#233 – What does it sound like when you change your mind?
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Black Epics
Black Epics is a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of successful Black Product Managers.
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If you build it, they will do nothing
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash Season 4 Finale
How to talk to your customers with Brian Casel [#37]
Top 10 Avoidable Mistakes SaaS Startups Make with Rob Walling
Being expert enough with Nick Loper [#40]
Pro-Level SaaS Marketing with Corey Haines [#39]
Building with your audience with Brennan Dunn [#38]
Every billion-dollar company started with 10 customers. Those first few customers are crucial. They help you refine your product, mould your messaging and positioning, and create vital social proof.
The First 10 Podcast interviews business builders on their First 10 Customers – who they were, how they found them, and what effect they had on their business, so that you can learn what worked, and what didn’t.
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An alive strategy vs. Dead strategy
Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash Product Strategy is Important
One of the most important roles of a product manager (PM) is setting the product strategy. The strategy, by way of a roadmap, is the document that drives team alignment. When a group of people adopts a strategy, it transforms the product strategy from just a piece of paper to something that drives team success. Informed teams, including product and everyone that affects product development—from engineers to executives, can deliver consistent results, essential to any organization that wants to grow from pure greenfield exploration into gaining product-market fit.
When you are looking for consistent strategic results that you can sell to the business and the team around you, you’ll need to escape the trap of pure feature velocity (“building stuff”) and get to building the “right stuff” that makes an impact for customers and the business. Consistent strategic results are essential because as teams scale, wasting time and resources gets easier.
Consistency is why the strategy must exist and live in the minds of those who need to operationalize it. That is when the strategy is truly alive when you can see it in action. But, unfortunately, most strategy is dead when it exists, but in name only.
What makes a strategy alive or dead? Well, let’s start by making sure you have a strategy that works first. If you aren’t sure what that looks like, you can find our complete guide here.
A Refresher of the Six Pillars of an Alive Product Strategy:
1. A product must have a purpose.
Building a product just for the sake of creating and maintaining something isn’t a strategy. Products should have a raison d‘être and exist for something beyond themselves. What drives the company? Why does the founder wake up in the morning? What about your product can the customer not live without? Take the time to communicate externally to find the locus of your product’s truth. Once you simplify that into something repeatable that a team can align around, you are most of the way there.
The alive product strategy has a clear, repeatable purpose. Dead strategy is muddled.
2. Understand the customer’s needs and their evolution.
Our customers are important, so it is critical that any product strategy we make also has to meet the customer where they are. But, more importantly, we can’t fall into the trap of “building a faster horse” instead of a car. Our customers don’t deal in features, and they deal in problems. Those problems evolve, and so must our strategy.
Alive strategy evolves with the customer. Dead strategy is static.
3. Understand your value chain and how it’s evolving.
Products don’t exist in a vacuum. Neither do its users. The product strategy must incorporate how it fits into the larger ecosystem, determining where it adds value and where friction points remain. As an ecosystem changes, the product’s role within it may also evolve. When determining strategy, you can find insight into how your product makes decisions—whether looking at your competitors or what systems your product builds on to work.
Alive strategy engages with the ecosystem. Dead strategy engages with a point in time.
4. Determine what change is likely to happen.
Although strategic thinkers don’t possess psychic powers, they should cast an eye toward the future and anticipate likely disruptions to either limit or expand the product’s opportunities for growth and usage. Then, with a good strategy, you’ll see what chances the business is willing to take.
An alive strategy makes bets. Dead strategy “knows” the future.
5. Define actions against those changes.
With a view on the horizon, what can your strategy do to mitigate disruption or seize opportunities?
Alive strategy anticipates risks. Dead strategy hides them.
6. Measure success and course correct.
There’s no way to know if a strategy is successful if no one’s keeping score. While the strategy itself shouldn’t be hitting specific metrics, tracking progress and KPIs illuminate progress and offer potential warning signs.
Alive strategy iterates. Dead strategy always starts from scratch.
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Strategy Doesn’t Need to Just Exist
Simply having a strategy isn’t enough, however. For example, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
Unfortunately, many teams that find themselves with a product strategy have to ask. “how does this matter to me?” and, as a result, lose interest. Strategy means nothing if it isn’t alive, in people’s hands, hearts, and heads applying to their work.
So, as we continue this article, let’s ask ourselves some questions. First, does any of this sound familiar to you?
- Feeling unsure of what to do, even though the strategy is there.
- Having a ton of distractions, even though the strategy is there.
- Operating in the past, even though the strategy is there.
Then your strategy might be dead.
Don’t fear! There is an opportunity here. If you have a strategy, you’ve already done the first step, create a strategy! So, we need to turn it around, and on that note, it feels like a good time to talk about what we mean by “alive.”
An Alive Product Strategy
Yes, your strategy is living.
In fact, strategy is a muscle and an important one for teams to exercise. Much like the muscles in your body, they need nutrition, and for them to operate at their best, they need exercise.
Download The Product Strategy Playbook ➜
So, what do we mean by that?
When we mention nutrition, your strategy needs context. Think about point two, mentioned above
“2. Understand customer needs and their evolution
Our customers are important, so it is critical that any product strategy we make also has to meet the customer where they are. More importantly, we can’t fall into the trap of ‘building a faster horse’ instead of a car. Our customers don’t deal in features, and they deal in problems. Those problems evolve, and so must our strategy.
Alive strategy evolves with the customer. Dead strategy is static.”
When you think about your customers, this concept makes sense. Our strategy needs to build towards our customers’ context of the marketplace. What if I told you that it needs also to do so internally – stakeholders who use your strategy also need that context.
So how is that strategy you made a few weeks ago? Is it alive? Does it have its nutrients? Has it gotten its exercise? In fact, when is the last time anyone referenced it?
Let’s talk about alive in another way – author Robert Greene once told author Ryan Holiday this:
“He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing.”
“Strategy is something that grows” is great as a mental model to see product strategy. But, remember, product strategy is a muscle. When a team sits around and doesn’t exercise that muscle, it will atrophy. An atrophied strategy is a recipe for disaster, as it is as good as no strategy at all. In fact, an atrophied strategy is a one-step towards a dead strategy.
So, let’s pose the question again, is your strategy alive? Like any new artifact, your strategy, once well crafted, starts that way. That said, from a distance, an alive product strategy can look like a dead one if you don’t know what to look for.
Don’t let your strategy turn into a zombie.
A Dead Product Strategy Will Become A Zombie
Grrr, brains
Zombies are scary (and possibly real). But we aren’t talking about those zombies right now. So instead, what we’re looking at is a zombie strategy.
The people we work with are smart and ready to work. A dead strategy, however, will sap their energy and leave our teams to fend for themselves. Moreover, as our teams grow, a culture built on dead strategy is a culture whose problems compound.
Product strategy is our domain, not theirs. When strategy atrophies, they will spend time working on things that make sense to them. Sometimes, the team will get lucky. Oftentimes, they will end up distracted.
That distraction is how you look up in the middle of the third quarter and wonder what happened to that roadmap you set in December. But, unfortunately, you’ve been bit by the strategy zombie, and as a result, the team is now playing catch up.
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The bad news, as a PM, is you’ve turned into a necromancer. The good news is that you can step away from that. The first step, though, is to identify if there is a dead strategy in your midst.
How do you identify a zombie strategy? Well, if it’s well built, here are a few indicators. Of course, we won’t leave you without homework either, so expect some ways to clear the zombies out. Then, each section holds a way to move that strategy from dead to alive.
3 Ways to Identify a Dead Product Strategy
1. Team members can’t remember what’s important.
Our brains’ short-term memory holds 5-7 things at a time. Why is that important?
One of the issues that can zombify a product strategy is overloading people with too much information.
We may have an urge to load the strategy with everything we need to get done. You, as a PM, may feel like you are giving proper context – however, overloading the team with context is exactly what will atrophy your strategy. Instead of giving context and helping folks find alignment, you allow the team to turn off and figure it out independently. This is how your strategy sits on the shelf and eventually zombifies.
So, let’s make this real.
Let me ask a question:
If you were to go around your team and ask, “What are the three priorities from our product strategy?” How confident are you that individual team members can list these top priorities? What about within 80% of your expectation?
If you gulped during that question, chances are, you may have a zombie product strategy on your hands. Unfortunately, whatever you thought was happening isn’t. The zombie strategy is eating your team’s mental space.
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In fact, brain science provides a reason for that. Our brains are more tuned to negative experiences than positive ones, up to seven times more. So those near-death experiences are negative experiences.
Strategy is a positive one.
Simplify your strategy
The basis of strategy is here. You need to simplify.
- Evangelize. Become a broken record and talk about the strategy regularly. Remind people at the end of every team meeting of the important pillars of your strategy. When people start getting sick of hearing it, you’ve only begun.
- Prioritize. Be clear about what is important, and get rid of the rest. Cut until it hurts – a strategy that doesn’t make any choices will atrophy.
- Positivize. Remind people of the small wins regularly. Remember, teams think negative first, so overwhelm them with positivity.
2. Strategy incorporates incentives for all
Every discipline has its own incentives. It’s important to recognize that the strategy isn’t about you. Human beings are storytellers, and without something more compelling, they will take what is around them to create their incentives. That is why a telltale sign of a lack of an alive product strategy looks like this:
Engineering cares about engineering stuff, same with design, marketing, and sales.
It’s natural with any vocation. Teams are just telling themselves a story and running with it. Since it isn’t compelling, they have to make it up as they go along.
A strategy will atrophy if the members of the team don’t see themselves in the strategy. As a PM, are you aware of everyone’s incentive? If you have to wonder, chances are you don’t.
When building the strategy, remember strategy is an abstraction. That abstraction helps people fit their mental model into the world itself. If that strategy doesn’t help them, they’ll split their time between your strategy and their incentive at best, and at worst, completely ignore your strategy.
Then your strategy is dead.
As an owner of the product strategy, make sure you talk to the point of contact from every discipline. Meet with the team regularly and have coffee with random team members to find out what drives those team members to work.
This is a slower process, but every time you iterate, the strategy gets better. This is because you are working your strategy muscles with each conversation as you make it more alive. As a bonus, your relationship with the other discipline will get better, too.
3. Strategy relies on consistent process
Do not try to turn the entire ship at once. Our teams have enough on their plate. That is why we, as PMs, have to be very careful when we bring in a new process.
If we do, we have to do so thoughtfully and repeatedly. Once is not enough. Remember, our brains can only hold 3-7 things in short-term memory, so it’s far better to leverage things that are already comfortable in an organization or build it into muscle memory.
As PMs, we live with our strategies for a long time, making sense to us (only). So we want to try a new process to shake things up and partially bring newness to ourselves, selfishly. So, we make the team go through an exercise, something you may find on the internet, and never refer to it again since the pieces fit so well in your head.
Well, while you may remember it, the team around you has their own issues, and more than likely, is overloaded.
When this happens, you’ve walked right into a dead strategy since the team has learned not to take anything you’ve done as seriously.
As a rule of thumb, small edits to the current process are better than a new process. If you aren’t going to plan around a new process to ensure it’s compelling and do it often, don’t do it at all.
Alive Product Strategy Starts with You
There is a pattern here. A product strategy isn’t alive on its own. So simply writing a great one isn’t good enough. Instead, as a PM or product leader, you’ll need to work hard at keeping it alive continuously.
It’s worth bringing up this quote again.
“He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing.”
One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing.
A great strategy is something you control, iterate, and grow. If you aren’t careful, you’ll turn from a PM into an unwitting necromancer. So your strategy will be less about control and more about waiting.
Strategy is a way to speed up alignment, and alignment isn’t stationary. If you aren’t working those strategy muscles, your strategy will turn from alive to dead. As a result, your team will get further and further away when strategy stands still.
Building a product strategy is not enough; make sure the strategy is alive and aligned not just with the market and the customers but also with the team that is working through it. When other functions use product strategy, it lessens the cross-functional burden and gives the organization a chance to course-correct when things aren’t going well.
Keep your product strategy alive with focused goals, aligned incentives, and repeatable processes.
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When It Comes to AI, Don’t Get Trapped in the Magic Box
AI can be a powerful tool, but, ultimately, it’s just that: a tool. Make sure you understand its processes so that you’re the one in control of making product decisions.
Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash Computers are not smart.
For me, the war against the myth of computer intelligence began in ninth grade when someone in my class started talking about how smart their computer was. This comment broke my mind. I thought, immediately, how does someone think a bunch of circuits are intelligent?
Ascribing intelligence to a bucket of bolts is a cognitive error in itself. The computer isn’t thinking; it’s processing instructions. Let’s be clear: human intelligence structures those instructions and operates outside of them; computers can’t. Computers can, however, accelerate.
If we aren’t careful, technology accelerates damaging practices. As product people, our job is to be stewards of technology. We can’t afford to let that harmful acceleration happen. As Aimé Césaire writes in his Discourse on Colonialism, “No one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either.”
Tech accelerates. Either you accelerate harm reduction or you are, as Césaire noted, an active participant in accelerating harm to fellow human beings. As tech professionals, we have to be mindful of what we are doing. The world at large still hasn’t moved on from the ongoing colonial project of exploiting and extracting labor from colonized groups. If tech is going to live up to its ideal of democratization, it can’t just be in slogans.
And that’s what I’m doing here: helping you get better outcomes by teaching you to operate from better principles. We will avoid sloganeering in favor of actionable solutions that separate intelligence from process. Once a month, I will identify some technology from a product management perspective and then give you some markers to move away from bias to make informed decisions. The ultimate goal is to help you, as a PdM, increase your odds of success at product development.
Speaking of “intelligent computers,” now is a great time to talk about AI. With GPT-3 all the rage, AI is continuing to thrive. With that fascination has come a bunch of ideas about how and why you should use AI to make product decisions in the name of efficiency.
The team behind the model took 175 billion parameters, many from Wikipedia and Reddit, and built a model that can predict text with stunning results. Granted, even though the team’s white paper does a good job of explaining the pros and cons of using the model, people haven’t stopped falling into the same trap as my classmate by thinking that the predictions are a form of intelligence, instead of what they truly are: a well-trained guess.
With so many people currently interested in the model and AI more generally, I want to warn against the perils of what I call the “magic box.” If you don’t deal with this problem now, you’ll find yourself in the middle of cognitive hell inside of your product development.
RELATED READINGWhy GPT-3 Heralds a Democratic Revolution in Tech
THE MAGIC BOX
If you’ve ever looked at some AI process and wondered, “What’s happening in there?” and no one can answer your question, you might find yourself in the middle of what I call the “magic box” fallacy. This happens when someone feeds input into a tool/object/person and simply trusts the output without understanding the process.
A report from Oxford University, “AI @ Work,” highlights this fallacy in action. The authors identify three issues that have emerged from AI work:
1) Integration challenges happen when settings are not yet primed for AI use, or when these technologies operate at a disjoint between workers and their employers.
2) Reliance challenges stem from over and under reliance on AI in workplace systems.
3) Transparency challenges … arise when the work required by these systems — and where that work is done — is not transparent to users.
The report does a great job of exposing the “magic box” that AI can be, especially when it comes to AI and worker agency (i.e., you) with respect to decision making. The case studies in the report show the damage that happens as companies end up either wasting their resources on wild goose chases or end up building unscalable systems.
Remember, tech accelerates.
I want to focus on the second conclusion in this article since it is a pretty good definition of how the “magic box” operates in the world of AI. Specifically, I want to look at how to identify these magic boxes in your company, how they affect your product development, and how you can avoid falling into the trap.
IDENTIFYING MAGIC BOXES
The easiest way to see if your company has “magic box” thinking is its decision fitness. How often do they check to see if their decisions are aligned with their goals? If asking the question, “How do we know this AI process is working to serve our customers?” brings nothing but strange looks, I can assure you that the AI is a magic box.
If people aren’t looking confused, ask further if there is some sort of process that sees if the major decisions the AI is making tracks with the expected behavior. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, here is the alternative.
HOW MAGIC BOXES RUIN YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
One thing I appreciate about “AI @ Work” is how direct the report is when it comes to the harm AI systems can create when they are running unchecked. Here are a few things you may recognize.
Optimization Bias: People, and especially laypeople, believe the AI is always right without investigating it. Users blindly trust the AI, including those who are affected by it internally. Once the AI is set on a path, it becomes a “dumb missle” and will optimize without context. This structure is dangerous, because if things go up and to the right, so to speak, we have a tendency to see motion as progress. People will base their decisions on what this AI does. We exhibit bias toward the machine because it doesn’t have pesky feelings, even though they may be making bad decisions.
Simplicity Bias: AI flattens decisions since it’s deciding between two paths. The more “open” the decision, the worse the AI gets. The GPT-3 paper does a great job of demonstrating this in its math section. The model is fine with adding two numbers; add a third, and it goes haywire. If you are using AI to make decisions, it’s critical you know what it’s deciding and if it isn’t oversimplifying.
Customer Disconnect: Your customer interfaces with the AI and stops talking with you completely. If you add the first two things I’ve mentioned here, you’ll realize how big of a deal this is. As product people, our job is to be proxies for the customer so we can ensure alignment in product development. “Magic box” AI takes us away from that.
AVOIDING THE MAGIC BOX
Let’s circle back to who is responsible for outcomes.
If no one is raising their hand, well — product manager, this one is on you. As the person responsible for alignment in an organization, aligning the use of a tool (AI) to output (business outcomes) pretty much falls on you.
So what can you do?
- Assume AI is the dumb missile that it is. This is where the concept of Human in the Loop is so important. A human being must be someplace in any AI process. In fact, the human plus AI combination colloquially called an AI centaur, has been shown to be better than AI or human alone. Act as that human. Help steer your AI systems so that you can have higher confidence in hitting its point. If you don’t, you’ll more than likely be optimizing for the wrong thing.
- Lay out the decisions the AI is making using a mapping process. Take journey mapping or service blueprinting, for example. Either work by “mapping” or laying out processes that are important to decisions. Both are tools designed to shine a light on which decisions customers (journey mapping) or the business (service blueprinting) are making.
