Product Management
- celebrating the wins
- learning from the challenges
- documenting the outcomes and value delivered
- Don’t take it personally.
- Clarify your goals.
- Confirm any and all assumptions.
(Last working day of the year today.)
No loose ends, no ambiguity.
Pickup and put away all your toys.
Finish what you started and do it with style.
The thing is, with any new products or services, you’re going to experiment.
This is an unavoidable fact. You may chose to blissfully call the activity something else entirely.
The question really becomes, exactly how costly or intentional or actionable does your company want this process to be?
The year is wrapping up.
After a string of successful releases, my latest work is gracefully winding itself down.
Wrapping things up always needs to include:
I cannot stress how easy it is for very smart, very successful people to forget this:
Your product’s greatest asset will always be the team behind it.
The second greatest asset? Your community of users.
During planning sessions, we sometimes talk about all the problems we are presently - deliberately - choosing NOT to solve.
This generally fosters alignment - but it can also shake loose faulty assumptions and open up new avenues for potential research and experimentation in future sprints.
In product management (like everything else), miscommunications can derail forward momentum.
And stops and starts can be painful.
When it happens:
Most importantly: revisit the outcomes your clients really need.
This podcast about how Will Guidara made his restaurant best in the world using “unreasonable hospitality” is worth a listen.
One of the best bits - how instead of dreading the unexpected arrival of the food critic, he and his team gamified the process by practicing for it nightly.
BlueSky’s Starter Packs are pretty nifty as far as features go.
They’re immediately useful for users to bootstrap communities, which makes them unique and differentiating.
This raises engagement and participation - core goals for the product.
In retrospect, they’re also fairly obvious. :-)
Time is your clients’ most valuable currency.
And it’s yours too.
Instead of asking “what went well / what needs improving” during your next retrospective, try giving everyone the chance to talk about how they were challenged, what they learned, and how they personally grew during a sprint (or project, or…)
Changing the framing can make all the difference.
I find myself talking a lot more about how products adapt to unexpected changes in their operating environment.
The world is messy but our products don’t need to be fragile.
Resilience is quickly becoming a basic expectation in an increasingly chaotic time.
“The future is like weather: a thousand thunderheads on the horizon, a haze of weird thunder-sleet in our eyes, and we never know where the lightning is going to strike. The best we can do is prepare for each possible hit by testing the possibilities.”
-Warren Ellis
#Quotes
Always have a well-understood rubric for determining the difference between urgent and important things when you’re prioritizing your backlog.
This adds transparency and helps communicate your thinking in any planning discussions.
Bonus points if you socialize it well in advance too.
Are your clients repeatedly working outside of normal hours? Are they regularly adopting new features or still slogging along in older workflows? How is the time they spend within your application changing over time?
Meaningful product metrics should reveal user behavior patterns.
The platonic ideal for your product’s user interface is that it’s so intuitive that it requires little to no explanation. It just works.
Remember, however, that sometimes you can end up being a bit too clever for you and your clients' own good in this regard.
Elegant simplicity is hard.
Consider how the Apple Watch’s focus shifted fashion accessory into a heavy emphasis on providing fitness and health tracking metrics.
You should always start by solving a small - yet meaningful - problem exceptionally well. Then build upwards and outwards from that essential kernel.
Remember to consider the cost of NOT building something whenever you’re prioritizing features in your backlog.
What happens if you wait?
Something terrible? Nothing at all?
Your product is not for everyone. This is a totally acceptable state of affairs.
Define your personas. Know who the product is for and - equally important - who it’s not for.
BONUS: This will also help you figure out how to talk with them about the value you’re creating.
You focus on building understanding first and foremost. Then go build new features.
Your product’s biggest cheerleader should be you.
If you’re not excited about it, why should anyone else be?
Your product team’s biggest cheerleader? Also you.
If you’re not excited about what they’re doing, who will be?