Transforming Products, Empowering Teams

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Blenheim Chalcot’s recent Product Transformers session was a game-changer, featuring insights from design expert J Paul and product guru Marty Cagan. J Paul illuminated the power of design thinking in product development, emphasizing human-centered approaches and the importance of empathy, experience mapping, and prototyping. Marty Cagan's AMA was equally inspiring, touching on empowered teams, customer discovery, and building product sense. The session left attendees with fresh perspectives on creating user-centric products and fostering innovation. It was a valuable opportunity for the teams to learn from industry leaders.

Enroll on Red Team to recap this session:

• Service Design Masterclass by J Paul

• AMA with Marty Cagan

AMA Marty Cagan with Dom Devlin

Empowered Teams

• The first 10 years of Marty’s career were as an engineer. “In fact, I only moved into product because of frustration with product people, which is a very common reason to move in.”

• Product managers don't build products, product teams do. It's all about the team and that team dynamic. If you have a healthy team where people with the skills they need work together collaboratively , they can achieve amazing things.

“There's no one way to do product - but there are principles that really matter.”

• There are principles that really matter, and those principles, things like if you don't embrace experimentation, there's just no way you're going to innovate. That's a principle. Every good product company in the world, have those same principles. The point of the product operating model is sharing those principles.

• There are very different models of product management out there and in most companies the definition of product management isn't what’s needed for a team in the product model. The role that really causes the problem is the product leadership role. So if the product leaders don't know what needs to happen, then the product managers aren't gonna be doing what needs to happen.

“Process is a way to avoid thinking” and why product purists are not helpful

• There's always at least a few that are so addicted to process that they will try to push everything towards a formal process, in organizations of any size. But you can’t do the Product Operating Model, if that's how you're working. Don't fall into that trap in every time you feel a craving for process. Instead, try to direct that energy to coaching and judgment and people thinking.

• Product purists are not helpful because they often rely too heavily on processes, aiming to replicate success, but this approach can be problematic. Each problem is unique, and following the same process won't address different sets of circumstances; requiring the fastest, cheapest way to solve the problem.

• Many want a process or framework to superimpose on all their work, but this leads to rigidity. Engineers often see this as rule-following without critical thinking. Elon Musk highlighted this issue, noting that big companies use processes as a substitute for thinking.

The Viability Risk

• The product manager is responsible for the value, but also the viability. It's not that hard to do the value if you don't worry about the viability - the viability is the catch. That's what's really hard.

• The value is for your customer. The viability is value for your company, and to get value for your company, it needs to be: legal; marketable; sellable; monetizable; fundable; compliant.

• Product Managers, won't be useful to your company unless they learn this. This is where managers will hopefully take the responsibility of helping Product Managers to learn value.

Why most B2B Software Fails

• The root cause of most B2B software failures is the lack of product-market fit. Companies often compensate with sales and marketing because their product isn't good enough. Sales teams bring in high-paying prospects with unique needs, leading to a Frankenstein product that's difficult to use and lacks reference customers. This issue has persisted for decades.

• The problem isn't the salespeople—they're doing their job. The issue is the product team not doing their job. Customer discovery, or customer development, is a technique to avoid this problem by focusing on a specific target market to achieve product-market fit. It requires discipline but provides the necessary focus for success.

Customer Discovery (1 of at least 100 Product Discovery Techniques)

• For B2B SaaS, Marty’s favorite is "customer discovery" or “customer development”. This approach focuses on making the product exceptional for a select 6 customers in a single target market, ignoring others. This requires discipline, as salespeople typically pursue any prospect with money, to maximize immediate revenue.

• Customer discovery aims to identify and deeply understand a specific target market to create a product that fully meets their needs. By focusing intensely on a small group of customers, product teams can ensure the product is truly valuable and effective for that segment.

• The goal of customer discovery is to create referenceable customers — those who are so satisfied with the product that they will vouch for it to others. In the early stages of a B2B SaaS company, particularly struggling to achieve product-market fit, having a few highly satisfied and referenceable customers can significantly boost credibility and facilitate market penetration.

1 week in Discovery = 30 iterations

• If a team spends more than a week on discovery without results, managers need to evaluate the situation and methods used.

• Discovery phases should be efficient, involving up to 30 iterations in a week to find solutions.

Addressing the 4 Risks of Product Development: Cadences

• Product discovery involves creating and testing prototypes to ensure value and usability.

• Testing involves various stakeholders: Users, buyers, influencers, and approvers: To confirm value and usability. Engineers: To assess feasibility and identify potential problems or improvements. Stakeholders: To address concerns, such as legal issues or sales challenges.

• Normally prototypes are iterated daily at least as a cadence; with multiple iterations often possible in a single day using Figma.

