March 2015 – How To Train a Product Manager

March 24, 2015

Service Design – Classify your Service Model

I’ve started leading a book club at work for Service Design and it’s creating some great discussions around how to improve our service setup. This week we covered Chapters 1 and 2, which gave an overview of how a Swedish insurance company used service design and the basics of service design. As we progress through the book I’ll post about interesting ideas and discussions.

One of our first talking points was around the notion of classifying services in one or more of the following values:

Care – Services that maintain people or things, such as healthcare or airplane maintenance.
Access – Services that enable people to use something temporarily, like a car rental.
Response – Services that respond to people’s unforseen needs, like an insurance policy.

For a new Product Manager, this classification of a company’s service values can help them think about a product holistically. A great point in the book is that many businesses silo parts of a customer experience into business unit to optimize organizational structure, but the end customer receives the service as one package. It can be all too easy for a new Product Manager to think only about product development without considering how product decisions impact the overall service that a customer receives. And that a customer’s experience with your company is shaped only partially by the product experience. It’s important to work across the business with all stakeholders, incorporating internal needs into product design and communicating profusely about any service impacts.

At work we’re in the midst of transitioning from Access and Response values to Response and Care values, which is an exciting time to explore new ways to structure our services. It also means that the tone and value proposition of our products has to change to support this new service model. Viewing the service change as a fundamental shift in service values helps give a measure for examining product changes. Any product change I make should be about getting us away from an Access value to a Care value. For instance, instead of giving customers access to raw exports of data, we should be caring for them by bundling that data into actionable recommendations that can easily implement.

If you are interested in using Service Design for you own book club, here are some discussion questions you can use for Chapters 1 & 2:

Gjensidige had their CEO and Executive Team talk to customers. What effect do you think direct Executive Team involvement would have/has on our services, both internally and externally? From the book – “When a CEO sits down to talk to customers to find out what they think, it sends an important signal to the rest of the organization and the industry.”
Where are we siloed as a service organization, and where are we not? What impact do these silos or lack thereof have on our customers? What could we do to help bust any existing silos? From the book – “The division of the silos makes sense to the business units, but makes no sense to the customer, who sees the entire offering as one experience.”
How do we think and talk about our customers: as productive assets or as consumers? From the book – “The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.”
Services deliver one or more core values: Care, Response, and Access. What are our service values? Is it different depending on the product/value proposition?
How could we make our service more visible to customers? How do we make the invisible visible? From the book – “As a result, service designers frequently need to make the invisible visible by showing customers what has gone on behind the scenes, showing staff what is happening in the lives of customers, and showing everyone the resource usage that is hidden away.”

March 18, 2015

The Kano Crystal Ball

Previously I talked about how to do a feature inventory with Kano to help onboard a Product Manager. Kano can help them feel acquainted with a product’s feature set and understand how customers engage with your product. You should also use Kano to take a look at customer feedback and upcoming plans. Classifying the planned features into the Kano emotional responses gives the same insights as the feature inventory, and also helps ground a product’s upcoming plans.

An important aspect of Kano when viewing future plans is that your customers’ emotional responses to features change over time. Features that were once Delighters will become Basic Needs as customers get habituated to such functionality and your competitors match you in the market. When looking at the roadmap, I like to first check that Basic Needs are met at the minimal level to reap the large returns on removing customer dissatisfaction. Basic Needs are “check the box” features, so as long as you check the box you’re good, and there’s little benefit to putting extra effort into making the “box’s check” fancy. I try to keep the MVP philosophy in mind to get the most value for the minimal effort when working with Basic Needs, as I’d much rather focus on Delighters. Delighters deserve the focus for several reasons:

They age better – By building a Delighter today you can reap value from that feature for a while as it ages into a Basic Need. If you were to focus only on Basic Needs, your customers would lose interest in your functionality sooner as they age into Indifferent features. The longer lifecycle for Delighters gives you more time to focus on improving customer satisfaction even more.
Competitive Advantages – Delighters give jet fuel to your marketing and sales team as they are often competitive advantages that can be touted in demos and marketing materials.
Team Motivation – Delighters are often much more fun and enjoyable to create as they are innovative and rewarding to customers. They give your dev team a challenge and boost morale which in turn creates even more innovation.

Kano can thus be a crystal ball that predicts how your features will fare in the marketplace over time. By knowing your customer’s emotional response to your current and upcoming features, you can extrapolate how those features will age over time as the emotional responses change. Reviewing the product plans with a new PM will help them know what to be on the lookout for in customer discovery as well as where to look for Delighter opportunities when creating new features.