- Talk to your customers on a regular basis. Continually keep an eye on customers using your AI service and spot check with user interviews for customers that have both completed the process and failed (hello Facebook and other tools). This will keep you honest, since AI is a tool to solve customer problems and that alone.
AI IS GOOD, BUT DON’T LET THE MAGIC BOX WIN
As has often been said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. AI is no different. It’s not a perfect solution for your product development with no drawbacks.
If you aren’t trying to understand how to use tools to service the customer, as well as building operations to understand, improve, and decide to align those needs with the business, you’ll be running into a high probability of wasteful optimization and customer disconnect.
These things are all tools.
AI, when used properly, is a fantastic way to make your operations more efficient. When you don’t understand what you are using, you’ll fall into traps that can sink your business, including the “magic box” that will kill your operations.
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Accuracy vs. Precision: what’s the difference?
Accuracy and precision may seem like the same thing, but understanding the distinction between them will let you level up your product management skills.
Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash Would you prefer your work to be accurate or precise? This sounds like a trick question, right? Aren’t they the same thing?
Well, not exactly. Both are important to your product management practice. As a product leader, you’ll need to understand and leverage both concepts to make your strategy a reality.
Accuracy vs. Precision
Let’s use the concept of the bullseye to make the distinction between accuracy and precision clearer.
Imagine you’re an archer taking some practice shots by shooting at a bullseye. I’m judging your shots over the span of time, and I tell you I’m looking at both precision and accuracy. I would judge your performance the following way:
ACCURACY
Accuracy measures how close measurements are to an accepted value, or in our example, how close your shots are to the center of the bullseye. If you’re hitting the innermost circle of the target, then that shot is as accurate as possible.
In product management terms, consider your ability to deliver products that the market wants and how right you are when solving a problem. Remember, you can’t ever be completely accurate, but you can approach perfection.
PRECISION
Precision measures how close each of your measurements — or shots — are to each other. If all your arrows are hitting the same place, then you’re as precise as possible, even if the shots aren’t accurate.
In product management, consider how consistently you deliver useful results to the customers and bring value to the market. Are your releases consistent?
Both concepts of accuracy and precision are essential to executing your product strategy well. If you’re failing at both, you’ll find your team is powerless. When both are rolling, however, you’ll find that your team is full of trust and positioned for success over the long term.
Comparing Accuracy and Precision
Let’s look at accuracy and precision in a matrix since visualizing things makes understanding this principle even simpler:
The relationship between precision and accuracy. | Image: Adam Thomas Let’s talk about each one of these quadrants, where a “+” symbol means the precision or accuracy is high, and a “-” symbol means the precision or accuracy is low.
Each section below will define how these quadrant scenarios look in practice. If your product team isn’t in the top-left quadrant, you’re going to want to fix that. We’ll talk about the consequences of each of the other quadrants and then, in the end, I’ll leave you with solutions for each that will allow your team to move to the top-left.
HIGH ACCURACY AND HIGH PRECISION
Let’s start with a look at the best-case scenario. What is the ideal state?
When your strategy is both accurate and precise, you solve customer problems and leverage your resources well.
This team can take many forms. Much like enlightenment, the path is different for everyone. But you’ll be able to tell you’re on the right track because things run smoothly.
A team that’s both precise and accurate has the right stuff. Your team is curious, thoughtful and action-oriented. They know how to look at the marketplace and create big wins to make a splash. The team also knows how to keep the marketplace happy with consistent results.
When you ship smaller releases, your customers are generally appreciative. Larger ones generate a buzz in the marketplace. Product usage makes clear that the customer needs what you’re giving them. For most releases, you’ll see over 40 percent usage. Those that aren’t at that level are usually specific add-ons for a particular segment of customers whose numbers may be small, but who are willing to pay for the exclusivity.
Product leaders: When a team is operating like this, your job is to get out of the way and let them cook.
Now that we have a good baseline, let’s take a look at what happens when teams are missing a part of the equation and it’s time for you to help.
HIGH ACCURACY AND LOW PRECISION
Let’s go now to BobCo, whose product team has a precision problem.
Over the last few quarters, they seem to have found some things that work and work well. The only problem is that, out of the 10 items they ship, only one or two of the products are helpful to customers.
Why is this a problem? Home runs are great and tend to bring better visibility to a company and a team. But delivering only big wins, punctuated by long stretches of not much at all, eventually leaves people wanting. After a while, teams expect to have some consistency in their work.
The result? The product team never knows how to justify resource requests to the broader company. Your lack of consistency means you don’t know what will be a hit and what will fall flat. Outside the company, the marketplace thinks you are great entertainment but not a serious player.
BobCo’s product team continues to work hard, but they can’t seem to make the case for growing the product function. The team starts to fade from importance in the organization, and as a result, loses influence. Product trades in influence, so this is a serious problem.
As a product leader, you’re responsible for the fact that the whole organization is stuck in the mud as other teams catch on to the issues.
How to Fix High Accuracy and Low Precision
The culprit is likely your lack of iterating on the process itself. My guess is that the most significant fixes will come when your teams have an opportunity to adjust processes. You probably aren’t reflecting on anything. Take a moment to slow down delivery and see how you can get alignment on how you ship.
A useful tool to generate this alignment is a team retrospective workshop.
LOW ACCURACY AND HIGH PRECISION
Let’s go now to HobCo, a team that has an accuracy problem.
Unlike BobCo, they seem to be able to get the team to provide value regularly. The problem is that they aren’t shaking up the marketplace.
Why is this a problem? Well, it’s basically the inverse of what we saw above. Being reliable is excellent, but over time, that consistency becomes less effective. It’s how you open room for new challengers to eat your lunch in the marketplace. You’ll run into issues with people feeling like the product is in the background. They aren’t making a splash, and people forget the team exists.
The result of all this? The product team recedes into the back of people’s minds. Always being reliable makes your product always a bridesmaid, never a bride. When a new player hits a home run, you’ll have to explain why you missed it.
Hobco’s product team continues to work hard but, just like we saw above, can’t manage to grow the team or its influence.
As a product leader, you’ll watch your team fade in importance. You lose influence, and much like your compatriots at BobCo, your team will be stuck in the mud.
How to Fix Low Accuracy and High Precision
When you find this is your problem, it’s an excellent time to take a look at your discovery processes. How are you talking to customers? Are you identifying who they are and what gets them emotionally invested or divested?
To do this, look at why customers are leaving your product, and find some big swings to take. Switch interviews are a great tool for making this change.
LOW ACCURACY AND LOW PRECISION
Let’s finally look at SobCo, a team that has a problem with both accuracy and precision.
Unlike either of the previous companies, this team is neither accurate nor precise. If you thought the rest of the company ignored the product teams before, well, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Why is this a problem? No one takes product seriously as a team.
Because product is considered trivial, everyone bypasses the product team entirely. If you’re lucky, your company becomes a feature factory that can crank out some products. More often than not, though, everything related to your strategy becomes more scattered. People can’t track what you are building or why it’s important.
Product development still happens, but you just won’t be involved. For a product team, this situation is apocalyptic.
The team itself is now on the brink of extinction. As a product leader, you either have to start digging your way out or start looking for another job.
How to Fix Low Accuracy and Low Precision
To start fixing this situation, you need to recognize that the biggest problem now is trust. Other teams are more than likely ignoring you, and for a good reason: They don’t trust that you can get things done. If you want to dig out of this hole, your best shot is to look for something small to tackle immediately. Find some quick wins to get some momentum on your team’s side. You can use those wins to begin re-establishing your team’s confidence in itself as well as earning back respect from the company at large.
I’d recommend finding a coach if you are a product leader in this situation. Even if you’re a new hire, having a second brain here is helpful.
To find tools to facilitate this process, go to Google and pick any framework related to process or discovery. Most will be helpful as a way to find a solid base to build on.
Start small, and good luck. You’ve got work to do.
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Why Track Both Accuracy and Precision
Precision and accuracy are both important to your product development.
Missing one or the other can lead your team to fade into obscurity and lose influence across an organization. If you are missing both, well, things aren’t great, and you’ll need to work immediately to gain control of the situation.
It isn’t enough to just build a strategy, you’ll need to execute that strategy in a way that sells product to an organization. So, when someone asks whether you would like to be accurate or precise, the answer is both.
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What are customer needs? 5 steps to meet them
Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash There are three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and product marketers being reminded to address their customer needs.
Sure, you can be easily forgiven if you’re sick of hearing this time and time again. After all, it’s a message seemingly being played on a continuous loop, and it ain’t gonna lose its momentum anytime soon.
And with good reason. After all, a customer base is at the heart of every business, driving sales and propelling organizations to the next level.
Without them, we wouldn’t exist. Period.
So follow our advice as we look at:
What are customer needs?
There are times when we act impulsively and buy something on a whim. We’ve all been in the scenario when we’ve been at the mall with zero intention of buying something and ending up wasting money on a horrific shirt that’s confined to the wardrobe, never to see the light of day.
However, the majority of the time, customers buy products or services because there’s a genuine need and reasoning behind their purchase.
Let’s say the customer’s lawn is looking like Tarzan’s Africa, and they’re keen to transform it into their very own Garden of Eden. They’ll need a lawn mower and gardening equipment to resolve their problem.
So, customer needs can be defined by what a customer wants and needs when they’re set to interact with your business, your competitors, or when they’re searching for a product or service you may be able to offer them.
Product marketers need to make sure they’re in a position whereby they can cater to the requirements of customers who fit their buyer personas. Let’s face it, if you can’t offer the solution to their problem, they won’t hang around until you’ve got your ship in order. They’ll waltz to your nearest competitor, who’ll be more than happy to benefit at your expense.
Which prompts the million-dollar question: Which methods are used to identify customer needs in the first place?
Customer needs vs wants
Customer needs are essential and most of your customers will have the same needs from your product. There is usually a hierarchy of needs, so the most important needs should be filled, and so on.
Customer wants, on the other hand, are unlimited and can arise from needs. For example, the need to eat dinner may lead to wanting a McDonald’s burger. Wants also compete with each other for the limited resources of the customer.
And perhaps most importantly, wants are not universal across your customers. You may want to use your customer segmentation to split customers by their wants.
How do you identify customer needs?
Make no mistake, understanding your customer needs isn’t merely a case of throwing mud and seeing what sticks. A range of methods are used by companies to ensure they’re not barking up the wrong tree and offering customers products that are way wide of the mark.
But this doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to introduce ways that’ll give you an indication of what customer needs you should be honing in on – and as usual, we’re going to ease your worries and give you a whistle-stop tour of what you need to know.
Hakuna Matata.
Focus groups
Sometimes, you need to turn to the art of conversation to discover what you want to find out, in which case, what better way to pick the brains of your customers than focus groups?
Focus groups are a market research method whereby you interview a group of people who are representative of your target audience.
Granted, a breadth of valuable information can be gained by using data, but addressing your prospective customers directly brings a whole new perspective on what they want in terms of features, price points, and so forth. You can even grill them on things they don’t like about products provided by competitors and use this feedback to either develop an existing product or design an offering that’ll blow their socks off – figuratively speaking, of course.
Focus groups provide the perfect backdrop for a frank, honest discussion with your customers. While you may not necessarily like some of the feedback you receive, in many ways, that’s the point of conducting these sessions – to iron out any imperfections and be sure you’re providing a solution your customers love.
Sometimes, it may be difficult to get a sample together to survey a physical location, particularly given the current circumstances surrounding COVID-19. Yet this needn’t stop you in your tracks. Surveys can be sent via email, post, and with the emergence of video platforms such as Zoom, you could even hold a virtual meet – the possibilities are endless.
Working on a budget? No worries – Google Forms is an awesome tool you can use for free.
So, wear your thick skin and set the ball rolling.
Social listening
Social media listening allows companies to track and analyze what their prospective customers are saying about them on social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
In 2019, 2.95bn people were using social media platforms – pretty crazy, right? In essence, this creates an invaluable pool of feedback for companies whereby they can monitor their customers’ social media posts and see exactly what’s being said about their company and the services they offer.
Let’s say you’re a fast-food chain and your brand-new burger prompts a hashtag to start trending on Twitter – and the feedback isn’t great.
The widespread feedback amongst burger buffs is the sauce on the burger is too spicy, but otherwise, they love the other features of your new creation. You could go back to the drawing board, revise the recipe, and start the same burger, with a sauce that won’t give diners the sweats.
This is a perfect example of social listening: you’ve launched a product, listened to the response, and amended your offering to align with the expectations of your customers.
Easy-peasy.
Keyword research
Not only is it important to think about what your customers want, but it’s also important to think about what they’re searching for.
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day. Madness, isn’t it? And all the more reason you need to make sure your keywords are on point.
Keyword research not only sweetens your SEO ranking, but it can also give you an idea of your customer’s requirements, and what they want from your business and the product or service you’re offering. By identifying your customer’s online searching habits and more to the point, how they’re searching for your company and industry, this enables you to establish exactly what they’re looking for – i.e. their customer needs.
Using this nugget of information, you can finetune your strategy to ensure you’re giving your customers what they need.
What is the importance of customer needs?
You get feedback
You might know the product inside and out but you probably don’t use it daily like they do. Maybe they just want a more condensed version of your existing user manual. Maybe they want a whole new feature adding. If you don’t ask you don’t know.
Remember, no matter how great your solution is now it can always be better and picking up snags and customer wish lists is the single best way to take it to the next level.
You can act faster
The more often you check in with customers the quicker you can pick up on any flaws, issues or demand, and the sooner you identify things like that the sooner you can take action. That means happier customers, less churn, a step up on your competition, and more sales. And now, not later.
Keep in mind: for every customer who bothers to complain, 20 others remain silent.
You get buy-in
It’s easier to get the go-ahead on a new campaign, feature or product if you’ve got concrete evidence supporting the why. That’s not to say you have to go and invest $$$$$s just because one customer said they’d quite like feature X adding to product Y, but keep a physical track of your conversations and if a trend emerges use it to support your argument.
You shape your campaigns
If one person’s thinking it others almost certainly are too, so the tidbits of knowledge you pick up during your chats could even shape future campaigns.
For example, let’s say you’re a CMS provider. Currently, your main marketing line is that your solution is “incredibly intuitive with drag-and-drop-style building features”. However, having spoken to a tonne of customers now, the selling point seems to be shifting towards its built-in SEO capabilities. Could there be a new campaign slant in it to attract more prospects?
Find out how you’re doing
Quantitative data is great and gives you a real insight into how products and campaigns are performing, but there’s nothing quite like qualitative research. It adds meat to the bones and helps you understand the reasons and emotions behind the numbers.
Why is page A the most visited in our app? How come people aren’t finding their way to feature B? Why didn’t campaign C work? Why was campaign D so successful? How can element E of feature F be improved? All answers you can get from direct communication with your customers.
How often should you speak to your customers?
We mentioned at the start there’s no such thing as a gospel frequency so we don’t have a magic number for you all of a sudden, we’re afraid, but what we do have is some for food thought.
While speaking to PMMs for our Product Marketing Insider series, we’ve come across leaders who make getting on the phone to customers part of their daily routine – however, while that’s definitely #customercontactgoals, understandably, it might not be achievable for everyone.
So, here’s what some other PMAers had to say:
“Within a team of three (different marketing roles, I’m the only PMM) we probably field several support questions weekly related to resources that we publish (i.e. can I get a recording of the webinar, that download didn’t arrive in my inbox…) and then between the team we run one or two customer interviews a month either for case studies, user testing content or product feedback.”
– Rebecca Taylor, Product Marketing Manager at GatherContent
“Maybe once in two weeks. We run feature adoption campaigns regularly and so end up getting on a call with the customers to understand the friction they face in not using the feature.”
– Vaishnavi Ketharnathan, Product Marketing Manager for Checkout at Chargebee
“It happens at least weekly. Not to the same customer, but it has to happen at least weekly.”
– Aneel Lakhani, Exec Marketing Consultant
“I’m on the phone at least once a week with a customer doing persona interviews.”
– RJ Gazarek, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian
“I find that with a role as busy as ours, committing the team to customer calls/visits is required to keep everyone on point. We require two customer calls a week per PMM, not including sales calls (so true “customer” calls).”
Jonathan Hinz, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Seismic
“Frequency will vary based on the size of your company, industry, etc. but one thing I would recommend is setting the objective for the conversation/feedback and having a way to consolidate and share on a quarterly basis with broader team or company.”
Daniel Kuperman, Director of Product Marketing @ Snowflake
Should you market to current customers?
Why market to current customers?
Adam Thomas, PM expert, shares why we should market to current customers.
“Sure, it’s easy to give lip service to our current customer base.
““We are customer-obsessed” or a variation of it, is somewhere in your company’s mission statement, and it may be something that gets talked about during an offsite, but think about how often you’ve talked to current customers in a proactive way?
“We usually talk to our customers reactively, in fact, if I look in your customer conversation tool (think Intercom) my guess is that any and all proactive conversation is in sales or retention. The “why” is simple – our incentives are aligned that way – Net Churn and Activations are going to get eyes immediately when talking to leadership.
“That isn’t customer-obsessed, that is keeping the ship together. Why not talk to the current customer base? Sure the numbers aren’t sexy, but over the long term, you are guaranteed to learn the following:”
Question -> Metrics/Output
“Why does the customer trust you -> Customer satisfaction, pricing analysis
“Why does the customer share your product? -> Referrals
“What would the customer buy from you? -> Follow-on products
“All of these things are good for business. All of them are going to make you look good.
“Win-Win.”
Look after your existing customers
Aicha Zaa, Product Marketing Manager at Productsup, shares how to look after your current customers.
The customer is king! As product marketers, we know that but how many of us really create strong processes around it?
New markets are exciting to enter, and when your company is ready, new markets can lead to a big payoff. However, don’t forget the customers who are already loyal to your company, as they are your competitors’ target market. They might have become brand advocates but now the work is in keeping it that way.
