Why? Because environments change, users change, opportunities change, and technologies change. Your product vision rests on assumptions about all four of these items: if you don’t adapt your vision to these changing assumptions, then your product will fail.

Shock Therapy Won’t Work

Many product vision re-orientations come from a shock rather than a more measured and considered series of changes. A shock may be something like a failed product launch, or sudden customer churn as another similar product comes onto the market, or low renewal levels.

A shock often leads to a rapid scramble as product managers and executives try to determine what has gone wrong and how things need to change. In this scramble, errors are made and you’re not guaranteed to come out the other side with a better product vision. It may even be that the product vision doesn’t need to change, but that also can get lost in the scramble.

Continual Review is Key

Instead of waiting for the shock, you can use continuous product discovery to continually monitor and adapt as things change. Combined with effective use of metrics and objectives you can continually review your product vision and your product strategy to address changing realities when things aren’t working.

By using continuous product strategy, you are continually reviewing all the problems and feedback that previously you’ve parked because they were outside your product vision and strategy. You should look for any trends in these parked problems.

A growing set of parked problems doesn’t necessarily mean that your product vision or strategy is wrong. It could just mean that potentially there are complementary products that could be designed to solve those problems.

You need to combine information from continuous product discovery with the metrics and objectives derived from your product vision and strategy. If you’re not achieving your objectives and your metrics aren’t good, and there are a lot of parked problems, then something is wrong. Try making a small change to your strategy and if your objectives and metrics improve then it is likely your previous strategy was not suitable for achieving your product vision validation.

If you change your strategy and nothing happens, it may be that your vision is not achievable. Now you need to delve into the specifics of the problems highlighted in the continuous product discovery to craft your new product vision, product strategy, objectives and metrics. If you’ve stuck to a continuous product strategy then this should be a tweak rather than a wholesale junking of everything. Sometimes, however, you may have to start again from scratch.

Tweaking the Vision

Prior to founding ProdPad, I was Head of Product for a startup called PeerIndex, a social media analytics platform which is now part of BrandWatch. PeerIndex started out as Viewsflow. Viewsflow was a way of receiving a personalised newsletter each day, based on what was shared by topical influencers on Twitter, for example Fred Wilson on venture capital. To do this we had to create a way of ranking people’s influence / expertise by proxy in a range of topics. While we gained some traction with the concept of Viewsflow, we found that people were only really interested in their own influence ranking. Our continual review of the customer feedback led us to review the vision and strategy of Viewsflow, which then led to a new vision and strategy encompassed in PeerIndex.

This pivot wasn’t rushed, but rather driven by our ongoing (weekly) review of customer feedback which raised the issue. This led to us taking a step back and reviewing all the customer feedback and behaviour, which then resulted in the change in the vision and strategy for the product.

It is this type of analysis and the continued interaction between what you learn from continuous product discovery, your metrics and objectives that will help you determine whether you need to change your product vision, change your product strategy or continue as you are.

Continuous product discovery can help you to identify problems with your product vision validation and strategy, and is also a powerful tool for validating that you are doing the right thing and that your vision is achievable. If the problems surfaced by continuous product discovery lie along your path to your product vision, then you are headed in the right direction.

How do you differentiate between product objectives and company objectives? Find out in the next in this series of blog posts.

The post Product Vision Validation is Important. Validating it, even more so appeared first on ProdPad.

5 steps to internal transparency

There are five steps – or levels – of internal transparency you can provide when you’re at a product company. From high-level strategy all the way down to customer feedback, you’re shifting the burden off yourself to keep your your colleagues – and empowering them to help themselves to the information they need to make good decisions.

You can introduce transparency at work starting today with documents you already have in ProdPad. Here’s how.

1. Open up your product vision

You probably already know the value of sharing your product vision – but do you do it enough? When it comes to product vision, it’s better to over-communicate than suffer through the consequences of not communicating it enough.

Our co-founder Janna Bastow once worked at a company where no one ever bothered to document a product vision. Then one day when the company sent a team out to recruit at a job fair, she and her coworkers could hardly keep their story together as they talked to potential hires.

One job-seeker even ended up asking her: “Are you sure you’re all working on the same product? I talked to a few of you about what your product is about and everyone gave me a different answer!” How embarrassing! 

Though the product vision is the highest level of transparency you can provide, it plays a really important part in how your coworkers understand their roles and the purpose of their work.

Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group points out:

When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools, and it serves to motivate the people on your teams to come to work every day.  Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision; they want to work on something meaningful.

If you already have a product vision, don’t be too shy to display it prominently in your office, to refresh everyone’s minds before planning meetings and to generally bring it up all the time. If they complain about it, tell them the people at ProdPad made you do it.

2. Open up your product roadmap

There’s no point treating your product roadmap like it’s a state secret, although we know some companies that do. (Why!?)

