Digital Possibilities

by Richard Beck

Is Your Product Organization Working Effectively?

Strong product management can lead to amazing performance for your business, supporting the work of all departments and giving you excellent returns on your investments.

However, it is a very difficult challenge to ensure that product is run optimally, and it can be difficult sometimes to identify disfunction in the race to release new value for the business.

To help you out, here is a list of ten indicators that your product organization has room to improve, and quick guidance on what to do.

1. Unclear Business Objectives

Does your product department know what your strategic business objectives are? Are they delivering according to what you believe your objectives to be?

Define OKRs (objectives with key results) that encapsulate your strategy for your product team. They must be clear and easily understandable; then share them with the rest of your business. The objectives that you define for product must also be aligned with those of the rest of your organization, notably sales and marketing.

Read more about strategic alignment

2. Squeaky Wheel Syndrome

Are there particular customers or internal stakeholders that seem to dominate the roadmap by making a lot of noise?

An example Roadmap from ProductRoadmap

Some customers are key to your business, and their supporters may be in a position to apply a lot of pressure to have their desired items on the roadmap. However, there is an opportunity cost to allowing them to dictate your roadmap where your teams might not be working on features that will allow you to attract new customers or better serve more broadly your existing base.

A key way to address squeaky-wheel syndrome is to ensure you have a strong and transparent scoring and prioritization system in place.

3. Customers are not Being Contacted

Are you hearing back from your customers that they feel disconnected from your product development strategy, that their voice is not being heard?

If this is the case, the main reason is that your product organization is not spending enough time on them, period. The first thing to do is to ensure your product managers have an OKR (objective and key result) to spend more time with customers.

Another complimentary approach is to restructure your team to create a clean differentiation between Product Owners and Product Managers. This will move the latter out of the day to day development activities and provide them with more time and headspace to spend with customers.

During the validation phase of the product management lifecycle, your product organization must be spending a lot time with your customers.

4. Where are your Prototypes?

If you are not seeing prototypes of new ideas before development starts in earnest, you can be sure your target customers aren’t seeing them either.

You want to make sure your investments in new features and products pay off, and that you reduce the risk of them not doing so. One of the best ways to do this is to prototype ideas and validate them internally and with customers

The development phase of the product management lifecycle must include the creation of prototypes.

5. “You mean no-one is using that?”

Have you spent months developing a new solution only to find out that no-one is using it?

This symptom speaks to many underlying causes. The principal one is that your product team is not creating the features that your customers want, in which case you need to review the signal, validation and development phases of your product management lifecycle.

On the other hand, this can also be symptomatic of issues in your GoToMarket and adoption phases.

6. Your Customers don’t know about a Feature

You hear from your customers that they don’t know about a new feature that you’ve spent a lot of time and money in developing.

There can be several reasons behind why this is happening, and frankly not all of them can be controlled by product. However, if the GoToMarket phase of the product management lifecycle has been implemented correctly, then customers should know. Some of the key issues are: not enough push to customers, lack of notifications to account management, lack of account management strategy to work with customers on the feature, ineffective marketing campaigns and not reaching the right people within customer organizations.

For SaaS platforms, consider using in-app notifications as one of your tactices to drive direct awareness on the user level.

7. Do you Know how Your Product Compares?

How clear is it within your organization how well your product drives value when compared with competitors or other substitute offerings?

To effectively market and sell a product or even a feature, your organization needs to have very clear positioning of the value of your product. If you see your organization working with feature lists rather than the value generating ideas, you know that you have a disfunction.

If your product, marketing or sales organizations struggle to speak in terms of value, consider implementing Jobs-To-Be-Done.

8. New Features Break when Given to Customers

Your customers are complaining that new features break or don’t address the value that was promised.

With the best will in the world, solutions that work fantastically internally, pass all their tests and meet the defined scope can have issues when being used by customers. Accept this risk and reduce it by making sure your product team rolls out new features gradually. Stop asking for big-bang launches, and ask for gradual rollouts to targeted customers or user segments. Consider this an extension of your experiment-based prototyping culture.

9. Delivery Dates have been Missed Again!

Product created a roadmap with dates, you shared it with your customers, sales was all excited and then…. nothing was delivered as expected.

I’m sure too you pushed for some items to be delivered more quickly? Here’s the thing with software development — it’s much more akin to artisan work than production line work. Most new features have new challenges that have a large element of risk. Either you pad your timelines to take account of this, or you change how your organization manages the roadmap.

Some organizations remove dates entirely from their roadmaps and just use a Now, Next, Later idea of timelines. A good middle route is to work with progressive timelines: This Month, Next Month, Third-Month, Next Quarter, Next Half and Next Year.

Example of using Progressive Timelines in Roadmaps

It’s important to note that any notion of time must be considered a target period in which the organization expects to begin *Go To Market*, but this is not a confirmed date for having a feature available.

10. Your Product Team is not Delivering Enough

You have all the activities in the Product Management Lifecycle, but your team is not delivering enough with the quality you expect.

Here’s the bottom line, you should have one product role per 8–10 developers. If your ratio is out, you will struggle to deliver quality across the Product Management Lifecycle. What are your teams not delivering on? Customer time, GoToMarket preparation, supporting engineering or supporting your sales teams?

In addition, make sure that your product teams are not involved in operational activities such as giving sales demos (sales should be capable of demoing themselves, either with specialized persons or preferably with each sales agent), making adjustments to customer accounts, doing deep dives on customer data or on bugs.

Learning More

If you want to learn more on how to optimize your Product Management Organization, walk through this series on the Product Management Lifecycle.

Header Image by Austin Distel via Unsplash