To begin with, use customer feedback surveys to gather this information. Learn how your competitors offer to support their customers and weigh yourself accordingly to discover the scope of improvement. Customer support and satisfaction is the door to a profitable business as it helps businesses win their customer trust and maintain loyal relationships.
For more insights check out Aicha’s article on the topic:
What is a customer needs analysis?
Customer needs analysis survey
The customer needs analysis is used to help companies figure out their position in their respective competitive markets and how they fair in terms of meeting their target customers’ needs.
The survey should ask questions about your brand as well as competitors, what your customers know about your product, and brand awareness in general.
You could ask:
- Are there any positive and negative word associations with our brand?
- Which brand would you is similar and/or competes with our brand?
Means-end analysis
Now you’ve conducted the customer needs analysis survey, you can use the answers to get a better picture of why your customers are your customers, as well as what makes your product or service stand apart from your competitors’.
A means-end analysis uses those answers to determine the reasons why a customer would buy your product.
These reasons are then divided into three main groups:
1. Features: Your customer may purchase your product because of a specific feature, if you were buying a new phone, for example, the fact that it has a titanium, indestructible casing might be a draw.
2. Benefits: Your customer buys your product or service because of a benefit, they believe your product will offer them. E.g. the customer might buy your phone because it wirelessly syncs to their other devices easier than competing models.
3. Values: A customer buys a product or service to help them fulfill an individual value. They may feel that by buying this phone they’ll communicate more frequently with loved ones who have the same handset.
Reasons for buying a product can be personal to each customer and vary wildly, which is why it’s important to make note of the answers and group them into each category. From there you can identify exactly which motivating factor your product falls under and which perceived problem it solves!
This is a great way to find areas you need to improve in and discover new ways to one-up your competitors.
Customer Feedback
After conducting customer surveys you will have loads of data on what your customers need – the problem is sorting through it. And that’s without counting all the unprompted customer feedback you could analyze.
You should try to sort this into rough groups relating to different major customer needs. Then you should look for common keywords in each of the groups and make a note of positive and negative emotions related to the feedback.
This can help you to get a sense of the key patterns in the data.
Common examples of customer needs
There is a whole range of different customer needs. For example, when we reach into our pocket and order an Uber taxi, this is driven by the need to go from A to B. Similarly, we may call for a pizza delivery, and again, this is driven by our need to satisfy hunger.
The list is endless. We’ve categorized the types of customer needs below and divided them into two categories: product needs and service needs – have a nosey and familiarize yourself with them.
Product needs
Functionality
Q: Given the choice, will your customer A) invest in a product or service that does half a job, and may not even solve their problem, or B) buy a product or service that’ll tick all the boxes?
No prizes for the right answer there. Customers need your product or service to function exactly the way they need it to, to rectify an issue or fulfill their desire.
Price
Whether it’s $20 or $2000, more often than not, buyers will be working on the constraints of a budget.
Remember, your customer will have a price point they won’t be able to surpass, so price accordingly.
Compatibility
Always ensure your product or service is compatible with your existing products on offer.
For example, when Xbox released its Xbox One console, a list of backward compatible titles from the previous console was released, meaning gamers could continue to enjoy their old favorites.
In doing so, you’ll keep your customers happy, and reduce the likelihood of them switching allegiances to your competitor.
Efficiency
Let’s face facts: we’re all impatient, and your customers are no different when looking for a product or service. They’ll always be attracted to a product or service that offers immediate gratification.
Performance
Nobody would visit a car showroom and buy a top of the range Mercedes with square wheels. After all, why buy the undrivable car?
Similarly, your product or service needs to fulfill the duties required by the customer so they can achieve their goals.
Reliability
Sticking with the car motif, ever wondered why so many people buy Volkswagen cars? One word: reliability.
Products or services need to perform reliably, as advertised, whenever the customer uses it. Anything else doesn’t meet the customer’s needs.
And that won’t cut the mustard.
Design
A product could have every feature on God’s green earth, but if it’s lacking aesthetically, chances are it won’t perform to its optimum potential.
When designing your product, always put usability at the forefront of your mind, because if it’s awkward to use, there’s a strong possibility this will impact the customer experience and they could seek future solutions elsewhere, rather than give you a chance to redeem yourself.
Experience
Never overcomplicate things as far as using your product or service is concerned.
Remember, the customer has bought your product to simplify matters, not make things harder!
Convenience
Your customers are always looking for the most convenient solution to their problem – if they wanted to jump through hoops, they’d have joined the circus.
Offer a practical solution to their problem. They’ll be grateful for it.
Service needs
Accessibility
Nobody wants to constantly hear a pre-recorded message when calling customer service teams – it’s irritating, and sends out all the wrong signals.
You need to make your customer service support teams accessible, even if this means having multiple ways whereby they can get in touch with you, including chatbots, customer service numbers, and so forth.
Remember, word of mouth can make or break your company’s reputation, and if your existing customers turn the air blue if you’re not accessible, they’ll make their voices heard.
Empathy
However, let’s be positive and assume your customers won’t have any trouble at all contacting you.
Top tip: people getting in touch with customer support aren’t calling for a chat – they have a problem. So, if they’re disappointed, or express dismay for whatever reason, show empathy and understanding when providing help.
Be fair
Nobody likes being ripped off. Ever.
So, when you’re pricing your product or setting out terms of a customer contract, don’t be sneaky or sly. It’s not big, it’s not clever, and you’ll only wind up booking your customers a first-class, all expenses paid trip to your nearest rival.
Be clear
Similarly, we can’t say how important it is to be crystal clear with your customers.
For example, if their cell phone tariff is set to increase by a couple of dollars, don’t spring a surprise on them when they open their next bill. Pick up the phone and let them know. They’ll appreciate your honesty, and it’ll only do good for your reputation.
Control
Everyone likes to feel some level of control and customers are no different when it comes to business interactions. Customers should feel empowered from start to finish and well after the sales. Make it easy for them to return products they don’t find satisfactory, play around with terms, and change subscriptions and you’ll have a customer for life.
Options
Consumers need options, after all, variety is the spice of life! Make sure you offer a variety in the form of products, features, subscriptions, and the way your customers can pay.
Information
Ever been in a scenario whereby you’re totally out of the loop?
If you haven’t, you’re not missing out: it sucks. If you have, you’ll know what we’re talking about, and shouldn’t subject your customers to the same treatment.
When people know about what they’re buying, this inspires trust; a relationship with no trust holds no credence, and sooner or later, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.
Publish content geared to providing your customers useful information they can use to make informed buying decisions and get the most from their purchases: blogs, instructional videos, downloadable brochures – they’re all useful resources that’ll improve your overall service.
What are the most common customer needs?
We’ve unleashed a helluva lot of examples onto your plate in our previous section, but don’t panic; not every single one of the aforementioned customer needs will be particularly applicable to your circumstances.
To round off, here’s a bite-size list of the most common customer needs:
- Price
- Reliability and sustainability
- Risk reduction
- Usability and convenience
- Transparency
- Control
- Empathy
- Information
How to meet customer needs in 5 steps
Sometimes, circumstances stop your customer from meeting their needs with your products or services, and when you’ve devoted copious amounts of time and effort to developing a product or service you’re super-proud of, it can be difficult to stomach seeing customers go elsewhere.
But not to worry, some steps can be taken to address common pain points and have your customers eating out the palm of your hand.
Well, not literally, but you know what we mean. Here are some ideas:
1. Pool customer feedback from different sources to show multiple sides of the story
Everyone’s number one choice is always going to be one-on-one phone, video or in-person time but sometimes that’s easier said than done. So, here are all your options.
Call your customers
This’ll give you an open forum to get firsthand answers from the horse’s mouth and comes with a couple of pretty huge benefits:
Benefit #1: you can explore areas you might not have originally anticipated – if a customer’s answer sparks a question that wasn’t on your premeditated list, for example.
Benefit #2: you can gauge their inflections and this can say an awful lot about how a customer really thinks and feels. For example, let’s say you send out an email survey for people to complete. One of the questions is “What do you think about our analytics software?” and someone answers “Yeah, it’s good.”
Written down, that might not seem like a negative at a glance. But, what if that Q&A happened over the phone and it turned out there was a long pause while they had to think about it before they responded? And the customer’s voice was a bit deflated and unsure? Instantly, it becomes less positive.
In terms of organising your calls, if you want time for a decent chat, it’s probably best to book appointments with your customers in advance – after all, no-one likes a 20-minute phone call being sprung on them out of the blue. Giving people notice will also ensure they book time out to answer your questions with care and thought.
If you’re going with the ad hoc approach just be mindful of what time of the day you pick up the phone (remembering to take time zones into account, too). It’s thought between 8am to 9am and 4pm to 5pm is best, lunchtime, between 1pm and 2pm, is the worst – a hangry customer is not a happy customer!
Last couple of tips for this one:
Tip #1: remember to ask open-ended questions; one-word answers don’t tell you much. So, for example, instead of asking “Do you like our analytics software?” ask “Can you tell us what features, in particular, you like about our analytics software and why?”
Tip #2: people are busy and sometimes it takes a little nudge for them to part ways with some of their time for you. Try it for free first and be creative with your approach, but if you don’t get anywhere and you have the budget, think about attaching an incentive to the call – a simple voucher would do.
Get the info secondhand
Unlocking internal data is a time old problem in the PMM community. We all know other departments (sales and customer service in particular) are sitting on a gold mine of data, but extracting it can be like getting water from a stone sometimes.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick or easy fix for this one and before you’re freely and regularly fed with the info you need, an internal, cultural shift might be needed. Why? Because, rightly or wrongly, before said people in said departments go out of their way to help you, they need to understand why it’s important and how it benefits them.
The good news is that’s pretty easy to justify. Better products and features mean easier sales for your reps and fewer calls to your service departments. Winner.
Next, you need to make it as easy as possible. You’re busy, they’re busy, everyone’s busy, but the harder you make feeding back the less likely they are to stick to it and they kind of hold the cards on this one, so it’s best to give them what they want – within reason, of course.
A couple of ideas include:
- Introducing a CRM whereby customer and prospect-facing teams can easily add important notes there and then. The later they recall what they’ve been told, the more likely they are to forget or miscommunicate key details.
- Investing in something like Slack and creating channels dedicated to feedback on things like ‘reason customer complained’, ‘reason prospect didn’t convert’ and ‘customer praise’.
- Sending someone from your team over to do random desk drops throughout the day to pick their brains in person.
Tip: if you want to really drive adoption of this kind of mindset it could be worth competionising it, at least for the first quarter or two until it’s fully embedded. For example, you could offer a reward to the sales rep who provides the most and richest feedback each week.
Analyse phone calls
This could be with your sales, customer service, support or onboarding teams and can be used in tandem or instead of (if you don’t get any co-operation) the previous point.
Admittedly, this option’s going to be a lot more labour-intensive but there are tools out there to help, like:
While the above tools are great the only snag is they’re predominantly for sales enablement, which doesn’t necessarily help decipher post-sale conversations. So, here are a couple of ideas on how to make the qualitative data you earwig on manageable and actionable:
- Divvy it up. That way, you can work your way through more without eating too much into any one person’s day.
- Set up a system. For example, you could create a scorecard with specific issues listed and then each time a customer raises something relating to that issue, scribble some of the buzzwords into the corresponding field.
On the flip side, you could monitor things people don’t say. For example, sticking with the CRM builder, if not a single person mentions your drag-and-drop builder as a pro, is it really as easy as you think?
Approach them in person
If you put on semi-regular events, trade shows or conferences for your customers use them as an opportunity to poach them for feedback – odds are, people will be a bit more giving with their time if they’re already at an event for them, by you. If all goes to plan, this could be a great outlet to get tonnes of first-hand feedback at once.
One caveat for this though is to make sure you’re speaking to the right person. If you’re B2B and want to understand how a customer finds your CRM system you need to speak to the person who uses it, not the person who foots the bill.
If all else fails…
You’ve still got lots of online options to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback, you’ll just miss out on some of the benefits that come hand-in-hand with actually hearing the responses.
Some popular tactics include:
- Sending out email, SMS and in-app surveys
- Going through social media conversations (public and private)
- Adding a quick form to your Wifi network (commonly used in cafes, restaurants, bars, leisure centres, and hotels)
- Using feedback monitoring sites – like Google and Yext
- Recording visitors’ website sessions
- Reviewing live chat transcripts.
2. Map your insights back to your customer profiles and LTV
Karim Zuhri, GM & Chief Operating Officer at Cascade, shares the rest of these steps for meeting customer needs.
“Quantify the JTBD and unmet customer needs. Don’t just surface feature requests, instead focus on the problem the customer is trying to solve, remove bias, and assess alignment with your company’s goals and product strategy.”
3. Look at your funnel from acquisition to churn
“In order to gain alignment across different parts of the business, this is essential. It helps each team to begin to understand how actions they take at the top (and bottom) of the funnel can impact customers further on in their journey.
Image via moonshotio.com “Make sure that you have success metrics along the customer journey to measure product lovability at any time. Google’s HEART framework provides a set of 5 user-centric metrics that revolve around happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. Each metric aligns with a goal and a signal to let you know how well you’re tracking towards that goal.”
4. Get input to gain buy-in
“For instance, if the feedback is related to a new feature – ask the Product Manager’s thoughts on how it fits into their roadmap. Have they thought about this feature, from this particular vantage point? Allow them to publish their thoughts on the request so they feel they’re able to add input into the work that you do.
“Is this request something that we are already planning to ship? Is this issue related to a broader problem we’ve seen consistently across several sources? If we build this solution, how big is the impact? . Will it help with engagement, reach, expansion, or retention? What’s the time to value? Is there a dependency that’s blocking us from taking action today?”
5. Let your customers know you are doing something about it
“Your roadmap is not a secret, but it doesn’t have to be set in stone either. Make your upcoming roadmap collaborative. Be transparent with your customers, discuss it with them, understand what’s critical and what a particular feature may mean for them. Be proactive in communicating not only what’s coming soon, but also what you are considering longer-term.
“At its core, this program continues to help us bring customer feedback, information, and thoughts to the forefront of our business’ conversations. Our aim was to consistently demonstrate, at scale, what our customers are saying and how they feel about our offer. We will continue to work towards this ever-illusive goal, and are confident that in the interim we’ve managed to ensure transparency and alignment across the business.
“Steve Jobs once said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” Don’t put it off and say it’s someone else’s job. Implementing a customer-obsessed culture within your company is definitely your job as a product marketer. Don’t settle, drive internal conversations and be the voice of the customer, always.”
Want to learn more?
Product marketing is and always will be a customer-centric role. A core part of your job is to value the voice of the customer and advocate for their wants, needs, and pain points. It’s your responsibility to make them feel heard. Therefore, customer marketing is an integral part of what you need to do to ensure that you’re staying true to this.
The Customer Marketing Certified: Masters course has been designed to give you invaluable, practical insights into streamlining your customer marketing approach so that you can ensure that:
- Your customers are happy,
- Your products are the best they truly can be,
- Your brand reputation is consistently positive, and
- That you bring in increased revenue for your organization.
So what are you waiting for?
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Why you should build customer trust as a product marketing leader
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash Ensuring your organization builds customer trust is one of the most important things you can do as a product marketing leader.
You want to have a long-standing relationship with your customers to increase their loyalty to your organization, improve overall brand reputation, and ultimately bring in those much-needed sales so you can meet your company-wide and departmental goals.
In an episode of 48 Hours to Lead, host Josh Lory spoke to Samantha Wu, who at the time was the VP of Consumer and Brand Product Marketing at Facebook and is now the Chief Marketing Officer at Braintrust.
In the episode, they spoke about a whole host of things pertaining to her role at Facebook (now Meta), building customer relationships as a product marketing leader including:
- Samantha’s philosophy around leadership
- How to empower your team members
- Building customer trust via branding and product marketing
- What makes a brand trustworthy
- Educating your consumer
Samantha’s philosophy around leadership
Q: Can you share your philosophy around leadership? And/or some of the principles that guide you and your team every single day?
A: Here’s how I think about leadership – I really lead in service of people. How good I am as a leader, and how effective I am as a leader is really based on the team and how good my team is.
What does leading in service look like? Good leaders give people space to thrive. They surround themselves with talent that can actually bring these different perspectives and experiences that complement their own strengths and round out their gaps.
So, as a leader, you’re in service of your team and your people. And when you do that, what happens is the impact and the effect you can have on the business, the culture, and even your own personal professional growth is compounded tenfold.
You’re the conductor of an orchestra. But it’s the actual musicians that are sitting in the orchestra who are making the magic.
So for me, it’s really about the team and being in service of the team.
How to empower your team members
Q: Giving your team members space to thrive and go as fast as possible and really empowering them to do so makes all the difference in the world. So can you just give a couple of examples of how you do that with your team members?
A: Before I jump into the examples, I was thinking a lot about how I show up every day, and how I hope people show up. One of the things that I’ve been codifying more is when I show up to work today, I’m bringing grit, and, I hope, grace and gratitude in how I lead.
We’re going through quite an unprecedented, volatile time right now. Looking at it from a macro context, there’s just so much stuff going on. I also work at the center of tech, and I think the uncertainty, the volatility, and the constant change that is happening can feel overwhelming.
And so, when faced with that every day, I think one of the things I like to do is make sure that as we’re going through changes in priority, budget changes, cuts, changes in directions, different expectations, leadership changes… is ensure that I am showing up with grace, with a growth mindset, and having gratitude that change is a good thing.
Q: That’s beautiful. And what I took away from your previous comments was, we’re going through an unprecedented time of change, and showing up as a consistent, gritty, grateful leader, through your actions and your role modeling people get confidence from that. So I really appreciate that. And it’s great for your team and others that interact with you every single day.
A: Yeah, and certainly for those of us who work in tech, there’s a lot of fatigue in different ways around the separation between work and home. Life starts to feel less so because we’re constantly in front of our screens. Certainly, for Facebook, our business is thriving, because in this new world people have realized how important connection is, and our platform has enabled that.
