Product Management

This reminds me of an interview question I got a very long time ago: "Is it better to have a bad team or a bad manager". In both cases, you'd rather not find yourself in either extreme. In both cases, there is no right or wrong answer and a lot depends on additional circumstances and assumptions. The answer will also depend on your value system and the experiences which have shaped your core beliefs about human aptitude and potential.  For the sake of argument, if I had to pick, I would first apply the same framework: which suboptimal option is more mitigatable.  I believe that most people have the capacity to learn the facts of the domain, the technical aspects, I.e. the hard skills, with sufficient effort and time. On some level, I see acquiring the hard skills in this contrived case akin to suceeding in a college course you know nothing about but are highly motivated to ace. The soft skills can also be learned, but these are much more entangled with personality, self-awareness, communication style, etc., all of which develop and become ingrained over the years. They are harder to inculcate artificially or to undo as bad habits. Poor soft skills can burn bridges and set the course of nascent relationships on the wrong trajectory, impacting your ability drive results far into the future. No amount of hard skills may be able to offset that. Good soft skills can even buy you time to get up to speed on the hard skills, and can get you critical early support from the team to actively help you get there.  This is why if I had to, I would pick the soft skills option.

It's essential to regularly evaluate and address tech debt as it can significantly impact a mature product's overall health and sustainability. If left unaddressed, it can build up and require a massive focus from the team that can disrupt existing customers or prevent you from adding new customers to the product until addressed (this is something I've run into before, and it's no fun!). Here's how I approach it: 1. Regular technical reviews: I schedule regular technical reviews with my development team to identify any technical debt that has accumulated and determine the best way to address it. We typically have a staff-level engineer or dedicated architect who can provide regular guidance and reviews as we build to ensure we consider the larger technical vision and the scale we need to deliver. 2. Budget for tech debt: I allocate a budget specifically for addressing tech debt and ensure that it is included in our development plan. I use three buckets at the team level to align what percentage of our overall capacity to devote to each: Innovation (new features, new products), Iteration (incremental enhancements), and Operation (tech debt, bug fixes, etc.). 3. Incorporate tech debt into prioritization: Once you have the target capacity allocation across the big three buckets, you can incorporate tech debt into the product backlog and prioritize it alongside new features and enhancements. This helps ensure that you take a proactive approach to reduce tech debt and improve the product's codebase. In conclusion, considering tech debt is an ongoing process when working on a mature product. By regularly evaluating and addressing it, you can ensure that your product remains healthy, scalable, and sustainable over time.

I've found it helpful to craft a ~3-year product strategy that articulates the market and trends, the challenges/opportunities, and the product's path forward with coherent actions to address those challenges. This frames the product's direction and how it will impact the company and customers you serve.  From there, determine the % allocation of your teams' capacity across investment buckets. Agree with your team on how you'll spend your time across these to achieve your product strategy: 1. Innovation: bold changes to make leaps and bounds towards the customer journey vision. E.g., new features, the overhaul of existing features, and integrations with partners. 2. Iteration: incremental changes to the existing product to deliver additional customer & business value. E.g., conversion funnel optimizations, A/B testing, and minor fixes that provide an incremental lift of a KPI. 3. Operation: The cost of managing a modern SaaS product. E.g., Security/data privacy, performance/uptime, tech debt/upgrades, and bug fixes. Next, you can consider the opportunities/ideas that may fall into each of these buckets to create a stack rank for each based on the Impact it can have. Again, a simple scoring framework can help, like RICE (detailed below). While prioritizing within each bucket, consider the following: 1. Align with the product vision and goals: Ensure that the features being considered align with the product's long-term vision and goals and that they support growth initiatives. This is often the first filter when prioritizing items. You can take additional steps to determine Impact and Effort if an opportunity is aligned. 2. Evaluate customer needs and feedback: Regularly gather customer feedback and analyze data to understand their needs and priorities. Is this opportunity impactful to these customers by solving a significant problem? How many customers might this opportunity affect? 3. Consider the cost-benefit of each feature: Evaluate the resources and time required to develop and implement each feature and weigh that against the potential benefits. A helpful framework for this is RICE, where R is the Reach (# of customers), I is Impact (degree of Impact on these customers), C is confidence (how much evidence have we gathered to support our assumptions), E is the Effort (how much effort and time might it take to develop this solution?). You take R*I*C divided by E to provide a numerical score. 4. Balance short-term and long-term benefits: Consider the Impact of each feature on both immediate and future product success. 5. Collaborate with cross-functional teams: Work closely with design, engineering, and marketing teams to ensure that all relevant perspectives are taken into account when making decisions.

