Product Thinking

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about wishing startup founders were able to see the value of being more product-oriented and how to influence them in that direction, organizing executives across multiple business units to align on product strategy, and how to gather evidence that a startup is the right place to work (and whether or not it’ll stay in business if you do decide to take the job).

Q: How do I help my leadership be more product-oriented? [2:06]

Q: How would you go about getting alignment or endorsement from your executive group with multiple business units on product strategy? [9:45]

Q: What would be your strategy to evaluate if a product management role in a startup is a good fit? What questions should I ask in the interview? [15:44]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri welcomes Gopal Erinjippurath to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Gopal is the co-founder, CTO and Head of Product at Sust Global, a company whose mission is to “develop data-driven products that enable every business decision to be climate-informed so that humanity can thrive in a changing planet.” Gopal joins Melissa to discuss climate sustainability and why climate data is proving to be valuable to all kinds of organizations, how he tested and iterated to build this complex data product, how he’s de-risking bets in a rapidly evolving market, the balance of being mission-driven and commercially minded, and the importance of making product thinking part of an organization’s DNA.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Gopal talk about:

• Gopal talks about his professional background, how he got into climate sustainability, and what led him to found his company, Sust Global. [1:29]
• Melissa asks Gopal what type of companies purchase climate data products and services and how they use them in a professional capacity.
• Your long-term strategy should include holding financial instruments that directly correlate to tangible assets. There are several physical climate risks related to these assets, so ask targeted questions about the climate to protect your assets. [5:26]
• Gopal shares how he was inspired to go into the business of climate-related data and insights. [8:29]
• Melissa asks how Sust Global tested their climate-based data product. Gopal explains that the first step was “to start with the outcome rather than the outputs and work backward from there.” Creating mockups of the data-based outcome and testing them with the early set of gated customers can provide valuable feedback. [10:42]
• Melissa asks Gopal how Sust Global ensures that their climate data product is of the highest quality. Gopal suggests that the best approach is to “sandbox the data capability into an area that one customer cares about and wants to decide on, and then provide them with that data in the simplest form so they can try it and use it for the first time.” [14:22]
• Your data should fit three criteria:
• temporal - how fresh your database and data product is
• geographic - dimensionality of your dataset, how it's partitioned before it is handed to customers, and what interfaces there are
• the business problem [16:26]
• Gopal highlights the challenges Sust Global faced when creating their product. [19:06]
• “You must enable your team to stay on top of things and...to fundamentally have product thinking be part of the DNA of your team,” Gopal says. [20:19]
• Gopal looks at capacity building, strategy and execution when he is building a data-based product team. [22:07]
• Climate change is a space where it is possible to stay mission-aligned and also be highly commercially minded, due to the rising importance of ESG and climate change initiatives. [24:54]

Resources

Gopal Erinjippurath on LinkedIn

Sust Global | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Ray McKenzie. Ray is the CEO and founder of StartingPoint Technologies, an organization that develops solutions for service-based companies. He has expertise across a variety of fields, most notably strategy development, workforce analytics, and behavioral analysis. Ray joins Melissa to discuss the ideal marketing strategy that product leaders should be adopting.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Ray talk about in this episode:

• How Ray got into product management. [1:16]
• Product leaders need to consult with customers and rely on other uses and experiences to outline how to build products. [5:01]
• One of the biggest challenges when it comes to a company startup is opening yourself up to criticism and feedback. However, allowing yourself to get feedback, both positive and negative, can benefit your business. [7:41]
• Melissa expresses that when building a product, leaders’ main focus should be on how they can make products easy for customers to use. [12:00]
• Product management should be tied into strategic decisions in the organization. Product leaders need to be present in decision-making so that they can understand the vision for the business and build products to align with that. [13:50]
• Product is a revenue driver and not a cost center. [16:58]
• Being product-led is a go-to-market strategy. Building a product-led company means that product building becomes ingrained in the day-to-day work. [18:07]
• The different go-to-market strategies that companies need to be thinking about, and how they should decide on which strategy is right for them. [26:53]
• The main way to experiment with your go-to-market strategy, or test it, is to talk to people. Talk to your ideal customer, your colleagues, and do market research. “If you just talk to people they will lead you in the direction of where it is easiest to go. And if you're taught to understand who your ideal customer is, talk to as many people of that kind as possible, and they'll tell you where you should invest your go-to-market dollars or go-to-market strategy,” Ray tells Melissa. [30:13]
• Companies that aren't software-based need to think about their ideal customers, what their competition is doing, and what differentiates their product from everyone else. [32:52]

Resources

Ray McKenzie | LinkedIn | Twitter

StartingPoint

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about changes and new features in SAFe 6.0, how to improve alignment and transparency between project managers on the same team while meeting the needs of the different stakeholders, and what it takes to implement business OKRs successfully.