March 13, 2015

Total Awareness with Lean Canvases

We’ve started a series of Lean Canvas reviews at work, which is a succinct way to share a product’s current ecosystem and plans to expand or focus its features. I shared mine today, which led to a constructive conversation on how to tighten up the model and view the current environment differently.

Beyond evolving a business model, the lean canvas is an excellent tool for communicating your analysis and plans for a product. Thus it’s also a great initial tool for onboarding a new Product Manager as it gives them awareness of all aspects of a product’s business model. This then empowers them to think of new product ideas by supplying the basic vocabulary and goals for a product that they can leverage to express their own proposals.

Consider these aspects of the canvas when reviewing it with the new PM to help them get the full value from the exercise:

Problem – Make this juicy to captivate the emotions your customers feel. As a PM, why should they lose sleep over scheming great solutions to this problem? The “Existing Alternatives” section also gives a chance to talk about competitors in the market.
Customer Segments – This is a place to introduce personas and other formal categorizations of users that the new PM can use as shorthand in future communication.
Unique Value Proposition – After you review the canvas, you may want to come back to this section to see if the new PM has an alternate way to express the proposition. With their fresh eyes, they may see a different angle that you missed to make it more compelling.
Solution – You can introduce some basic existing or proposed product concepts here, that will then be built upon in later activities like feature demos and tech diagramming.
Channels – Be sure to cover any unique or oft-forgotten channels like special partner relationships. This can also highlight the different internal and external communications the new PM will need for launch coordination.
Revenue – Help the new PM see what financial numbers are important to the business. Is it monthly recurring revenue, or one-time sales, for instance?
Cost Structure – This is the place to highlight any uncommon costs such as data acquisition or partner integrations. If you can put concrete numbers it will get the new PM a baseline for comparing the scale of different models.
Key Metrics – Try to get specific to give the PM a focus in exploring new products. This helps them see the user behaviors you want to increase or decrease. At work, we’re also exploring the use of “KPIs” for this panel to better link it to higher-level planning.
Unfair Advantage – Tie it all together and talk about how this product gives you a competitive advantage.

Another use for the Lean Canvas can be in the interview process. If your product has a rich website, you could have the PM candidate create the Lean Canvas for one of your existings products for the first interview. This prework will validate interest from the candidate, give you a chance to review actual work material, and judge their critical thinking and research skills. With the same above conversations used in onboarding, you can investigate the candidate’s product thinking and share some more details on the product to ensure they’re excited to manage it.

March 10, 2015

Feature Inventory with Kano

The Kano model provides a great framework for not only thinking about how to prioritize new features, but also giving a great lens for evaluating existing ones.

Even if you don’t use the Kano questions in customer interviews, the Kano chart of the emotional responses to a feature helps think about the life cycle of existing features. Most Kano analyses focus on the Delighters/Attractive (features that drastically increase satisfaction, especially as they are enhanced) versus Basic Needs/Must-Haves (features that remove dissatisfaction with a product, up to a certain threshold). There are other emotional responses, however, of Indifferent/Unimportant and Detractors/Undesired. Indifferent/Unimportant features are ones that do not increase customer satisfaction as they are built, and Undesired/Detractor features decrease customer satisfaction as they are enhanced.

A great activity for onboarding a Product Manager is to look at the existing feature set of a product and classify them in the Kano emotional responses they elicit in your users. You can then interpret each response in the following way:

Delighters/Attractive – These are often competitive advantages that you have in the marketplace that may be worth reviewing with Marketing to ensure they’re capitalizing on them. These may warrant future investment as well.
Basic Needs/Must-Haves – Features you need to maintain to “check the box” on product capability. Over time, Delighters/Attractive features fall into this category as competitors match these capabilities, making them a feature that is taken for granted by customers. These may not warrant future investment if the basic need is met.
Indifferent/Unimportant – Features that may have been needed at one time, but no longer serve the user. These features are eligible for sunset as long as you consider that they may have different emotional responses for different personas.
Undesired/Detractors – Features that should be sunset now as they are negatively impacting the customer experience. They may have been well intentioned at one point, but the industry or customer landscape has changed such that they are no longer helping customers.

By going through a product’s features with this lens, you can help a new Product Manager understand the ‘why’ for existing features as well as the future plans for these features. Doing a regular feature inventory also ensures you’re thinking about feature sunset plans. You can start trying this technique today by asking the Kano questions to some existing customers about current features. From their answers, categorize them into one of the emotional responses and identify the next appropriate action for these features, be it sunset or future enhancement.

March 6, 2015March 6, 2015

Feeding the Roadmap with Feedback

Feedback Roadmap We’re approaching the end of Q1, and that means it’s time to plan Q2. Each quarter I need to produce a one-year (4 quarter) roadmap, and with Jenni starting at the beginning of Q2 on April 1st, it’s a perfect opportunity to involve her in to the roadmap plan that she’ll be helping execute. Luckily she’s willing to help out with planning while still doing her current role.

