Product Discovery 👩🌾
As a PM it is in your very nature to get stuff done (GSD) making it very tempting to jump right in, but rushing to find a quick solution without thoroughly understanding the problem will only lead you off course. Beyond your personal desire to GSD chances are the executive leadership team, customers, and possibly sales are eagerly waiting for a solution.
Rushing to find a solution without understanding the core problem will lead you off course. If you don't take a step back and refocus there is a high probability that what you build can be something no one wants instead of building something people actually want.
Product Discovery gives you the opportunity to prevent mistakes by intimately understanding users' problems, needs, validate ideas and solutions before going into development. - Product Girl
While there are many ways to go about Product Discovery the GV Design Sprint is very beneficial as it helps to fast track validating the problems you think users have and see if the solutions that you and your team come up with will help them. The GV Design sprint is a 5 day sprint process that moves into 4 stages: idea, build, launch, and learn.
During the 5 day process you will validate your ideas by launching a prototype of your minimal viable product to understand if the solution you have will work for your customers. If you want to learn more about the process read “How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp.
GV Design Sprint Process
This process is a proven methodology for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users. The below outlines the 5 day structured process
- Understand (pre-sprint): Gather as much information as you can about problems, opportunities, goals and success metrics across the organization.
- Define (day 1): Choose the problem or opportunity and outline them with goals and success metrics. Make sure the problem or opportunity is an important area of focus for the customer and business.
- Sketch (day 2): Sketch a wide range of potential solutions on paper.
- Decide (day 3): Select the solution to prototype
- Prototype (day 4): Build a realistic prototype.
- Test/Validate (day 5): Gather feedback from users to validate or invalidate your hypothesis.
Transparency
Developing a skill for transparency will help to limit short comings by creating an atmosphere of trust and support. Secrets or purposely leaving out information will create constraints for the organization and show a lack of judgement. Whenever there is an opportunity to showcase your roadmap, explain team goals, or show success metrics make sure that you are transparent so that your peers and stakeholders can understand the current state of initiatives.
Product Decisions, Effective Communication and Delivery
As a PM making product decisions comes with the job. You will need to establish why a team exists, pick a strategy that fulfills a vision, decide why, where, how to make the most impact, and prioritize the most important features that will need to be built first. Being able to communicate your product decisions with intention and conviction is a super power. Being an effective communicator will help build interpersonal relationships with leaders and customers.
There is a reason that one of the most popular interview questions that are asked in a PM interviews is "what do you do when someone disagrees with you?" As a product manager employers want to know that you can handle differences of opinions and be able to articulate your decisions. This comes down to communication.
When communicating your product decision it's beneficial to position it in your mind as "offering them a possibility." Then build awareness of the idea by framing it in a positive way. Endorse your viewpoint instead of just presenting information and being persistent for someone to accept your view. Build motivation by showing how it can be helpful to the business and customers. If leaders feel that something will be helpful to not only the customers but the business as well (aka business viability) it sets a different tone.
Don't forget to let go and listen. Once you've communicated your product decision and the best approach (awareness) and how it will benefit not only the customer but the business (motivation). You will need to stop "telling" and starting "asking." Be genuinely curious about their feedback and point of view. It's important to not forget that you are offering them a possibility, not insisting.
Partnering with Design
From the very beginning of any project or new initiative a good PM will invite the design team and bring them in on conversations to ensure alignment. As a PM it's important to not dictate a solution, but create a collaborative approach. There should be a safe space where design and product managers can gather to share their thoughts to create a business viable solution for users.
The design team and the product manager will need to have a close relationship. Although designers are responsible for the user experience, a PM is responsible for defining what success looks like and making sure that the solution meets that criteria.
One way to develop a great relationship with your design team is to build your design sense. This means understanding the products they use, why features/products are designed a certain way, Laws of UX, fighting for your designers and keeping the user experience top of mind. Here are a few tips to develop design sense.
Product/Design Principles
Product principles are a set of core values that guide designs, evaluate solutions and decide on difficult tradeoffs. These values help to make autonomous decisions and are effective in aligning cross-functional teams.
