Author: Heather Samarin

It’s Product Roadmapping Season! Get some quick tips…And a helpful framework for the process

Heather Samarin 0 Comment Product Management , , ,

 

For many of us, roadmapping season is starting or about to start…

We’re coming up to the end of the year and embarking on our new year.  And every year we walk into roadmapping with just a little dread. “Ugh, another 2+ months of research, debate, and planning gymnastics!”  “No one looks at it!” “By mid year, it’s blown up anyway!”

I’m here to tell you that if you approach it with the right principles and effort, the roadmap can be a great ongoing galvanizing operating mechanism in your company.  It can actually help you avoid shiny object syndrome too!

We should start with a couple basics…

Definition of Success of a Product Roadmap: 

  • Enables the business to achieve it’s goals; on time, within expectations
  • Provides a way for the entire organization to understand the prioritization, timing and relative sizing of solving major customer problems
  • Drives long term platform development scope & timing

We presume you have a documented business strategy and objectives that are used as a rudder throughout this process.  If not, we tell all our product managers…propose them and get agreement, so that you can build a supportive product roadmap.  I say that loosely, because it’s not that easy.  But without business strategy and clearly defined objectives/measures, what are you aiming for?  We have an online course for facilitating the definition of both if you find yourself in this position.

Okay, now for the main act…Here are some tips in achieving roadmap success:

Start with the Customer

No duh. Right?  Well, lets step back a second.  For many, this means “let’s do the features that our customers requested.”  That is not what we mean here.  Instead, it’s making sure that you have clear persona(s); personas that your team/company has agreed to.  This is not easy.  But if done right, you can actually ward off shiny objects that address problems of customers outside your persona sweet spot.  Having a clear persona helps people understand who you’re NOT going to solve in your roadmap as well.  We’ve got a couple posts on our blog about personas…try this one.  Contact one of our rebel leaders if you need a simple template that works!

Clearly Define Problems You’re Solving – Your Roadmap Themes

Most roadmaps are organized by 2 dimensions…time being the obvious one…and themes which are basically problems, strategies, or objectives for the business.  Each theme should be solving a very clear customer problem.  Having a clearly defined problem statement will help galvanize your team around what you are and are NOT solving for.  Having clear problem statements will help ward off shiny objects as well…”Hi Mr. shiny object thrower!  How does this shiny object serve the problems we agreed to solve in our roadmap?”  Most of the time you get “Well…uh…hmmmm….You’re probably right.  Let’s table it for now.”  The persona and problem statements help you justify tabling a shiny object.  If you don’t have those, it’s easy to get into an opinion-driven debate that usually ends up with that shiny object being added to the pipeline and other important initiatives are delayed or worse, never completed.

Facilitate Innovation/Design Thinking

You may already have clarity on target persona and a clearly defined problem AND a previously discussed set of initiatives that serve both.  Hopefully they are fully agreed to by the extended team.  But if you are questioning any one of those inputs or if you don’t have a shared vision on those inputs, then I would step back and ensure you are flexing your design thinking muscle.  Problem-driven brainstorming (with choice-ful attendees…creative minds, market experts (internal or external,) customers, partners, etc.) and other design thinking techniques will ensure the most impactful ideas are considered vs. just the squeaky wheels.  A quick set of customer interviews (5-10 targeted interviews can do wonders,) a brainstorming session, and a vote will drive far more committment than status quo thinking or focusing on the “sacred cows” in the organization.

Build Shared Vision…and Commitment

As a product manager, you’ve probably felt the pain at one point in your career of a lack of committment to the product roadmap…either someone from your leadership team, your development team, or your design team doesn’t agree with the prioritization or existence of some initiative and it makes it a painful process every time you have to justify it and ensure it’s given the attention it requires to be successful.  We’ve all been there.  Your job in this process is bringing team members in at the right time…Providing them the customer context (having them hear from customers directly is even better,) getting their feedback and hearing what their dependencies or concerns are, getting their ideas, agreeing on the criteria for prioritization of themes/efforts, etc. …And ensuring they are onboard before the final presentation of the roadmap.  Ideally, your development and operational leaders are standing beside you when presenting to the leadership team and show as much ownership over the roadmap as you do!  Yes, I have experienced this myself!

