More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 27 - July 4, 2020
The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce. When companies stop producing real value for the users, they begin to lose market share, allowing them to be disrupted.
“Your company is not set up for that type of feedback. People are afraid to talk with you or their managers. You tie people’s bonuses to shipping software, not to solving problems. They think they have to ship or they won’t get paid,” I said.
Every feature you build and any initiative you take as a company should result in some outcome that is tied back to that business value.
When companies do not understand their customers’ or users’ problems well, they cannot possibly define value for them. Instead of doing the work to learn this information about customers, they create a proxy that is easy to measure. “Value” becomes the quantity of features that are delivered, and, as a result, the number of features shipped becomes the primary metric of success.
To be strategic and to have people operate strategically, we need to stop judging teams based on the quantity of features shipped. We should instead define and measure value and then celebrate them for delivering on outcomes for our business and users. Then we should build products that help to achieve this.
Products, as I said before, are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time. These can be hardware, software, consumer packaged goods, or any other artifacts in which human intervention is not needed to achieve value for the user.
Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes.
Product-led companies optimize for their business outcomes, align their product strategy to these goals, and then prioritize the most effective projects that will help develop those products into sustainable drivers of growth.
your known knowns. These are facts that you gather from data or critical requirements from customers.
Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask. They are assumptions that you want to test, data points that you can investigate, or problems that you can identify and explore.
Unknown knowns are those moments when you say, “I feel like this is the right thing to do.” This is intuition from years of experience.
unknown unknowns are the things that you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t know enough to ask the right questions or identify the knowledge gaps. These are the moments of surprise that need to be discovered.
Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.
The product manager deeply understands both the business and the customer to identify the right opportunities to produce value.
A great product manager must be able to interface with the business, technology, and design departments and to harness their collective knowledge.
Being a great product manager takes a thorough understanding of your users, a careful analysis of your systems, and an ability to see and execute on opportunities for your market.
Product managers are responsible for the why? Why are we building this? How does it deliver value to our customers? How does it help meet the goals of the business?
The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.
Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building. They know the goal at hand and understand which direction the team should be building toward, depending on company strategy. They communicate this direction to the rest of the team.
A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned in product management is to always focus on the problem. If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,”
A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market.
Good product managers are able to figure out how to achieve goals for the business by creating or optimizing products, all with a view toward solving actual customer problems.
I have listened to many arguments that product owners do not have time to do both roles. In the current context, that’s true. The product owners I speak with spend 40 hours a week writing tons of user stories. At that point, you need to ask, are those user stories even valuable? What are they prioritizing them against? How do they know that they will solve a problem? If you have one person spending that much time writing user stories, every week, you are most certainly in the build trap.
With a good strategy framework in place and ruthless prioritization around a few key goals, one person can effectively talk to customers, understand their problems, and help to define the solutions with the team. The amount of external versus internal work will shift, depending on the maturity and success of your product. But, you should never be doing all this work at once.
product managers in senior roles (VPs, product leads, or middle managers) concentrate on defining the vision and strategy for the teams based on market research, an understanding of company goals and strategy, and by ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next. Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there. Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers
...more
A value stream is all of the activities needed to deliver value to the customer. That includes the processes, from discovering the problem, setting the goals, and conceiving of the idea, to delivering the actual product or service.
That guideline was to “delight customers, in margin-enhancing, hard-to-copy ways.”
Table III-1. Gibson Biddle, Netflix strategy, 2007 Key strategies Tactics Metrics Personalized Ratings Wizard, Netflix Prize Percentage of customers who rate ≥ 50 titles at 6 weeks; RMSE Instant Hub expansion, streaming Percentage of disks delivered in one day; percentage of customers who watch ≥ 15 min/month Margin-enhancing Previously viewed, advertising, price & plan testing Gross margin, LTV Easy Simplify and kill; progressive disclosure Percentage of customers with ≥ 3 titles in queue on day one
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
Instead of seeking more detailed information, upper management should be limiting its direction to defining and communicating the strategic intent, or the goals of the business. The strategic intents combine to communicate where the company is heading and what it desires to achieve when it gets there. The strategic intent points the team toward the outcomes the businesses wants to achieve.
Organizations try to fill this gap by providing more detailed instruction; whereas, instead, they should allow each level within the company to define how it will achieve the intent of the next level up.
A good company strategy should be made up of two parts: the operational framework, or how to keep the day-to-day activities of a company moving; and the strategic framework, or how the company realizes the vision through product and service development in the market.
Having a strong company vision and product visions that align to the strategic framework helps companies avoid swirl in planning and execution.
Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.
All of these are based on the same premise — setting the direction for each level of an organization so they can act. Choosing the right framework is important for the organization, but understanding what makes a good strategy framework is even more important.
The teams should be out there, analyzing, testing, and learning and then communicating what they discover back to their peers and their management teams. This is how we set strategy.
