Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

Part IV. Product Management Process

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Chapter 15. The Product Kata

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Chapter 16. Understanding the Direction and Setting Success Metrics

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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.

Pirate Metrics were created by Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, to talk about the life cycle of users through your product. 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.

Chapter 17. Problem Exploration

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My friend Josh Wexler says, “Nobody wants to hear that their baby is ugly.” The way around this is to not get too attached. Kill the bad ideas before they take up too much time and energy from the teams and before you get hooked on them. Instead, fall in love with the problem you are solving.

Chapter 18. Solution Exploration

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Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn. Experimentation is all about building to learn. It allows you to understand your customers better and to prove whether there is value in solving a problem.

“I have had lines of people at my desk asking me to upload the products for them because they can’t figure out the tools. I need to get work done. I can’t be everyone’s help desk.” He paused for a moment and then looked at me and said, “Well, if they can’t figure out how to use the tools, that’s on you, not them.”

Chapter 19. Building and Optimizing Your Solution

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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.”

Part V. The Product-Led Organization

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Chapter 20. Outcome-Focused Communication

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Visibility in organizations is absolutely key. The more leaders can understand where teams are, the more they will step back and let the teams execute.

The more you try to hide your progress, the wider that knowledge gap becomes. Leaders will demand more information and will crack down on your freedom to explore. If you keep things transparent, you will have more freedom to become autonomous.

Most companies I’ve worked with have a few 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.

The product initiative review is another quarterly meeting that can be staggered with the quarterly business review on off months.

Release reviews provide the opportunity for teams to show off the hard work they have done and to talk about success metrics.

Usually, our roadmaps consist of a few key parts: The theme Hypothesis Goals and success metrics Stage of development Any important milestones

Chapter 21. Rewards and Incentives

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Rewards and incentives are motivators for the employees of every company. The biggest issue I see with companies trying to transition to becoming product-led is that they don’t evaluate their current reward structures to make sure they incentivize the right behavior.

Chapter 22. Safety and Learning

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In addition to reward structures that prevent people from innovating, the culture of the organization plays a big part. You might not be judging your teams for success based only on outputs, but they may still not be willing to try new things. Why? There may not be enough safety in the organization to fail and learn.

So many companies fail slowly. They release products and never measure whether those products do anything. They just let them sit there, collecting dust in a sea of endless features, never knowing whether they are producing value. This is the more dangerous and costly way to fail.

if you adopt a great product mindset and you give people the freedom to fail, what you’re doing is allowing them to fail quickly, quietly, and at a lower cost because they’re testing things early.

Chapter 23. Budgeting

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Because these budgets are done on a yearly basis, it also really kills the team’s ability to change course at all throughout the year. The organization is preventing itself from rapidly learning and iterating.

Chapter 24. Customer Centricity

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Chapter 25. Marquetly: The Product-Led Company

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