Product Model Advisory

Marty Cagan’s Product (Operating) Model is almost an anti-process, because there is no right way to create successful products. But, there are mindsets and principles. One key principle is that all individuals and all teams in a product-selling company are working on their products, regardless if they are “just” in the IT department or in HR. All of the organisation has to change their way of thinking about product development, to start seeing it as a great collaborative effort aiming towards a successful outcome for the organisation, the individuals within and the customers on the outside.

Apart from changing how you think in the organisation about product development, there are three more areas to cover to move towards the Product Model:

Changing how you build things
Changing how you solve problems
Changing how you decide which problems to solve

The first one tackles the fact that however well you build your product, what matters more is how agile you can be when building and releasing. Principles of how to do this are listed under ‘Product Delivery‘ below.

The second one tackles the fact that it is easy to come up with ideas, but harder to know which ideas that are worthy of implementing. Principles how to do this are listed under ‘Product Discovery‘ below.

The third one tackles the fact that serving only the business will get you so far, what matters more is how you serve your customers. Principles how to do this are listed under ‘Product Strategy‘ below.

Product Strategy

Keep focus on the huge impacts, say no to not worthy ideas
Powered by insights to get serious about keeping focus
Build transparency to build trust
Make experiments to manage the risks
Structure organisation for the wanted outcomes
Improve collaboration to increase effectiveness and efficiency

Product Discovery

Understand the problem and the solution to minimise waste
Improve collaboration to increase effectiveness and efficiency
Test ideas responsibly
Continuously address risks to create the best impact and outcomes

Product Delivery

Iterative and experimental thinking to increase feedback and lower risks
Small, frequent, uncoupled releases to increase feedback and lower risks
Evolutionary development to minimise waste
Improve collaboration to increase effectiveness and efficiency
Continuous integration and releasing to have agility / turn on a dime
Continuous qualitative measuring, monitoring and telemetry to find outcomes fast

Case study: Product Discovery with the Holistic Product Discovery Framework

Playbook for the team at King

Case client

King

Background

A team whose mission was to build and maintain a game operations platform for operators and developers in a large gaming company had realised a year back that they needed some developer tools for building applications for that platform. This realisation came through feedback that it was hard to start creating applications, regardless of the knowledge and experience of the developer. The idea for tooling and support for the platform developers to fulfil their needs was born.

Assignment

I was assigned to help out with the second stage of the project, when the team had understood there was a great need for discovery to make sure they built the right thing. Since I was meant to help out over a longer period of time, the Discovery process I created was just shared briefly as a concept to the team, and then I gave them one part of the map at a time so not to overwhelm them.

Activities

Discussions with the team to understand the product and process needs
Creation of a process together with the team while we together performed their needed Product Discovery. We did this so that the team could use the process after I was gone from the project
Using the Holistic Product Discovery Framework as a structure, which was something everyone in the team understood after sufficient training.

Delivery

A way-of-working with ideas and problems of all risk-levels, including high risk discovery in the form of a open and flexible process structure.

Client benefit

The employees learned the mindset very well along the way and could change the process when needed on their own.

Read a deeper explanation of this case project here.