• Time zones, especially between locations like London and Mumbai, can affect the speed of this process. Being co-located significantly reduces cycle time and increases the cadence, facilitating faster progress.

Addressing the 4 Risks of Product Development: Collaboration

• In "The Lost Interview" with Steve Jobs from 1995, is highly recommended as a master class in product development.

• Jobs emphasized the necessity of good friction within teams, where engineers, designers, and product managers respectfully challenge each other. This friction, based on psychological safety, leads to better solutions by addressing various constraints.

• Working remotely makes fostering this friction harder, as people tend to avoid conflict over video calls or messaging platforms. Leaders must coach teams to embrace constructive friction for effective collaboration.

• Those who have experienced this kind of teamwork often find it their most rewarding professional experience. Whenever possible, teams should meet in person for prototyping and debates, as this is where the magic happens.

Building Trust with Stakeholders Across the Business

• One of the most important tasks for product teams is building trust with executive stakeholders, who are responsible for protecting the company and its assets. Executives fear teams conducting discovery without leveraging existing knowledge, especially when teams claim autonomy.

• The issue often arises because many product owners lack proper training in discovery. This leads to frustration among executives, who quickly realize the teams are not equipped to function autonomously. Product owners, focused on delivery, are not suited for the discovery process.

Training Product Managers On The Business Context

• Marty's journey as a product manager began with an assessment of his understanding of sales, marketing, financial analytics, and areas needing improvement. This assessment led to a coaching plan focusing on finance, despite his extensive experience as a developer.

• He realized he had much to learn about customers, but with a supportive manager, it took less than three months to transition to a competent product manager.

• Marty stresses the importance of willingness to learn, as most people dislike the product owner role and aspire to be product managers but need proper guidance. Product management skills aren't typically taught in universities or most programs.

• With the right managerial support, the transition to an excellent product manager can be quick and make the role much more enjoyable.

6Product Sense

• Every good product person has very strong product sense - and the reason is because they have done a ton of work learning about their customers, learning about the data, learning about the industry, and that's what builds that product sense.

• When you go out to a customer and test an idea and get these big insights, a lot of that is not just from what you saw in that hour. It's what you saw in the last six months of building this product since and it all coming together.

• Marty’s Manager insisted on Marty speaking to 30 customers before making any product decisions. His view was it takes 30 customers before you have any reasonable amount of ‘product sense’ and then it only gets better from there. Once you've learned about a market of customers it's not that hard to predict what will happen.

Marty’s Aha Moments

• Marty's manager insisted Marty visit 30 customers before making any product decisions. This experience revealed how different customers were from the team and taught Marty the importance of understanding customers and continually learning from them.

• At Netscape, Marty learned a crucial product principle from co-founder Mark Andreessen: the best product managers know what they don't know and actively seek to learn from customers. Prototyping and constant testing are essential to product discovery, as they help uncover customer needs and the necessary value propositions. Understanding customers, their purchasing processes, and the necessary value through ongoing prototype testing is the heart of product discovery.

B2B Discovery Techniques: Qualitative vs Quantitative

• There is no single process, only various techniques, and you must choose the right one for the job.

• A/B tests rarely work for early-stage B2B - they take too long and aren't suitable for early product discovery; qualitative techniques are much faster.

• However, quantitative evidence is still important. Instrument everything to gather useful evidence and learn to judge its value.

• Regularly conduct qualitative usability and value tests, doing so every week to gain insights quickly.

Product Discovery is a 2-part problem

• Product discovery has two parts: identifying the problem to solve and finding a superior solution to that problem. Problem discovery involves understanding what issues customers face, while solution discovery focuses on creating a better solution. Product managers often learn these steps as a rigid process, which can be unhelpful.

• Empowered teams focus on devising solutions to identified problems; the common mistake is to focus on which problems to tackle, wasting valuable time for the company and losing stakeholder trust. Dismissing stakeholder input and independently discovering problems is wasteful. Most problems identified by stakeholders are valid, and spending excessive time re-discovering them is inefficient.

• Stakeholders typically present problems as features to be built; product managers should reverse-engineer these to understand the underlying issues. Product managers should focus on creating the best solutions to known problems rather than challenging the identification of the problems.

• Earning stakeholder trust by solving problems effectively allows product managers to later influence problem selection.
  

Good Management and High-integrity commitments

• In an empowered organization, managers ensure their teams are productive and focused. Managers coach product managers, designers, and engineers, staying on top of their weekly progress and challenges. While some may label this oversight as governance, it is fundamentally about competent management.

• Deadlines often drive interest in command-and-control styles; however, reliable delivery on dates requires a balanced approach. No serious product person would say they're not real.

