Product Management

How to identify and define all your customer's needs using JTBD (Job-to-be-Done).

Watch Jay Haynes the founder and CEO of thrv give a lesson on ''How to identify customer needs'' using the Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation method. He explains that customer needs are the variables required by your customers to get their job done and satisfying them is the key to attaining competitive advantage and successful innovation. Join the video lesson to learn why JTBD effectively delivers valuable customer products and the steps to follow when solving customers' problems.

Learn how to effectively use 'why' during customer problem research.

Not understanding the customer problem is one of the top reasons projects fail. The reality is that there are multiple customer problems to be resolved, and each must be understood. Harsh Vardhan shares a technique called the "Y-Map", which helps to raise awareness of lesser known reasons to build the product while uncovering gaps not identified during customer interviews.

Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do.

Christensen and his coauthors give a deep analytical report on why most businesses are staggering with innovation and the importance of knowing your customers. They state that firms focus more on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data than trying to understand the jobs that the customers are trying to get done. Read the article to know more about why the key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

Form follows function. Therefore, the organizational structure follows the Jobs-to-Be-Done.

New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable. Customer Experience (CX) is more holistic than just product management. It should be our aim to eradicate all unhappiness with our business. Happiness is the gap between your expectation of a product and the current situation. The author suggests that closing the happiness gap either by lowering your expectation or improving the situation is a good contender for the definition of Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD). In fact, product owners worldwide describe Jobs-to-Be-Done as helping people close their many happiness gaps. The article generally helps you figure out why we have to prioritize some things over others with JTBD.

Why you should focus on Riskiest Assumption Tests and forget about MVPs.

Does replacing your MVP with a RAT save you a lot of pain?

A Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) puts the focus on learning. It is a candle in the darkness that allows us to move forward one step at a time. Once you’ve validated the riskiest assumption you can move on to the next largest one. Gradually building confidence in the viability of your idea. The key to this is rapid, small tests.

On the contrary, the MVP is losing its originality due to over-reliance as It's noted in the article. An MVP seduces with false reassurances of a clear, linear path to an optimized solution.

Customer interviews are the foundation of good product discovery - learn how to gain valuable insights in each interaction.

The Discovery track is all about quickly generating validated product backlog items, and the Delivery track is all about generating releasable software.

You should talk to your customers with the goal of learning who you are building for, not what to build.

It’s not about what your competition is doing. It’s about about what your customers are doing.

The research seems to indicate that we aren’t very good at making decisions. So what are we to do?

Identify your customers’ hidden needs.

Me and My Shadow is a powerful way of understanding your customer, but it comes with a catch: it is hard to observe your customer in such a way that your observations don’t change how they work. The observers should emphasize thinking of themselves as a shadow, so that any negative interactions caused by your observations are minimized. It works best when you can observe your customers in their native habitat (with native guides in tow).

This activity consists of observers carefully recording a participant using a product or service. You may want to segment your customers based on perceived motivation: those who want to use your product, those who are indifferent about using your product, and those who don’t want to use your product but cannot find or justify an alternative, and in rare cases, those who may be forced to use your product. The observer(s) sit next to the participant to watch for and listen to actions, expressions, comments, and suggestions. Observer(s) ask questions of the participant, such as "Why are you doing that," or "what are you thinking at this moment".

Capture many kinds of observations, such as: 1) People who interact with your customer; 2) Your products and services that they use; 3) Products and services that they use at the same time they are using your products or services; 4) Utterances, body language, or facial expressions that give insight into their emotions as they use your products or services; 5) The physical environment and larger context of their workspace; 6) Your own feelings and reactions to what is going on.

Then Assess each observation along the following dimensions: 1) Novelty: The degree to which the observation indicates a novel or unintended use of the product; 2) Performance gap: The degree to which the observation indicates a performance gap between desired and actual performance. Large gaps mean large problems; 3) New opportunity: The degree to which the observation indicates a new opportunity for solving a customer problem.

Identify the most exciting product features.

The aisles of supermarkets around the world are filled with colorful product boxes from all over the world. They tell us of products that are new and improved. They tell us how these products will make us thinner, smarter, sleeker, happier. In the process, the best boxes help move that box from the shelf and into our home. Product Box lets you leverage your customers’ collective retail consumer experiences by asking them to design a box for your product. Not just any box, but a box that represents the product that they want to buy. In the process, you’ll learn what your customers think are the most important, exciting features of a given product or service.

Overview: Ask your customers to imagine that they’re selling your product at a tradeshow, retail outlet, or public market. Give them a few cardboard boxes and ask them to literally design a product box that they would buy. The box should have the key marketing slogans that they find interesting. When finished, pretend that you’re a skeptical prospect and ask your customer to use their box to sell your product to you.

Covering the ins and outs of product discovery - the work that we do to make decisions about what to build.

