“Modern” processes and practices for product design, development, and management are a complex topic.
Let’s start by saying that there are just too many: too many different methods, tools, and ways to do your craft.
Just consider the following table:
There are myriad of options, without any “leader” or de-facto way of using them. Additionally, there are significant differences in implementation according to the stage of the product, type of business, and industry. It is quite different doing discovery work for B2B financial services than for a freemium consumer app in a startup.
In summary, each company does it differently. Product teams face the stress of continually being selecting, learning, and changing their practices.
Opposition
Furthermore, some influential voices oppose having this kind of structured approach to our disciplines. For example, Gibson Biddle in his Netflix culture talk mentions
“While most companies add process and rules as they grow, culture helps employees to make great decisions without talking to one another. If executed well, culture is an antidote to talent-sucking, mind-numbing rules, and process.”
In essence, opponents to processes argue that it is impossible to set rules that cover all the different aspects of product development, which may kill talent’s motivation and ability to innovate.
Surviving
How can we survive this variety and opposing points of view?
The good news is that if we try to find the essence of those processes and practices, most have similar foundations. Knowing and using those principles in any methodology is a critical factor to:
- Apply the tool with success, understanding “why” rather than merely following steps.
- Quickly adapt to new practices, understanding that they are a different execution of similar concepts.
- Understand which method can work better in each context.
A parallelism can be made with agile methodologies. It is far more important to “live” the agile principles than to flawlessly execute all Scrum practices with a PMI mindset.
5 Product Principles
So, what are those principles?
1. Outcome orientation
A foundational requirement to make any of the practices successful is to have teams that focus on the results instead of deliverables.
Teams won’t care to research and understand the user’s problems if they are told what to do, and they are merely focusing on the output. They won’t either experiment or iterate to get the most valuable solution.
At the core of all methods is this mindset shift, with missionary teams delivering value to the user and the business.
Related process: strategy, roadmapping, goal setting. Research, experimentation, data analysis & iteration.
2. Understand and empathize
The vast set of customer-centric techniques for research, ideation, and validation are based on the need to understand the user problem and empathize with them.
At the root of this understanding is the combination of quantitative and qualitative that many of these processes seek.
Combined with the previous one, they form a good couple: what I’m trying to solve and what does success looks like. By knowing the problem, we recognize if it is worth solving.
Related process: research, definition, validation, analytics, strategy, goal setting.
3. Rapid learning loops
We all know that most ideas will fail. Instead of getting in love with our designed solutions, we embrace uncertainty. We focus on identifying our riskiest assumptions to experiment and learn as fast and cheap as possible.
That nimbleness requires being thoughtful to “slice” the problem into manageable hypotheses to test. If your idea is to build a bridge over a river, do not think of the smallest possible bridge. Think about the “crossing the river” problem and see if people would be interested in crossing on a boat.
Another implication of this principle is designing good experiments: gathering the facts, being data-driven and analytical, and reasoning the success criteria are complex skills required in any discovery practice.
Related process: research, discovery, data analysis, and iteration.
4. Diverge and Converge
Knowing that most ideas will fail and that we will build a muscle for quick experimentation, our goal at almost any stage is to start by considering multiple options (diverge) to later decide the most promising ones.
The Design Thinking method describes it clearly in the double diamond model:
Similarly, the opportunity-solution-tree help teams consider multiple opportunities for one desired outcome and numerous solutions for each option.
Even when considering strategy, the idea is to evaluate many potential insights to get to our vision and make a data-informed decision of the most promising ones.
Related process: research, strategy & goal setting, definition.
5. Fast value delivery with long-term sight
After countless failures with waterfall, agile practices are now a well-established method for delivery. But regardless of what flavor you are using, your goal should be to minimize time-to-value for customers.
This focus on rapid delivery to the customer is at the core of the “agile value proposition”:
We are gaining business value, and we are also facilitating our rapid learning loops, reducing risk, and increasing our ability to adapt.
Breaking full solutions into a smaller deliverable value is not the only division we want to make. We are splitting strategic outcomes in more granular opportunities, user problems into actionable pains, broad assumptions into smaller hypotheses, etcetera. Everything becomes more manageable and allows us to iterate with agility and speed, with continuous learning.
Additionally, we don’t want to get lost into the smaller components and lose sight of the big picture. Tools like OKRs, Story Mapping, Customer Journeys, and many more help us navigate from a general view to the particular nuances of each product component.
Related process: agile execution, goals, discovery, definition.
Bonus — communication
I can’t say that communication is a principle, but it is undoubtedly embedded in most product processes. Given the relevance of products to the organization’s success, the product team has multiple stakeholders, clients, and product peers who continually need to receive updates on our progress.
While trying to survive in the methods jungle, keep in mind that regardless of the selected tools, you should be aware of how to use them to communicate and discuss the product and plans’ status.
Conclusion
I have to admit that I am prone to use processes. But the number of options can be overwhelming, and it is easy to fall into the checklist trap.
Understanding the foundations behind your practices is the best way to gain flexibility and get the most of each tool you choose.