A blog on things related to products
June 11, 2021 Leave a comment
Okay, this will be a short article.
To achieve the goal of transforming a software development site from a cost center to a product center (i.e. an innovation center), without getting into moot points or too much of detail, I believe it’s a no-brainer that ‘culture’ is probably the most important topic to be addressed.
Let me know if you notice any key ingredient missing!
February 27, 2021 Leave a comment
In big companies, based on my experience, there’s so much friction between product and development teams. The #1 reason for this divide is ‘organizational culture’. While the product, leadership, and marketing teams are wearing one hat, the development teams’ mind is in a totally different world.
Below are some differences – I leave it to the reader to conclude which teams are on what side of the culture spectrum. It’s up to the leadership team to fix the divide.
The Visionaries
The Frankensteins
August 9, 2020 Leave a comment
A lot of material is out there on the topic – however, a refresher is always useful.
1. A bad product manager talks more (or maybe less than the minimum needed), but listens less for sure.
A good product manager will listen effectively, listen more, and then some more.
2. A bad product manager is clueless about product strategy & the overall business direction, and hence does a lot of conjecture.
A good product manager aligns the team’s efforts with the product strategy, understands that focus is not about moving in a straight line but it is about aligning with your purpose.
3. A bad product manager is data driven. (and then blames the data if the results are not favorable)
A good product manager is data inspired.
4. A bad product manager approaches problems from only one dimension – data, customer, competition, sales, or technology.
A good product manager optimizes his approach towards problem solving, and does the right level of trade-offs between data, customer, sales, technology, competition, etc.
5. A bad product manager has low agency, low EI, and high ego.
A good product manager has high agency, high EI, and low ego.
6. A bad product manager neither makes course corrections nor thinks about opportunity costs.
A good product manager always intends to do the right thing even if it requires to make course corrections and is consciously works toward mitigating opportunity costs.
7. A bad product manager attempts to please everyone. (sounds intriguing, isn’t it)
A good product manager focuses on his target customer/persona.
And we could add many more, but the above list is a good summary of the top differences. Thoughts?…
June 19, 2020 Leave a comment
A lot of us talk about Product-Market Fit and to the highest degree in the startup world. In this post, we’ll touch base on the topic, its context, etc. so it acts as a good refresher.
What is Product-Market Fit?
Product-Market Fit is building a product that the market is fully satisfied with, a product that solves top problems for the targeted customers and they are willing to pay for it.
Additional definitions from various sources
Why is Product-Market Fit important?
Product-Market Fit is the most important metric, probably the only metric that matters, when introducing a novel product (a new product of its kind) in the market.
In the introduction phase, after launching the MVP, it is almost incumbent on the product team to continuously assess customer feedback and iterate the product to improve its relevance & acceptance and thereby achieve Product-Market Fit sooner than later. There’s usually no competition at this stage, so it is only obvious to achieve Product-Market Fit as soon as possible, because a faster fit means the product will enjoy maximum differentiation for a longer period of time. Achieving Product-Market Fit is an important milestone for all product teams and esp. startups as it ensures we have built the right product.
How to achieve Product-Market Fit?
Product-Market Fit is best achieved by having a strong product discovery process. Continuous validation with target customers and refining your offering is the key to success. Typically, you start with a hypothesis, build an MVP, validate it, and iterate based on what you’ve learnt.
How to determine if Product-Market Fit is achieved?
Below are some commonly used methods:
That’s the wrap on Product-Market Fit.
And here is a bonus.
There’s a chasm out there
To reiterate, Product-Market Fit is to be achieved in the introduction phase — however, that doesn’t automatically qualify the product to be acceptable to the mass market (early/late majority).
In other words, Product-Market Fit was achieved for the Early Adopters, but the expectations from the mass market (Early Majority) are different. There’s a chasm that needs to be crossed!
According to Geoff Moore, author of ‘Crossing the chasm’, the early majority are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow the established ways of doing things/business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else’s product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base. The early majority / pragmatists want to buy from market leaders — be a market leader niche by niche.
A good approach, mentioned in his book is the Beachhead strategy — in business, particularly startups, the beachhead strategy is about focusing your resources on one key area, usually a smaller market segment or product category, and winning that market first, even dominating that market, before moving into larger markets.
Let’s stop here, and cover this topic in a separate & dedicated post.
Hope this post is useful!
May 15, 2020 Leave a comment
Most of us are aware of the typical Product Life Cycle curve (PLC) but product management leaders ought to be on top of key metrics that define success in each of the PLC stages.
The purpose of chasing the right metrics in each of the life cycle stages is to ensure the developed/built product delivers value to customers, is viable to the team, and profitable for the company.
There is, of course, the market discovery and product discovery phases before you develop a product and introduce it in the market.
Market discovery is about identifying a problem worth solving and identifying the right opportunities worth pursuing.
Regardless of identifying a new problem via market discovery or deciding to solve an existing problem innovatively, it’s essential for companies to do a good job at product discovery – it’s about identifying the right product to build which will be valuable to the target customer and feasible & profitable for the company.
Now onto the metrics…
Product Introduction Stage
Growth Stage
Maturity Stage
Declining Stage
Hope the post is useful, feedback is welcome.
October 1, 2019 Leave a comment
A lot has been said about qualities that product leaders must possess. Let’s spin it around a bit and look at the topic from the opposite direction, and crack down the top traits a product leader should NOT possess.