Clarify the operating context for your products and services.

Although you may think you have a solid understanding of how your product or service relates to other products and services, chances are your customers have a different point of view. By helping you understand these relationships from their perspective, Spider Web helps you capture more revenue by showing you webs of potentially unknown relationships.

Spider Web is partially inspired by a requirements analysis technique called context diagramming. Context diagramming was originally created to show the data that flows between a given software system and other entities with which this system communicates. These entities can be people, other software systems, physical devices, electro-mechanical devices, other sensors, and so forth. Context diagrams are a useful tool, usually created by business analysts trained to interpret the perceptions of a customer and who usually manage to make their context diagrams look very neat and tidy.

Spider Web encourages customers to directly draw their view of the relationships. And because the real world isn’t a neat and tidy place, customer generated diagrams tend to get messy. Wonderfully messy. Realistically messy. Messy in a way that helps you understand the real opportunities for genuine innovation.

Overview: Put the name of your product or service in the center of a circle. Ask your customers to draw other products and services, ask them to tell you when, how, and why these are used. Ask them to draw lines between the different products and services. As your customers reviews when and where they user your offering, you can capture the various inter-relationships that exist between the different products and service that they use throughout the day.

Teams who invest in research are quickly finding that their experiments are only as good as their hypotheses and experiment design.

This approach to JTBD puts the process in the proper order - providing the targeting necessary to create the right products, with the right features.

A framework for continuous product discovery, where we first discover opportunities and then discover solutions.

Defining what MVP means and how to differentiate it from other terms typical for the product pipeline.

What is MVP (minimum viable product), proof of concept and prototype definition? In this video, Railsware Academy describes the whole product pipeline and its key terms - outlining the differences between minimum viable product (MVP) and minimum lovable (MLP), marketable (MMP), and awesome (MAP) products as more advanced MVP examples.

Managing the unpredictable overhead that contributes to the total cost of ownership.

In a product's life cycle, there are often those technical imminent changes needed to improve the quality of the product dubbed as Technical Debt. They result in a scattered and distorted view of the product, poor decision-making, and draining of the product's value. Sjoerd Nijland slams these complexities as the evil monster in product development that comes to haunt developers and the entire Scrum team if not well managed. Read on what is Technical Debt and some of the ways that can be leveraged to manage it through the article.

The product management process is 7 stages: idea management, specs, roadmapping, prioritization, delivery, analytics, and feedback.

The product management process is similar across workplaces but the names and details may vary. It’s a lengthy path, with stakeholder participation throughout and contributions from multiple departments. This piece defines the seven main stages of the product management process such as idea management, road mapping, prioritization, delivery, and more. We also learn that great ideas in product development do not necessarily mean they will develop into exceptional products.

How to structure product teams and feature developments inside one team: basic needs, long-term initiatives, and short-term bets.

Product management concepts and frameworks writer Andras Juhasz discusses the answer to the conundrum, of "how to structure product teams to operate efficiently" in this article. He explores a framework for designing product teams, how that’s similar to making investments, and how it can be translated to deciding on feature priorities by simply treating product teams as investments.

Too much focus on the competition, and not enough time worrying about the users.

Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired, in a clear business context that comes from leadership.

Learn how to select the right leadership style to effectively guide others and become a successful product manager or product owner.

This article explains how product managers and product owner scan use shared goals to lead and align the development team and stakeholders.

Sharing eight tips to help you make the right product decisions and generate strong support from the stakeholders and development team members.

What can product managers and product leaders learn from jazz, an art form that is all about improvisation, collaboration, and being willing to take risks?

What product managers can learn from jazz musicians, in the keynote talk at the Mind the Product conference of 2016

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships, and can be accumulated to make faster and faster decisions.

All high functioning teams must prioritize. Not once a month, not once a week — but rigorously, and ruthlessly.

Sharing the process used at Def Method to help clients avoid product failure and ensure that they build to succeed.

Some of the best PMs make their decisions based on first principles: assumptions that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

This article shares seven recommendations to get ready for taking on the role of a head of product and to be off to a great start.

Scaling a product management team can be challenging. This article shares practical tips to help you succeed in growing your team.

This articles explains how the term "product owner" is applied. It describes six roles that exercise product ownership but differ in what they actually own.

The article describes six common types of product owners and their roles. The roles of each product owner are product management roles, anybody playing one of the roles takes product ownership, but the ownership scope significantly differs, and with it, the empowerment and skills required to succeed. Any product role can provide a great opportunity to help progress a product and create value for the users and business. In general, the six product owners are; the original scrum product owner, the feature owner, the component owner, the platform owner, the SAFe product owner, and the portfolio owner.

A thin line between love and hate defines most relationships between Product Owners and Developers.

Insights from 7 scientific studies into what it is that Product Owners do and what makes them successful.

