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

by Melissa Perri

HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.

Happiness is a measure of how satisfied the user is with the product. Engagement is a measure of how often users interact with the product. Task success measures how easy it is for a user to accomplish what they were meant to with the product.

When we use an MVP only to get a feature out quicker, we’re usually cutting corners on a great experience in the process. Thus, we sacrifice the amount we can learn from it. 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.

Concierge experiments deliver the end result to your client manually, but they do not look like the final solution at all.

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.

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.

Prototypes don’t make sense when you need to validate the problem. In this case, you’re spinning your wheels creating shiny designs that look great but don’t help you to learn what you need to learn. That’s why you need to focus on exploring the problem before any solution activities.

The goal of solution exploration is to get faster feedback. If we take too long to get feedback, we not only waste money but we also waste time. The opportunity cost of building the wrong thing is too high.

Cost of Delay is a numeric value that describes the impact of time on the outcomes you hope to achieve. It combines urgency and value so that you can measure impact and prioritize what you should be doing first.

As Jeff Gothelf, the author of Sense & Respond, once said, “Version 2 is the biggest lie in software development.”

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.

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. This meeting is for the product development side of the house — CPO, CTO, design leaders, the VPs of product, and the product managers. 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.

Corporations love to talk about risk management. The irony is that experimentation is the ultimate risk-management strategy because, when you experiment early, you can prevent the failure of something you will have spent billions of dollars on later.

I learned that my role was not that of the big idea generator but that of the bad idea terminator.

Experimenting with my team taught me the power of data. Data beats any opinion every time.

People will get in the way of a good product every time. Even if it is the best idea for the company, if it doesn’t meet the personal agendas of senior stakeholders, it can be squashed. To mitigate that risk, you need to deeply understand what motivates people and to know how you can address their personal motivations by introducing information and data that wins them over.

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. That’s when most people leave.

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