Your product roadmap is the single best way to communicate your strategy in a way that everyone understands – as long as you do it the right way.

The right way to share your roadmap is by defining a set of problems you plan to solve. No features, no timelines. That gives your colleagues the context they need to understand the direction your product is moving in, while still giving you the space to figure out what exactly you’ll do to solve it.

One way to make your roadmap really useful is to share different levels of detail with different audiences at your company.

For example, your CEO and exec team would probably be happy to review a high-level roadmap with you. What they want to see is the bottom line.

On the other hand, you’re better off sharing a highly detailed version with customer support, who need access to documentation, functional specs to handle customers and helpdesk tickets.

If you’re on ProdPad, we make this easy for you. You can create multiple versions of your roadmap and share the link (or embed) with each audience. Use this chart to help you figure out what you need to share with whom.

3. Open up your product backlog

You can be on your way to a solid product culture today just by forking over access to the product backlog to your colleagues.

Just like a Facebook post gathering likes and comments, people like to see their ideas get attention and feedback. It makes them feel heard and makes them likely to contribute and discuss ideas with you – and each other.

Barbara at Clicktime explains the profound difference it makes when you actually receive feedback on an idea you’ve submitted:

“It’s nice to have someone from the product team explain to you really clearly: ‘We hear your request and this is actively on our roadmap’ vs. ‘I don’t know if we’re ever going to do that.’”

In ProdPad, your colleagues monitor ideas and jump into the discussion early on. They can review ideas that didn’t make it to the next stage and find out why. They can also stay involved with an idea as it progresses and help shape the product spec.

4. Open up your product management workflow

Now we’re getting into truly transparent territory.

There’s no better way to communicate how the product team operates than by simply opening up your product management workflow and letting others peer in.

Workflows expand your power to share the stages through which you make everyday product decisions you make product decisions. They also empower your colleagues in marketing, support and sales to see what’s coming down the pipeline so they can prepare for the next release.

Launching a product or feature successfully requires a great deal of coordination across teams. With this view, your teams can quickly see where they need to focus, access details quickly, grab the docs they need and go. 

5. Open up your customer feedback

Think you’ve bared it all? Not quite yet!

The most valuable layer of information you can share across your business is customer feedback. But this critical layer of information – the primary source itself – is also often the least visible across company communications.

When you’re at a product company, making customer feedback easily accessible to everyone is the only way to keep a user-centric company…user-centric.

Remember, feedback isn’t just limited to customers sending you complaints on a website widget. It’s also the problems they tell you about on sales calls, on live chats, on social media and even at conferences. Every opportunity to improve your product, your marketing and your overall customer experience is hidden in what your customers are telling.

In fact, the most resourceful marketers have been known to “steal” their messaging ideas by digging into customer feedback. There are a lot of golden nuggets in there, so it’s in your best interests to make it easier for us all to see it.

We keep up with customer feedback at ProdPad is with our Slack integration. We pull in customer from services like Zendesk, Intercom and our customer feedback portal into the #feedback channel.

That gives us the initiative to monitor what customers are communicating to us and jump in to make improvements without waiting too long.

What next?

Believe it or not, you don’t have to be the boss to foster a product culture or a culture of internal transparency at your company.

You have the tools. You have the information. Now all you have to do is get it out there in front of your teams – then to get out of the way to let them do their best work!

The post Five Effortless Ways To Introduce Internal Transparency Into Your Organization appeared first on ProdPad.

Make design decisions based on data

Needing to get back to 1985, Marty seeks out Doc’s help. Unaware he had only just hit his head and came up with the concept of the flux capacitor, which would in turn set off a domino effect bringing Marty to his door in 1955, Marty now has to rely on his knowledge of the future to figure out a plan with Doc Brown. And fast.

Good thing Marty hands Doc a flyer from the future recounting the lightning strike. It’s this critical piece of information that Doc uses to design a plan to get Marty back to 1985.

“Data-driven design looks to ship fast, optimise at every step and let the data drive many of the design decisions. Often (but not always) it is possible to get large percentage improvements with small tweaks as pages have similar and standardised layouts, or a startup only has a few features to optimise for and one specific type of customer to speak to.” 

Alastair Simpson, Design Manager @Atlassian

Product managers should make informed decisions. When you’re looking at features to improve or retire, using collected data will allow you to ship fast and optimize your product quickly.

But how do you know which data to track?

Reddit Co-VPs of Product, Alex Lee and Kavin Stewart, recommend focusing on different thematic organization areas of the product, such as:

• Core product: How can we make typical use of the product better always?
• Signup experience: How can we bring more people into our product:
• Internal tools: How can we optimize the way we are working with infrastructure?
• Content: What content do we present to users and how?
• Community: How are we setting communities up for success?
• Channels: Where and how are we engaging with users outside the core product?
• Monetization: How do we sustain what we’re doing?

