is knowing the right questions to ask. Ideally, at least to me, you would start out with asking the user (who presumably has never seen the product before) to accomplish the products main goal. For example, imagine working for Microsoft and you are doing this style of user feedback for the Word product. I’d probably start out with a question like (from a blank Desktop): “OK, create, save, and print a Word document with the text ‘1, 2, 3, 4′ in it.”
Some other example questions might be:
- Create a bulleted list
- Adjust the properties of the document to ensure the ‘Author’ field reads ‘Bill Smith’
- Insert a table with 4 columns and 4 rows and make sure the text is center aligned vertically, and left-aligned horizontally
These are some leading questions that should drive the user forward without them just sitting there staring at a blank screen. You want to keep the sessions moving, but you don’t want to push the user to answer for which you are seeking. If a user has difficulties, the user has difficulties - note it and move on. If they can’t overcome them and have to to continue the next pieces of the session, teach them.
They should be able to offer up some ideas to make things much easier - and even if they don’t, you would have just experienced a pain point with a real-life user. Much better than doing anything in a vacuum.
High Satisfaction is Good, but…
Remember, above all else, you want negative feedback / criticisms to come out of user feedback sessions. You don’t want to have to report back to your boss / management that everything is 100% - that’s like saying you don’t have any competitors in the marketplace.
You need to sometimes really hunt for the gems. Users don’t usually know what’s going to be the solution to the problem they are having - that’s not their job. But they (in concert with additional market research, diving in to product analytics, competitive analysis and other such inputs) should offer up a very clear picture of ways in which to proceed.
Assessing Opportunity
So what does it take to bring a new product to market? Well, a lot of things. But it all starts somewhere; and that somewhere is assessing the potential market opportunity.
Really, this is about constructing a business - however lightweight or heavy you and your organization need it to be - and making the appropriate decisions early on.
I’ve been reading through the Product Manager’s Desk Reference these last couple of weeks, and it has really started to round out my skill set as a product manager. It’s one thing to be able to take instruction top-down (from your CEO or Board of Directors) and bring a product to market that they say needs to do, “x, y, and z.” But it’s another to fully understand the product and how it aligns with the opportunity / customer need and overall business strategy.
When you are in a start-up, you always walk a very fine line between overkill and getting 3-4 months in to something and realize you’ve missed key things. It’s important not to rush, but it’s really important not to skip over key steps.
So I look at this step in product development / definition as identifying a few key things, that aren’t too different from the Party of Four model I’ve identified in the past.
It all starts with identifying the problem itself. This is essentially stating the obvious - what the opportunity is. For example, maybe it’s the fact that people always complain about chewing gum never lasting long enough and always losing its taste far too quickly.
The second aspect is identifying the market segments / target customers for whom the problem will be solved. I have this clearly identified within the Party of Four model as “market segments.” In keeping with the chewing gum example (in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m referring directly to Stride gum). Now, this isn’t your parents gum that’s been around for 50 years, so I would pinpoint their target customer as a younger crowd - maybe 18-40 or something like that.
You could go on about additional characteristics of their target market - more than likely it’s predominantly Male if you look at the front page of their website. More of a professional type than blue-collar worker, so they are probably looking for folks that are college-educated, etc… Anyway, you get the picture.
Then you move in to how the problem is going to be solved. Remember, the problem is chewing gum not lasting long enough - so the problem is solved by Stride, probably using a proprietary formula / technology or unique composition in order to allow each piece of gum to actually last longer than other competitors in the market.
You should also discuss (provided the company is larger than one product) how the product aligns to their parent company (Cadbury Adams) as it is right in the candy / gum / etc… grouping of products. They already have a line of gums in Trident, etc… so they have to be careful not to cannibalize their existing business by marketing very carefully and effectively.
Now that you have gotten through all that, you need to clearly assess why the opportunity is attractive at all - obviously, if the marketing is successful and this product catches on, everyone wants to have their gum last longer. Nothing pisses me off more when I pay money for a pack of Juicy Fruit and each stick of gum lasts about 30 seconds.
Identifying key competitors takes the Party of Four model a little bit further than what it is today. Of course, there are a lot of players in the chewing gum space - Trident, Juicy Fruit, Bubbalicious, etc… So - Stride would probably remove any direct competitors (like bubble gum manufacturers) and stick to a more everyday / lifestyle type of gum. It’s not a breath freshener play - Excel and Clorets may not be viewed as direct competitors. This needs to be evaluated carefully in order to help ascertain what’s going to be unique about the product in the market place for the target customers - which leads to a strong value proposition.
When creating high-level / rough financials, it’s critical to be conservative. Don’t go out guns blazing and state you are going to clear 20mm in first-year revenue, because there is just now way. Get your cost measurements under control and start to figure out how you are going to price the market and how many units you think you are going to move in the first fiscal year. Someone from Finance should be a part of your cross-functional product team, so they can really help you out here to get the numbers right - especially if you are like me and you’re not the strongest in accounting and finance.
But most folks with any business experience should be good enough to sketch our a strawman model, which is all that’s needed at this point.
Remember to keep in mind who the audience is for this type of document - and that it’s going to keep evolving and changing as you go throughout the evolution of fleshing out the business case with other cross-functional team members, senior management, and possibly the Board of Directors.
But don’t let folks tell you this isn’t important - it is. Even if it seems like a lot of work and overhead, this business case approach (even though it’s really rough sketches at the beginning) will help you out a great deal down the road.
Changing Product Direction
From time to time you need to tweak and change your product’s direction. Essentially, this means that you’ll be trying to work in new things, but also change existing things at the same time.
So, how does this impact the organization? Well, in a lot of ways. Namely, it’s the swapping and changing of certain key features that currently exist and changing those out for new features that better match the revised vision.
Really, this is just all about one thing: alignment. Competitors will come and go, but to make a product truly great, it has to align to your overarching vision - the identification of the solution for how to solve your chosen market problem(s).
Now, in theory this is very simple. Turn some knobs here, change out some labels over there - easy, right? Well, not really.
Successfully shifting a product from one chosen strategy to another (regardless of the size of that shift) can face some adversity within the business. People are inherently adverse to change, which is really where the challenge lies. Everyone will be OK with things until features start to get severely changed (or, in many cases, dropped) because they may feel things are working out really well as they are - or maybe, the didn’t understand that a product strategy shift would mean so many new and/or different things.
So, how can you as a product manager help to ease this transition to the new strategy you may have created (or not)? You kind of can’t - just let it run it’s course. Clear things up for people as much and as regularly as possible.
The other thing you can do is communicate early and often. This is something I struggle with because I always ask myself, “why are people interested in what I have to say?” I am slowly coming to the realization that it has nothing to do wit me as a person, but me as a product owner. If you are in charge of the product (and thus, the associated strategy) that’s changing, everyone will be interested in what you have to say.
Why? Because it directly affects them and what they do.
Make the change - buy in to that change. Execute it. Remove features, change features - sometimes more drastic changes are required. It will make the product feel awkward. It will feel drastic, and in some cases downright wrong. But you have to buy-in and you have to commit. Otherwise, you are failing to properly execute the product strategy you believe will make it successful in the end.
