RADICAL

A Product Management approach

What’s your PM approach or philosophy? This is not easy to answer in a few words. And if you do, you don’t really convey the important stuff. Here are my thoughts on how to live and breathe product management radically.

RADICAL stands for:

1. Results driven What ultimately matters are the results, outcomes, ROI, impact. To achieve this you need a product vision and strategy that is derived from the company’s vision and strategy. Everything you do as a product team should be in line with this.
2. Alignment If you’re not aligned as a team or company, you’re working on different things. Not in line with the vision and strategy and therefore at risk of working on the wrong thing. Radical alignment. 360 degree alignment. Communicate at infinitum. Repeat. If you think everyone knows what you’re talking about, repeat the same again. A little trick I learned along the way is to ask your co-workers or stakeholders one simple question: “Describe in your own words what we’re working on.” See the magic happen.
3. Decisions Radical decision making. As a PM we make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis, that’s what roadmapping and prioritising is really about. It’s just impossible to spend time or effort on each one of these. And even if you did take the time to gather 100% of the information available, you would still get it wrong more often than not. So ask yourself: is the outcome of the decision irreversible or not. If not, waste no more time thinking about it, just make the call. If it is, spend no more than 37% of time or effort gathering information. More on this to come.
4. Ideas Innovation doesn’t always need to be radical, but your ideas need to be. Simplify and think 10x. That’s it.
5. Customer centric Empathise. Research. Talk. Gather feedback. Use Design Thinking or Design Sprints. Service Design. Find Wow experiences. Whatever technique you pick, you need to understand your users and their needs so you can address the problem.
6. Agile Agile in its purest sense is about being radically flexible, adjustable and lean to avoid wasting time and deliver the goods. It’s a process used to execute and iterate on those radical decisions you made. Which exact ‘agile’ process you use does not matter, but it needs to work for you and your team.
7. Learn Be the best at getting better. Use data, prototyping, experiments, user testing, benchmarking, customer complaints, industry insights, stakeholder demands, etc to learn about the problem you need to address. Be inquisitive and never stop learning. Use those retrospectives to be better and work together better.

Did you find this article interesting and useful? Let me know what you think in the comments.