These code of ethics help to embrace and maintain the values the team has set for the product by helping teams stay true to their ideals as every choice the product team makes can be checked against these principles. Thus, product principles are often referred to as the core DNA of the product.
Above all, product principles can help mitigate any confusion by guiding the decisions that need to be made and validating if what are you doing is worth pursuing.
Product Principles help to ensure that teams stay consistent, aligned, and focused when developing or maintaining a product. - Product Girl
If the team does not have a set of product and design principles you can research other companies principles to help lay your foundation. Before doing this it is beneficial to come up with current examples of tough decisions that were made and highlight the difficult tradeoffs. This helps to prevent using generic principles that won't help change the way your team builds and designs products.
💁♀️ Tip: When making decisions if you and your team cannot point back to one or more of the product principles then you should reconsider whether it's the right move. Also, make sure to get buy-in from the stakeholders so they can reinforce the decisions that are made will be guided by these principles.
Product Sense
Product Sense, Product Thinking, and Product mindset are all terms used to describe a PM's natural instinct when figuring out what problems to solve.
Product Sense is knowing what makes a product great and how to make it even better. - Product Girl
Product Sense is an acquired skill and can be refined through practice. As you grow as a product manager the ability to solve for complex problems becomes so efficient that it becomes a natural instinct. So this is great news as it's not something that you need to be born with and can be acquired through time.
This is a beautiful skill to develop because it gives you the ability to explore all the different possibilities of a product. Having a product mindset means that you are constantly exploring and analyzing what can be done to improve a product. You want to know how a product ticks, how it's designed, how it makes money, how users truly feel, and what you believe can be done differently.
The following are a few tips to help develop a product mindset...
Evaluate
- Observe people interacting with your product
- How is the product designed
- What are the goals
- What makes the app money
- What keeps users coming back to the product
- Deconstruct products
Be Curious
- Be aware of changes happening in the world and the tech sector
- Learn from other great product managers
Building product sense takes time and some are naturally prone to it and others it may take a bit more work. To help with building this skillset continually use great products, check out design websites like dribbble to see the latest UI/UX, brainstorm with teammates, cross-functional teams, and get involved in product forums to expand your ideas.
Product Taste-->Your Quality Bar-->Product Quality
Delivering a well rounded user experience is always at the top of a PM's list, but how do you determine your quality bar? This is set by your users expectations of the product. What are they expecting? How does it compare to the other products they use? If your product is rolling out with more bugs than your competitors than your product will feel like low quality to your user base.
Finding the middle ground and flexing your product taste to align with user expectations will determine the quality of your product and help to create your quality bar. - Product Girl
Become intimately aware of your UI. Notice when the work flow is off or if there are missing elements in production. Maybe there are features that aren't working during testing, maybe the new feature failed entirely for new users in a/b testing, maybe their are some low-fi or hi-fi wireframes that have usability issues.
It's also important to know which issues need to be fixed and when you need to roll with it. You can't fix everything and cost is always a factor especially as you move up in your PM career you become responsible for P&L. This is when you will need to work closely with the design team and engineers. The goal is to make sure the important 'must haves' of a product get fixed and the ones that don't won't affect the quality of the product or your quality bar.
Final Words 📖
Throughout the process of development and when starting a new project always reiterate your goals. A lot of times we work so quickly we forget to come back to our goals and loose sight of what we are trying to accomplish. This is especially true during the product discovery phase. A helpful way to remind yourself would be to put a post-it on your computer reminding you of your goals. (Hint: I used to do this along with my success metrics).
Don't forget that product discovery along with quick validation before you start the 'real' work on a product will save time and cost. Never assume anything about what a customer would want. What matters is building the right solution for their needs. Assumptions don't matter only validations do.
Next Steps 🚀
- Google Ventures Design Sprint
- Design Sprint
- Learn Early/Learn Often Design Sprint
- Benefits of Product Management Transparency
- How to develop Product Sense