As First Round Review observes,

This cuts a ton of context switching out of your process. You reduce the number of people who work hard to solve problem A only to move over to an entirely unrelated problem B. You group people so they are always attacking grouped, interrelated problems that they know well.”

By narrowing your product work into focus areas so you can set up specific, tangible goals for each one.

There are several tracking tools that can track each thematic org area listed above, and by making this a priority and analyzing the data that comes through, product managers can then make accurate development changes and scale growth in a way that makes sense.

Plan with the technology you have, not hope to have

In all his genius, Doc Brown did not foresee (or chose not to consider) that 1.21 gigawatts of power was irresponsible and dangerous.

While his ‘for science!’ moment may have allowed Marty to travel to the past, they now relied on 1.21 gigawatts of power to get him back to the future.

Plutonium was certainly not going to be easily available in 1955, nor in 1985. But having the data at hand, they knew when and where lightning would strike to power up the flux capacitor with the needed boost. Even then, there were unforeseen snags that may have prevented the whole thing from happening.

So what can we learn from this?

Don’t get ahead of yourself.

Scale within your means and build with what’s available to you now. We all want to deliver great quality products, but putting ourselves in technical debt and not being able to support our clients can be more damaging in the long run.

Have your roadmap out for inevitable detours

We may not need roads, but we do still need roadmaps.

Whether Biff ruins your plans or you slip from the top of the clocktower while trying to plug cables together, always remember that life happens. There are things that are just completely out of your control.

At times like these, roll up your sleeves and throw your time frames out. You’re going to be here awhile, and nothing’s going to work out like you thought it would.

The mission hasn’t changed. The vision hasn’t changed either. But the way you get there will.

We product managers have product roadmaps for that.

Your product roadmap serves as a communication tool, outlining your vision and direction.

It also acknowledges the real world – a world that will give us engineering challenges, communication breakdowns, and unexpectedly demanding customers – and gives us the flexibility to accommodate them all.

Use your data to make your own path

In BTTF2 Marty gets a sneak peek at his future, a future he’s already dreading. Due to an accident during a drag race, Marty hurts himself and is unable to play guitar, which makes him angry…and we know that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

All this just because some bullies taunted him into doing something stupid.

The big lesson here: Don’t just do things because other people are.

You have your data, you have your feedback. Now use it to solve the problem, even if it doesn’t look like what everyone else is doing.

As Paul Graham once said, “Most startups fail because they’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

And that’s what we do: we solve problems our way, for our customers. If what we’re doing has been done before, then what are we in business for?

Keep your eyes open for the ‘pivot’ moment

As he’s being chased by Biff and his goonies, Marty borrows a kid’s box-cart scooter and turns it into a skateboard to get away. His quick thinking allows him to get away, while Biff and gang end up in a pile of fertilizer.

This is what we call the pivot moment.

It’s that moment when you realize the solution in our head doesn’t matter. It’s about solves the problem, whatever that looks like.

Doc Brown used a train to push the Delorean to 88MPH.

So why can’t we also be flexible and creative with our solutions right here in the present?

After a hilarious conversation in MTP’s Slack Channel about Back to the Future and how it relates to product management, I felt compelled to dig deeper into the connection between one of the greatest trilogies ever created and our rockin’ jobs.

Thank you to everyone who participated! This one’s for all of you.

The post Why Every Product Manager Needs A Flux Capacitor appeared first on ProdPad.

A term popularized by startup writer Eric Ries, a minimum viable product (MVP) is “a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial user” – according to techopedia.

At the heart of it, the MVP philosophy about doing the least amount of work you can in order to learn the most of something.

When you release a new product, there are a whole lot of potential risks. What if people don’t see the value of your product? What if they just don’t love it? What if it’s not scalable? And what if it’s not financially viable? Or what if it’s not sufficiently differentiated from your competition? Or your market isn’t as big as you thought? Developing a minimal viable product is about reducing that risk so that you can maximize your success. When you push out an MVP as soon as is reasonable, you reduce your overheads, get faster feedback and all the while you’re able to measure your progress.

So how do you do it? How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP, when to stop building, and when to just get your product out there?

Taking a development term like this perhaps makes it seem more complicated a concept than it really is. Instead, you can probably take a look back to your grade 9 approach to science. In this introduction to the scientific method, all you were asked to do was to define a simple hypothesis and test it.

And much like your 9^th grade science experiment, when developing your MVP this can be broken down into a few simple steps:

• Declare your assumptions or business risks
• Organize them into a testable hypothesis
• Answer the question: what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis
• Do it! (it’s your MVP)

The last thing to figure out is what to do with the data that comes back from your 9^th grade experiment. This is where the MVP philosophy is also about being bold. If your results show you that your hypothesis carries too much risk, you either change direction, or completely pivot, and try again.

