Tag: Product

Goals for Upleveling Your Product Team

Goals for Upleveling Your Product Team

There’s a lot of content out there about metrics – OKRs, KPIs, AARRR, LTV, ARPU etc etc. There’s even some thoughts on this very blog about metrics (Metrics, Means and Maps, Cogitating on ROAS, It’s Good that Data is Man Made).

When product folks talk about measuring our team’s success, we always talk about the success of the things we build. Ideally the customer- or business-level outcomes that we want to achieve.

“This quarter we’ve prioritized reducing churn within the first seven days of a customer activation by at least ten percent. We can now observe that in six of our seven regions, churn has gone down by at least eight percent – we’re over halfway to our goal.”

There are still a lot of teams with the bad habit of measuring how MUCH they build – “We shipped fourteen new features this year!” – which is different than how something has impacted customers, the market, or the business. I know there are a lot of “Outcomes Over Outputs” folks, and to be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever measure output. Sometimes, in some organizations, it can be exactly what you need to do.

That’s a space to explore in a different post, I think.

It’s important – I’d even say mandatory, to measure and understand the success of the products that we build. What is missing in many cases is measuring the success of the team itself. If your product team were a product itself, how would you measure its success over time?

(Also worth mentioning, of course; teams don’t exist, but people do. )

When you’re leading a team, or building an organization, when thinking about the long term growth, you should be thinking seriously about how you’re investing in the success of the people on the team, and how to measure that over time, the same way you would for a new launch, a new product, or a new campaign.

Over a long enough time horizon, your team’s ability to accomplish those key business moving goals (decrease churn, grow customer base, improve LTV, move into a new market, etc) is downstream of this team development work. Building a strong team, and spending at least some time on how you keep that team improving over the long haul, is enormously high leverage.

Investing intentionally in the health, growth, and success of the professionals on your team also has an impact on your team’s retention, and ability to attract new talent.

These are the metrics that we use on my team – I’ll list them now, and then do a little commentary (as I do!). We’re sticking with these for 2024 (we do monthly in-team goal reviews and quarterly roundtables with our key partners) but there are some changes I think coming for next year. They’re sets of two metrics, in five themes or tenets.

2024 Team Development goals:

We Rise Together

  • Run monthly Product Jam sessions
  • Initiate 1x Development Opportunity per quarter (book club, speaker session, skillshare workshop, etc)

When I think about, “We Rise Together,” the “Together” is really broadly inclusive: it’s about creating opportunities for broad development and network growth within Disney. Disney has hundreds of product managers from cruises to in-park mobile apps to streaming players. Bringing folks together, to share skills and insights, and being visibly the team that is committed to doing so, generates a lot of positive visibility for the folks on the team, and makes new partnerships and internal collaboration opportunities much lower-friction.

It’s also quite fun! I personally get a lot out of a book club or tech talk; and it’s a nice forcing function to get me to actually read the new Cagan instead of scrolling Slack. Product Jam is a monthly 60-minute call where a member of the product org gives a talk or proposes a blog post or podcast to lead a discussion on. It’s quite casual but it’s a great chance to get to see folks around the org.

The tenet name is aspirational: we want to make our team better but not if it comes at the expense of our peers. It is also the first tenet on purpose: we rise but we rise together. Product is a team game, and supporting our colleagues and investing in the broader product org always bears positive dividends.

We See Far

  • Schedule 1:1s with PMs outside of Media Product 2x per Quarter
  • Schedule 1:1s with PMs outside of Disney Streaming 2x per Year

“Media Product” is the VP-level organization that we’re a part of. My direct lead is a Director, his direct lead is our VP. A PM outside of Media Product might work on the mobile app for Disney World, or the syndicator feeds for ABC, or the A/B testing framework for the streaming platform.

The important thing about this goal is that it helps us get out of our bubble: it’s very easy to get your nose so close to the grindstone that you lose sight of what else is happening around you. Taking some time to get to know folks outside of your direct team, as well as folks fully outside of our firm, helps to set a broader context about what’s happening in our company, as well as in the product field at large.

We See Far and We Rise Together are often contributive to one another: you have an intro 1:1 with someone, and they end up being an excellent Product Jam speaker. You get an intro to a PM working in an interesting startup from someone at book club.

We Care About Quality

  • Every L-XL+ project gets a Looker Dashboard & a Retro
  • Formally seek feedback from Engineering Teams Quarterly

This one is about great habits: we need to keep a pulse on how our projects perform, and how we might iterate on them in the future. To do this effectively, we have to intentionally build out the infrastructure that will fuel that awareness and iteration. The Looker piece just happens to be the tool we use – the tool is less important than getting in the habit of creating dashboards by default.

