A highlight this week was attending a virtual Q&A session with Melissa Perri at work about her book, Escaping the build trap. The book talks about strategy, processes, and culture as the three key parts to a successful product organisation.
I want to capture here some of my takeaways from her book and from the Q&A session with her.
A good vision mission statement sets the company for success
I often get mission and vision confused. Melissa explains the difference with the following: A good mission explains why the company exists. A vision, on the other hand, explains where the company is going based on that purpose.
Melissa finds that the best is when a company can combine both the mission and vision into one statement to provide the value proposition of the company—What the company does, why it does it, and how it wins doing that. She gave the following examples that work well:
- To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker
- At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America
- Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film-makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience. Netflix
I really like that as these statements bring clarity on why the organisation exists and where they see themselves heading without being too prescriptive on the detailed steps to get there.
Uncover the why behind the what
Melissa found that often organisations are overly focused on delivering and shipping products that they lose sight of the why and value of building them in the first place. Metrics become how many features get released and not enough people are questioning if those are the metrics to measure success. Everything that gets built should serve a purpose that ties back to the company vision and strategic intent.
Inspired by the Toyota Kata, Melissa created a product kata to help organisations understand how to strategically tackle problems to reach goals.
Through the Product Kata. We ask ourselves the following: What is the goal? Where are we now in relation to that goal? What is the biggest problem or obstacle standing in the way of me reaching that goal? How do I try to solve that problem? What do I expect to happen (hypothesis)? What actually happened, and what did we learn?
I wanted to see how I might apply this thinking to my current project with NHS on the topic of interoperability. I quite like that the information unfolds in a way that gives clarity to how we arrived at our current project and what potential impact the project may bring. In laying out information in this flow, one can get a better sense of the what and why at a glance that a paragraph cannot do. This makes getting alignment from the project team members more effectively and people can easily chime in if they feel the strategy isn’t quite right.
Focus on the outcome rather than the output
A good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions. Melissa laments when teams are expected to produce detailed plans when asking to create a strategy for a product or service. The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.
In such cases, we need to shift the entire mentality of the organisation from delivering to achieving outcomes in order to make a real impact. Every feature you build and any initiative you take as a company should result in some outcome that is tied back to that business value.
Outputs are easily quantified things that we produce — number of products or features, number of releases, or velocity of development teams. Outcomes are the things that result when we finally deliver those features and the customer problems are solved. True value is realized in these outcomes, both for the business and for the user or customer.
Products are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time. —Melissa Perri
You have to get to know your customers and users, deeply understanding their needs, to determine which products and services will fulfil needs both from the customer side and the business side. This is how you develop the Value Exchange System.
You need the discipline to move toward organizing for products over projects. Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes.
Have different levels of strategy in place
Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.
In order for people to act on the stories they hear, the stories can’t have significantly different time scales than they are accustomed to.
As you go up in the organization, you tell stories with longer timespans. Executives are really good at telling five-year stories, but a team cannot act on a five-year story when they’re used to thinking in two to four weeks. There’s too much space to explore.
Strategy deployment is about setting the right level of goals and objectives throughout the organization to narrow the playing field so that teams can act.
Kill not just the bad ideas but also the potentially good ones
“The best thing you can do, at this point, is to kill the bad ideas! The fewer features, the better. That is how you reduce the complexity of products. Otherwise, you can quickly run into feature fatigue from customers.” —Melissa Perri
On the other hand, you may have good ideas for new features but it might be not the right time to investigate or commit to those based on your organisation priorities. Ensure you’re always going back and aligning with your company’s vision, mission, and strategy to help make decisions on what to invest in.
Focus on the product mindset, then you can apply it to all other areas
While Melissa’s book mainly centres around software and product companies, she argues that the product mindset is just as applicable in other organisations and service industries. Think of the product mindset as a framework rather than a detailed prescriptive process
Alignment always start from the top
All of the above are great and all, but without the buy-in, alignment, and commitment from the top-level management of the organisation, it is difficult to maintain a great strategy and mission that is sustainable. Melissa shares her consulting experience where she was tasked to figure out strategies and build road maps for organisations only to have them fall apart once she left. She learned that nothing is going to change or stick without the buy-in from the executive level of the organisation and have them be partners in creating the mission and strategy. The people in the organisations that the senior leadership team are committed to the same cause and will empower them to head in the right direction.
Product management and UX
A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market.
Reading through her book, I found that a lot of what I do as a User Experience (UX) Designer and Consultant seems to overlap with the roles and responsibilities of that product manager Melissa described. When asked about this, she says that While UX is a huge piece to make great products, it isn’t the only piece. The product manager also looks at business metrics and goals. They need to understand profitability and strategy, the implication of going up and down the market. There are UX implications but it isn’t all. Thinking about product strategy, the implications of architecture and the building of products aren’t always part of UX.
I hope the above learnings also resonate with fellow practitioners. To dive deeper into some of the above points and more, here’s a recording of a talk by Melissa on product management:
You can also find her ‘Mind the product’ talk along with a summary here.
