Good to Great (product) Manager: Key Decision Making in today’s agile world

The roles of many professions are changing nowadays in this fast-paced digital world. New technologies are rising every day, the new digital experience is changing the industries, the companies, how people work, travel, eat, socialise, interact……..

To follow this fast pace and adapt to what is needed on the market, product managers must step up with the trends in the new digital era. And not only PMs, all roles across the digital world and beyond digitality, as tech is coming everywhere.

The skills that PM need to have to build winning products are also evolving and we must be ready for what is coming. Each decision we make is impacting the whole product strategy and by that, the whole company strategy.

The well- informed product decisions will make the difference between good and great (product) managers and between products that are winning the markets and those who never leave the “garage”.

Good to Great Product Manager, the journey starts now:

1. Hypothesis-driven decision making

Fail fast! Set your hypothesis about your new features and prove fast what is accepted on the market by your users. The digital customer experience is offering new gratifications with hard-to-follow speed, so all new products have to be tested on the market. And even just a new feature in already existing and successful product!

1. Understand the problem deeply. “The problem is that we don’t” understand the problem.” First and most important, understand the root-cause for the problem your new feature is trying to solve. What are the pain points we are solving? How painful are they? What is causing them? How are users currently solving them?
2. Make an observation. Once the root-cause is stated, observe the user behaviour in the times of the “problem” and the “pain points”.
3. Propose a hypothesis and make a prediction. After we have the root problem and the user behaviour, we can propose our hypothesis for the new feature or improvement of existing features and make a logical prediction on the potential outcome. The good hypothesis consists of:

• What is the desired user action for new features? Or what is the change in the existing feature?
• What do you expect to happen?
• To whom(target user)?

Vague Hypothesis: “Making a flow shorter will make customers more satisfied”

Better Hypothesis: “Reducing steps in a flow from 5 to 2 will lead to an increase in sentiment scores for churned customers”

4. Test & Iterate. The first set of hypothesis defines the MVP1(minimum valuable product). We test each hypothesis- what proves to work for our users, we implement it in the MVP1. The rest we eliminate. For the next iteration, we define the set of hypothesis for MVP2 and we repeat the process, again and again.

2. Data-driven decision making, AARRR

Data, data, data is everywhere. Data can be used to improve and better understand the journey of our users- how do we “attract” them, where do we “lose” them, how do we convert them. These 5 metrics can be used to deep dive to our users’ journey:

1. Acquisition — Initial Attention: How do we acquire our users? How do we convert people to become our users? Where are they coming from? What channels are used to users to “land” on our product?
2. Activation — First Impression: Do we impress people enough to start using our product- signup or download an app? How good is the user’s first experience? What is the % of activation? Where do we lose them?
3. Retention — Number of happy users: How many of your users are returning users? What is the retention rate? Why are we retaining those specific users? Why are we losing the others?
4. Referral — Number of user advocates: What is the number of people recommending our product? How can we turn our users into your advocates? Why are they recommending us?
5. Revenue — User value: How can we turn our users to paying users? What is the best payment model? What is the price users are willing to pay? How can we increase revenue?

3. Innovation-driven decision making

Innovation is a state of mind. It’s solving existing user problems in a new way. Or solving new user problems. Or solving problems that are not yet problems. Or providing the users with the opportunity for a new feature that they don’t yet know they need. How to “create” innovative environment for our team/company:

1. Innovation happens in an uncertain environment and most of the attempts are total failures. So, create an environment where we embrace failures. We have a wall of “fails”. We are comfortable with taking a risk and total uncertainty. We are not afraid of stepping “outside the box” and design “crazy” solution.
2. Innovation happens in crowds and communities. So, create a crowd of several teams, or even invite external customers. Hackathons are a great opportunity to put the crowd at one location to brainstorm solutions for a certain problem.
3. Have a single place to capture the “innovations”. Many ideas come up with different people within different departments. Or from our users- via feedback or user testing. Some of those might be the next big winning idea. Unfortunately, those ideas are just floating around the teams and after some time they disappear. By having a single place for brainstorming, we have the “innovations” ready to be observed. Maybe some solutions will come by combining several ideas. Or one solution will trigger another solution.

4. Proactive decision making

Anticipate the needs of your customer, team or manager and have them ready before the “need” becomes urgent. With having prepared for what is already needed in advance, the team pressure and stress can be easily avoided. Sometimes it’s a real challenge to predict the next steps, especially in today’s agile startup environment, however with time, it becomes possible to predict what could be the next logical step that PMs and the team need to take.

Observe the previous work and work relations in the team, the business decisions made within and outside the team, the level of autonomy, the business changes and the level of agility. With this data, it can be predicted the next step to achieve the team or company goal and this could often be changing the whole strategy and “redirecting” to the next goal. When this happens, it’s important to be proactive, so you and the team is prepared to focus fast on the next team or company goal.

5. Process-based decision making

The process is crucial for executing from idea to winning product. Our analysis, data and hypothesis can be perfect, but if the process is broken, there will be no success. The process defines from WHAT to HOW:

1. Getting things done: First, we need to understand how our teams are getting things done. Each team has its own and unique process of working together and it’s rarely repetitive. By understanding deeply the values, motivators and synergy in the team, we can make a decision that can lead to success.
2. Speed: Speed is a metric, but it’s not the only metric! “How many story points?” is not the question we ask when we measure the team value delivered. There are contributions the teams are creating that are not calculated in the “story points”.
3. Repetitive cycles: When the team reach the stage to have successful repetitive delivery cycles, we then know the process per each team and we can better and easy estimate and predict our roadmaps.

And the end, managing winning products in today’s dynamic digital world is a challenge that every PM has to encounter its way. Every product decision makes a huge impact, so we need to make sure to make impactful and valuable decisions to make a lasting difference in our companies and our society.