Any project sufficiently large to mandate a dashboard should also already have at least one retro scheduled by the engineering side of the house; but Product isn’t always invited to them. If it’s possible, I really like to sit in on those calls – they can often be a source of really helpful insight into process and approach, as well as feedback for how you personally are doing with a given team.

For the engineering feedback piece, we use a fairly simple Google Form, with a standard NPS metric and a few ethnographic and a few feedback questions. We schedule them in conversation with engineering leadership so we’re not asking engineers to fill out a survey in the midst of a stressful crunch time, or when lots of folks are on vacation.

There’s no perfect Product Manager, only the Product Manager that uses their product toolkit to best effect with the engineering teams they work with. Retros and quarterly surveys are a great source of insight as to how well your team is performing in that space.

Become Aware

  • Each PM attends at least 1 trade show in our industry per year
  • Each PM attends at least 1 Product focused event per year

This falls in much the same theme as above – a ‘trade show’ would be something like NAB in Las Vegas, a chance to connect with vendors, understand our space in the broader media and entertainment space, and walk around a gigantic trade show floor. A Product focused event would be something like Product Con or Lead Dev, maybe An Event Apart.

A theme-of-themes here is “get out of the office,” – mentally, network-wise, and literally physically. I am a firm believer that innovation emerges from novel intersections, unique combinations of experiences and expertise that are rare but valuable, and the most expedient way to achieve novel intersections is to get out there and experience a bunch of things.

Cause Awareness

  • Each PM speaks 1x per year at an external event or conference
  • Each PM speaks 1x per year at an internal event or conference

Becoming Aware and Causing Awareness are collaborative tenets as well – often we can check a couple boxes at a single event. I think for product folks, investing in public speaking, in clear communication, is so important, and is such a highly portable skill, even if folks I work with leave product forever (not because of me, I hope!), being clear communicators who can talk confidently in front of a room will serve them where-ever their journey takes them.

While the actual giving-a-talk is what’s being measured here, I feel that the preparation of a talk is in some ways at least as valuable as the experience of giving it. Much like blog posts, preparing a talk forces you to distill your thinking into something crisp, to take a position, and defend it to strangers.

Maybe at the end of the year I can do a roundup of how we’ve performed against these goals – and which ones we are shaking up vs. keeping as-is. It could be valuable to reflect on how setting them has been productive, or could be improved. Stay tuned!

Don’t Taste One Coffee

Don’t Taste One Coffee

Did you know I had a whole career in specialty coffee before I became part of the tech industry?

It’s true – I trained hundreds of baristas, some of them competitors (barista competitions are a thing!), opened a number of cafes, developed a whole multi-course curriculum, I also kind of interestingly in retrospect did some product work with muffins?

One of the most memorable aspects of that time in my life was buying coffee, by which I mean, working with importers and exporters to source the green unroasted coffee to bring to the States, to then store, roast, sometimes blend, and serve in the cafes.

There are a whole library of ways that you can try to ensure taste (at a given price and availability) in the cup through the buying process. There’s a Sommelier type test for folks who do coffee buying professionally (which I did not pass by the way!) One of the most common tools in the toolbox is an exercise called cupping.

Cupping involves standing at a table, usually a very long table, where there are a collection of little groups of cups (the standard for professional buying sessions is 5, but I’ve been at tables with 3 or 4 cups per group, like in the image above), with each group holding a particular coffee from a particular farm. You might be tasting fifteen coffees, which would mean fifteen little groups around the edge of the table. Then, you and your colleagues and partners walk around the table, use your individual spoon to taste the different samples and different coffees, take lots of notes, and decide what fits your needs for the coming season.

Imagine instead, packing your bags, flying to Guatemala, taking a drive into the mountains, roasting, grinding, and setting up a single cup of a single coffee, giving that one lonesome sample a try, and your import partner turning to you and asking, “Well, should we buy it?”

Even if you’d tasted hundreds of coffees in your life, it would be incredibly challenging to consistently make the right decision in that moment.

Humans are really good at comparing. When we have the chance to assess multiple options, in real time, all together, especially in discussion with others, we are much more successful when we have a small number of things to compare and contrast to one another, rather than having a single yes-no binary choice.

So we never only try one coffee. You try lots of coffees, and you keep trying them as they cool, to help get as much information about the different options, the trade-offs, and guide you in making the best choice you can.

The thing is, this is also true for making decisions in other fields, especially in Product, whether prioritizing a feature or making a whole roadmap, or hiring onto your team. You will always make better choices when you give yourself the space and process where you consider and discuss alternatives and the trade offs between them.