We’re in this marathon that’s not really going to end, right? Whether it’s this new way of living because of the pandemic or the way of working. And so a lot of how we navigate through that, as leaders, is not only leading by example, but it’s the perspectives and the orientation that you bring to the situation. And for me, it really is about doing that with grit, but also with a lot of gratitude. And I think that helps us continue on this marathon.
Building customer trust via branding and product marketing
Q: What is your team doing to build consumer trust via branding and product marketing?
A: I would say that trust is something the whole company is focused on across all of our businesses and certainly inclusive of financial services and the digital wallet. We fundamentally believe that it’s imperative that the community trusts us, and that we continue to earn that trust.
And so part of what the company and what my team does with every product launch and every piece of communication is ensuring that we’re really transparent in our decision-making. That we explain the rationale of our decisions, and the trade-offs that we’re weighing and we ensure our community really understands how we handle their information.
Obviously, it’s a complex issue, because it touches so many different parts of our business. I think that we’re really consistent and clear on making good on the promises and commitments that we have put out there publicly.
An example of what that looks like is that we think a lot about online privacy, right? We want people to use the tools and services on our platform and it’s a huge area of focus for us. So we spend a lot of time on that. It’s not just in the marketing itself, but also in working as one team to make sure that we’re protecting people’s privacy.
And so we’ve made a lot of investments in the technology itself and how we even designed the privacy and the products – which is privacy first. How we allow controls around sharing of information usually defaults to the most private or last type of sharing option that consumers have put. In the case of Facebook, it’s how they share their information when they post.
We also look really closely at how the data is used and make sure that there are proper safeguards in place. It’s really, for us, how that shows up, how we build our products with a privacy-first mindset, how we then launch them, and how we make sure that the communication is super clear and transparent, and easily understood for consumers.
That’s kind of generally how we think about it. It’s imperative that we continue to be very transparent and clear about what we’re doing because there’s just so much happening right now in this space and technology, and Facebook, obviously, is very much at the front and center of a lot of these issues as well.
What makes a brand trustworthy
Q: When you think about the most trustworthy brands that you use in your day-to-day, what are those aspects that make them the most trustworthy brands? Why do you keep going back to them?
A: There are many vectors that I think about, but for me, it’s really about the experience that I have as a consumer, where it’s easy to follow and understand. So that could be as simple as how I’m interacting with an app and how I’m navigating through that and understanding how each piece of that comes together.
But it has to be easy for me to get information or basic customer service if something goes wrong. If I have a problem with my account, if my order isn’t being delivered, it needs to be easy for me to get help, reach customer service, and get it resolved immediately.
I started my career at American Express. And now it seems very basic, but one of the things that that company does very well is if you have a charge on your card but it’s not your charge, no questions asked, you can call them and they take care of it. That is an incredible trust with consumers nowadays.
It seems commonplace practice but back in the day, when they first started doing it, they were really an industry leader in doing what most other issuers made you jump through hoops and fences for.
Amex just took the approach of no questions asked and they would resolve it for you on the back end. So I think those are some of the examples of brands that create that experience, and you inherently build that trust.
Educating your consumer
Q: Leadership is hard. It really requires us to balance major competing priorities and deal with a lot of areas. And so like many social media companies, Facebook relies on rich consumer data coupled with your ad business to drive top-line growth.
So with that, how does your team educate almost 36% of the world that are active users on data privacy, misinformation, and healthy online activity while also scaling the advertising business? What are some of the examples of how you’re educating your consumers on those things?
A: That’s a big question that would probably require more time for me to do it justice in terms of all the ways that I think about it, and all the things that we’re doing against that. So let’s just pick one of the areas that you pointed to, and let’s talk through that in terms of how we balance that.
If I think about misinformation, specifically, in the pandemic and health misinformation, here are some of the things that we thought about…
First off, our point of view and our belief is that we’re really committed to making sure that the information we put on our platform is reliable. And specific to health, we have encouraged people to get vaccinated and fight the spread of harmful health misinformation, right?
We promote and encourage vaccines across platforms because health misinformation during that pandemic is a critical issue to us.
We’re committed to having substantiated sources to make sure we’re putting out the right information on the platform to encourage people to get vaccinated during the pandemic. And so we built a COVID hub and with that work, we’ve had – I think – 3.3 million people visit the vaccine finder to make appointments and to get all of the right information.
We’ve also connected over 2 billion people to expert resources. So, part of what we believe is the responsibility of the platform is connecting people to all of those right resources of information.
We’re also about finding that balance, putting a lot of focus, resources, and time into making sure that we’re removing misinformation that health experts believe cause imminent harm. Because it’s what I would call harmful vaccine-related misinformation.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve actually removed something like 18 million instances of COVID-19 misinformation. We label it as misinformation, and we reduce the visibility of pieces of content that we want to debunk through fast-tracking partners that we work tirelessly with.
And so this is an example of just balancing the two. I think we know that getting it right is hard, and we know that it takes tireless focus and commitment to that, but because it’s so important to us, and we’ve done it, we’ve at least seen on our platform that the hesitancy of vaccines has declined by 50%. We’ve seen that more users on Facebook have been vaccinated.
We’ve done things from a marketing perspective, like campaigns that promote key facts on safety and testing and it’s really increased the belief in vaccine safety. And so this is just like one example of the complexity of all the issues that we balance.
We really work very closely with health experts to make sure that what is being put on our platforms and how we’re managing the information is reliable and accurate so that we can actually mitigate the spread of misinformation, which we know is such a huge focus area for us as a company.
It’s very complex but talking about misinformation in the context of health, and certainly in the context of what we’re experiencing right now is, hopefully, a way to kind of bring to light how we think about these issues. And certainly, the things that I think about as a leader as well.
Jade Warne, Copywriter at our sister community, Community-Led Alliance, gave some awesome tips on how to engage with your community to build that deeper relationship.👇
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What is a case study in marketing?
Photo by Iewek Gnos on Unsplash What is a case study in marketing?
A case study is a testimonial outlining your customers’ success with using your product, explaining how your product’s key features led to benefits for your customer such as productivity and through increases and time and cost savings. Case studies often serve as your products’ calling card, highlighting how a customer successfully used your product.
What is the purpose of a case study?
Case studies in marketing are used as social proof. This gives buyers more context to understand if they are making a good choice. Showing case studies to customers who are on the fence about your product could convince them to make a purchase.
What is the difference between a case study and a customer story?
A case study is a more in depth look at the customer’s thoughts and results from your product than a customer story.
The customer story paints a picture of the problem, solution and results. A case study will include all of this information plus a more detailed explanation of how the solution was delivered and the key measurements that show the product’s effects.
What makes a good case study?
A good case study can usually be broken down into the following elements:
- Challenge: Your customers’ challenges before using your product
- Solution: How your product solves these challenges
- Benefits: Key performance indicators highlighting the benefits your customer received from using your products. KPIs include:
- % increased productivity
- X in cost-savings
- Y amount of time saved doing Z task
- B times increase in throughput
- Products used: Which of your products did your customers use to experience this success? Which features benefited them the most?
What should a case study include?
Case study formats
Case studies usually come in a variety of formats such as written documents, third-party reviews either on your product page or a third-party site, videos, or even a customer presentation on your product at a live event.
Here’s the breakdown of each type of case study:
White papers
Case study white papers are usually written documents that provide a full overview of how your customers succeeded with your products.
These documents usually detail everything from your customers’ decision to use your products versus the competition, their implementation, their day-to-day, and key performance indicators.
Usually, case study white papers are great for your sales team to use as leave-behind collateral.
Videos
A video case study is a great way to highlight your customers using your product in addition to discussing their success with your product.
Typically, the best videos blend an organic customer interview with shots of your customers using your products in their environment. The best length to target for these is about 3 to 5 minutes at most.
Third-party websites
Third-party sites such as G2 Crowd and TrustRadius are also great sources for customer testimonials. Customers tend to be candid on these sites and, in addition to getting great customer quotes which you can repurpose on your website, you can also get valuable product feature requests and ideas, or information on what’s not working so well with your product.
Presentations at live events
Customer presentations highlighting your products and your customers’ success with your products also case studies.
If your customer is willing to go on stage at your event or a relevant industry event and discuss how they’ve used your products and how they’ve been helpful, that’s probably one of the best testimonials you can get, especially with other prospects in the room. Your customers become instant lead magnets and can attract new users to your company through their presentation.
To help your customers be successful with advocating for your products, arm them with tools that they can leverage if they need or offer to support them during their presentations!
Customer advocates
The same customers who are willing to go on stage and present about your products on your behalf are also great customer advocates for your Sales team to use to help your company sell your products.
As part of the sales process, you can provide your salespeople with a list of customers who are willing to connect with curious prospects. Hearing an opinion for an existing customer can help convert a prospect to a customer.
Adam Thomas, PM expert, shares some case study formats:
Testimonials
“When talking to your customer doing the case study, they may say a bite-sized anecdote that sums up a feature or your product in a helpful way. These are great to use on a sales page or product page, as it gives your product more credibility.”
Articles
“Your blog, if you have one, can highlight users. Writing an article or using the case study conversation as a post can help customers see, in a more relaxed context, how your product works for them.”
How to build a library of customer case studies
Poornima Mohandas, Director of Product Marketing at Birdeye, shared her advice for building a library of case studies.
“First things first, before you start cranking out case studies, find out what your salespeople really want. Are they after desirable logos from select verticals? Start with a long list of happy customers and narrow it down with appropriate filters such as length of customer relationship.”
Talk to sales, map the need
“Talk to your sales leaders and a handful of sales folks across enterprise and SMB teams to figure out their needs. Ask them:
- Will customer case studies be valuable to you?
- Ideally, which brands would you like case studies on?
- What verticals, geographies, size of companies are you most interested in?
“These answers coupled with the strategic direction of the company will map out your targeting strategy.”
Prepare a long list with customer success
“Consult with your customer success team to get a list of happy customers. Forward-looking customer success teams will have colour-coded and complete lists, just waiting for you to run with it!
“This is your long list. Now go ahead and trim it down to:
- Recognisable logos
- Target verticals, geographies, and company size
- Customers who have been with you for > a year
“If your list still has over a 100 names, narrow it down to customers who have been with you for five years. That is a lifetime in the SaaS business and it will speak volumes to what a great partner you make. And just like that, you have your shortlist of case study candidates.”
Reuse conference sessions
“On the other hand, if you don’t have the time to shortlist customers and interview them, a shortcut is to tap into your company’s user conference recordings. If you have recordings of customers sharing their stories in a breakout session, simply transcribe it and repurpose it as a customer case study.”
Tips for startups to get case studies
“Startups often struggle to find willing customers, some of them even offer discounted product prices as an incentive. I don’t recommend that as it dilutes your value.
“If you find that you don’t have many happy customers, then your problems may be more fundamental like a product-market misfit. Now, that’s a totally different beast for another blog post.
“Here are some tips you can try to get more case studies, faster:
“Offer a sales incentive – Involve your sales folks to solicit case studies, after all, they own the relationship. If budget permits, announce a spot bonus for every sales person who brings in a case study, I have seen this work wonders. Share the shortlist of case study candidates and ask sales to check in on the customer’s willingness to do an external-facing case study.
“Use the circumstance to your advantage – Under the current economic climate, your customers are most likely delaying payments. Now is as good a time as any to ask for something you want — a case study.
“Look for the right moment – Always be on the lookout for the right moment. Perhaps, it’s after a Customer Advisory Board session or after the customer has significantly broadened product usage. When the customer is mighty pleased with you, pop the case study question.
“Look for ambitious champions who like publicity– Look for outspoken, ambitious customer champions who want to be seen as driving change. So you may ask, how will I find them? Typically, they will be seen speaking at industry events and will in all likelihood be active on LinkedIn. If such champions benefit immensely from your product, they will more likely than not want to share their story. Your case study should capture the transformation they have been able to bring about in their organization. Make the customer the hero in your case study rather than your product.”
Do the leg work
“Reach out to five companies to get one to convert. So if you are aiming for a modest library of 10 case studies, reach out to at least 50 customers.
“At the outset, take permission for a public-facing, named case study. Recently, I wasted about 60 minutes doing research and interviewing the HR manager of a large retail brand only to receive a frantic phone call 30 minutes later saying, “Please don’t publish anything I said. I got a call from my boss saying that we cannot do case studies with vendors.”
“Simultaneously, work with your demand gen team to work out a promotion plan for each of your case studies. Here are some easy-to-implement ideas:
- Write a customer-focused blog post
- Post the case study both as an HTML page as well as a PDF
- Create a banner on your customer webpage featuring the latest case study
- Send an email to your prospects featuring the latest case study
- And of course, broadcast on social media”
How to get the full customer story
“Say you have a customer interview scheduled, as a product marketer, be sure to attend the interview even if you have a content writer to write up the case study. You will be able to probe much deeper and uncover a story that syncs with your positioning. Plus, you will learn yet another valuable customer story that can come handy in your next customer demo or analyst presentation.
“In the interview:
- Let the customer talk and don’t interrupt
- Ask open-ended questions
- Ask for anecdotes, examples, and all relevant details
- Probe deeper for quantitative benefits
- Gather more information that you need
“Find out which departments use and benefit from your product. Interview people across departments and hierarchies so you get the full perspective. Get a benefit-oriented quote from the senior most buyer persona.
“For instance, if you sell to the operations team, interview the director of operations, an operations manager, and a warehouse manager, then get a quote from the COO.”
Once the customer story is ready
“Share the final version of the case study with the customer for review. Be ready to accommodate some edits. Once approvals are in, design, execute on the promotion plan and press publish.
“Send your customer a thank you note, try the snail mail variety on your company letterhead, also be sure to thank them on social media.
“Rinse and repeat to build up your library of case studies.”
Adam Thomas, PM expert, also shares some tips for building a a case study library:
Open-ended questions
“Your question set should be short – no more than five questions. Make sure that there is no way someone can give a one-word answer – these questions need to be open-ended. You want to have a conversation, one that is free-flowing and that means focusing on the customer and the environment.”
Analyze carefully
“Make sure you sit with these conversations for a while. Take the time to get good quotes that are interesting and align with your values. Check to see if the language on your marketing materials match how your customers talk. All of your customers belong to some sort of “world” everything that comes from this.
“It may seem simple from what we’re discussing, however, as you start to put this plan into action, you’ll see how much data you’ll collect, and how closely you can match the mental model of your customers.”
Product Marketing case study examples
Companies often use case studies on their website to demonstrate how their products have helped a previous customer. Here is a selection of some of the examples out there:
Drift
Boston-based company Drift specializes in helping their customers generate qualified leads, using chatbots and conversations within their website.
When software company Zenefits encountered huge marketing growth, the large amount of traffic being diverted to the company’s website resulted in problems such as inefficiencies in the SDR channel, lack of buyer centricity, and prospective customers slipping through the net.
Drift provided a solution for the Zenefits, by introducing buyer-centric conversations, as well as time-saving automation. The company not only optimized the SDR channel, but put contingencies in place to provide Zenefits’ customers with access to around the clock support.
As a result, the customer experience improved, the win-rate increased, while the overall efficiency of the SDR channel was improved, and Drift did a great example of bringing all this fore with their case study page by:
Pulling out key stats:
Including clear quotes from satisfied customers:
HubSpot
Japanese consumer electronics and commercial electronics manufacturing giants Casio needed to find a way to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of inbound marketing efforts at the organization, as well as the communication between sales and marketing, to protect coveted leads.
In search of a solution, Casio turned to the HubSpot growth stack, which combines Marketing, CRM, and Sales software to support its clientele.
The decision to invest their faith in HubSpot has paid dividends, as highlighted on the case study page on the HubSpot site.
Performance statistics:
Like Drift, HubSpot have structured their case study in a way which draws the focus to the impressive results Casio has achieved since they received their support.
SolidWorks
SolidWorks is a solid modeling computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering computer program.
The company was tasked with taking the development of humanoid robotics to a new level, with the design and creation of engaging, fun, and non-intimidating robots.
As part of the solution, the company combined several features, including SOLIDWORKS Premium design, SOLIDWORKS Simulation Premium analysis, SOLIDWORKS Plastics injection molding analysis, and SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM product data management software.
This helped form robots with human-like traits and movements – a significant development in treatment for people living with autism, with the case study page highlighting successes by including the likes of:
Positive quotes from key stakeholders:
Where to find your case studies
The best way to find a good case study is by asking your Sales, Customer Success, Support, and/or Product teams to source vocal, happy users. Case study customers are usually the ones that are happy with your products, constantly jumping at the opportunity to advocate for your products to their friends and colleagues, and ones who are willing to jump on the phone and be a sounding board for your team. Typically, these users provide a 4 or 5-star rating on third-party platforms like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, Apple App Store, etc.
The best way to find these folks is to keep your ears to the ground by monitoring third-party review sites, listen closely to when your product managers or customer success folks rave about a particular customer, and look out for the users who are chomping at the bit to talk about you. You can also use Google alerts to source instances when your product name comes up online, you may find that a blogger online is a good testimonial customer.
Social media can also be a great resource for prospective case study candidates, especially if you’re finding that specific followers jump at the opportunity to share a screenshot of what they’re doing in your products or offer advice to other followers.
Tips for startups to get case studies
When you’ve found a great case study candidate for a video or a live presentation, you want to get a story from them as quickly as possible. However, some candidates and companies may be camera shy or may hesitate to go on record with their testimonial.
Use the circumstance to your advantage
One way to sway your prospects is by presenting a case study as an opportunity for your customers to showcase themselves as leading industry heroes for taking a fateful leap and using your products.
Look for ambitious champions who like publicity
Case studies are also a great way to highlight the interviewee and provide them with an opportunity to build their resume by saying they were featured in a case study.