A great example of this is Groupon. Before becoming the business we all know today, the Groupon team had created a social media platform focused on bringing people together around a cause, called The Point. When members showed a tendency to focus on saving money, The Point’s founders tested a simple MVP to test the hypothesis that group buying offered a better product/market fit. This took the form of a wordpress blog with PDF coupons. The success of this experiment is well-documented history of one of the fastest growing companies of all time.

Building an MVP isn’t about knocking out something quick and dirty or cutting corners. It’s not about deciding part way through development that you’ve about had enough and you want to give it a shot in the market. It’s about getting down to the very basics of the scientific method, and finding something to test.  The MVP approach to building products is much more than a specific method of development. It’s a mode of business that believes it pays off to invest in learning.

So if you have to, dig out those old excercise books and get back to the basics of experimentation, and you’ll be surprised by what your science teacher really taught you.

If you’d like to find out more on best practice processes, read our 7 pillars of product management

And if you’d like to discover how ProdPad can help you with awesome product management, sign up for a free trial here

The post How building an MVP is just like your 9th grade science experiment appeared first on ProdPad.

As a very first version, ProdPad was built for nothing more than to solve our own needs. The tool was built in an older version of Symfony and basic HTML as that’s what we knew at the time, and didn’t even have a name. For the first couple of years we used it internally, gradually iterating as our teams grew and we started to work with different businesses and learnt about their product management challenges.

As Product Managers, we do have a great personal investment in our product and are able to empathize with our user base. But it was quickly apparent that this doesn’t mean that our needs are strictly the same as theirs. Through constantly talking to our early customers we were able to rebuild the ‘wrong stuff’ to move towards the comprehensive solution embraced by teams of many different shapes and sizes today. Already the tool has dramatically transformed from its humble beginnings; we have over 200 customers around the world, comprising more than 2900 monthly active users.

But we’re certainly not slowing down now. I’m excited to finally share the upcoming release of ProdPad Regenerated. 

An entire team is currently working on an overhaul of the ProdPad system based on the new things we’ve learnt about making product management successful from our ever-growing customer base. ProdPad will see a huge upgrade behind the scenes – to the latest versions of Symfony and Doctrine – and the front end will see a complete makeover for an even more user-friendly interface, powered by Angular.js. Our goal is to build on and enhance the system our customers are already using to make it even easier to integrate product management processes across an entire team.

I’ll be giving you an insight into our own product processes over the coming weeks as we move closer and closer to releasing a brand new ProdPad. So keep posted for updates on how we’re using best practice product management processes to build first-class product management tools – it should be an interesting journey!

If you’d like to chat to me about ProdPad, get in touch on @simplybastow or drop us a message here

The post Our journey to a better product management solution appeared first on ProdPad.

Round 1: Product vision and KPIs

Before it gets a yea or nay from product management, the first test for every new idea should be the product vision. But the highest-level strategy for your product is not the same as the whims of your CEO. Getting your product vision committed to text and available for everyone in your team to see is the best justification for what makes it to development. KPIs help you to quantify those decisions and are one of your best weapons when turning down an idea that might sound good but just isn’t geared towards your business’s growth.

Round 2: Product backlog

Even if an idea seems to meet your product vision, you can’t be certain based on an initial suggestion alone. It would be great if you could properly interview the mastermind of every promising idea but you just don’t have the time. Instead, your product backlog is an important incubator to figure out whether something really should be built. When you capture ideas in ProdPad, you can pull upon the resources of your entire team to figure out the pros and cons. What’s more, in bringing different people in your company together to discuss the merits of an idea someone else might just say no before you have to.

Round 3: Roadmap

If an idea makes it through your initial qualification tests, the next decision you need to make is how this idea stands up against other epics on your product roadmap. Your roadmap might detail your planned developments for anything from a 12 month to a five-year period, with longer terms plans being much less specific than near term projects. Even if you think an idea is a fit, your roadmap can help you provide a strong justification for why something is a yes or no just now. All product management decisions are relative, and your roadmap is the best way to make this clear to your customers and colleagues.

Round 4: Voting

Another way you can make use of the rest of your team to decide whether a feature should be built is via direct voting. If you want to gauge the reaction of others to a possible new development, just ask! Votes provide a quick and effective way to determine the popularity of an idea, and rationales for or against its development can come from anyone in your team. Democratic decisions are much easier swallowed than product management decrees.

Following good product management processes can help you identify when to say yes and when to say no, and support those decisions both internally and externally. Allowing your colleagues and customers insight into product strategy can help you to say no, without having to say no. When everybody is aligned to the same goals, tough love from product managers is a lot less tough.

If you’d like to find out more about applying best practice, read our comprehensive guide on the 7 pillars of product management process.

And if you’re not already a ProdPad user, you can sign up for a completely free trial today.

The post ‘Saying No’. Tough Love for Product Managers appeared first on ProdPad.