• High integrity commitments, approved by the head of engineering, ensure deadlines are met while maintaining productivity, highlighting the importance of discipline and understanding in managing critical timelines.

• The discipline comes about how and when we do them, because this really gets to the core of trust.

Design Thinking Session with J Paul Neeley – 05/07/2024

What is design?

• Think about design as a verb, which means to plan, draft, or map out. Design is fundamentally a decision-making process. Design involves making decisions in an infinite variable space, unlike science, which is useful for single variables that can be identified and isolated.

• In design spaces, you face an overwhelming number of variables with no clear right answer. Design is the process that takes you from a problem to a solution or from a current state to a desired future state.

• Design thinking is a way to popularize design as a decision-making process. Some describe it as a human-centered approach to innovation. The most helpful definition of design thinking is the decoupling of design from specific tool sets (like industrial design, architecture, graphic design) and recognizing that the process can be applied to any problem space.

Impact on Businesses

• The Design Council conducted a study comparing companies using design thinking with those that were engineering-led or financially focused. They found that design-led companies significantly outperformed others on the FTSE 100 over a 10-year period, nearly two to one.

• McKinsey repeated the study from 2012 to 2017 and found that design-focused companies outperformed others in revenue terms by three to one and in shareholder returns.

• The studies show that companies solving problems and bringing products to market with design thinking approaches see significant business benefits.

Human Centered Design

• Innovation occurs at the intersection of desirability (human needs), feasibility (technology), and viability (business).

• Human-centered design (HCD) emphasizes designing for the people using the products and services, rather than just focusing on financial needs or available technology.

• Businesses often fail by focusing solely on new technology without understanding actual user needs, leading to poor product-market fit. Another approach focuses on business metrics and viability, crucial for financial success but not enough on its own.

• The magic happens when there is a deep understanding of human needs, making products desirable, viable, and feasible.

Service Design

• Service design involves choreographing multiple touchpoints over time to create a comprehensive experience. In technology, design often focuses within the screen, but real problems can exist outside of it, such as users not having good cameras for Airbnb photos.

• Service design goes beyond technology, considering what happens before and after users interact with the tech, including their lives, other interactions, processes, systems, and partners. It zooms out from just digital to analog systems to understand the whole picture. UX/UI design focuses on buttons and screen space, while user experience design considers onboarding and overall experience; service design zooms out even further.

• Sometimes the magic is not within your application It's actually just adjacent to it, and that's what's going to unlock the value.

3 Superpowers of Design: 1. Develop Empathy 2. Map the Experience 3. Build Prototypes

Develop Empathy

• We need to care deeply about the people we're designing for. We must empathize with their pain and frustration, which influences our decisions about what to build.

• Understanding people involves knowing not just what they say but also what they think, feel, do, and experience. Observing behavior is crucial because people often can't articulate their own actions accurately.

• In complex systems, the end user, decision-makers, and purchasers have different roles, so understanding these dynamics is essential. Sometimes the solution isn't what the end user needs but how to engage decision-makers.

• We must be user-focused, empathetic, curious, and humble, adopting a beginner's mindset to learn new things. Look for unintended uses or behaviors, as people often find their own solutions using workarounds. We're looking to see how we can get that information about their experience.

• Observing user pain points is valuable because it clearly highlights issues that need addressing – this is the low hanging fruit.

Mapping the Experience

• Gather all information to develop a shared understanding of the user experience over time. Ensure everyone on the product team aligns on what the beginning, middle, and end of the product journey looks like.

• Use user journey maps to detail each step, starting before users even know the app exists and continuing after they stop using it. Build alignment with these maps to understand where the team is focused and how data fits into the journey. Create current and future state maps to show how the journey is now and how it should be transformed. Develop system maps to identify all players, technologies, partners, and regulatory bodies involved, and understand information and money flows. Construct service blueprints, showing user interactions and what happens behind the scenes, to ensure seamless user experiences.

• Consider the entire lifecycle of the user’s experience, to see where the product fits in; this includes daily cycle; annual cycle; 100 year cycle. Think about different levels of zoom, such as procurement cycles and multiple lifecycles, to derive more value.Build Prototypes
  

Build Prototypes

• The Identifying directions that don't work is highly valuable to avoid wasted effort later.

• Encourage building over describing to ensure clear and accurate communication. Use the principle: "A picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings" to accelerate processes and team alignment.

• In early project phases, generate numerous low-fidelity prototypes to test specific attributes. Later in the process, develop high-fidelity prototypes incorporating all desired specifications to validate the overall design. Adjust the fidelity of prototypes based on the phase of the project and the attributes being tested.

• Think about what it the lowest, cheapest, quickest, dirtiest ways that we can get the the feedback or the reactions we need.