Look for the right moment
Case studies can be a great source for product feature requests, customer feedback, and enhancement requests. When you interview your customers for a story, pay close attention to any side remarks they may make, some of these could potentially serve as good feedback for your product teams. You can also sprinkle in some customer research questions as well throughout the interview to surface some of that juicy feedback.
Offer a sales incentive
Additionally, you can offer to link back to their company site to provide them some SEO juice. Or, better yet, a coffee or a $25 gift card in return for a case study tends to go a long way!
Example questions
Which problems were you looking to solve when you went out searching for our product?
- What made you choose our product over other solutions? What other solutions were you considering?
- What is your favorite part about using our product?
- What was your experience implementing our product?
- Which benefits have you seen from implementing our product? Any time-savings, productivity gains, etc?
- What are you able to do with our product that you weren’t able to do before?
PMA has a lot of great case study questions you could ask as well:
Want to learn more?
Product marketing is and always will be a customer-centric role. A core part of your job is to value the voice of the customer and advocate for their wants, needs, and pain points. It’s your responsibility to make them feel heard. Therefore, customer marketing is an integral part of what you need to do to ensure that you’re staying true to this.
The Customer Marketing Certified: Masters course has been designed to give you invaluable, practical insights into streamlining your customer marketing approach so that you can ensure that:
- Your customers are happy,
- Your products are the best they truly can be,
- Your brand reputation is consistently positive, and
- That you bring in increased revenue for your organization.
So what are you waiting for?
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Bias in interviews and why hiring in product is broken
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash Hiring in product is broken, and those hypothetical product questions you get asked in interviews are just the tip of the iceberg.
“Describe a coffee cup.”
No, you’re not in the middle of a therapy session, you’re in a product manager interview, and a bad one at that.
If you can, you should get up and walk out, because your interviewer’s bias is about to count against you.
Yes, bias.
These types of questions are great if you look, sound, and have “the resume” the interviewer dreams about when they put up the job posting (none of these things are explicit. It would get them sued).
But because they can’t be explicit about what they want (anti-discrimination legislation and all that) here you are, describing a coffee cup, and unintentionally running directly into a process that is full of bias.
Sorry to break it to you, but if you don’t look like you fit on the company’s “about us” page, you’re in a world of trouble.
How did we get here?
Enter the product hypothetical – for a long time, companies have been using interview questions like “how many matches could you fit inside of an airplane” or “how many gas stations are in the country” as a way to understand how someone thinks.
But do these questions really help you to understand how product people think? I posit that they don’t. Instead, they land us in a world where bias wins and rational thinking loses.
What do I mean by that? Let’s ask the world of behavioral science.
Behavioral Science isn’t new
Behavioral science teaches us about our mind’s proclivity to lean towards bias, specifically cognitive bias.
In fact, we’re cognitive bias machines. I learned this while reading about behavioral science from two of its foremost experts, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The pair spent their lives trying to understand the WHY behind our behavior, and for their efforts, they became two of the world’s most cited academics.
Kahneman’s seminal work, Thinking Fast and Slow, talks about our system 1 – intuition, and system 2 – rational thought. Most importantly the book shows us that our intuition is a hotbed of cognitive bias, one that can be controlled by almost anything – from how much we’ve eaten in the morning to the last argument we had with our spouse. Do you want your choice of breakfast to determine the next person on your team? Relying on intuition means it could play an important role.
Back to bias
The Kahneman and Tversky research points to system 1 as being susceptible to bias.
Most product hypotheticals have no guideline, no rubric, and rely on the “intuition” of the person giving the hypothetical to determine what happens next.
Ask yourself, when you’ve seen a product hypothetical with clear criteria? And by this, I mean a situation in which the criteria have been clear for both the interviewer and the person being interviewed.
While the person on the other side might be trying their hardest to work out a complex system, the interviewer is just listening, usually passively. With no rubric, no grading structure – they end up at the whim of their system 1 thinking.
What happens as a result?
Unfortunately, in this situation, the interviewer is more likely to play heuristic bingo (a term I’ve created that describes when we let our bias control our decisions).
Heuristic bingo is a good thing when deciding where you want to eat for lunch, but when it comes to hiring, it leads to disastrous consequences. The interview process becomes less about skills, experience and know-how and more about what we expect people to look and sound like.
For folks like me, who aren’t white from privilege, it means you end up a casualty of the process, no matter what your skills are. This plays itself out during the hypothetical section of interviews where the interviewer relies more on whether things ‘feel’ correct rather than if they are interesting or match criteria.
If that person says something novel, it is discounted. This is particularly insidious in product management because most of the work is contextual, and a best practice at Facebook may (actually, probably) mean absolutely nothing at your company.
How do we avoid bias?
Let’s shift to system 2, our rational thought, which is less susceptible to cognitive bias.
One of the easy ways to get into system 2 thinking is to have a long conversation about someone’s life. The good news is that interviews already have a vehicle for such things – it’s our experience.
People have no problem telling stories about how they did something. The important thing to remember is that you’ll need to really dig in, as an interviewer, to know what “something” you are looking for. Your questions are important.
This is no different from trying to solve a problem for a product you own. This is the time to ask questions and get context around how this person’s experience helps your company to solve that problem.
It’s time to talk to people more
Our brains are built for stories, and in hiring, we need to take full advantage of that. So instead of asking people to create, just ask them to recall.
Talking to people and asking them to recall will help you to uncover their stories, through which you can learn about what they’ve done.
Their stories will be filled with details and these details are enough to see if someone is being honest. They also give you room to ask follow-up questions to get to the bottom of what you need. Write them down so you can check them against your criteria and understand what you’re looking for.
For extra points, recording and rewatching the conversation (especially if someone is further along in the hiring process) can give you, the interviewer, more insight into this person’s experiences. It also gives your ‘system 2’ enough time to think about the conversation.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash Hiring is broken
Let’s be clear — hiring in product is broken. In fact, many tech companies are failing outright when it comes to hiring equitably, despite the statements many have made in response to recent police brutality. These statements have been highlighted in a database published by The Plug, in response to which, The Plug founder, Sherrell Dorsey, has reported that at the majority of companies in the database so far, less than 4% of employees are black.
Talking about product hypotheticals is, therefore, only the tip of the iceberg, as there are systemic injustices that lead to inequality everywhere, as recent events clearly illustrate. If we’re to make a better world, we need to work for it.
With that said, getting rid of hypotheticals now can give you the space to focus on a more equitable hiring system by listening more to candidates and asking them about the problems that they are dealing with.
That is how we solve problems.
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What Do Product Managers Produce?
Product management, unlike many other technical disciplines, doesn’t create a discrete output. So, what should you be spending your time on?
Photo by airfocus on Unsplash Product managers (PdM) are responsible for helping companies make better decisions consistently over time.
In a previous article, I talked about how wide-ranging the job can be. Product managers do a lot, but the most effective thing a PdM can do is focus on raising the decision-making capabilities of those around her.
After writing that article, I heard from a few folks who wanted me to expand on the idea that “PdM’s have no discrete outputs, and to focus on them is a waste of time.” On the surface, this statement is about outputs over outcomes. Outputs don’t tell us much about how to make better decisions, whereas mapping outcomes over time tell us a lot about who we are as a team. Focusing on shipping code or designs as a PdM may feel good short term, but in the long term, it doesn’t really help the team.
I wanted to take a step back and add another point: Focusing on responding is a choice that has an immense impact on how PdMs spend their time. You own your time as much, if not more than anyone else you work with. You aren’t attached to the deadlines that other disciplines have. For example, an engineer needs to ship code on time, or the sales person needs to close the deal. A PdM’s time is more fluid since deadlines are much more ambiguous. The catch, however, is everyone else feels like they own your time too.
Your time management directly impacts your ability to manage the job as a whole. Without finding space to learn how to respond instead of just reacting, you won’t be able to manage what happens around you.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s spend some time dissecting PdM time management. We’ll examine how time management impacts responding over reacting and how focusing on outcomes is your most important job.
THE PRODUCT OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Product Managers (PdM) are responsible for helping companies make better decisions consistently over time. We do a lot, but the most effective thing a PdM can do is focus on raising the decision-making capabilities of those around her.
Product Management Is Time Management
There’s always a demand on your time, isn’t there? If there’s one thing that PdM’s won’t ever run out of, it’s requests. These ceaseless requests are why time management is important. You’re expected to raise the level of decision-making while managing an unknown number of inputs from stakeholders who often aren’t quite sure what you do. They just know that, whatever it is, they feel better when you’re there.
In short, you’ll find yourself becoming the company’s safety blanket if you aren’t careful. Some of you who are reading this can look at your calendar and see the signals:
- A calendar full of meetings, none of which have a theme.
- An inbox of soft requests from all over the business
- A Slack that might as well be painted red.
If you see any of those things happening, I have some bad news for you: You can’t raise the decision-making quality of the team around you since you’re constantly reacting to the needs of others.
Let’s make this real by checking in with John, a PdM at BobCo. John has been with the team for three months. Since there was no product manager before him, his work helped the team gain insight into the company’s vision and align their work with it. He has been super helpful to everyone, always raising his hand and trying to solve problems, wherever they are in the business. This attitude gained him a ton of trust early.
That trust didn’t come without a cost to his thinking, however. In short, he didn’t have any. Every morning, there was the same routine:
- Wake up to 30 Slack messages. He does triage and respond to the most important 10, saving the rest for later.
- Attend a meeting. Although he’s there in body, he isn’t in spirit because he has to deal with those 10 major Slack messages.
- Another meeting, which he uses to process email. Thank goodness, most things have transferred over to Slack internally, but there is still some code he can push to production. Doing so will speed up the sprint and help the team reach its goal of 24 story points.
- Phew, the third and final meeting of the day! Wait, what were the last two meetings about? No matter, everyone else felt great with him there. Now, he can help with a quick sales deck.
- This process continues until the Slacks stop going off.
The past three weeks have been like this, and while he feels busy constantly, he’s realized that nothing ever gets done.
Responding, Not Reacting
In his seminal behavioral science book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman described two distinct systems for human thought.
System one refers to our gut reaction. This type of thinking is reactive and quick drawing on our emotions and current state to move as fast as possible.
System two is our responsive system. This approach is slower, focusing on logic and taking effort.
System one thinking drives quick solutions and bandaids. When you’re running into an issue with a lack of resources to push something over the finish line, here are two ways your brain may try to handle it.
System one says, “It’s no big deal, I used to be an engineer. I can just code that up!”System two, by contrast, thinks, “This has happened three times in the last quarter. We need to adjust our product development methodology to understand why we are falling short.”
Which one of these sounds more like decision-making? System two does. System one leaves the PdM in trouble because, not only is he messing with code that he hasn’t spent a ton of time with, now he doesn’t have time to think about the overall issue either. Without looking at the big problem, the PdM will continue to drown as more red buttons appear on Slack.
Let’s go back to John. He’s realized that his calendar looks crazy and he is falling behind his OKRs for the quarter. This doesn’t make sense, though, because … well, he’s so busy!
He reaches out to Jill, the director of product, for an informal coffee and coach session. Coffee and coach is Jill’s way of informally coaching the product team on how to spot problems. John wondered, with how much Jill oversees, how she had time on her calendar for such a session.
The coffee, starting with small talk, soon gets to the meat and potatoes.
“Jill, I find myself underwater. Even though I’m shipping stuff and answering my Slack messages fairly quickly —” his Slack goes off again. “Sorry about that! Anyway, I don’t see any long-term progress.”
Jill sipped her coffee; this is the part of the job she loves because she knows there is a growth moment for a PdM in front of her. This is what evolving in your role looks like.
“John, I want you to look at your phone, but before you do, I want you to tell me, on a scale of one to five, how important is that last Slack message to your overall goals this quarter? After you tell me your prediction, I want you to read that message and tell me the actual number.”
John tells her three, playing it safe. Then he looks at his phone and sees it’s nothing serious, really a one.
Jill smirks “ I can tell by the look on your face that the message wasn’t that important. Do me a favor: Look at the last 10 messages you’ve gotten. Do any of them crack a two? Could any of those be delegated, if not ignored outright?”
John shakes his head as he goes through the messages.
“What you are seeing here is that you’re becoming a safety blanket. The company likes you and trusts you. But I bet you can’t tell me anything from your last five meetings that was important and how it worked with your goal.”
John sat there, quiet.
“No worries — we’re going to fix this. In fact, this is a big part of your growth as a product manager. Your homework for this week is to look at your calendar and decline every meeting that doesn’t have anything to do with your goal and for which you can’t delegate the work. I also want you to delete the IDE from your company laptop and make no slides.”
Now John looked worried.
“Tell them you’ll need to withdraw and let them know if they have trouble, reach out to me. I then want you to leave your laptop at work and take the next few days off. When you come back the week after, don’t accept any meetings outside of your team rituals and turn off your Slack notifications. Answer them outside of meetings. Meet me here the Wednesday after next for breakfast, and we will talk next steps.”
Our Best Asset as Product Managers
As product managers, we have no discrete output. When it comes to our teams, the product manager is not responsible for anything people can wrap their hands around. We don’t write code, we don’t make the UI and we aren’t making the sale.
What we can handle, though, is the heavy lifting of our teams’ decisions when it comes to process, empowering everyone to make better decisions. So, every moment you focus on outputs, you’re taking time away from helping your team in the long term by avoiding the harder problems that accompany crafting successful products.
Useless meetings are outputs. Responding to every Slack message, direct and indirect, is an output. Coding is an output.
If you’re doing one thing, you aren’t doing another. If you chose to focus on output, you aren’t choosing strategy. If you pack your schedule all the way and leave no room to process, you are choosing to stay still. Managing your time like this is hard, but it’s the job.
Without removing yourself from unnecessary entanglements and delegating, you’ll find yourself on a treadmill. You’ll never gain a discerning perspective. You won’t find yourself with the time to deliver decisions.
Let’s check back in on John and Jill during breakfast.
John arrives; surprisingly, he finds Jill unbothered, drinking coffee, as usual.
“I am surprised you aren’t sweating, Jill. I had so many irons in the fire, I thought you would feel the burn or at least get a little singed. No one came up to you asking where I was?”
Jill smiles again.
“Nope, everything is fine. Your presence wasn’t as missed as you think. Tell me, with that week, what did you get done instead?”
John smiles with renewed vigor.
“Well, I was able to get into the data in a way that I’ve been putting off. I found that one of our initiatives was a waste of time, so I’m planning on scrapping that next week and putting the energy behind some follow-up discovery that has a high probability of success.”
Jill nods.
“During our retro, I facilitated instead of Slacking, and we had a really powerful conversation. I found out about two blockers, one of which you fixed pretty quickly. I was surprised.
Jill takes a sip and remarks, “Amazing what you can see when you look,” smiling.
John finishes off his answer by saying, “And I was able to put the research back into the product strategy, and we found a way to move some work and get back on track there.”
Jill smiles. “Now you have something impactful to go back to those other teams with and see if you can pull them along. That’s how we merge trust with data.”
Jill and John talk through how they can do that as they wrap up breakfast.
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Decisions > Output
Every time we make a choice, we don’t make another.
If our heads are down, we can miss the forest from the trees. As product managers, our job is to help the team avoid running into a tree face first. We do that by having the confidence to say no, managing our time, and focusing on putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
When we do that, everything else will fall into place.
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To stay agile, don’t let your product team get trapped in a loop
To ensure your product team is truly following the Agile Manifesto, you have to give yourselves time to adjust. That can’t happen when you’re stuck in a positive feedback loop.
Photo by airfocus on Unsplash Product managers (PdM) oversee more than features. Simply focusing on them is a mistake and will leave the product person in charge of nothing more than a feature factory. Feature factories turn PdMs into project managers, which means doing far less research about why we’re making what we make and more simple delivery. Although PdMs can do project management, that’s a poor use of our skills.
Let’s see if this sounds familiar. A stakeholder says they know customers need a widget for a huge enterprise deal. They say to just trust them, they’ve talked to the customer and know what they need. We don’t have time to research, and a competitor is already working on this. Just get in there and build.
Take the requirements, build what they say, and produce features. Many teams take those orders and follow through on them. It’s easy to do, and no one gets in trouble.
Well, nobody except the company. The team builds plans that satisfy stakeholders’ fears instead of meeting the actual customers’ needs.
Here is the truth: Companies that do this are executing a terrible version of agile. Worse, they generally don’t understand they’re dismissing the Agile Manifesto. They probably also paid a lot of money to consultants to “transform” their product development processes. Either that or the company is a startup, arrogant and drunk off of the ability to fundraise instead of delivering to the customers.
Either way, instead of operating based on the Agile Manifesto, which we know works, the product development team turns agile into shorter forms of a waterfall development model, a more risk-averse form of linear product development, with none of the benefits.
The manifesto, which built much of the architecture that holds up the top 10 companies of the S&P 500, has turned into a shadow of itself. Likewise, the team’s “transformation” turns into anything but.
AGILE DEVELOPMENT AND FEEDBACK LOOPS
The agile methodology values responding to change over following a plan. In order to do that, teams have to work in negative feedback loops that allow built-in breaks for adjustment. Getting stuck in a positive feedback loop means you risk transforming from an agile team into a feature factory.
Responding to Change
Let’s focus on the manifesto’s fourth tenet, responding to change over following a plan. The ability to respond to change instead of blindly following a plan **cough** generally in the form of a roadmap **cough** is the difference between teams that just say they’re agile and those that truly are.
Fortunately, I’ve already given you a tool to help here: Survival metrics help teams focus on the fourth tenet by assisting a product team in determining if an initiative is worth investing in more, pivoting, or stopping altogether. At their best, these metrics provide a shock to the system that forces the team to think about what adjustment to make. This jolt can get teams out of positive feedback loops in which they continually make the same products based on inertia.
But here’s the rub. If you only define survival metrics once and never update them, then you aren’t adjusting to change. Instead, survival metrics become just another plan to blindly follow.
Survival metrics are about change. Change doesn’t just happen at the beginning of a project, either. It’s a constant factor in agile product development. So, you have to adjust your survival metrics to keep up with your development. If you don’t, you’ll end up doing a version of the small waterfall model. Your handoffs will be smaller with none of the benefits that agile brings.
