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January 26 - February 17, 2020
The idea behind the Wizard of Oz is that, unlike the concierge experiment, it looks and feels like a real, finished product. Customers don’t know that, on the backend, it’s all manual. Someone is pulling the strings — just like the Wizard of Oz.
Wizard of Oz can also be combined with techniques such as A/B testing.
Concept testing is another solution experiment that focuses more on high-touch interaction with the customer. In this case, you try to demonstrate or show concepts to the user to gauge their feedback.
When you show the concept to users, you are asking them to put themselves into the scenario in which they are experiencing the problem, and you are asking them questions about how the solution would or would not solve their problem.
If you want to make it evaluative, to firmly test a hypothesis, you need a definitive pass-or-fail criteria, when interviewing a customer about the concept.
Prototypes are the most popular tool for testing. When you need to learn whether a specific user flow or feature solves a problem for the user and allows them to achieve their desired outcome, you can turn to prototypes.
The team used a technique called story mapping, created by product management veteran and consultant Jeff Patton, to make sure they all understood the work and to prioritize the first release.
success criteria on this first version.
A North Star document explains the product in a way that can be visualized by the entire team and company. This includes the problem it is solving, the proposed solution, the solution factors that matter for success, and the outcomes the product will result in.
Story mapping helps teams break down their work and align around goals.
In his book, The Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen talks about the importance of Cost of Delay in prioritizing work.
Figure 19-1. Qualitative cost of delay, by Joshua Arnold and Ozlem Yuce
If it is high urgency, that means that every moment you do not ship that feature to customers, you are losing out on opportunity to hit your goal
High value is about solving the strongest problems or desires for the customer.
Black Swan Farming
We are done developing or iterating on a feature only when it has reached its goals.
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.
If there is one main reason I have seen companies fail to make a transition, it’s the lack of leadership buy-in to move to an outcome-oriented company.
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.
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
Here we review the progress of the options against the product initiatives and adjust our strategy accordingly.
Release reviews provide the opportunity for teams to show off the hard work they have done and to talk about success metrics.
Instead of thinking of roadmaps as a Gantt chart, you should view them as an explanation of strategy and the current stage of your product.
Living Roadmaps.
Usually, our roadmaps consist of a few key parts: The theme Hypothesis Goals and success metrics Stage of development Any important milestones
Experiment This phase is to understand the problem and to determine whether it’s worth solving.
Alpha This phase is to determine whether the solution is desirable to the customers.
Beta This phase is to determine whether the solution is scalable, from a technical standpoint.
Generally Available (GA) This phase means that the solution is widely available to all of our clients. Sales teams can talk openly about GA products and can sell as much as possible to the target market.
You can make an agreement with the sales team that anything being released as GA — or anything further along in Beta — can be added to its sales roadmap.
The chief of staff created a very small team (two people) to help her streamline operations and reporting. They oversaw the cadences of strategy, found an analytics partner to set up tracking, and collected and organized the progress toward goals into reports for executives.
product operations.
The product operations team should be made up of a combination of project managers and product people. It’s good to allocate a few developers to this team, as well, so they can integrate with third parties, if needed, or build custom tools to fit a specific purpose.
Tying livelihoods to the fact that you shipped product at all, instead of learning or solving problems for customers, is what gets people into the build trap. It also means that people are afraid to try anything new.
Tying retention numbers to their success metrics can also help to ensure that they target the right people.
Startups must pitch investors on their vision and on the data they collect to prove that the vision will be viable and profitable in the market.
Product-led companies invest in and budget for work based on their portfolio distribution and the stage of their work. This means allocating the appropriate funds across product lines for things that are known knowns and ready to be built, and it means setting aside money to invest in discovering new opportunities that will propel your business model forward.
In the beginning of this book, we talked about product management being a value exchange. Being customer-centric allows you to figure out what products and services will fulfill that value on the customer side.
Questions to Determine Whether a Company Is Product-Led
Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?
The product manager should be leading the charge to discover user problems and to solve them.
It’s a huge red flag when a team not only can’t take ownership for what it is building, but can’t even tell me why it is building it. This means that the originator of the idea never connected the why to the what.
What was the last product you decided to kill?
The organization already committed the idea to customers.
Budgeting can’t budge.
No pushback to management.
When’s the last time you talked with your customers?
What is your goal?