Questions and tips for interviewing product managers

Breaking the six Product Manager skill areas and management into more granular measurable skills.

Find out how the product owner and the product manager roles differ and what they have in common.

Find out how to apply the product owner role when a single product owner is not sufficient and the responsibilities have to be shared.

A basic understanding of how we can measure product/market fit using metrics.

Marc Andreessen, in one of the definitions of product-market fit discussed in this article, notes that (PMF) is when the customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers and money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. The PMF concept is important when working on a new product, as it helps build a successful business around. However, it's alleged that few understand the concept and can measure product-market fit using metrics. Let's read about some of the most common product/market fit definitions and their advantages and disadvantages here.

How do we decide what goes into the product, determine it's roadmap, and balance between the business and technology needs.

A very descriptive text in slides delving into Product Management, mainly focusing on what it is, what leads to a product manager's nightmare, the difference between good and bad product managers, how we decide the product roadmap, and many more. If your interest is to understand the responsibilities of a product manager, how to deal with the chasm in product development, and why some products fail, take a look at these slides.

Learn what an effective product strategy is and how it helps you create a successful product.

How Spotify embraces and embodies the principles behind each of the dimensions of the product model.

This article explains how you can systematically link product strategy and execution by using the product strategy cycle.

“Build a product that solves a real pain point” is roughly correct but not entirely accurate.

Learn how to create a powerful agile product roadmap that helps you describe how your product is likely to grow and aligns the stakeholders.

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. In this episode, I share ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

Seven proven techniques to help you answer it, and prioritize a product roadmap.

Try Needs, Wants and Wishes instead of MoSCoW when prioritizing.

There are several ways to prioritize a product backlog but Mike Cohen clearly disagrees with the MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Will not have) prioritization technique in this article citing that the method fails to consider items placed in the could-have category and is used to sort out product requirements for a non-agile project. Instead, through an approach that he borrows from his financial planner, he suggests projects to try needs, wants, and wishes. The agile coach notes that the new method has worked well with 3 companies he tried and he finds it a lot easier to explain wants vs. wishes than explaining could-haves.

Learn how to create a powerful agile product roadmap that helps you describe how your product is likely to grow and aligns the stakeholders.

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. This post shares ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

An overview of the GO product roadmap: a goal-oriented, agile roadmap that effectively captures how your product is likely to evolve.

Find out how the product roadmap and the product backlog relate, and who should own the two artefacts.

This article explains how making you product roadmap goal-oriented (or outcome-based), shared, and actionable allows you to fully leverage it.

Moving to value-based delivery by ditching feature measurement and using OKRs to identify and measure customer value.

Most organizations are still using an annual, waterfall, top-down process to create a static set of goals that conflicts directly with Agile. These organizations have become feature-factories, where many improvements are incremental at best. This talk by Felipe Castro shows how to define agile goals using OKR (Objectives and Key Results), the goal setting framework adopted by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox.

The difference between a project mindset and a product mindset and why product mindset outshines project mindset in client satisfaction.

We have heard of organizations starting temporary projects targeting a specific goal in a predetermined period, with a set budget. Most projects manage to pull it off but end up with a poor product that does not meet their consumer's needs. But why is this the case? Which is the best MINDSET for organizational teams to adopt to deliver a satisfying product to its clients? Barry Overeem in this article weighs the differences between Project Mindset and Product Mindset and answers why Product Mindset outweighs Project Mindest in team development and client's satisfaction.

A summary of lessons learned in product management

Putting in the hard work necessary to become a Great PM creates tremendous career and time flexibility. Shreyas Doshi shares 14 years of experience as a product manager and product leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo in a list of 30 comparisons between good and great PMs. He reasons that any good PM has the intellectual capacity to become a great PM - working on progressing a few of these items at a time.

Being clear on what a product is a prerequisite for effective product innovation.

A product is a collection of attributes (or features) that address customer or user needs thereby providing value. Products are means to an end – to meet customer and user needs. Projects and teams serve to bring the next product version to life. Understanding which products an organization develops is the prerequisite for achieving product success. It enables longer-term thinking and finding the right people. Only if it’s clear what the product is can management find the right product owner and can the right people be invited to join the development effort.

This article helps you create a great product vision. It describes six essential qualities that a compelling vision has to have.

In this article, Roman Pichler suggests that a product vision can be a powerful tool to align stakeholders and development teams as it acts as the product's true north, and also inspires and guides people. He then lists and describes six easy-to-understand qualities of a great product vision talking about product vision elements like inspiration, Ethical, Conciseness, and others.

KPIs are crucial to track product performance and make effective product decisions. This article helps you select the right key performance indicators.

How do you keep the CEO and PM on the same page?

This post introduces the Product Vision Boar, a simple, yet powerful tool to capture the vision and product strategy.