The easiest way to avoid blindly following a plan is to create a negative feedback loop. We can use a tool we’ve talked about before, premortems, alongside another PdM best practice, retrospectives, to create the breaks that allow us to adjust our survival metrics as time goes on.
How do you do that? Well, let’s walk through the process. We’ll follow Bob and Rachel, two PdM’s at WidgetCo, over a two week sprint.
Before we do, though, let’s go negative.
Going Negative
Would it surprise you to learn that agile is built on negative loops, not positive ones? The difference between the two is simple. Positive loops offer teams no way to adjust since they are designed to accelerate, while negative loops have a break (think of this as an adjustment period) that helps you get closer to reality.
What does that mean for agile development, you ask?
Well, I would argue most teams live in positive loops. When have you seen your team change direction? The Agile Manifesto tells us to respond to change over following a plan, but ask yourself how often do you find yourself just following a roadmap you built a year ago?
Negative loops happen when something stops the loop, allowing teams to adjust. Think of the negative loop as one where you must respond to something.
Feedback Loops in Practice
Let’s look at this distinction through the lens of two teams. Rachel’s team naturally goes with the flow and, as a result, works in positive loops. Bob’s team, on the other hand, works in negative loops so they can adjust when things change.
Rachel’s team has a shiny, new roadmap. They blindly trust the plan, and after developing survival metrics, they focus on just getting the next feature out. They decide that retros are a waste of time that just slow them down. Instead of doing one every two weeks, they just continue to build whatever the plan tells them to as long as no one is visibly angry.
Bob’s team also has a shiny, new roadmap. They trust the plan but verify it before beginning. They run a premortem and create survival metrics using the data they get from the workshop. They work with the metrics for two weeks. After that time, they take time to do the retro they have planned. When they look at their work, they find something they didn’t expect.
Using the Premortem
The premortem is a workshop where the team gets together to envision what could possibly go wrong during a project and adjust the plan to account for those eventualities. This may sound like ordinary planning, but what makes premortems different is that the workshop format allows a mixture of voices that can lead to new insights.
A neutral observer needs to facilitate these workshops. This facilitator needs to move the conversation forward and keep notes. Without a facilitator, this workshop can go off the rails.
Without further ado, here is a template for the workshop:
- Check-in. Spend a few minutes trying to understand everyone’s mental state by asking, “How are you feeling?”
- State the objective. Ask everyone to write the objective of the product down on a piece of paper, then have the facilitator check all the sheets. If the objectives match, hooray! That means everyone has done the reading. If they haven’t, then spend the next few minutes aligning the team around the goal.
- The project has failed. Tell the participants to imagine that the project has failed, and ask them to write one or two reasons why. Do this as a brainwriting exercise. You want everyone’s unfiltered point of view.
- Vote. Which problems seem the most likely? Pick the top three.
- Discuss. Talk about the “why” for each of these problems amongst each other and come up with a few action items to avoid the impending disaster.
- Build. The facilitator works with the team to turn the action items into something the team can track. This output can either be eigenquestions if they are going to guide the product delivery process or new survival metrics if there is a trackable change in the process.
- Vote again. Hold another vote to see if this new set should unseat the other survival metrics the team started with. Remember you only want five to seven survival metrics in total. Ask whether these new metrics or the old ones will move in the next few weeks.
Rachel’s team doesn’t take this process seriously and skips it, preferring to follow the roadmap.
Bob’s team does this workshop and finds two of the original survival metrics aren’t going to move the needle. They initially thought they had to adjust their development based on the proposed marketing budget. After an infusion of capital and the hiring of a new head of marketing, however, they realized they had much more leeway.
They replaced the marketing metric with a survival metric focused on team connection by assessing how aligned the team is on the overall objective. If Bob felt alignment was off, then the team would need to adjust their communication plan. They also find that operations team is nervous about the AWS bill, so they added that to the list of survival metrics. They also found out the infrastructure bill was an issue after some development, and put it on the list as well.
Two weeks later, the retro provides the perfect time to do a survival metric retrospective on the last sprint.
Survival Metrics Retrospective
So, in the retro, we analyze what has happened, and we probably have to adjust to a new reality.
Retrospective exercises help your team make these adjustments by making reflection a regular part of the team’s routine. Instead of going with the plan, they have the opportunity to stop themselves and change by cobbling together action items. Because of that, the team gets to adjust over time.
You want to answer several critical questions with a survival metric retrospective, but the most important is this: “Are these metrics affecting our product development over time?”
Essentially, survival metrics are useless if they aren’t touching what really happens with product development. They are active metrics, designed to help change direction when things are happening. If you aren’t feeling the burn of the survival metrics, it is time to change direction. The workshop will help you to see how well they’re working.
The workshop works as follows:
- Check-in. Just like before, spend a few minutes getting everyone’s mental state coordinated and understood by asking, “How are you feeling?” Retros are a bit tougher than premortems since they generally come with more trepidation because we’re looking at work we’ve actually done instead of hypothetical situations.
- State the objective. You may ask why you need to do this again. Well, this is also a chance to make sure that the team understands what they are trying to do. It also gives you, the PdM, an opportunity to adjust your communication strategy. For the PdM reading this, any opportunity to repeat objectives is a good one because objectives have a short lifespan in a team’s mind.
- Consider. “How have these metrics affected our product development over time?” Go through the metrics one by one and ask how they affect development. If nothing is happening, get rid of it. Time for new metrics.
- Ask. What is actually affecting our product development? These answers are potential new metrics.
- Adjust. The facilitator works with the team to adjust. Sometimes there isn’t anything to change, but most of the time, there is. The important thing is to walk through your current metrics to see if they reflect reality.
Rachel’s team doesn’t do this type of evaluation and keeps the same metrics. As a result, the exercise becomes another useless concept that takes the team’s time for no reward. After two initiatives, survival metrics go into the dustbin.
After a few more cycles, Rachel and the team look at the feature’s usage numbers with shock. The numbers were nowhere near where they expected. The initiative also came in over budget. They didn’t adjust, and the team ended up losing long-term trust as Rachel had to explain the poor usage numbers.
Bob’s team takes this opportunity to change three more metrics. The team has a good hold on what’s useful and eventually stops the initiative. They saw the writing was on the wall. Since they were able to go through the retro process, they were able to speak to other parts of the business about why what they were building wasn’t effective. The team finds that what they have built will blow the budget out of the water, and since they were a cost-conscious company, raising this fact to leadership kept them from building something that wouldn’t be useful.
Over time, Bob’s team gained the trust of the whole organization. Bob eventually got promoted since he became known as the PdM that shipped all impact, no filler.
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Don’t Fear Negative Loops
The negative loop is important because we have to respond.
Responding to change keeps strategy alive. Remember, as PdMs, our job is to raise the decision quality over time. We can’t do that if we aren’t adjusting to change in front of us. Leveraging negative feedback loops through premortems and survival metric retros from time to time take you away from the humdrum of following a plan to get closer to the dynamics of what is really happening.
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What does a product manager actually do?
Product management requires flexibility and adaptability in its practitioners. So, with so much nuance, how do we define what product managers actually do?
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash Product management (PdM) is a flexible discipline. It means different things to different people for a few reasons.
- Different organizations require their product teams to do different things. Sometimes you find yourself in an environment that appreciates SAFe while others are fully “Empowered” with everything in between as well.
- Your day is never the same twice. If I asked one PdM to list ten things they did this week and another one to do the same, the lists likely won’t match up, even if they’re both in the same organization.
- There is no discrete output. Engineers produce code, designers produce experiences, and salespeople produce revenue. Product, however, can do any of these things, depending on the circumstances.
I could continue a list like this for quite some time. The theme would remain the same for each item on it, however: Product goes where it is needed. So, with so much variation in its day-to-day practices, how do we define, at a high level, the role of the product manager and the work it entails?
After several years of doing the job, I’ve landed on the following definition: “Product managers should help their organizations make better decisions over time.” For us to support the teams that deliver the outputs that make companies successful, we have to take charge of improving the quality of decisions that everyone in the organization makes.
PdMs should spend time prioritizing issues based on business and technological need, and then come together with different parts of the company to solve those problems. This process becomes a cycle. The longer product people work in this cycle, the better and faster they get at understanding problems and using the right tools to solve them.
In my article on survival metrics, I talked about the need for teams to be fast, data-informed, and politically safe, and I think these are three modes of operation that allow product managers to get comfortable with the change that comes with focusing on complex problems. Your job as a product manager relies on dealing with complexity, and your value to the business is in how you can help it navigate those decisions over time.
So, what constitutes fast, data-informed, and politically safe decision making? And how can you draw on these principles to remain flexible so that you and your organization consistently improve in the quality of your decisions?
WHAT DOES A PRODUCT MANAGER DO?
After several years of doing the job, I’ve landed on the following definition: “Product managers should help their organizations make better decisions over time.” For us to support the teams that deliver the outputs that make companies successful, we have to take charge of improving the quality of decisions that everyone in the organization makes.
Fast, Data-Informed, Politically Safe
Don’t think of the concepts fast, data-informed, and politically safe as having fixed definitions like everyday words do. When you incorporate them into your thinking, you’ll find that they’re flexible enough to fit several different situations.
So, what does each of these principles mean in practice?
FAST
How might I increase the speed with which I make any necessary choices? In product development, and especially in agile product development, the shorter your decision cycle, the sooner you can adjust to the changes that dealing with complex problems necessitates.
DATA-INFORMED
How might I improve how closely our team performs to reality instead of the ideal? Teams often make decisions in workshops or based on what comes from the boardroom rather than what’s really happening in the business and the marketplace. Better decision-making involves taking the influence that the stakeholders wield and pushing back with data based on reality.
POLITICALLY SAFE
How might I enhance the psychological safety of the team around me? When people feel heard, they feel safe, which means they’re willing and able to take risks. Political safety extends that concept to the team level so that teams feel better with interpersonal tension. As a product manager, the more trust you can foster across teams, the better the decisions you’ll all make.
Operating with these frameworks allows you to make better decisions over time. Think through some of your past decisions to see how you can improve your processes in these three ways. Doing so will help you define the role of a PdM to your team.
The frameworks are important to lean on because you are going to be fighting a lot of fires. In fact, I’m sure your Slack is going off right now.
Fires, Fires Everywhere
Put down your laptop. I’m sure no one is going to come around the corner and threaten you for not immediately answering that incoming Slack.
Why did I ask you to do this? You have to stop reacting. You need time to think. You need time to respond.
Let me know if this sounds familiar to you:
- Stakeholders are pounding on your door, demanding “innovation.”
- Bugs threaten the viability of the next release.
- Sales added something to the roadmap again.
I bet you’re nodding your head. Well, sorry to break it to you, but this kind of adversity is the nature of the job. Product classes usually leave out that, although managing all of those things and more is important, your primary job is to facilitate better decision making. And this happens when you are able to respond rather than react.
Responding Versus Reacting
Responding means that you’re thinking about the outcome you want instead of whatever is ahead of you. As a PdM, you must keep the outcome in mind so you can remain flexible and apply the fast, data-informed, and politically safe principles.
Let’s go a little deeper here. Imagine that we have two product managers, one named Jeff and the other Anna. They are both dealing with a push for innovation from leadership, a hyper bug tracker, and pressure from sales on the upcoming release. Everyone wants a meeting. Jeff says yes to them all and finds himself in meeting after meeting, dealing with every single one of those fires.
Anna pushes back on the request and promises a response in three hours. She then takes those hours, looks at all of the requests, sends some probing questions via Slack to those involved, and creates a list of tradeoffs and possible outcomes based on company strategy.
Who would make a better decision about what to do next: Jeff or Anna? The answer, I think, is clear. This hypothetical illustrates the difference between reacting and responding. Those that simply react will find themselves being output-driven. They can’t see past the next fire. Reactionary teams are always trying to figure out how to “launch” the next thing.
By contrast, those that respond are able to take a step back and adjust to the entire picture. They’re able to communicate in a data-informed way that helps teams gain trust in one another. Responsive teams are focused on the “why” behind the outcome. Those responsive teams focus on the big picture since they spend time thinking about strategy.
How does this make a team faster? Well, PdMs who take time to think before they act understand the priorities of the business better. So, once they have a better grip on what’s important, they can ultimately move faster without getting bogged down in details.
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Remember That You Do a Lot
A lot of your work happens in the background. There isn’t a day-to-day PdM map to follow. Because of that, this job gets frustrating. Moreover, proving impact is hard since a lot of your time can be devoured by people asking you to put out their fires. Creating the space to respond is incredibly important to help you improve the decision making in your company.
That said, implementing this kind of culture is also the most rewarding part of the job. Helping teams dig through ambiguity is the essence of product management. Making sure everyone is making better decisions shows up not just in the releases, but the overall efficacy of the company.
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What is product discovery?
Product discovery is a process typically undertaken by product teams, UI/UX researchers, UX designers, UI designers and company stakeholders.
Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash The process is performed to define a problem, explore potential solutions and build a working prototype that will present value to customers. Modern product discovery and validation is essential to startup success, for example, those utilizing the outcome-driven innovation framework see an average product success rate of 86 percent.
What is discovery in product design?
- In order for a startup or an enterprise to achieve success, new products must be brought to the market that fill a consumer need. Uncovering what that need is and determining the most efficient way to provide a solution is what is known as product discovery.
Product discovery is typically undertaken by diverse teams of stakeholders from throughout an organization, such as product teams, UI/UX researchers, data analysts, product designers, executives and others who are closely aligned with customer needs and insights. This helps create a link between the customers and the business before any work is done, ensuring that the intended product will be useful and not fail due to a lack of adoption and users.
The roots of modern intentional product discovery and validation can be traced back to the 1990s, when Steve Blank created the customer development philosophy and published the book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win. Eventually, Blank’s methodology facilitated the start of the lean startup movement where customer development is considered a main pillar. Simultaneously, Anthony Ulwick developed CD-MAP, which would eventually set the course for the creation of outcome-driven innovation and the jobs-to-be-done theory.
What are the key elements of product discovery?
- A few key elements of product discovery include the journey map, empathy map and consumer persona.
When conducting product discovery, it is first important to ensure that empirical user research is done so qualitative and quantitative data can be gathered. This allows discovery teams to challenge their own assumptions about what a user needs and gather data on potential product use cases and customer pain points. From there, teams can form design artifacts that allow the data to stay top of mind and be easily referred back to throughout the discovery and development process. These artifacts often include journey maps, empathy maps and consumer personas.
Journey maps are a set of actions that the user is expected to take to achieve their goal. The actions taken are marked as “locations,” and the product is expected to reduce the amount of actions needed to accomplish the goal. Journey maps must be based on empirical user research to accurately determine what the product will accomplish. Empathy maps are a four-quadrant diagram that are used to record what customers think, hear, say and see in regards to their challenges and the product’s opportunities to present a solution. This helps companies understand user feelings on products and services. Consumer personas are an approximated segment of users that come to be known as target customers. Personas are named and matched with demographics, psychographics and behaviors that help identify a potential customer.
What are product discovery techniques?
- Techniques for product discovery include identifying risks, understanding underlying user needs and identifying the optimal solution.
Product discovery is all about identifying solutions to customer challenges. By doing so, companies seek to build products that provide continuous value to both the user and the business. This requires risks to be clearly identified before teams can begin building a prototype. These risks include: value risk, or whether customers will adopt the product; usability risk, or whether users will know how to utilize the product; feasibility risk, or whether it is capable to produce a product with the allotted time and resources; and business viability risk, or whether the solution will also work for other aspects of a business.
Once these risks are identified, stakeholders have a better understanding of user needs and can create an optimal solution through ideation, prototyping and testing processes.
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How to conduct better product management interviews
Hiring is one of the most important parts of product leadership. Use these principles to make sure you’re landing the best talent.
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash Product leadership is difficult.
That difficulty comes because it’s often very different from product management. As a product manager (PdM), your focus is squarely on making sure that your team is consistently making the best decisions they can.
When it comes to product management, you can easily access help to upskill yourself. Plenty of resources describe how you can do this more effectively. I’ve written a few myself. Some great voices in the space, such as Matt LeMay, Teresa Torres, and John Cutler, among others, lay out frameworks that help PdMs figure out how to increase the decision quality of their teams.
But what about product leadership? Well, product leaders’ job is to build product teams, which involves less framework and more coaching. You aren’t the star anymore. Instead, you take teams and make sure that they are ready for primetime.
Accomplishing this requires a completely different skill set from strict product management. You start to assume responsibilities that take you outside of a tracker or prototype and have you spending far more time focusing on the people themselves.
This work includes bringing people onto the team that you’re developing. One skill that product leaders must cultivate is learning to hire effectively. If you aren’t adding the right skills to the team, no amount of work you do individually can fix things when they go askew.
The simple truth is that when you become a leader, you have too much to do, from team to resource management, to continue doing your old job. As an executive told me in a previous product leadership position, “You can’t do both.”
And you can’t. So, you’re now hiring new PdMs to do the work you used to do well. But how do you go about that?
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Hiring Pitfalls
Have you ever heard the saying, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you can teach it”? Well, the same thing applies to hiring.
The skills necessary to hire someone who will be a good fit for the role aren’t as simple as one would think. You risk becoming a victim of expertise bias, where you end up looking for someone exactly like yourself. You also have to consider cultural bias, in which the hiring manager prioritizes candidates who look, talk, and think exactly like the other team members. Both of these biases lead to building a team that thinks and looks alike. In a discipline like product management, this can be a fatal error.
No tension on teams means no growth. Unless you get some measure of luck, your team will remain stagnant because no one challenges each other. After all, we’re here to increase the decision quality of the teams around us, and that can’t happen without the team coming together from different backgrounds and points of view.
The bad news, as a product leader, is that you likely won’t be trained on how to do this. The teams around you probably don’t know much about product manager, let alone hiring for it. Even if they did, they hired or promoted you to be a product leader to handle these things.