Something happens in the process of discussing trade-offs – it forces you (and your colleagues!) to get really clear on your thinking, and it can help draw out benefits and drawbacks that wouldn’t have arisen if you’d only tasted the One Coffee.

Teresa Torres (absolute luminary, her book is a must-read imo) outlines a great way to do this in the Opportunity Solution Tree exercise. If you give that approach a try, you’ll have lots of options to consider!

If we’re talking about the Ideal Platonic Product Organization (which doesn’t exist, by the way!), following our successful Opportunity Solution Tree exercise, we’d produce a ranked list of these potential opportunities to prioritize, and then we’d leverage our reliable, fast, and effective experimentation framework to run tiny inexpensive experiments to determine which possible direction would go the best with your customers and infrastructure, and then execute on that opportunity.

I can’t speak for other fields, but in developing software, Only One Coffee can sneak up on you.

“When can we schedule the Anti Light Particle Beam feature?” … when you hadn’t even heard about the Anti Light Particle Beam feature!

“Nautical Cloud Experience says we need to build the Zoidberg Platform v3 out by end of March to unblock their P Zeroes.” … but Zoidberg v2 was never even completed!

In situations like these, it’s incumbent on the Product organization to say, “Wait, hold on a minute, let’s think about what our alternatives are,” and then do so in a structured way. Remember, you always have the choice to do nothing! Between the proposed Single Coffee, and the evergeen Do Nothing, if you come up with only one or two other possible paths to a solution, you’ll already be in much, much better shape.

You won’t always get the chance to go through Discovery exercises, and you won’t always have the experimental infrastructure or organizational support to run lots of iterative experiments. But you can always ensure that you’re considering alternatives, and giving yourself and your firm the best chance at building the right thing.

The most important thing a Product organization does is avoid building The Wrong Thing. Never taste only one coffee.

Trombone Oil & Picking Good Problems

There are these three ideas that are coming together for me right now.

We’ve talked about the importance of novel intersections before – how as you explore different areas, texts, content, relationships, you find places where they approach the same problem in different ways, or you find a similar perspective being represented in unexpected ways across industries.

One of the best ways to drive innovation is to get out of the office, and we need to follow that same pattern when it comes to our information and research diets. We have to get out of the standard operating procedure sometimes, and cast a wide net, find other things that are interesting and engaging outside of our professional day-to-day.

(I think this is why we see such a strong correlation between arts and crafts and winning the Nobel!)

When I joined Disney, I read Bob Iger’s book. In this book there are a number of useful take-aways (although it is a pretty classic business guy book), but one rang out to me and has been hanging around my mind since:

“My former boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” ”

Iger in Ride of a Lifetime

It was a little later that I first read the (now classic) Shreyas Doshi piece on the importance of not only identifying customer problems but also seeking to understand how those problems relate to one another.

After you’ve talked to a customer about a specific problem & possible solutions you could build, ask them to stack rank the problem being discussed vs. the other problems they are trying to solve for their business & org. This is where the real truth will emerge.

Shreyas Doshi

And there was the time that ol’ Brian Chesky scared me into learning about product marketing, which brought me to the very smart, very thoughtful, very valuable podcast and books of April Dunford (which I have recommended before and will recommend again!)

One of my biggest takeaways from Dunford’s Obviously Awesome (which was my Work Book of 2023 by the way!) was the importance of framing a product or solution within the broader context of your target customers or market – and being sensitive to the dynamic and shifting nature not just of your own product being developed, but also how the market itself can shift away from established successful frames.

(I know classically we think about positioning as a skillset for product folks working with external customers, but I’ve started using Dunford’s positioning framework with internal platform teams, and it’s been really valuable!)

These are three ideas that are in the same neighborhood, which is of special interest to product folks, which is the area of Problem Assessment. The most important thing a healthy product organization does is ensure that they don’t build the wrong thing, and it’s easy to hyper focus on a solution, on a product, and lose sight of what problems that real people have, that you can help them to solve.

It feels like every team I talk with, someone has a story about working for months on a project, crunching to hit a deadline, and then seeing the delivered product fail to achieve any interest from the market. We want to avoid this!

When we chat with our customers, when we observe the platform landscape of our companies, there will always be things to improve, areas where we might deploy our resources and time. It’s important that we take the above lessons and leverage them to help consider problems from a few different perspective:

  • “Is this trombone oil?” (Assess business opportunity)
    • We want to consider, if we absolutely defeat the problem, if we build out the absolutely best possible solution and become the dominant player in that market, will that be … a big deal? Would it move the needle for our firm?
  • “How does this rank against other problems? (Assess customer pain)
    • When we talk to our customers, do they consistently report that the problem at hand is more important, more urgent, or more painful than the broad landscape of other problems they have?
  • “Can we appropriately frame this problem?” (Assess market understanding)
    • Even if your firm has the product/engineering talent to build out an exceptional solution to a serious problem, do you know enough about your target market to bring the solution to them in a way that will communicate the value in terms and ways that resonate with that market?