Understand ALL Your Critical Path Dependencies

Most product managers guess at their dependencies or don’t cover them all.  This is just a word to the wise.  Go through your draft roadmap with your major partners to get their input and understand what they’d have to do (development or otherwise) to ensure the initiatives can be successful in the timeframes you are expecting them to be.  As what their biggest concerns are or believe to be the biggest risks.  You’d be surprise at what you learn by going through your draft roadmap with your teams beyond just the dev team… support, operations, marketing, IT, etc.  We always think about it in terms of inputs, process, and outputs.  What are the input decisions, development, or partnerships required to begin the dev on any given initiative?  What is needed to actually develop the functionality; 3rd party software, partnerships, critical-path platform tech, etc?  And what needs to be released or ready by the time that functionality needs to be in market; partnership support teams, partnership technology or marketing, marketing technology, packaging, etc?  Think beyond mainline platform dependencies!

Ongoing Management

Once complete, we usually have a couple versions…one that’s all polished and summarized for the leadership team and one that is used for ongoing discussion as we learn more and have ongoing discussions with our core team.  We recommend reviewing the roadmap every month or two to ensure you’re managing the backlog accordingly and you’re communicating any major learning and associated pivots in the roadmap to the leadership team.  You can also use the roadmap as a tool in shiny object discussions.  “You want that shiny object added?  Are you willing to push this theme out X months for it?”  When you can have a discussion about the implications of a shiny object as it relates to a roadmap that the entire team helped build, you avoid opinion-based discussion and ensure you are doing what’s best for the customer and business.  It’s a much easier discussion.

Don’t have a clean process to take into account all these best practices?  We have a process framework that has worked for us. It’s a ratty ol’ powerpoint, but its a proven process that enables the most targeted, impactful, and committed roadmap.

Happy Roadmapping Season!!

 

 

Persona Pitfalls

Heather Samarin 0 Comment Product Management , , , , , ,

 

Okay, everyone says they know who their target customer is…Many even say they have personas.  Where does your team fit here?

Here are common pitfalls we see in most companies as they relate to effective personas (can you say “That’s us!” to any of these?):

  • Focused on demographics – age, location, occupation, etc.
  • It’s made up by an external vendor
  • Your team has a couple documented, your UX team has some, there’s one the research department created….point being there are a few and not all consistent.
  • Aren’t considered in day to day product decisions
  • Cost a lot of money for beautifully designed artifacts (designed to be displayed)
  • Lengthy (boring) descriptions or multi-page persona’s
  • Haven’t been updated since being created years ago.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It’s okay!  It’s normal.  We often don’t know how to build practical personas and understand how to use them on a day to day basis.

Here are some tips to apply tomorrow:

  • Try using a template that works.  Here’s one we’ve created (and have a whole workshop around.)  Contact us if you’d like to take our course.  Other templates work too, but make sure they aren’t exacerbating the problems mentioned above.
  • Focus on behaviors and attitudes that are relevant to the task/problem you are solving… leave demographics for last if at all.
  • Work with your broader team to finalize (don’t do this in a vacuum…include dev leaders, UX team, and research team members, if applicable.)
  • Find a picture that best represents that persona.  This will be the most memorable thing about the persona and what gets used most.  Make it a good one.  With a relevant background environment, facial expression, clothing, tools in hand, etc.  Check out a really great example of visually oriented personas
  • Post them up where everyone can see/utilize.  See examples of how some companies have done this.
  • Treat them like participants in a conversation when making product decisions…”Would [your persona’s name] actually find this valuable?  What’s the problem she/he is facing and what’s the context impacting the solution we build?”  Here is one example we use in our workshop that highlights a real world example of utilizing a persona in choosing a feature/design direction for an area of a small business software application.