The good news is that I’m going to give you a quick tutorial on how to avoid some of these traps and push you in the right direction. First, we’ll talk about the importance of being clear about the problem you’re trying to solve with your hire. Next, we’ll use that information to formulate good interview questions. And finally, we’ll talk about being honest about the time you have. Getting all three of these things right drastically increases your chances of making the right hire.
3 STEPS TO BETTER HIRING
- Focus on the problem you’re solving.
- Craft good questions.
- Allot the proper time.
Focus on the Problem You’re Solving
Every team needs a certain headcount. Likewise, every team has a million problems they have to handle. Product leaders definitely understand this since they engage with other teams at the strategic level. Sales could always use another SDR and engineering another back-end developer, just like you can always use another product person.
The fact is, everyone will say yes to another hire if it’s offered. But do you know what you need them for?
The most important part of the hiring process is getting the right mind in the job. The second most important thing is onboarding that person correctly. Third is making sure that the new person knows what they need to do to be successful.
All three factors rely on your understanding what you’re hiring for. What problem are you trying to solve with this new team member?
Product is a flexible profession. As a product leader, I’m assuming you’ve had a couple of product management jobs in the past. Have they ever been similar enough to have the same job description? My bet is no.
Despite that, every product job shares one element: flexibility. As they say, the only constant is change, and that’s as true of product management as anything else. Yet many product job descriptions look the same. And before you copy that mistake, taking a job ad else someone wrote and making some superficial changes, I would like to point you to Kate Leto’s book, Hiring Product Managers. In it, she says that one of the most impactful tools in the discipline is the product role canvas.
In her words, “Ensuring there’s a clear and shared understanding of the role that you’re hiring for is an essential first step to thinking more collaboratively and comprehensively about what a new role might be before the interviewing even begins.“
How you understand the role in your organization’s context is incredibly important for the people who want to fill it. Product means different things to different people. How can you set someone up for success if you can’t define it for them before they walk in the door?
Use the product role canvas to define the problem you want to address before you move forward. Doing so will give you and the rest of the team (usually your designer and engineering peers, but this also can include folks like customer success and sales) an idea of what you are looking for.
Then, you can think about interview questions.
What Questions Should You Ask?
So, you know the problem you need to solve with your hire. With that in mind, you should write a clear job description that matches your problem. Don’t just copy and paste whatever you find on the internet.
Once you publish the job ad, you’ll start receiving applications, and you’ll invite promising candidates for an interview. What do you ask them?
I’ve seen teams blow this part of the process. Instead of being prepared and curated, the questions are either haphazard or clearly ripped from a how-to article. Product is far more calculus than algebra, and so you should know that anything that’s called “the perfect question for product interviews” is only perfect for the context in which the question was created.
Much like a good product, good questions help you tell a story. Even better, you create an environment for the person across from you, usually stressed and hurried, to show you their unique self. Strive to uncover “unique” traits rather than the “best” ones because that best isn’t who a candidate is day in and day out. “Best” is a character they have prepared to show you; unique is who they really are.
Tap into unique by asking questions like these:
- Tell me a story about X on your resume.
- What was the hard part about making X real?
- How did you convince opposing forces about X to make it work?
These types of questions can lead to stories that give you the unique flavor of a candidate. Uniqueness wins here since you’re looking for someone interesting and adaptable rather and who meets every item on a checklist.
In product, you’re always looking to solve an ambiguous problem, How you rate the uniqueness of a candidate against the problem set you want to solve is important. Think about the problem and the types of both hard and soft skills necessary to solve it.
Your questions should also get the candidate to talk about their experience so they can form a tapestry of their experience. The follow-ups you ask should aim to give you a better understanding of who the candidate truly is instead of the “best” person they have prepared to show you.
Because we’re looking for a story, ask open-ended questions. For instance, ask “Walk me through a time you’ve done X” instead of direct questions about some specific item. This will allow the candidates to tell you their stories.
How Much Time Do You Have?
It’s important to get to the candidate’s uniqueness quickly because we’re on the clock. You don’t have much time to devote to this process.
As a hiring manager, you’re conducting interviews and hiring on top your actual job. Finding time to look over assets and grade things can be a hassle. So, why do teams act like they have a million years to do so?
Generally, you don’t have time to look at that long presentation, nor do you have time to dig into that case study, or to relisten to that hour long interview that the candidate gives you. Sometimes, you may not even have enough time to do more than Mad Libs on a review.
So, create a key for scoring interview answers. This document gives you the ability to do reviews shorthand. You can answer what others need to know without a ton of investment on your behalf.
As a part of that key, define the time that it is going to take to review the answers. Share those targets with both the interviewee and interviewer. Being honest about the time can help you and the team get clear sightlines on how much work you are asking of them. You can even bundle the time (e.g., a standing 30 minute meeting to review interviewees each week) to get through the review process cleanly.
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Hiring People Is Hard
And getting it right is the most important thing you are going to do as a manager. When you’re ready to take your team to the next level, you can’t afford to fail. Be clear about the problem, put the right amount of rigor in the questions, and set reasonable time expectations.
This may seem like a lot of work up front. Over time, though, you’ll spend less time thinking about the hiring process and more time thinking about the candidates themselves while being transparent about needs, which can help your team get a lot stronger in the long run.
Being a product leader is a different job and requires a few different skills you won’t learn as a PdM. Take the time to learn these new skills, and you’ll get better outcomes.
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As product manager, what story should you tell?
As product manager, how do you take your plans from theory to action? Simple: Tell the right story.
Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash Making change is hard.
Even harder is making change while projects are in motion. As a product manager, though, this is the job. Remember, as a PdM, you are judged on how you improve the decision fitness of the team you are on. Just thinking about better decisions isn’t enough, though. You have to make them happen.
Turning plans into reality isn’t as easy as simply putting an idea on the table. Humans don’t work that way. Sure, you can try to force your agenda on people. Unlike other disciplines, however, product management works by influence, not brute force.
That’s because, while brute force may work, it won’t work for long. PdM’s thrive on influence without control. Using the stick instead of the carrot gets old fast.
But don’t take that lack of control as a license to not act. PdMs who let inertia take over hoping people just get it on their own don’t last long. Playing tattletale isn’t a winning strategy either. Whispering in the CEO’s ear, much like the proverbial stick, may work in the short term since the CEO has the power to make things happen. Thing is, though, people start to realize that you have no actual influence yourself, and they start to find ways to work around you.
No one respects the PdM who can’t influence change without relying on outside help.
Storytelling as Product Tool
So, what should you do if plan alone isn’t enough, but you can’t use brute force to accomplish your goals? In order to turn plans into action, what you need is a good story.
Why a story? Human nature means that stories captivate our brains. As you’re reading this, think about the last three things you’ve remembered for any stretch of time. I’m going to bet at least two out of those three were attached to a story that triggered some emotion in you.
As PdMs, we need to be storytellers. Our influence takes hold through the stories we choose to tell and the way we construct those narratives.
That’s all well and good, but how do you know what you need to include in a story? Well, let’s bring back an old friend: survival metrics. We’ll look at my personal principles of storytelling: leading with proof, repeating the story, and then iterating it inside of your culture. We’ll then explore how to use your story to turn survival metrics into action for your organization.
3 KEYS TO A GOOD STORY
- Lead With Social Proof.
- Repeat the Story.
- Iterate Within Your Culture
What Are Survival Metrics?Before we begin, let’s have a quick refresher on survival metrics, which help a product team determine if an initiative is worth investing in more, pivoting or stopping completely. They are a forcing function that prevent product teams from suffering due to the sunk cost fallacy. Survival metrics put resource allocation and company incentives, both implied (think politics) and direct (think data), in front of the team before a project begins and again at regular intervals, giving everyone permission to act quickly.
Survival metrics create a clear picture of what can go wrong while a project is in motion. By spelling out potential limitations early, you’ve created a warning system for both the team and the company that will make any necessary pivots more effective since you won’t spend time convincing the organization to get on board with necessary changes.
Survival metrics have three levels, each based on the information you’ll get from answering questions about the project. If something is worth stopping the project for, the metrics are STOP statements. Those that lead us to reconsider the direction we’re going in are PIVOT statements. Anything that signals you to lean into the initiative as you build, even if things are a little rocky, is an INVEST statement.
We Have the Metrics. Now What?
So, you’ve put together a great batch of survival metrics. What happens next?
You need to create a story that can help sustain the metrics and keep them fresh in people’s minds. To do so, employ the three concepts we mentioned above: leading with proof, repeating the story, and then iterating.
Survival metrics’ underlying benefit is that they’re iterative. Every time you launch a project with survival metrics, you’ll notice some metrics go away and a few stick around. Those that you keep returning to are a clear measure of what your company cares most about. As you get survival metrics closer to reality through each iteration, the process you build will grow with your company.
Leading With Social Proof
People don’t just accept ideas out of thin air. Concepts need some proof to show that they work before anyone listens.
This is why conference talks work. The people onstage have been vetted. They are real experts who have some social proof supporting their arguments. The idea here, in short, is that people believe an idea is trustworthy because it has been verified by another source that they trust. The psychologist Robert Cialdini described this phenomenon in his book, Influence.
Trustworthiness can come in many forms: Conferences, articles and books can all provide social proof for an idea. This is true for survival metrics, but also for any popular concept. For example, I love opportunity solution trees. Teresa Torres has plenty of social proof, as you can see by typing her name into Google and perusing the pages and pages of results that attest to her expertise.
The trouble is, even if you have social proof, that’s not enough by itself. Social proof helps people see you aren’t just creating something out of thin air. There is more to the story, however.
If you’re focused on social proof by itself, you’ll notice new concepts start strong but never stick. When it comes to survival metrics, you’ll notice a team starts using the concept, but usage fades during release.
Let’s consider an example. A BobCo product leader, Jill, saw someone reference survival metrics in a tweet and began to read about them. She liked the idea and decided to introduce the product team to the concept.
Her two product managers, Alex and Erica, took on the task of implementing them with their respective teams.
Alex simply introduced the premise of survival metrics to the team. Everyone thought it was a concept that he had created himself. Lacking any broader context, the team just waited to see what was next rather than taking action.
Erica, before introducing the new paradigm to her team, read the article herself. To better understand survival metrics, she also watched a video from a conference talk and learned that other companies, such as Mailchimp, had used them. She added that background information in her presentation to the team, explaining where survival metrics come from and how other well-known companies had used them. Rather than just mentioning this new concept, she earned some buy-in by telling a comprehensive narrative about it. Thanks to the additional information, people on the team were curious about how they could use survival metrics themselves.
So, now that you have a story supported by proof, you need to keep telling it.
Repeating the Story
You’ve used social proof to demonstrate the validity of your metrics. Now, though, people keep forgetting that they’re supposed to rely on them during projects. How do you keep things on people’s minds?
Simple: You keep telling the team. Repeat the concept. Repeat the metrics. Repeat their value. In this case, you’ll repeat survival metrics in meetings, in documents and during standups. Say it over and over.
Repeat it until people get tired of hearing it, and then repeat it again. You’re fighting inertia. Since inertia is difficult to overcome when people are settled, you’ll have to continue to sell your work over and over again.
The story that you’re telling about survival metrics is a story of change. Survival metrics are crucial for an agile organization and its commitment to the Agile Manifesto. Specifically, they allow your organization to “practice responding to change over following a plan.” Keep that principle top of mind and reiterate it along with the survival metrics. Using the agile angle to explain why survival metrics work is the winning move when fighting inertia.
When you’re doing this, try repeating yourself in different ways. Build a slide that finds its way into every presentation. Write a note at the top of the sprint review to review every week. Make a video that appears with every demo. Just keep talking about survival metrics in a bunch of different ways.
In marketing, this approach is called the rule of seven, and you’ll hear it every time you listen to a podcast ad. The name of the product and the company will come up at least seven times, implanting the memory in your head.
Returning to our example, Alex simply said the words “survival metrics” once or twice during the meeting. He never mentioned them explicitly again, instead expecting the rest of the team to remember to use them. Because they were still waiting for more information, though, the team never did anything.
After the first meeting, Erica added the survival metrics and the relevant storytelling elements into all of the templates the team used. That way, everyone would see them again when they started something new. She also added it to the previous project to bookmark it. When the team saw the updated templates, she took the opportunity to tell a story about the metrics again, segueing into the specific metrics they were using.
Of course, repeating the story over and over again will get old, and people will eventually tune you out. This is why the story has to evolve.
Retrospect Into Evolution
So, you’re repeating the point and referencing social proof for support. That is all well and good, but if you do something long enough without adjustment, it becomes white noise.
Let’s be honest: As good as any tactic is, your mileage may vary since every framework you bring in was made elsewhere. Your company’s culture is unique, so a new framework won’t necessarily land right away. Survival metrics are no different. In my experience, it takes at least six months for a product team to take on a new framework as its own.
You have to build your own culture into survival metrics and then let them evolve within your organization’s culture. That’s why you’ll need to have some way to see the continuing validity of the framework and adjust accordingly.
This is where team retrospectives come into play. In those meetings, you can adjust the tactics you’re using by asking pointed questions and investigating, with your peers, how you can make your procedures better.
After introducing survival metrics to his team, Alex only talked about them in one more retro during the quarter. Soon, survival metrics disappeared, becoming just another tool that Alex talked about that never brought any real value to the team.
Erica noticed the new tool wasn’t inspiring action when she first used them with her team, so she took the time to talk to everyone about why the metrics weren’t guiding action and how to better implement them. They created check-ins to talk about the metrics regularly. The metrics started to improve thanks to having dedicated discussions every few weeks. By the end of the initiative, the team got to a point where they felt very confident in the metrics they selected.
Remember, frameworks evolve in the team retro. You and the team are the secret sauce for anything to work.
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Driving organisational alignment with survival metrics (with Adam Thomas, product coach)
Photo by Liam Pozz on Unsplash Listen here!
About the Episode
An interview with Adam Thomas. Adam is a passionate product leader & product coach who wants to help you drive organisational alignment. By day he’s Lead Product Manager for a recruiting platform, and by night he’s the hero that Gotham needs with product consultancy Approaching One.
We speak about a lot, including:
- His work with Approaching One and how he’s trying to help product managers & product leaders get better
- How he started out as a mainframe programmer, and ended up falling into product management when a mentor realised how unhappy he was
- The story of his two startups, whether they succeeded or failed, and some of the lessons he learned from the experience
- His journey from individual contributor to leadership, the resources he used and how he mixed mentorship with repeated mistakes to get good
- The importance of driving organisational alignment, the types of negative & positive feedback you can get due to misalignment
- Why alignment is the product manager‘s job, how you should never assume anything, and have to do the work
- Some of the warning signs of misalignment, techniques you can use to get back on track and why you should trust but verify
- The importance of having a compelling story around your product that you can align your team around
- Survival Metrics – what they are & how you can use them to decide whether to pivot, double down or give up on an initiative
And much more!
More on Survival Metrics
Why not visit the website to find out more about Survival Metrics?
Contact Adam
You can find Adam on Twitter. He’s also got a Substack mailing list and his website is theadamthomas.com
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What do you do when product and customer success won’t play nice?
Too often, customer success and product teams treat each other like adversaries. Here’s how to fix that.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash What kind of relationship do you have with your company’s customer success team? I often ask product teams this question, and the answer is usually that there isn’t a relationship at all. And if there is, it’s hanging on by a thread. The product team never connects with the customer success team except when it’s time for an “enablement” session. The session is designed to allow other teams to understand a product. This meeting, though, is likely to just be a quiet presentation and Q&A.
Meanwhile, the customer success team tends to see the product team as the product feature repository. They just drop off feature requests and then go back to their own work.
Both forms of communication are reactive. Customer success hands off customer problems with solutions and dates to the product team. The product team uses customer success as a shield against the customers themselves. Neither team leverages what the other knows to maximize their ability to collaborate on solving big customer problems and innovating in the marketplace.
But that dysfunction isn’t the most significant issue. The organization is building a culture of resentment. The teams will continue to resent one another until something changes. So, they’re losing in two ways. They lose the opportunity to leverage the intelligence of both teams, and, because of the resentment, the business misses out on some moonshots that could change its overall trajectory.
Before we talk about the tactics we can use to make things better, we first need to address that resentment. Remember, it’s the product manager’s (PdM) job to increase the overall decision fitness of the organization. By decision fitness, I simply mean how well the team makes decisions. Good product management leads teams to consistently make better decisions. You won’t be able to level up in this area if there are no clear lines of communication between customer support and product.
So, let’s talk about how you can identify some of the issues both teams have with each other, create more precise lines of communication, and tie it all to your culture so that it stands the test of time.
Identifying Issues
Your customer success team is likely the lowest paid and the least listened to team in the building. Their job is often a taxing one. It’s a matter of when and not if customers are going to yell at them. The customer success agent is on the front lines of frustration, listening to customers vent during their lowest moments of using the product.
Your job as a product leader is to take the opportunity to sit down with them and listen to what they have to say. If the poor relationship between teams that I described before sounds familiar, they will likely have a lot of valuable information to tell you.
Let’s set the stage with BobCo, where two leaders, Jill, the new director of product management, and Bob, the new director of customer success, are connecting for the first time. They plan to get the company on a better path and leverage each other’s team for better product outcomes.
Bob and Jill both took the time to listen to their teams for the first 90 days of their tenure. They also talked to other disciplines, like engineering and sales, to get a solid overview of the organization.
Both connected with a random distribution of people, taking advantage of their newness to the organization, and led one-on-one conversations with everyone on each team around three subjects.
3 GOALS FOR ONE-ON-ONES
- Establishing competence — “Here is who I am and what I’ve done.”
- Laying out their vision of the future — “This is what I want to do.”
- Building a bridge between the other team — “How can my team help yours?”
Replacing Resentment With Trust
Bob and Jill both know that the secret to identifying issues is to build trust. That trust must first start with themselves, so Bob and Jill spend time listening to each other and developing a shared vision of their futures.