Business objectives help the broader team and business understand if they've achieved the intended impact but are difficult for a product team to use sprint to sprint for a few reasons: * Revenue isn't super actionable for the team: if it goes down or up, it's not immediately obvious what actions the team should take in response. * Business outcomes are often lagging metrics: length of sales cycles, churn, and expansion all impact revenue, and this takes time. It doesn't enable the team to take new actions in response to these sprint by sprint. * A complete focus on financial metrics might cause unintended behavior: We've all heard about the Wells Fargo example where they had a KR of selling eight products to every customer, which led to teams signing up customers for products without their knowledge. With business outcomes or financial metrics as the only objectives given to product teams, they could be pulled into short-term thinking to hit revenue growth instead of focusing on the customer behaviors they need to change. With so much revenue not controlled by the product team itself (sales cycle, pricing, discounting, renewals, expansions), teams should be looking at sub-metrics that are more leading and actionable.  To translate business objectives to product objectives, I'm a big fan of Josh Seiden's book, Outcomes over Output as a helpful framing. In this book, he defines an outcome as a change in customer behavior that drives business results.  Using this framing, teams can ask these questions to find product objectives and associated metrics: * What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results? * How can we get people to do more of those behaviors? * How do we know we're right?

While infusing ML into a product can be extremely powerful to light-up new scenarios for customers and to optimize current scenarios, it can take a lot of effort to get it right. It all starts with defining and prioritizing the right scenario/problem to focus on, working with data science and ML engineering teams to map the business problem to an ML problem, trying out to different approaches to identify the right one to go ahead with, experimenting and optimizing and then operationalizing the approach and shipping it as part of product stack working with ML engineering and development teams. In addition to focusing on functional aspects and non-functional aspects like performance/scale/reliability, ML scenarios bring in an additional critical aspect of transparency and fairness which is broadly classified under Responsible AI - this is required to gain customer trust and hence feature adoption.  It is the responsibility of product manager to define the business scenarios and success metrics to focus on, work closely with data science teams to map that into ML problem and enable them with right data for them to come up with right approach. Then work with ML engineers and developers to operationalize it as part of the product. In summary, it take collaboration between multiple teams/roles in order to ship great ML features as part of a product. If you are interested in learning more, watch my session on AI/ML Product Management: https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6929801568753971200/

Implementing an ML feature vs a non ML feature is no different. The complexity is how the ML model is integrated into the existing product, business or user workflows, and how it might impact the overall end user experience. The goal is usually to simplify and not complicate things. The goal is to reduce buttons and not add buttons. The decision for ML features in a product is similar to the other features -- ML is just the technology about how - under the hood. It is not the end in itself.  As regards working with data scientists -- it depends on the feature. As PMs where there might be significant impact on end user experience, it is helpful that PMs keep in mind the ethics, diversity and inclusion issues to inform data scientists about what to include when capturing data for training and testing. It is important to have a good diverse test data set. 

There are several inputs I think about when considering product differentiation: 1. Specific target customer - There are many types of customers in a market. Who are you serving? Try to narrow your focus as far as you can to understand the specific problems faced by this customer to be as tailored to their needs as possible. Has a particular customer type been ignored or underserved in the market? If so, why? What value are they seeking but not able to find with existing products? 2. Specific value delivered - The inherent "why" customers use your product. Regardless of how many features/"bells and whistles" you think customers want on your roadmap, there are generally much fewer reasons why they use your product. What is the CORE reason? That is your moat. Stengthen and defend this core value proposition to the best of your ability before adding more stuff. This value is the point of view you solve your customer's biggest problem - don't lose sight of it, or you'll start solving problems that don't matter. 3. Market maturity - Is this a new market? Is this a mature market? Hugely different considerations. In mature markets, the incumbents have defined what good looks like, or what customers expect. Incumbents will lage behind new entrants in not adapting quickly enough to new customer expectations, and new entrants may not accommodate the existing requirements fully enough. This is a hugely delicate balance to strike. This goes back to #1 - who in the market are you serving? Then, adjust accordingly.  4. Competitive benchmarking - You have to know why your customers choose other vendors. You have to understand why sales loses deals to these competitors. What value do they derive from these vendors. This is more of a general understanding of where you fall in the market to understand if there is a difference between your positioning and market perception. 5. Ease of use - Making something easier to use is itself a product differentiation strategy. I like to think of the two axes here to be - 1) how powerful is the product and 2) how easy is it to use? - and then determine where my product falls within and these two axes. Upper right quadrant - easiest to use and most powerful. Highly differentiating, but pretty rare. Go back to that target customer - how technical are they? What do they care more about? What do other solutions make hard for their customers that I can reduce as a pain point? Apply. 6. Pricing and packaging - This could be an entire AMA itself. Think of pricing as another way to leverage strategy. Charge for the value delivered in the product. What do I mean by that? Charge more when customers get more value out of the product, so you align product incentives with your customers. The trick here is to pick the metric that best represents value in your market, for your customers. Options? # of users, # of things in product consumed, # of things I can apply the product to, etc.

