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September 12 - September 30, 2020
To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker
At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America
Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators...
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All of these vision statements provide focus for the company. They are short, memorable, and clearly articulated. They als...
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Company leaders need to spend time communicating their vision, explaining their choices, and painting an image of what is to come.
Strategic intents communicate the company’s current areas of focus that help realize the vision.
“What is the most important thing we can do to reach our vision, based on where we are now?”
Keeping the list of strategic intents small focuses everyone.
they were peanut buttering — spreading themselves thin over many areas of work instead of making a concerted push in one direction.
When organizations plan their strategic intents, they should think about how each part of the organization can contribute to these goals.
Getting the right level and number of strategic intents is incredibly important. As Marquetly found out before, too many higher-level goals, and you are back to peanut buttering.
One intent is usually good for a small company, and three are plenty for a large organization.
Strategic intents should be at a high level and business focused. They are about entering new markets, creating new revenue streams, or doubling down in certain areas.
Product initiatives translate the business goals into the problems that we will solve with our product.
All of these solutions, which I call options, were aligned to this product initiative. Options are your bets, as Spotify would call them. They represent the possible solutions that teams will explore to solve the product initiative.
Product initiatives set the direction for the product teams to explore options. They tie the goals of the company back to a problem we can solve for the users or customers. Product managers are in charge of making sure the product initiatives and options are aligned with the vision of an existing product or portfolio.
The product vision communicates why you are building something and what the value proposition is for the customer.
The product vision emerges from experimentation around solving problems for users.
This simple statement describes the problem the user is trying to solve and the capabilities it enables for them to solve it.
The VP of product usually is the one who owns the product vision,
In companies with one product, the product initiatives describe the major user problems that the company is prioritizing. They need to be aligned to both the product initiative and the strategic intents. The VP of product works with the product managers below them to determine which are the right problems to solve to achieve both of these things.
Companies with more than one product often wrap their products under what is called a product portfolio. Very large companies have multiple product portfolios, all aligned by the type of value they provide to customers.
How do all of our products work as a system to provide value to our customers? What unique value does each of the product lines offer that makes this a compelling system? What overall values and guidelines should we consider when deciding on new product solutions? What should we stop doing or building because it does not serve this vision?
The product initiatives emerge from the work that needs to be done across the product portfolio to achieve the strategic intents and to further the individual product visions.
It’s not that you don’t have time to innovate; it’s that you are not making time to innovate.
The best solutions are linked to real problems that users want solved.
Those were our three choices: Acquire more individual users. Retain existing individual users better. Create new revenue streams for existing individual users.
After we have set the goal, we begin walking through the Product Kata. We ask ourselves the following: What is the goal? Where are we now in relation to that goal? What is the biggest problem or obstacle standing in the way of me reaching that goal? How do I try to solve that problem? What do I expect to happen (hypothesis)? What actually happened, and what did we learn?
Product metrics tell you how healthy your product is, and, ultimately, your business, given that a healthy product contributes to overall health of the business.
Think of it as a funnel (Figure 16-1): users finding your product is acquisition; users having a great first experience is activation; keeping users returning to your product is called retention; users recommending others because they love your product is referral; and, finally, users paying for your product because they see value in it is revenue.
HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.
Even if you have access to the people you need, customer research is not without its pitfalls. It can be tricky because, as you might have experienced already, people often immediately jump into telling you the solution. “Oh, I just need a button here that lets me do X,” they say. As a product manager, you need to back up and ask, “Okay, but why? Why do you need a button? Why do you think a button is the right thing? What are you trying to accomplish?” It is understanding the user’s need — not the button — that helps you to get closer to understanding the root of the problem. Remember, it’s
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After the direction is set for the product vision, it’s important to make sure everyone understands the context and work that needs to be done. Story mapping and North Star documents are two ways to help teams find alignment around the vision.
A North Star document explains the product in a way that can be visualized by the entire team and company.
North Stars are great for providing context to a wide audience.
Story mapping helps teams break down their work and align around goals.
As Patton says, “Its purpose is to help the team communicate about their work and what needs to get done to deliver value.”
There are many frameworks out there that will help you prioritize, like benefits mapping, Kano models, and others, but my favorite is Cost of Delay.
The Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen
Cost of Delay is a numeric value that describes the impact of time on the outcomes you hope to achieve.
Cost of Delay can help end many debates about what should and should not be prioritized first. If you want to learn more, head to Black Swan Farming
Definition of Done. It is defined by the Scrum Alliance as a “checklist of valuable activities required to produce software.”
As Jeff Gothelf, the author of Sense & Respond,
When you have success criteria set for the launch, you can use them in the Product Kata and repeat the steps we went through in this section: set the direction with your success criteria, understand what problems are standing in the way of you reaching it, and systematically tackle them through experimentation.
you should always be diagnosing the problem and trying to understand how to solve it.
Process and frameworks get you only so far on your way to success. Culture, policies, and structure are the things that really set a company apart to thrive in product management.
To truly get out of the build trap, you need to become a product-led organization, both in mentality and practice.
They are not patient enough to see outcomes emerge, so they instead measure progress by the number of features shipped.”
core meetings to evaluate progress and to make strategic decisions from a product level: Quarterly business reviews Product initiative reviews Release reviews
During quarterly business review meetings, the senior leadership team, made up of the executives and the highest level of the organization, should be discussing progress toward the strategic intents and outcomes of a financial nature. This includes reviewing revenue for the quarter, churn of customers, and costs associated with development or operations.