They spend their first few conversations feeling each other out. Once they get to know each other a bit, they agree that a team conversation will give them a jump-start on understanding how product and customer success can work together.
How should they frame this conversation between the two teams? I’m a big fan of the team retro process laid out by NOBL.
A team retro gives the facilitator and the relevant team at least 60 minutes to get everything out on the table. Remember, the retro process isn’t about blame; it’s about level-setting and improving, so make sure you use your time together to get a clear lay of the land. In our example, both teams more than likely have some misconceptions about the work the other does. It’s finally time to clear them all up.
Both Bob and Jill are coming into teams that already exist. Like most of us, they have to deal with the culture that’s already there. In this case, it’s one that is marked by the resentment that I mentioned earlier.
Without presenting a solid foundation to both teams, one that establishes competence and tells a story that people can trust, and showing that they trust one another, they know this process can fall apart.
A team retrospective can raise issues that plague teams and businesses. Both leaders are committed to handling the pressing problems upfront, by writing them down and following up. They present regular status updates to ensure that no one had to work to find out what was happening. They also keep each other accountable by holding routine check-ins. All of these steps can go a long way to establishing trust.
Building Bridges
So, you’ve done the first team retrospective. Put the next one on the calendar in about a month. Keep this meeting a consistent part of both teams’ workflow. Every time each team talks, you’ll build more trust. But you’re not done there.
After the retro, Bob and Jill realize that just talking about the issues won’t be enough. Instead, they need to change how the teams communicate. This change means moving from a reactive approach (enablement and feature requests) to a more proactive one. Making this shift requires bringing both teams into regular contact during product development.
So, they pick one point during a sprint for the customer success team to meet with the entire product team to talk about development and see how customers may engage with the product as it’s being constructed.
This connection point helps the customer success team understand how to talk about the product with customers and get their insights. Because they now know how to frame these insights, the product team is more likely to receive this feedback instead of brushing it aside.
And this new structure leads to an important point. Customer success teams have a good understanding of the emotional state of reactive customers but aren’t always clear about the problem set of proactive customers.
Bringing the customer success team inside the process allows them to guide the product team in addressing the customers’ emotional needs as it’s building the product. For example, say you have a section of customers that are angry about your latest widget. The customer success team can take a look at the next iteration of the widget and tell you exactly what they are hearing, which will help the product development team avoid potential landmines.
Jill knows by bringing Bob and his team around in the middle of the process, the team can make sure they solve more pain points and build a better story to present to the customer. Bob knows by bringing Jill around, his team can frame customer requests more effectively.
Keep in mind that the PdM should under no circumstances consider this feedback qualitative research, however. The customer success team’s involvement isn’t a replacement for talking to customers. But it is a great way to make sure each team is making the most of one another’s expertise.
Be Transparent
Bob and Jill know that working together will lead to stronger teams, but they need to make sure they can keep it that way. After all, these are two teams that have had some contention before. Bob and Jill need to keep the newfound trust going.
The continuing retrospectives will help to identify any trouble between the teams as it happens. This relationship isn’t going to work like before, though, and change is fragile. So, leaders will have to talk often about both successes and failures. Transparency is the bedrock upon which you build trust.
You’ve already made some serious inroads if you’ve adopted the retros and invited customer success into the development process. The next step is to instill a culture of transparency.
Bob and Jill set up a report designed for the business; they call it the BobCo Product to Customer Report. Inside, they highlight anecdotes from customers and how the different product development teams are each building products that meet the needs of the customer. Those anecdotes fit the story the product team is trying to tell, and speak to how those customers will be affected by the change. They also include data about research, renewals, churn and team changes.
Are new hires coming in to shake things up? Is the team doing some tech debt initiatives that mean new features can’t happen right now? Are you holding office hours? All that information should go into the report. This report then goes to the rest of the business to build trust and allow them to keep an eye on the product strategy.
MORE IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENTWhat to Do When Product Theory Isn’t Your Product Reality
Get Everyone on the Same Page
Customer success and product can work well together. What does it look like when it works?
Important customer information gets back to the product team and influences strategy. Remember, product management’s job is to improve decision fitness. By taking in the emotional energy of the customer, we can better understand their points of view, leading to better decisions. Customers aren’t acting out. Their feelings come from somewhere. Customer success holds the key to understanding where.
A strong relationship with your colleagues in CS will give you a much higher success rate when launching products.
How do you build such an alliance? I put the onus on the product team to manage the relationship and bring out the best in the teams around us. Product isn’t just a translation service — it also is a diplomatic one. We’re here to build bridges to help us level up the decision fitness of the company as a whole.
Our customer success teams are on the front lines keeping things running every day. We have an opportunity to use that expertise to make better decisions about the products we bring to market and how our product development serves customers. We get there by making sure that we stay open, bringing them along, and continuing to build trust through transparency.
Building the right products is a team effort, and when we all work together, great things happen.
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Build better products by creating better case studies
Case studies are one of the most useful items in the product management toolkit. To build effective ones, you need to follow a simple but vital set of guidelines.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, first released in 1984, popularized the concept of social proof. This phenomenon consists of individuals copying the actions of others around them in order to acclimate to a system. People are subconsciously influenced by the behavior of other people within a given environment. Although this idea is simple, Cialdini’s book radically changed my mind with respect to how I interacted with the content that my product team and I produced.
Why was this theory so profound? Well, the book helped me understand why people were ignoring almost everything that we gave them. As it turned out, everything that we wrote was focused on ourselves and not on our customers.
We weren’t influencing. Instead, we were just talking.
Cialdini’s work gave a conceptual framework to something that the best marketers already subconsciously knew: Nothing sells better than reflecting the customer’s own actions back at them.
For example, say you want to buy a shirt. Which of these pitches is more likely to make you buy?
Option A: This shirt is made of polyester, washes well and makes you look professional.
Option B: This shirt is built for the product manager on the go. When you’re sweating the details and pacifying the battle between sales and engineering, you’ll want a shirt that stays tucked in as you rush from meeting to meeting.
Option B draws on social proof to reflect actions that you’ve experienced back at you.
Product management (PdM) is about helping the team improve decision fitness. That includes how we influence our customers to use our products, especially if we’re confident that our product is the right one for them. Social proof helps us accomplish this goal.
Before we can use social proof, however, we need a way to get the information that we want to reflect back to the customer. In other words, how do we come to see the world as our customers see it? How might we put ourselves in their headspace?
Sure, you can scan different websites, browse social media, or even look at your competitors to see what they’re doing. With any of these strategies, however, you’re only getting part of the picture. Like almost anything dealing with product development, talking to your customer directly is going to get the best results.
So, for PdMs to get the data they need to gather social proof and understand how customers see the world, we can rely on case studies. Let’s talk about what exactly these are and how you can use them to help you influence your customers and help other teams, like product marketing and sales, make better decisions.
3 KEY STEPS TO BUILDING A PRODUCT CASE STUDY
- Make an outline.
- Ask the right questions.
- Analyze carefully.
MORE PRODUCT ADVICE FROM ADAM THOMASHow To Improve Your Product Research
What Is a Case Study?
For our purposes, a case study is an in-depth conversation aimed at understanding how a customer uses our product. We want to get to know who they are, why they use our product, and the context in which they use it.
This technique is how you get inside of your customer’s head. When you have multiple, deep customer conversations over a period of time, you’ll get a better understanding of what drives them. You’ll also be able to target your marketing so that it makes sense to them.
How Do You Build Case Studies?
Building case studies is no different than doing any other interview. When conducting a proactive conversion with customers, you need to understand what you want, use open-ended questions, and analyze everything carefully.
MAKE AN OUTLINE
You can go in a bunch of different directions when you talk to your customers. In fact, if you’re like most PdMs, this is an easy trap to fall into. Everything that the customer says may seem like gold, and it’s easy to follow any string in hopes of chasing down an insight.
So, how do you avoid that trap? You’ll need to write an outline to keep yourself on track. A case study outline is simple and has three components.
- Hypothesis. You need a clear hypothesis whenever you talk to a customer. What question are you trying to answer by talking to the customer? Why are they important? Note this information upfront, and derive the questions from the hypothesis. Consider it your anchor.
- Goal. What type of assets are you planning to create from this interview? Who wants this information? Having this in the form of an aligning statement, something that helps the team know what you are looking for and what you want to build, will help with analysis. Do it now so you won’t have to think about it later.
- Questions. These are based on both the hypothesis and the goal.
Those three components will help you avoid the trap of letting the interviews meander. Now, let’s talk a little bit more about those questions.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Your question set should be short, with no more than five max.
You want to follow up on your initial questions to get as many stories as possible. If you have more than five, you risk letting the interview get rigid since you’ll feel pressured to get to as many questions as possible. Further, asking fewer questions will make sure you have some uniformity to the answers.
Even though you’re just asking a few questions, you’ll want to keep them open-ended. An open-ended question like “Walk me through your shirt purchase. What drove this decision?” is better than “Did you like our service?” The latter could too easily elicit just a yes or no response while the former invites the customer to provide more detail.
You want to have a free-flowing conversation, which means focusing on the customer. Conversations are going to give you the information you need to build that social proof. Once you’ve acquired that information, you can analyze the material and create the case study.
ANALYZE CAREFULLY
Before conducting an analysis, make sure you sit with these conversations for a while.
Take the time to find good quotations that are interesting and align with your values by transcribing the interviews. Check to see if the language in your marketing materials matches how your customers talk. The closer your work matches their worldview, the more they will trust the product.
This process may seem simple at first. As you start to put this plan into action, however, you’ll see how much data you can collect and how closely you can tailor your product to match the mental model of your customers.
You’ll eventually be able to see if the plan is working when you make changes and hear from the customer again. The next time you talk to them, you want to hear something along the lines of, “Your [page/feature/tool] described my issue exactly, and that’s why I bought the product.”
Build Artifacts To Put Case Studies to Work
When you have the data from the interviews, you’ll be able to build artifacts that match your customer’s mental model.
What are some artifacts that can come from doing a case study?
- Testimonials. These are short-form statements, usually a paragraph or less, that come directly from the customer and attest to the value of your product or service. During the interview, the customer may offer a bite-sized anecdote that sums up a feature or your product in a helpful way. These statements are great to use on a sales or product page to give your work more credibility.
- Articles. These interviews create the kernel of an article for your writers. If your team has a blog, use it to underscore the high points that customers report or spotlight a particularly well-liked feature. Writing an article based on the case study conversation can help customers see, in a more relaxed context, how your product will work for them.
- White Papers. A white paper is a one-page selling document highlighting the technical side of a product. For more technical products, you must give potential custoemrs a look at how the product functions in a more structured, quasi-academic format. Your case studies will allow your team to write a white paper by giving you anchor points led by the customer.
Customers want to tell their stories. When your product is great, rest assured they are doing it anyway. Most of the time, they are happy to spend time with you and your team and give you good feedback. More importantly, you’ll get the social proof you need to stand above the rest of the marketplace.
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How to improve your product research
Your research involves talking to customers to gain insight. Great — now let’s talk about how to make it matter.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash In the world of technology, where the products we work on have to deal with the tensions of a rapidly changing marketplace, conducting customer research is critical to keep pace. Doing it often and well is a way to keep your company ahead of the competition. Despite this, most research doesn’t make it past the first mention. Researchers often talk about not getting a seat at the table and not getting enough respect to get traction in an organization.
Let me know if this sounds familiar to you: You’re working hard talking to customers, and you come up with a bunch of data. Oddly enough, none of it ends up in the final project. The project ships, and as you would expect, it falls flat. No one listened. Nothing changed. Everyone lost.
Why?
Good research involves more than just talking to customers. Good research is focused, packaged and sold no differently than any of your favorite products. Good research understands the subtext, or, what lies beneath the surface of the answer you’ve been given, and adjusts the dynamics. Good research understands that if someone says they like the color of a button, it might mean they like what the button does, but can’t quite explain why.
In short, good research helps teams understand the why behind the why — the thing that’s driving the customer’s need to find a solution for the problems they face.
A dichotomy exists between what we see in the laboratory, including conferences and classrooms, and the reality on the ground. In the lab, we view our research as a way to get closer to the mental models of our customers. Since we are so close to the work, we see, with every iteration, how much subtext exists in conversation and observation. We see our research strengthen or weaken our theories, and we are able to incorporate the data into our work as we move forward.
Outside the lab, though, people are busy. They have their own priorities. Every discipline has other things to worry about. Curiosity often takes a back seat to the bottom line. This process is what happens when you bring data into a complex world.
Before we move forward, we have to acknowledge this reality and deal with the problem: Our research isn’t respected because we don’t meet our stakeholders where they are.
Let’s talk about how to fix that, using the lenses of discipline, visibility and negotiation to ensure your research gets to the table.
DISCIPLINE
Research is full of subtext. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons many of us become researchers in the first place — the customer is a mystery we are trying to solve.
It’s fun to talk to customers and try to understand them. But that fun is why discipline is important. Although customers have a million things to say, we have a limited amount of time to engage with them. If we aren’t careful, a lack of discipline can float into our analysis and our output and results in research that doesn’t solve the critical problems of the business. If your research doesn’t affect the problems that people care about, it will be ignored, and with good reason.
Therefore, it is critical that the rest of the organization sees your focus through the quality of your artifacts, i.e., a good study guide and thoughtful questions. It will give your research a level of seriousness and keep you honest about the work you are doing. You’ll need to be rigorous in the inputs you use in the research, how you conduct the study and how the outputs look to those involved.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- How are you putting together your research study guides? Are they rigorous — did you vet your study guide against company and team goals, with open-ended, thoughtful customer-perspective-driven questions and a clear objective?
- Is your hypothesis falsifiable? If it can’t be “wrong,” then bias takes over and ruins the research. You’ll see what you want to see. Can the customer refute it and lead you to a better path?
- How clear are you being with your recommendations after your analysis (three max — remember your stakeholders have their own plates full!)?
Keeping things sharp requires discipline. To build trust, give others in your organization the recommendations they need and, if people outside of the research team want, a place to read how you got to those recommendations. If you keep that discipline, you’ll notice more of your work being used in the organization.
VISIBILITY
One of the things that makes Waffle House, a restaurant chain based in the southern United States, different from many 24/7 diners is that you can see the kitchen right in front of you. When you’ve had too many drinks, this even functions as entertainment. We love to see how the sausage is made. This peek behind the curtain is a reason Waffle House is one of the biggest and most beloved restaurant chains we have.
Your research is no different. As Cyd Harrell notes, communicating your research to the world is just as important as doing it. Start by inviting other people to the lab. Doing so is the highest-leverage move you can make for the visibility of your research. Asking your engineering team or salespeople to help with research gives them an appreciation of the work that goes into finding conclusions.
Want to get them there? My bet is those folks are curious about what people have to say about their products. Play on that curiosity. A few anecdotes that come from the research will raise some eyebrows. Give them a recording of a session. Bring them on board during the analysis stage to talk about problems that deal with their area of responsibility. Little nudges will get them in the room. Once they are there, I have rarely seen someone not want to come back.
Here are some questions to ponder when thinking about the visibility of the research:
- When was the last time people got a chance to see your research while you were making it?
- Who is involved in the creation of the research? How aware are people of the problem that you’re working to solve?
- How often have you shared your unfinished research? Is there a cadence with the rest of the company/team?
The first step to making people care is making them aware. There is a ton of value just in having people know about the process. You can create even more excitement when people can engage with and be a part of your projects.
SALES
A basic principle of advertising is the Rule of Seven. This dictum states that someone has to see or hear something seven times before they will buy a product or service. Less than that, and the listener will more than likely forget the product’s name. Whenever you watch a commercial or listen to a podcast ad, notice how often the company’s name and offerings get brought up. My guess is you’ll hear it seven times.
Let’s think about our own research in the context of the Rule of Seven. In a commercial or podcast ad, you hear the product’s name repeated seven times. That’s what it takes to get an idea to stick in another person’s consciousness. So how often are you talking about research, in general? If I were to look at your product development process, how often does research come up? If you’re not talking about it, what makes you think people will care?
Just as importantly, how tailored is the pitch? You’ve spent time getting disciplined and raising your visibility, but at the end of the day, folks are busy. They need to have the data presented in a way they’ll care about.
Here, stakeholder management comes into play. Ask a simple question like this: “How would you like to get information from me in the future?” Doing so can help you build the right artifact at the right time. For example, if an engineering director loves to read transcripts, and the CEO needs a presentation, it’s your job to provide both. Returning to the first point, if you are disciplined, it’s a lot easier to do this since your research will be contained and accessible.
Ultimately, when you are selling your research to your stakeholders, make sure you tailor the story to the audience and then repeat it often.
How is this different from visibility? Visibility is about making people aware of your work on your terms; selling is about action on theirs.
Here are a few questions to ponder when evaluating how you sell:
- Who is buying your research? Are they in-org or out-org? What are their priorities? Is this being reflected in your artifacts to them by putting what they care about up front?
- How does research, as a whole, generate resources for the company? Is it helping people solve problems? How can you highlight that process?
- If the research is good, how often are you getting it in front of people who make decisions?
Research needs to be sold again and again. People need to get the why behind the why. Without selling, the work you’re doing can seem like you’re just talking to customers all day without action. You’ll need to make good research happen.
At the beginning of this article, I talked about how research matters. It isn’t enough to just talk to customers and show people that you’ve talked to them. None of it matters if you can’t get the research in the product. The first step toward that goal is understanding that your research exists in a system, and it won’t sell itself.
A team that maintains discipline with its research practice while also making it visible and sellable is the team that gets its conclusions into the product. Those conclusions are the difference between a product that stays on the pulse of the customer and wins the marketplace and the others that become also-rans, doomed to play follow-the-leader and, eventually, die as the marketplace evolves.
- How are you putting together your research study guides? Are they rigorous — did you vet your study guide against company and team goals, with open-ended, thoughtful customer-perspective-driven questions and a clear objective?
