Zooming out, drilling down and changing hats
A product manager/founder has to wear multiple hats to ensure that her product is successful. This article highlights the perils of staying too long with a static perspective and how to avoid it by zooming out, drilling down and changing hats when required.
Let’s discuss the above idea taking the example of a product manager/founder whose product is close to reaching product market fit and is scaling up.
How should she think about improving her current product ?
She should start by wearing the designer’s hat.
- She should identify her user persona(s) in detail
- She should do user research by talking to and observing her users, so that she is able to describe their user journey including their goals, motivations, pain points etc.
- She has to keep building a product that helps users do their jobs, solve their pain points and achieve their desired outcomes
- All this by taking continuous feedback on the current fidelity product stage(mockup > prototype > MVP)
She needs to keep doing these iteratively to identify the ideal product that a user will pay for either with money or with time and data that can be used to monetize indirectly. The market size for the product should be attractive for her and her investors.
Perils of staying completely in this mode:
Once the initial versions are released and product starts scaling, the product owner needs to wear a different hat to manage growth. If not, the product team or its sponsors will have no visibility on the success of the product and various initiatives they are investing in.
Zoom out to tracking metrics and doing experiments
Now, she needs to measure important product metrics, set goals to improve them, identify initiatives for these and execute them.
I had written an article on product success metrics earlier. Once the product and product team starts scaling, it becomes very important to track these KPI-s and make sure that continuous product enhancements are improving them.
For example, the product team can commit that in the next quarter they will reduce churn rate by 10% by launching few product improvements.
Startup metrics for pirates: Dave McCLure
I would also argue that some features will emerge only if you focus on improving a KPI and not from user research. For example, loyalty programs for increasing repeat usage, bundling of product features, membership programs for increasing life time value of customers etc. might not be discovered through user research.
The team also needs to imbibe a culture of experimentation and taking data driven decisions. Once a framework for a/b testing and decision making is adopted, then it becomes easy to scale the product team.
Perils of focusing here:
Sometimes, product teams focusing on continuously improving KPI-s become inside-out focused. They stop wearing the designer’s hat, lose their empathy with users, and just obsess over improving these metrics. This results in irritating product features like spamming the users to increase engagement and weird user flows to improve referrals and worse.
Now what!
Now, the product team has balanced user research/design thinking with data driven decision making and experimentation. They seem to keep on improving the product as measured by the KPI-s. Is this enough ?
Not at all. A business should show a path to profitability in the long run so that its investors get a handsome return. Its products should grow in usage, monetize and also defend against current and future competitors. For this the current view is too myopic.
Lot of things can change for better or worse (and we should assume the worst)
- The industry might be shrinking
- Current competition might get aggressive in pricing and/or their features and value proposition
- New entrants might easily copy the product’s features and capture business. We might have to thinking of building moats against that
- The product might not be serving a niche well enough and a new entrant might capture that space
- An important vendor might increase their prices and the product might lose its profitability (think about the costly API-s that we use)
- You might be depending on few big customers who might run out of business or consolidate and increase their bargaining power
- A technology trend can make the product irrelevant or help competitors who ride the wave. (think what internet did to print media, digital cameras to kodak, ML/AI/Bots, smart speakers/personal assistants, virtual reality, IOT and more)
- A new user interface paradigm might emerge that helps a new set of competitors. (chat based platforms, search on maps, voice based interfaces)
- A social trend or a demographic shift might suddenly make your space vulnerable for competition (think facebook losing young users to other apps)
- A legislation can make your competitive advantages irrelevant (think GDPR)
The leadership team should proactively foresee these landscape changes and identify measures to get favorable outcomes for the business.
Questions about Growth:
In addition to the above, the team should be actively looking at growing the business:
- Is the team ready to target different type of customers (next billion internet users/enterprise customers) ?
- Is the team ready to launch a complementary product for the same market ?
- Is the team ready to launch in a new market ?
All these can be called as strategic themes/initiatives and become inputs to building the product roadmap.
Articles on product management written by me:
On what goes into a product roadmap and the perils of a static perspective: Zooming out, drilling down and changing hats
Managing machine learning based products and model evaluation metrics: How to evaluate your model?
A brief note on causal inference for product managers
How to add machine learning to your product?
On tracking and measure product KPI-s: Success Metrics
On learning continuously: About Curiosity, Learning and Eigenvectors