One tool that I use to help prioritize product work is an affinity map of direct customer feedback. Each month our Customer Experience team deploys a monthly survey to collect both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. The survey has the customer rate our products numerically on several scales and gives them the opportunity to deliver unstructured feedback. I receive an email after each survey response, and for each customer who makes a comment, I print it out on a card such as this:

I then organize the feedback into grouped possible product solutions, like “Performance Enhancements”, “New Import Tool”, or “User Management.” On a wall or window, I mark a column for ‘Delivered’, ‘Q2’, ‘Q3’, ‘Q4’, ‘Q1’, and ‘TBD’ (as shown in the photo above.) These cared groupings are placed in either one of the four upcoming quarters, or TBD, to show how customer feedback is addressed by upcoming product solutions.

With the new quarter coming, I worked with Jenni to clear off the old board and rebuild it from scratch. I reprinted the cards, got some tape and markers, and we got to work. It was a great time for several reasons:

It was an opportunity to collaborate on not only the next quarter’s plan, but also to look at the upcoming quarters that Jenni would get to help more directly plan.
The activity of cutting, taping, and marking was a fun way to get away from the laptops and get some “arts and crafts” time, leading to great conversations.
It was satisfying to get a project done together. When starting a new team or project, it’s always a great idea to start with a success, no matter how small. Everyone starts with a sense of accomplishment, even if it’s as simple as taking a pile of cards and getting them taped to a wall in this case.

Getting the feedback wall updated for the next quarter was great, and showed both of us how we’re addressing the majority of customer feedback in the new plan. It sets the foundation for Why we’re building new products as we progress to defining the How.

March 5, 2015March 6, 2015

Career Switching with the Personal Business Model

No one gets a degree in Product Management. Everyone comes from a different career, and needs to learn to leverage their strengths as they come to Product Management.

I’m fortunate at work to have the opportunity to start working with an Associate Product Manager. It’s a new role for my company, and we found a perfect internal hire, Jenni, to take the position. My first formal role in product management was as an Associate Product Manager, so it will be fun to tread old ground and have a great excuse to strengthen my skills. To teach is to learn, and I look forward to sharing that learning in this blog.

Jenni is coming from a role in Customer Research, and thus has many great skills for Product Management, as well as some risks in the difference in careers. As an interviewing exercise, I had her complete the Personal Business Model Canvas as found in Business Model You. I think this is a great exercise for several reasons:

This exercise is very similar to the Business Model Canvas which is a great tool for a new Product Manager to understand. Thus she learned some Product Management right away in the interview.
The book is a great stimulation for thinking about an important career change. Product Management is a rewarding but demanding career, and thus a candidate should think critically about how it matches their strengths.
The canvas gives a conversation piece in the interview for discussing soft skills. For an Associate Product Manager hire, soft skills such as organization, communication, and critical thinking are crucial, as there are no yet hard skills to assess. My previous experience with soft skill interviewing has used TopGrading, and I think the Personal Business Model Canvas achieves many of the same goals in much less time.

So, for the assignment before the interview, I asked her to read the first section of the book (lending her my copy) and create her Personal Business Model Canvas for her current role. On the last page of the first section (page 77), there’s an example of how a canvas changes with a new career. I asked her to do the same and either mark-up her first canvas or make a second for how she sees her Canvas changing with a move to Product Management.

She was very excited to check out the book and explore the framework for helping her think about a career change. She came to the interview ready to share her canvases, and I found the conversation around the canvas very insightful. Highlights of the conversation focused on the Resources, Activities, and Customers panels of the canvas. We came away from the interview feeling confident that Jenni understood how she’d be able to leverage her existing strengths and where she’d need to grow to become a great Product Manager.

March 4, 2015

Welcome to “How to Train a Product Manager”

Thus begins an excellent adventure in the joys of Product Management. I look forward to your company as I train others how to succeed with Agile, Product Management, and whatever cool new techniques I find along the way. I hope you’ll get the following from this journey:

Gain skills to help you be a great Product Manager, no matter if you’re new to the field or a veteran
Learn how to train others in Product Management
Have fun

My name is William Kammersell and I’ve had a variety of roles over my career thus far. I began as a software developer, became a scrum master, then a product owner. I wanted to switch to product management, so I took a role as an associate product manager that soon became a full-on product manager. I then had a short stint as an agile coach, and am now back to product management. If you’d like to see the full story, check out my LinkedIn profile.

I always seek to learn new skills and I love sharing them with others. I hope this blog will be an incredible way to share my learning and experiences with others, creating a valuable resource in the field of product management.