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

by Melissa Perri

“Tell me, what is the most important thing you can achieve today?” I asked him. “Revenue growth,” he answered easily. “We need it to get back to thirty percent year over year at least.” “When I asked others in the company, they did not give me that answer,” I told him. He looked a bit shocked. “Your CTO said the most important thing was the mobile strategy. When I asked why, he cited a board member. When I asked Karen what the most important thing was, she said acquiring more teachers on the teacher platform. When I asked the sales leader, he said getting more enterprise clients. No one is tying it back to your goal — the revenue. You are not aligned.”

Everything is number one on your project list. You are peanut-buttering your strategy — meaning that you have so many strategic initiatives spread over very few people.

You have to become product-led.

When we lose sight of what is important, when we forget what value means, the products we produce — and sometimes our companies themselves — fail.

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.

The company lost sight of what made its product attractive to customers — what made the company special.

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.

Many small companies start off as sales-led, and that can be okay. As a startup, it’s necessary to close that first big client and get the revenue needed to continue operating. So they’ll go above and beyond for that client, working closely with them to define the product roadmap, taking all of their requests, and sometimes customizing things especially for them. But this way of working does not scale for long.

If that is not in the cards for you, you need to change your strategy to building features that apply to everyone, without customization.

Their sales process gets ahead of their product strategy, and they continually need to play catch-up to make their commitments. This leaves no room for product teams to strategize or explore what could push the company further.

Innovation needs to be baked in to the system so that one person is not the weakest link. When you have 5,000 brains working on a problem (as opposed to one), you can harness that power better to succeed.

the role of the product manager was that of a creator and an arbitrator. We connected the development teams with the business, gathering requirements and translating them into features that people could actually use.

The waiter is a product manager who, at heart, is an order taker. They go to their stakeholders, customers, or managers, ask for what they want, and turn those wants into a list of items to be developed. There is no goal. There is no vision.

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.

“What is the difference between UX design and product management?” These two disciplines overlap quite a bit, but user experience is only one piece of building a great product. Design is a critical component of a successful product, but, again, it’s only one piece. Product management is about looking at the entire system — the requirements, the feature components, the value propositions, the user experience, the underlying business model, the pricing and the integrations — and figuring out how it can produce revenue for the company. It’s about understanding the entire picture of the organization and figuring out how the product — not just the experience — fits into it.

When you look at the role of the product owner in most Scrum literature, the three responsibilities of the position include the following: Define the product backlog and create actionable user stories for the development teams. Groom and prioritize the work in the backlog. Accept the completed user stories to make sure the work fulfills the criteria.

Most organizations do not give their people the necessary time to do product vision and research work. They would rather hold them responsible for a steady stream of outputs and measure success based on stacking backlogs and writing stories.

If you want to build products that create value for your businesses and customers, you need good product management foundations in your company. If you want a career path for your people, you need to give them this foundation so that they can grow into more senior roles. So remind your people to think like product managers. They might be playing the role of a product owner on a Scrum team most days, but you need them to think like a product manager in order to validate that you are building the right things.

You have everyone spread around components of features, but there is no one pulling together a holistic vision for each value stream.

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 vision statements provide focus for the company. They are short, memorable, and clearly articulated. They also don’t include fluffy terminology.

The product initiatives answer how? How can I reach these business goals by optimizing my products or building new ones?

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. Sometimes, you might even end up creating new products to solve these problems for your users. The product vision and portfolio vision keep you anchored in the problems and solutions that you want to explore.

Although having a strategy usually helps these companies align and focus their work, it also reveals a bigger issue: the lack of an overall product vision.

The product vision communicates why you are building something and what the value proposition is for the customer.

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 best solutions are linked to real problems that users want solved. Product managers use a process to identify which of those problems the team can solve to further the business and achieve the strategy.

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.

it’s not the customer’s job to solve their own problems. It’s your job to ask them the right questions.

There are many ways to experiment to learn. Concierge, Wizard of Oz, and concept testing are three examples of solution experiments,

Setting expectations on experiments with your customers is key to keeping them happy and to mitigating risk of a failed experiment. Explain to them why you are testing, when and how the experiment will end, and what you plan to do next. Communication is key to a successful experimentation process.

Internal tools are often neglected, but they still matter to the company. They need to be treated the same way as any other product.

In his book, The Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen talks about the importance of Cost of Delay in prioritizing work.

Experiment This phase is to understand the problem and to determine whether it’s worth solving. Teams in this phase are conducting problem exploration and solution exploration activities. No production code is being created. Alpha This phase is to determine whether the solution is desirable to the customers. This is a minimum feature set or a robust solution experiment, but built in production code and live for a small set of users. These users understand that they are getting early access to a feature that might change or be killed, if it is not solving their problems. Beta This phase is to determine whether the solution is scalable, from a technical standpoint. Although not always needed, this is a good phase to reduce risk. This release is available to more customers than the Alpha phase, but is still only a smaller subset of the entire population, since we are still testing. At this point, we’ve proven that the solution is desirable to customers, so it is unlikely that this feature will be killed unless it is not technically stable. 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.

A product operations team is a critical component to a well-run product organization at scale. It promotes good communication and alignment of the organization.

Being customer-centric allows you to figure out what products and services will fulfill that value on the customer side.

if you did not judge people for success by outcomes, you would never achieve those outcomes.

one of the quickest ways to kill the spirit of a great employee is to put them in an environment where they can’t succeed.

The product manager should be leading the charge to discover user problems and to solve them. This doesn’t mean that an important initiative or solution idea can’t come from management every once in a while, but that should be the exception, not the rule.