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January 26 - February 17, 2020
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 Alignment Gap, shown in Figure 11-2, is the difference between what people do and what management wants them to do, which is to achieve the business goals.
The Effects Gap (Figure 11-3) is the difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what actually happens.
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.
DIBBs, which stands for Data, Insights, Beliefs, and Bets.
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.
Agile teams are really good at telling two- to four-week stories. That’s what they deal with on a daily basis. As you go up in the organization, you tell stories with longer timespans. Executives are really good at telling five-year stories, but a team cannot act on a five-year story when they’re used to thinking in two to four weeks.
When teams are not sufficiently constrained, they become stuck.
Appropriately constrained teams, ones who have a direction set to the right level for them, feel safe to make decisions because they can see how their stories align to the goals and structure of the organization.
In most product organizations, there should be four major levels in strategy deployment (see Figure 12-1): Vision
Strategic intent Product initiatives Options
Strategy creation is the process of figuring out which direction the company should act upon and of developing the framework in which people make decisions.
Toyota, called the Improvement Kata,
Mike Rother documented how the process works in his book, Toyota Kata, an excerpt of which you can see in Figure 12-2.
Framework for thinking about value, by Joshua Arnold (reprinted
Figure 13-2. Marquetly strategic intent and product initiative
Product initiatives translate the business goals into the problems that we will solve with our product.
Options are your bets, as Spotify would call them. They represent the possible solutions that teams will explore to solve the product initiative.
The product vision communicates why you are building something and what the value proposition is for the customer.
The VP of product usually is the one who owns the product vision, but they might not be the first one to set it.
The chief product officer (CPO) is responsible for setting the direction and overseeing the product portfolio.
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?
Leaders always complain that they don’t have time to innovate. Usually, this is due to poor capacity planning and strategy creation.
Product managers can rely on the Product Kata to help them develop the right experimental mindset to fall in love with the problem rather than the solution. They continue iterating until they reach the outcome.
“Have you heard of a tool called Qualaroo?” asked Rich, the lead developer. “It allows us to poll people when they go toward the back button or try to leave the page.
Usually, when we think about processes, we focus more on the act of developing software than we do about building the right software. This is the build trap.
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?
“Don’t spend your time overdesigning and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition.
Reserve your time and energy for the things that will make or break your value proposition.”
The team pulled together the numbers from the data and defined their original option statement: We believe that, by making it faster and easier for teachers to create courses, we can increase the rate of published courses to 50% and increase the number of second courses created to 30%.
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.
You can easily turn a vanity metric into an actionable metric by adding a time component to it.
Pirate Metrics
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.
Figure 16-1. Pirate Metrics, by Dave McClure
Activating people well at the beginning leads to retention down the line.
HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.
Rodden’s article, “How to Choose the Right UX Metrics for Your Product.”1
Kerry Rodden, “How to choose the right UX metrics for your product,” Medium.com. http://bit.ly/2D77HAi.
Giff Constable wrote an entire book, called Talking to Humans,
Problem-based user research is generative research, meaning that its purpose is to find the problem you want to solve.
When you understand the context around a customer’s problem, you can form a better solution to solve it. Without that, you are just guessing.
One easy slip when you’re in this mode is pretending that the problem is the lack of a feature.
we just don’t need this right now. There is no problem this feature is solving.”
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.
Remember, it’s not the customer’s job to solve their own problems. It’s your job to ask them the right questions.
generative solution research,” I said. “That means you need to answer questions like, ‘What do they value in a solution?’ This is less about proving a hypothesis and more about understanding what would make a good solution to test.”
concierge experiment. They are, by nature, expensive because you’re manually taking on the work. You need to learn what makes sense in the solution and then think about how you can scale this to a sustainable offering — that is, if it proves your hypothesis.
Companies often confuse the building to learn and building to earn. Experimentation is all about building to learn.
The most important piece of the MVP is the learning, which is why my definition has always been “the minimum amount of effort to learn.” This keeps us anchored on outcomes rather than outputs.