You’d be surprised how many companies believe they have clear target customer definitions but when we poll the entire team (product managers, UX team, engineers, etc.) we get different definitions across the teams and different opinions about how/if those definitions are adhered to in decision making.  That makes getting product decisions made quickly and in a way that “stick” almost impossible.

Start by polling the team… are you all on the same page?

 

 

 

Turn the Negative into Focused Action

Heather Samarin 0 Comment Product Management

Did you know…

  • Americans tell an average of 9 people about good experiences, and tell 16 (nearly two times more) people about poor experiences. [Source: American Express Survey, 2011.]
  • It costs 7x more to obtain a new customer than to keep an existing one.
    [Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs]

What is the number one reason your users speak negatively about your brand?  You probably have heard many reasons, but are you acting on the issues that will impact your growth most significantly?

Effective product managers always know what their top drivers of negative comments / pain.  As such they are making sure that those top drivers are known and are reflected in your roadmap and backlog appropriately.

Our experience shows that most product teams come across negative comments all the time but rarely understand how to act in a way that will impact the company in a positive way in the long term.  Instead, the team is reacting to as many negative comments as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.  The CEO says, “I just saw this comment on my twitter feed, we need to fix it.”  The division Leader comes to you and says, “My friend told me he hated this part of the experience, how do we fix it?”  Don’t even get us started on what your poor technical support team hear or online listening posts tell you.

Product managers are usually left with a plethora of negative comments and pain points coming in from colleagues, social media, customer support, and leadership team. It’s overwhelming!  You brainstorm around potential fixes,  juggle to get them into the backlog, and generally don’t have the justification necessary for why one fix goes in before the other…leaving the CEO, division leaders, and other “messengers of pain” left wondering why you’re not fixing their issue.  I, personally, used to feel deflated because I never thought I was doing enough.

Well, let’s re-inflate!  Let’s talk about a quick approach to building your confidence in making the most impactful prioritization decisions and keeping your “messengers of pain” abreast of the smart decisions you’re making!

Remember, this isn’t about being 100% accurate, it’s about having a practical approach to sorting and moving forward with a rationale your leadership can get behind.  You will never be 100% right…

  1.  Get Feedback:  Make sure you asking a summary feedback question through survey, interviews, and/or service calls, that helps you understand who’s happy and who isn’t.  We are huge advocates of the “likelihood to recommend” question (often referred to Net Promoter,) but if you ask “how delighted are you…” or “how satisfied are you…” or some version of those, you’re halfway there.  All we recommend is that you ask this question the same way across your key user listening posts (those with the highest volume and most representative of your primary user segments.)  No duh, you say?  Well, you’d be surprised…and hang on…There’s more.
  2. Ask Why:  Make sure you are asking “why” if they’ve responded negatively to that question…Do this through an open ended follow up survey question…a question at the end of an interview or service call.  Just get the qualitative reasoning behind the negative answer.  For those of you that don’t get this kind of feedback, you’re not alone and you’re still okay.   (Pssst… It’s never too late to get started.  We’ll cover that in future blog posts.) Instead, talk to people in your company that have firsthand conversations with your users.  Your customer service/support team, your marketing/social media team, your product management team, and your sales team are all listening to your customers at different phases of their experience.  Bring them together and listen to them discuss what they believe to be the big drivers of pain and negative comments.  Give them a chance to tell you what they believe are THE top 1-2 issues and why.  Then use the data you do have to validate and further prioritize…If your social media team is seeing a few comments a day out of 1000 followers vs. your service team seeing 200 support calls a day (many with clear negative feedback,) you can use your judgement in deciding which one to prioritize.  You’ll also find that you’ll get consistent feedback across listening posts.  Those are the gems!
  3. Categorize:  Take the open ended answers across all your listening posts and LOOK AT THEM!  We can’t tell you how many companies that have a boat load (technical term) of rich open-ended responses, but don’t know what to do them.  Take the data across different listening posts and dump it into Excel.  Categorize it. (Yes, this is very subjective, we realize, but unless you have deep pockets and years of runway before you have to make a tradeoff decision, this is all you got!)  Remember to remain unbiased through the process.  Your categories will change as you get through more data. So remain open and evolve your categories accordingly until they are most representative of the sample(s) obtained.  Make them as mutually exclusive as possible until you get to the end.  You can then review each mutually exclusive category and parse those into subcategories if necessary.   This is time consuming depending on how much data you have, but anyone can do it over coffee each morning for one week and have a very solid outcome.
  4. Turn it into Actionable Information:  Once you’ve summarized this data, get it ready for a discussion that drives shared vision with your teams.  Rank order the categories based on volume within each customer segment.  Provide a clear list of prioritized issues.  For those top issues, use the sub categorization (or create hypotheses) to clarify what the issue means in terms of root cause. Bring the data to life by bringing in actual quotes for each that represent that root cause.  Define the next steps for each major issue.  It might be further research into understanding an cloudy issue or taking action on those issue(s) that are clear cut.  Circle back to the pet projects from those messengers of pain and where they fit into this new found education on top pain points.  Will any of them neutralize or turn the most important negatives into a positive?
  5. Present and Discuss.  Bring your teams together, leadership included, and show what you’ve learned.  Help them understand the top drivers of pain and negative comments and why you have prioritized the product initiatives the way you have.
  6. Act.  Create the user stories, get them into the backlog, do the follow up research on those issues that aren’t as clear but are high in volume.
  7. Rinse and Repeat