Product differentiation is not about a feature laundry list; it is about ensuring you are addressing a key business problem. So instead of starting at we need to build features A, B, and C that our competitors don't have; start with the business problem. Then ask how we can leverage product differentiation to reach the business goal faster, better or cheaper. This way it ensures you are solving the underlying cause and not just the symptoms. * If you are in a 0 to 1 category, the main business problem to address is educating the market that there is a problem worth solving and you are the solution. * In a crowded marketplace, there may be existing leaders whom you want to take market share away from or you may be defending your leadership positioning. There are many inputs you can consider (target customer, market, competition, geo etc) in product differentiation; starting with the business problem as the main input will arm you with the right goals to move your company forward.

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: 1. Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? 2. Do we have alignment on these outcomes with leadership / execs? 3. Do we have a way to regularly measure progress against these outcomes? 4. Do we have a ritual (ex: recurring meeting) where progress towards these outcomes are reviewed? The onus is on you to change the culture in your group to focus on outcomes. What you present to leaders is a key first step. Once they become familiar with the outcomes and your progress or lack thereof towards them, the conversation around investing in strategic product initiatives becomes simpler.

If your exec team has not articulated a credible product strategy it could be that they don't know how or they feel that they cannot invest at this time due to much bigger near term issues or constraints. Consider what that might be saying about the viability of the company either way, and a potential switch. If you are still compelled, one way is to try using the voice of the customer: ie compile direct feedback on where your customers want to see your company go to continue being customers and couple this with a competitive strategy comparison.

I love this question. The answer is: it depends on the exec team and how they are motivated, whether they are answering to private investors or public shareholders, etc.  But - to put it simply - find someone on your exec staff who both 1) trusts you/your vision and sell them the vision and 2) is trusted by the rest of the executive team and can sell your vision or has the budget authority to invest. What do you need to sell it? A business case. I think of a business case as satisfying the inputs to the following equation:  "why should we do this" + "what do we need to do" + "how much it going to cost us" = "eventual benefit to us" Many templates exist for things like this, like North Star exercises, Market/Products Requirements Documents, and Amazon's PRFAQ. Your organization probably has a template they prefer, or you can introduce an existing template to your organization if it doesn't. Just make sure it has: 1. The "why", which can come from a couple places: Untapped opportunity in an adjacent market your product could address, Customer feedback requesting this investment (this is the most compelling way to back up your assertions) bolstered by competitive pressures (this makes exec teams sweat) 2. Requirements and costs. Understanding the upfront engineering investment, ongoing COGS, and time horizon to reach projected ROI 3. Some kind of financial projection. How accurate are these? Depends on how much data you can get to influence your assumptions.

Focus on alignment. Aligning differentiation into the product development process, cross-functional team members, go-to-market planning and goal setting. This will ensure that there are collective voices across the teams highlighting differentiation as a strategic investment and helping influence your exec teams. Here are a few tactics you can deploy: * Leverage your core differentiation pillars in product activities. Roadmap communication, product launch demos, buy/build/partner analysis, beta program etc. * Build alignment with your cross-functional partners across Sales, Customer success, BD, and Marketing to leverage product differentiation in Sales enablement, Partner communication and GTM planning activities. * If your company uses Objective Key Results (OKRs) or another goal-setting framework; PMs can leverage this to tie product differentiation investments to company goals This will ensure it's not just the product teams who think about differentiation. However, leverage differentiation as a strategic and sustainable bet for your company’s success.

Don’t forget about marketing, positioning and acquisition of customers as a key part in your differentiation strategy.  It’s easy for Product Managers to solely focus on the bits and bytes of how the product works once someone’s in it, but if you cannot acquire or entice new customers - you need to move your differentiation focus further up the funnel.  Is your product too hard to set up or use? Does it take a long time for users to see value in your product?  It’s key to partner with sales, product marketing, support and solution engineering to get the full picture here.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage. 1. Product attributes are insufficient and can be replicated by competitors with enough investment and determination 2. Pricing models and all their nuances can be undercut. Customers' willingness to pay may be negated by the next recession or evaporate when a new shinier, cooler competitor product arrives 3. Human capital, though harder to build up and retain, can still be hired away from you. Everybody has a price. So, what makes for sustainable competitive advantage? Leveraging economics of scale but more so economies of scope, driving flywheel type effects (positive network externalities), preferred access to resources or markets, etc

I'll keep this one rather brief. I find that some product managers do not always listen to their customers and their problems as the guiding light for improving and differentiating their products. Instead, they fall in love with a shiny new piece of technology that may not be solving a critical problem.

