Are These Challenges Hampering Your Product Design and Management?

While product design and more general product thinking are becoming the industry ideal, many organizations struggle to implement them fully and reap the benefits. In many cases, the problems they’re facing can be boiled down to a few main issues that are getting in the way.

We’ll discuss three of these issues and some practical solutions you can begin to implement today. We encourage you to invest an hour of your day by watching our recent webinar, Solving Your Product Challenges: Top 3 Ways to Focus your Strategy, for more detail and a much deeper understanding of this subject.

Challenge: No clear direction

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re unlikely to get there. Companies that want to implement product thinking but that do not have a clear direction in place to help product teams make decisions quickly and effectively are going to run into roadblocks all along the way. They may be able to build things quickly and efficiently, but they’ll be building the wrong things more often than not.

Solution: Identify and utilize your North Star

In centuries past, before GPS and other navigating technologies, sailors would use the North Star (Polaris) as a means of guiding their ships across great stretches of ocean. It was so valuable because it didn’t move. The rest of the starfield seems to rotate around Polaris because of its position directly above the Earth’s North Pole. That made it a constant stationary point that navigators could use to judge their direction in relation to true north.

Metaphorically, your organization needs to have a North Star that likewise provides a solid, stationary, and reliable guidepost that product teams can use to navigate the design and development process, among other things.

This idea or statement can be likened to a corporate Mission Statement or Vision — a company’s commitment to an ideal or optimal state. In fact, in some organizations, the North Star and Mission or Vision may be closely related or even the same. But, in this case, we’re talking about an ideal or principle that everyone in the product teams can look to to guide their decision-making and prioritizing processes as they build and deploy their products.

An effective North Star is made up of four key elements:

• It communicates the company’s vision for delivering customer value.
• It can be used to hold the product (and the product teams/leaders) accountable for delivering that value.
• It can be measured using collectible metrics.
• It is stated clearly so it can be easily understood both inside and outside the company.

Challenge: Lack of collaboration

Product thinking and agility are based around highly collaborative, cross-functional teams. However, many organizations still have their engineering and design teams siloed the way they were when they followed waterfall development methods under a traditional project management scheme.

The result is a severe lack of collaboration and, as a result, a deeply flawed process that sacrifices teamwork, agility, and customer value in favor of self-congratulating, personal advancement, and internal recognition.

Solution: Build collaboration into the culture

If you’ve constructed your North Star concept effectively, all the products you currently make or will in the future will “revolve around” that concept like constellations in the starfield. They will be easily tied to it, even by people outside the company.

One excellent example is that of Tesla. Their North Star idea is their Mission Statement: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” There is obvious customer value in the ecological benefits of moving toward sustainable energy sources. It’s clearly expressed. And, the metrics and accountability are inherent in the lofty goal of pushing the world to make advances in the development and adoption of sustainable energy.

The mission behind Tesla’s Cars division serves as a perfect example of a supporting constellation: “To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles.” It translates that North Star idea into a more practical and actionable guidepost for product decisions while still focusing on customer value.

If you want to guide and support product thinking in your organization successfully, establish a North Star.

Challenge: Lack of collaboration

Product thinking and agility are based around highly collaborative, cross-functional teams. However, many organizations still have their engineering and design teams siloed the way they were when they followed waterfall development methods under a traditional project management scheme.

The result is a severe lack of collaboration and, as a result, a deeply flawed process that sacrifices teamwork, agility, and customer value in favor of self-congratulating, personal advancement, and internal recognition.

Solution: Build collaboration into the culture

A focus on collaboration within and between teams is essential to promoting product thinking and keeping customer value as the main driving force behind every action and decision. A big part of making that happen is ensuring that collaboration is culturally supported across the organization.

One example of a practice that fundamentally hinders collaboration is rewarding individual bonuses or merit increases that do not emphasize the individual’s contribution to the team’s (and company’s) success. By rewarding individuals for standing out above their peers, companies encourage them not to collaborate, lest they water down their own reputation.

Instead, bonuses and merit increases should reflect the individual’s commitment to working together with an entire product team to achieve optimal results and produce the greatest amount of value for the customer.

Likewise, if people feel like voicing their opinion will result in being shot down, or experimenting and failing may lead to punishment, they’re not going to reach out for help or work together to try new things. Instead, this kind of culture encourages people to keep to themselves, keep their heads down, and just do what they’re told. No innovation, no experimentation, and no improvement.

In other words, you are eliminating all the benefits of product thinking.

The alternative doesn’t just mean providing employees with Slack, Teams, or some other collaboration tool (although that’s an essential factor in supporting collaboration.) It comes down to making collaboration, cooperation, experimentation, and innovation the natural byproducts of the organization’s culture.

Challenge: Not involving the customer

Because customer value is the central theme of product thinking, it’s amazing that so many organizations struggle with involving the customer in their planning, design, and development processes. At the same time, it is admittedly challenging to establish customer engagement if it’s never existed before. But, it’s well worth the time and effort required. Without their feedback, there’s no way to know what is of value to them.

Solution: Pursuing customer engagement and a strong feedback loop

Product thinking and business agility work hand-in-hand, so an iterative process is fundamental to both. A product begins with feedback from customers indicating a problem exists that the company can effectively address. A minimally viable product (MVP) is produced and released to some subset of customers so they can quickly determine if the proposed solution aligns with their needs and will add value. If not, another hypothesis is developed and another experiment commences. If the MVP does solve the customers’ problem, it’s obviously worth pursuing additional features or optimization to build on that success. But, the feedback loop needs to stay open to ensure every improvement or bug fix still aligns with what the customer wants.

Of course, there’s an important caveat to remember: often, the customer doesn’t know exactly what they want. There’s little value in copying and pasting what a customer says in a survey response and using that as a user story in the product team’s backlog. Feedback needs to be synthesized and clarified to ensure real value is being delivered.

The best way to maintain an effective feedback loop is to engage your customers directly via email, social media, or other marketing research channels. This should be easy if you’ve already established an engaged community of satisfied customers and interested prospects. If not, it may take time for outreach. Empathy and curiosity are the foundational values that will guide an effective feedback loop that results in actual customer value.

These three challenges and solutions were discussed in detail in our recent webinar, Solving Your Product Challenges: Top 3 Ways to Focus your Strategy. But, that’s only half of the excellent information supplied by Product Coach A.J. Joplin and Agile Coach Scott Selvwright in this fluff-free webinar. Get free access today and continue your journey in product thinking.

Scott Seivwright, Agile Coach