Q&A:

• Q: I just finished a significant dev project in the FinTech industry. There were about thirty-five product managers in the company. I took a role as a senior product manager, and they made everyone go through SAFe. Their commitment to SAFe was about a ten, and their commitment to outcomes was about a two. So what is the deal with SAFe? Have you seen this improved output in any of your encounters with it? It didn't seem agile or lean to me.
• A: I have not seen anybody actually succeed in implementing SAFe in a way where we focus more on the outcomes instead of doing the actual process. People turn to SAFe because they want the instruction manual. But the problem with that is they stop thinking for themselves about what is right and wrong and whether we are actually delivering outcomes. And that's my biggest issue with it. But this is a great time to look at SAFe 6.0 and see what's happening here.
• Q: I'm a product operations manager at a medium size company operating in the field of digital health. The company has been growing fast in the last couple of years, and the number of PMs and projects has also grown, making it more difficult to collaborate and stay. ...To improve alignment between the main people involved in those areas, we decided to form a PM designer's team. The team currently includes five product managers, including senior and junior PMs, and is led by a Head of Product, as well as three designers and senior designers led by a Head of Design. However, we've been struggling to identify how to set up things to become a well-functioning team. ...On the other hand, the team has an urgent need to align on the product roadmap, but we haven't found an effective way of doing that yet. Do you have any recommendations on how to set up this kind of team while meeting the needs of the different stakeholders? What kind of virtuals and processes could help us?
• A: The main idea behind product operations is one of enablement, not micromanagement. When you think of product operations, cadences and governance are a big part of your role, and it's about getting the right people in the right room so that you can review the things that you need. Now, if you have this new product management and design team, the leaders will want some transparency in the roadmap. But they don't need to know everybody's tiny task. Here’s what I think could help your team.
• Q: Our tech department is small and in the growth stage, and we have recently implemented business OKRs with key results, but we're not sure what to do next. We don't have the team structure set up correctly. We don't empower the teams. We don't seem to have a product or business strategy for digital products. How would you approach a situation with our product lead and stakeholders?
• A: If there's no guiding strategy, how did you come up with the OKRs? To me, they're probably going to be a little messy, and they're not gonna be focused on the outcomes we are trying to achieve. People put the OKRs all on the team level and don't roll them up. You should have three levels of OKRs that roll up to the business goals. So that might be a good place to start with your business leads and stakeholders. 658076

David Bland is the founder of Precoil, a company that helps organizations find product market fit through assessing risk and experimentation, and the co-author of Testing Business Ideas. David joins Melissa Perri on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast to talk about how to identify your assumptions, experimenting within slower feedback cycles, the importance of aligned confidence, and how product leaders have to continuously walk the walk when it comes to experimentation and de-risk.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and David talk about in this episode:

• David talks about his professional background and how he first got started in the field of business testing. [1:49]
• David’s framework that uses themes from design thinking to define risk and identify assumptions. Experiment in the areas where there is the least amount of evidence. [3:32]
• Many product teams put too much emphasis on feasibility but they also need to focus on desirability. Talk to customers to figure out if they want the product itself; if they are, figure out cost and revenue. [4:46]
• David advises product managers to start with the business model and understand it; that will inform the plan for how the business is going to make money and how the product is going to impact their business. [6:44]
• "What are the leading indicators that would predict that someone's going to renew? You should be able to start thinking through what are these touchpoints that would lead to somebody renewing, and how do we remove the friction from that?” David tells Melissa. [8:28]
• The biggest hurdle to experimentation is time. If you don't have time, you are going to take the easy route. The goal is not to run experiments. The goal is to de-risk what you're working on to make better investment decisions. [13:11]
• If a company is in a check-the-box mentality, it's not in the right condition to learn experimentation. You need to think about how you're de-risking, and changing your mindset and approach to processes within your organizations. David talks about the way he's designed his training programs to help companies with this problem. [16:55]
• Repetition is key as product leader. Don't stop talking about the way you want your teams to run because you think they no longer need to hear it. "It's part of your job as leaders to keep repeating this, and showing it, and enabling it and creating a culture and environment where people can work this way," David says. [19:38]
• David talks about experimenting around product strategy from a higher level, what types of experiments he's seen at that level and what experiments he advises product leaders to run. [20:38]
• One of the main problems with experimentation is that companies often fall into the realm of testing on their customers as opposed to testing with their customers. It should be about co-creation instead. [32:36]
• If you focus on customer value, you don't always have to have a finished product. It can be a service. Once you're fulfilling a need for that customer, or solving a problem that's valuable to a customer, or performing a service, you can start charge for that service. [35:30]
• David talks about companies that have been doing experimentation well. [38:00]

Resources

David Bland | LinkedIn | Twitter

Precoil