Here’s my top 4.
1. NOT having a vision
Knowing where we are heading to is a fundamental know-how a product leader must obviously be aware of. Product leaders are required to inspire their teams, they can’t inspire if they don’t have a vision.
Not having a vision leads to loss in focus, lost focus leads to nothing but a me-too product.
2. NOT having a strategy
It’s not sufficient to just have a vision and not know how to get there. Strategy is the chosen path to achieve the vision and make it a reality.
Product Strategy has to be crafted meticulously to ensure it aligns with the organization’s values, capabilities, and resources with the opportunities in the external environment.
3. NOT innovating consistently
Every competitive advantage has a lifespan, so consistent innovation is the key to stay relevant in the market.
4. Aspiring for more followers
What are you going to do with more followers, anyway? As someone put it “the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not followers“. A leader’s job is to groom his subordinates to become leaders in their respective area of ownership. Product leaders must focus on the success of the product and eventually the business, and not aspire to have more followers.
Hope you liked the post, please do comment on what you think!
March 19, 2019 Leave a comment
This blog post is a synopsis for a talk from Teresa Torres (@ttorres) called An Introduction to Product Discovery.
It was an excellent presentation — here is the condensed synopsis for my product management friends.
We should immerse ourselves in our customers’ worlds, actively working to develop a deep understanding of our customers, what their needs are, the context in which those needs occur and ideas emerge through this deep understanding. We should not be sitting in a room deciding what to do next, we should go out meet customers and ideas emerge out of deep understanding, and still we move forward cautiously by iteratively testing our ideas.
Assumptions in this approach are (1) We don’t know about our customers until we observe them (2) Customers are the experts (3) We are wrong, so experiment.
There’s two aspects to product discovery: (1) Deep shared understanding of the customer’s world (2) Iteratively test ideas
1. Develop a shared deep understanding of the customers’ world grounded in research
Exercises/activities
Tools
Build empathy for the challenges and pain points that our customers are experiencing. We want to provide enough context about the customers’ world that our teams would feel the same pain, start to empathize with our customers, and want to help them out.
2. Evaluate whether an idea is worth pursuing by iteratively testing it
Don’t go ahead with full steam and build too much. Quickly learn that the idea is not going to work so that we can move to the next idea that will work.
How many assumptions are true and how many are to be iterated on / evolved → most often it’s not a go/no-go decision it’s about refining/modifying the idea based on what we are learning.
At some point when we have enough evidence, we can decide to go ahead and iteratively build and test it.
If there is insufficient evidence with a lot of risky/unprovable assumptions, we could park the idea and move onto the next one.
The loop will be time consuming for the first few assumptions, and then it’ll be okay. Because most of our ideas could share the same set of underlying assumptions.
Summary
Ideas emerge from our deep understanding → those ideas get iteratively tested/validated → we start to learn about which assumptions are true and which are not → that feeds back into our deep understanding → and that makes our ideas better and better.
Hope you find this post useful.
January 22, 2019 Leave a comment
Backlogs are an inherent part of software companies — many articles talk about the need for a backlog, prioritizing it iteratively, having more details for higher priority items, etc. but there’s not much guidance on how many backlogs should a company have. And that’s what we’ll discuss in this blog post.
Some people I’ve come across think there needs to be one backlog and pick the top items from the list for implementation. That’s a flawed approach because in a typical ‘single backlog approach’ the items would be weighed in a mix of several business priorities and at the end of the day you’d have achieved less-than-100% of few things and not 100% of even one thing.
So, how many backlogs should a company have?
One?
Two?
Five?
One for each VP… maybe
Image credit: thedigitalprojectmanager.com
The correct way to tackle backlogs is from the perspective of business priorities. Below is a simple step-by-step guide:
1. Jot down all the corporate objectives & business initiatives, with their preferred timing (let’s call them ‘goals’)
2. Allocate budget for each goal
3. Have a separate backlog for each goal
4. In each backlog, prioritize items with value, effort, and impact to its specific goal. Typically, the stronger an item impacts the goal the higher is its priority. This way the rank of each item in the backlog could be assessed against the impact to its goal.
5. Time the backlog implementation (based on the overall goal timing, see #1)
6. Using the allocated cost/resources, knock down items starting from the top of the list
I believe this method helps us to concentrate our resources, remain focused, and create meaningful impact to the business.
Would love to hear how many backlogs you have and on what basis do you build them!
January 2, 2019 Leave a comment
Sometimes the difference between success and failure is the result of how some companies approach their business and the values they stick to.
Here’s a list of differences between Terrific Companies & Terrible Companies, at least how I perceive them. Whilst the list could be long, I’ve trimmed it to the important ones.
This is a topic that is close to my heart, and has been sitting in the drafts for a while.
Hope you enjoy the list.
Please do share your thoughts!
December 21, 2018 Leave a comment
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs
A while ago, I bumped into a TED Talk called ‘The surprising habits of original thinkers‘ by Adam Grant and this blog post is inspired by it.
Image/screen-grab credit: Adam Grant
Two key takeaways from this talk are:
I see a correlation between the ‘crazy ones’ mentioned by Steve and the ‘originals’ in Adam’s talk.
Both (the crazy ones and the originals)
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Thank you @AdamMGrant, for the topic and the inspiring talk.
Passionate Product Management by Aneez 