Are you shipping values or just features?
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Riddle of the week 💬
What is seen in the middle of March and April that can’t be seen at the beginning or end of either month?
The answer is at the end of this newsletter
Working at different companies over the years, I’ve heard my fair share of “How fast can you ship this blog out?” and I’ve seen Product Managers in my team face the same thing. While shipping out products in a timely manner is important, speed should never take over quality or value. I remember publishing blogs so fast that I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how it turned out and not surprisingly enough, it didn’t gain much traction with my subscribers either. Lesson learned.
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/02/21/features-vs-benefits
In the midst of product development, speed isn’t the only thing that can take your focus away from building value. With the excitement or pressure of pushing out more features, Product Managers can sometimes move on to working on the next feature right after one is released. But a great PM doesn’t just stop once the product is released, but sees it all the way through to measuring the impact it delivers.
Here are four ways you can focus on delivering products that yield value to your customers:
1. Understanding the “a” to “z” of your customer’s problems
Product Managers are the ones to decide which feature to build while developers are the ones who know how to build it. But a Product Manager that doesn’t fully understand the customer’s pain points will often end up telling developers to build features that hardly have any impact on the customer.
That’s why it’s important to have consistent communication with your user base to understand their growing needs, the different use cases, and more. And there’s only one sure-shot way to do this, by talking to them and asking the right questions.
Here are some examples of the types of questions that usually prove fruitful:
When did you last encounter a problem with this technology?
Can you describe exactly what happened?
What attempts have you made to solve the problem?
What further issues have stemmed from the initial problem?
2. Focusing on the output > focusing on the outcome
Outcome is the result of the product development cycle whereas the output is the measurement metrics used to understand how much of an impact the outcome has made. These can be in the form of new sign-ups, more business revenue, and so on.
As leadership consultant Ashley Cox describes it, “I see outputs as the hard numbers, data, and metrics of doing business, while outcomes are the intangible results and human aspects.”
Even after all the user research you have done, there could still be instances where the data shows that the outcome did not create the value that you anticipated. That’s why it’s important for PMs to focus on the output and have a learning mindset to learn from these mistakes.
The same goes for how you celebrate your product too. During your weekly demo meetings, in addition to the dev and product teams explaining the new features, also stress the output and value you plan to achieve with this. You can also mention the steps the team took to make sure the last released feature created the intended impact. Like how the teams spoke to many customers, what they learned, how the customers reacted to it etc.
3. Articulate the problem, then find the solution
Sometimes it’s easy for PMs to get carried away by the product roadmap. A roadmap typically includes requests or ideas from customers, the sales team, or senior stakeholders and these may even be features that your competitors already have. But what often happens here is that teams get so focused on discussing the different values that these features will create than sitting down together to understand if these features will actually solve their customers’ current pain points. That’s why PMs should resort to using insights and problems identified from solid user research to help in decision-making.
Credit: https://uxdesign.cc/dont-ship-features-solve-problems-e54d1003f52a
4. One big feature that adds value > Too many features
A good Product Manager always delivers fewer features that yield the highest values. But more often than not, PMs will end up prioritizing a number of small features that add small value over one important feature that delivers big value. Simply because the important feature requires more time and effort. The product now ends up with a number of less impactful features which also makes the product feel crowded and cluttered.
Contrary to traditional frameworks, which simply count the number of features or the number of enhancements, product managers should evaluate the ratio of value to effort and focus on obtaining the most value for the customer with a given amount of effort.
Instead of adding more features, product managers need to make sure they have the right features in their product and consider removing features when appropriate.
Credit: https://www.goodproductmanager.com/2008/05/20/deliver-customer-value-not-product-features/
Good reads for extra credit 📚
1. Ship outcomes, not just features, with the Product Impact Framework by Intercom.
2. Kill features before they kill your product by Avi Siegel, a Product Leader
3. How to Stay User-Focused as a Product Manager? By Zeda.io
Song of the week 🎶
An underrated artist that definitely needs more recognition!
What’s brewing on Zeda.io’s side? ☕
The recent Twitter Blue update caused a lot of backlash around the world.
And we couldn't hold back our curiosity! 😬
We asked our guests a bunch of these hot questions at the recent ProductCafe event, but in rap form!
📹 Watch us pick their product brains:
Help us create Zeda.io’s Product Leadership Report! 📄
Over the past few weeks, we have been working on a Product Management Report that covers the career path of product folks, their challenges, what makes them tick, and more. However, to finish it, we need your help.
All you have to do is participate in this 1-minute survey and answer some simple questions about your day-to-day life as a Product Manager. Do share this survey with your colleagues and friends who share your same passion for building products as well :)
And this goes without saying, we would happily send you a copy of the report when we launch it next month. 🗓
Here's the survey link: https://tally.so/r/mZ95kB
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
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Answer to the riddle: The letter “R”
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