One important ingredient is tying how product differentiation helps drive business value like brand recognition, product usage or increased sales. This connection between differentiation and business outcome can be overlooked because it may not be a straightforward exercise to draw causation conclusions. One strategy to deploy is to think of leading-indicator measurement (vs. lagging). Few examples: * Increased sales are a lagging indicator. However, can you measure how product differentiation helped shorten the time window from the first sales pitch to the customer pilot or POC (leading indicator) * A faster time to recruit for beta programs with a differentiated offering could be used as a leading indicator for product adoption * Can you measure improving time-to-first action or time-to-value as a leading indicator for product adoption As product managers prioritize not just thinking about feature differentiation but also how to measure the impact of this differentiation. 

The most common mistake is to not think about it at all. It can be so challenging to get a product built and shipped at your company that Product Managers naturally become very internally focused. They have dependencies to manage across other teams, they have timeline pressure from leadership, there are technical challenges to work around, etc. On top of it all, most Product Managers don’t engage their Product Marketing counterpart until they are almost done building the thing. This should be avoided at all costs – your Product Marketing partner is key in helping guide and shape creating the best product that will land most favorably with your audience.

Product differentiation != new features. New features can enhance differentiation, but these are not the same thing. For example, product differentiation can be predominantly delivered in the go-to-market if a product's "see-try-buy" motion is just inherently better than everything else available. The differentiation there is in the trial experience and ease of transaction - not necessarily in the latest feature.

Differentiation is not just a product team responsibility. However, as a product manager, you can help connect the dots from product differentiation to customer adoption and business value. Product feature differentiation is the internal metric. As a product manager, you focus on competitor feature matrix tables, technical deep-dives, SWOT analysis and more. However, the external more important metric is customer focus and sustained business value. Focus on differentiated features that drive customer value, pricing and packaging that drive market share, and GTM execution that puts winning for customers and partners as the top priority.

While it may be tempting to get sucked into feature by feature wars and spar through marketing communications it will not yield much for whoever (you or the competito) lacks sources of Sustainable Competitive Advantage. see related answer on what those are, not to be confused with Competitive Advantages

This is a tale as old as time. There are many ways to approach this. I have seen vendors heavily bid on the AdWords of their competitor names and promote alternative solutions (trials or marketing content). I have seen vendors who are challengers in mature markets create "Us vs. Them" web pages or blogs that outline the differences (according to the vendor publishing the info) what the major differences are. And, I have seen third-party research or analyst evaluations heavily promoted that rank vendors according to specific criteria (contracted by the vendor or annually conducted created by a research firm).  However - the most powerful thing I see is customers doing the work for you. In general, I'm not a fan of tearing down competitors publicly. Think about a time you heard a friend talking about someone behind their back - it makes you feel uneasy, maybe even distrustful of your friend, right?  Now think of the inverse.  What if you heard you friend tell you a positive anecdote about a service or new app they used for a problem you have. How likely are you to try that service/app? I believe positive associations are more powerful than negative associations for long term engagement and trust.  Customer stories are your biggest ally here. Maybe you can include in the customer story that Customer A replaced an *unnamed* competitor with your solution, and UNLIKE *unnamed* competitor, they derived the following three benefits and business outcomes with your product. And now you can arm your sales team and/or partners with this story to have a specific "you vs. your competitor" conversation with one customer at a time, proven out by a trial or proof of concept. Put your customers on your website, have them speak to other customers (video testimonials, backchannel phone calls, on stage at your conference, etc.). Customers are your biggest offense against competitor messaging. 

In this case, be competitor-aware, but customer-focused.  You don't have much control over what your competitor’s teams are doing. However, what you can drive is focusing on delivering business results for your customers and getting your internal company teams to work with your customers to publish these stories, case studies and testimonials. With this approach, your new customer prospects may evaluate you and your competitor and at first, might think you both offer the same features. However, you can now easily turn the conversation from features to driving outcomes. You will have your customers publicly highlighting how you helped them succeed; which is what your prospects want to achieve. By focusing on consistently winning for your customers, you can shift the narrative from feature to business value.