This is scrappy and it’s also subjective.  But in most cases, we product managers don’t have millions of records of data, automated AI tools, or analysts laying round waiting on our every command.  And we have to make decisions quickly and effectively.  This is a practical way of developing an educated gut for tradeoffs we have to make every day.  It’s a way of enabling you to focus on the most important negative comments/pain points, neutralizing the negative or possibly turning it into the positive.  It provides air cover for the pet projects of the week.

Sitting in Your Customer’s Shoes at least 30 Minutes a Day

Heather Samarin 0 Comment Product Management

Sit in your customers’ shoes for at least 30 minutes a day.

Looking at customer satisfaction metrics is great, but isn’t enough. We also really need to hear their voice and/or see them in their own environments; using your product.  And this needs to be on a regular basis, not just saved for the periodic qualitative research effort.

Set time aside each day or a few days a week to sit in your customer’s shoes.

Here are some ways to think about it:

  1. Pick the customers that are most important (that could mean a lot of things depending on where you are in your lifecycle… newest customers, highest paying customers, angry customers, etc.)  Don’t make this a massive thought or analytical exercise.  Just be conscious in your choice.
  2. Pick a channel of communication where you’re most likely to find that customer.  Again, don’t make this tough.  If you only have one way to contact or find a customer, then you have your answer.
  3. Choose 2-3 questions you want to get answered.  Be thoughtful about what you want to learn.  This should take no more than 5 minutes.   Examples:  “What’s the one thing my customer would change to make their experience worthy of recommending to others?”  “What is the one thing we could do to get you to use our product?”  etc.
  4. Get started TODAY.  Here are scrappy ways to get connected:
    • Take a support call or listen into support calls over your lunch hour
    • Read a customer email or feedback note… read a bunch over lunch or coffee
    • Set up a “Follow Me Home” (more on this method later) that essentially has you watching a customer use your product…live.  You can do this remotely if you don’t have a choice, but actually traveling to their home or place of business to watch them use your product is invaluable.  Doing that at least 1X per month will make you a significantly more effective product leader!
    • Sort and read through your open ended responses from your satisfaction or Net Promoter surveys (a bit more time consuming but so enlightening.)
    • There are many other ways to do this…pick one and go with it.  Test a few different ones until you feel good about the feedback your getting.
  5. The goal is to get qualitative insights around the key questions you are dealing with around the product.  Adding the necessary context around your quantitative data.

Set an example for your team.  The better you know your customer, the more effective at problem solving, and therefore, delighting, you’ll be.

Keep delighting!