Like any discovery exercise, this assessment can go as deep as you can sensibly prioritize: of course, the framing piece can be improved by learning more about a market and audience, the customer rank piece might be dynamic based on who your target customer is, and even the market sizing piece might change given other larger shifts in the macroeconomic landscape (think about the market for AI Assistants only two years ago!)

They also relate to one another: you wouldn’t want to invest a great deal in learning about the appropriate framing for a customer segment if you aren’t yet sure you have a solution to their most painful problems – and ensuring with relative confidence that you have a significant addressable market probably should come before the other assessments.

I hope bringing these different pieces together this can be a helpful lens in considering the different problems that you might work against: if we can avoid trombone oil, and build things that create real value, and solve real problems, that’s a great start!

The Time Brian Chesky Scared Me So Bad I Bought A Book

When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical.

Surprised in part because, AirBNB is a company whose product folks have had a serious impact on me and my own product practice – Lenny of course but also more directly Nick and James from the Transform team (who I got to know during my time in the modern data stack space). To think that a company that produced such thoughtful and successful product folks, was pivoting away from this mindset and methodology (which I’ve built my professional journey on!) was jarring, to say the least.

Was this part of a larger market shift? Was Product Management going the way of the Elevator Operator? Surely a little over-the-top, a dramatic overreaction from a former theater kid. But even so!

A quick Google will give you lots of hot takes and deep dives on what Chesky really meant, and how what they were really doing was shifting from the way that they had found themselves doing product, more intentionally to a revenue- and market-focused direction.

That being said, in hearing the news, my first reflection was more personal – I’ve had the opportunity to work with some world class product marketers, but that part of the overall Product Toolkit was an area where I felt quite weak – not for lack of interest or adjacency, but just, never happened to get around to it!

So, I did the thing any good Product person does when faced with uncertainty; I did some discovery! I reached out to the undisputed most talented product marketing professionals I know, and asked for help.

And help they did – after a few Zoom powered coffee hangouts, I felt as though I had passed through the Dunning Kruger horizon. The depth and complexity of the topic unfolded before me in an exciting (and nervous-making) way, like any topic does once you get close enough.

One aspect of my concern was validated almost immediately: while I had worked closely with marketing teams and marketers, my own toolkit could use some sharpening in this area. So, I set about doing just that sharpening – ingesting a lot of audio and text content, YouTube videos, and overall sort of soaking in the broad Product Marketing Content Ocean – and an ocean it is! There’s no shortage of folks who are happy to opine on the many aspects of the field.

Through this effort I did find two resources to be especially useful and continue to be folks I look to for expertise and value regularly, which I share here:

  • Jason Oakley of Productive PMM – I subscribe to his newsletter, which shares regular quick-hit examples and analysis of interesting things being done in the wild.
  • April Dunford – I will read, write, and listen to anything that April makes! I’ve been so impressed by her thinking, her storytelling style, and her deep and expert analysis. She has a podcast which is a great first stop.

It was through April’s podcast that I first started to think a lot about positioning – not something I had considered with much depth before, but something which, due to the topic itself or perhaps due to April’s natural charisma and engagement around the topic, really drew me in.

I think most folks have the experience of, occasionally, being really taken by an aspect of their own work, some line of thinking or research, or new approach or methodology, that can arise with a sort of renewed energy, a renewal of excitement and a new sort of lens on a great many things that you’ve been doing regularly without much new insight or novelty.

For me, the most recent example of this is positioning – in coming to better understand this line of thought and methodology, I’m find it applying to more and more aspects of my own work.

It has me so fired up, between the great fright that Chesky gave me, and the compelling nature of Dunford’s podcast, I did something I never thought I’d do. I bought a sales book.

I haven’t finished the sales book, but I am already seeing some unexpected intersections of how we thoughtfully market and sell to external customers, and how internal / platform product teams could more thoughtfully represent the value of their partners and work. There’s something here, and I’m stoked to dig in more.

All this to say, if there’s a kerfuffle in your industry, in your place of work, and it makes you nervous or anxious (as Chesky’s shift to Product Marketing did for me) it’s worth sitting with that internal landscape, spending some time interrogating that feeling, maybe having a coffee or two with friends or mentors. You may find there’s something new and exciting behind that anxiety that unlocks a whole new space in your journey.