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Mastering Product Strategy Ownership Communication Guide

Welcome to our Product Newsletter, a biweekly email highlighting top discussions, and learning resources for product managers.

What We Will Cover In This Edition:-

Top Discussions: 

1) Which is better, creating a new product for internal use or external?

2) What activities have you seen Product owners do?

3) How do you communicate product improvements, to those inside your company?

Top Learning Resources:

1. 10 exercises to train product thinking

2. How to work with designers?

3. Training your product intuition.

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Top Discussions

Question 1) Which is better, creating a new product for internal use or external?

I see many PMs itching to create a product, be it for their internal customers or the external customers. So many PMs are trying to build ERP solutions, payment gateways, survey tools. I find this urge to create mostly in those who got into PM from dev roles, so that itch to write code and delve into testing a new tool is understandable. What about the PMs from a non technical role? How do they create a Product or what is their approach to create a new product?

– Carlos Dubois

Discussion

A] It’s human nature to focus on the solution than the problem because we assume we know what our customer needs. We been program to think solution first before understanding the problem which is the number one mistake I see PM or product teams make. Take time to really understand the problem/opportunity and your customer before determining a solution. Majority of the time, the solution you come up with isn’t the one customer wants or it was only good idea in your head then reality.

– Cathryn Cui

B] “Many PMs itching to creating a product”, a bitter fact, and hence, majority of PMs and Product Team focuses on building solution no one wants because they believe they know what the customer wants without interacting with them. In addition, it’s human nature we are wired to be solution first then problem therefore, we go and work with UX and Dev with our ideas without ever testing our assumptions. I don’t doubt with 15 years of experiences you may know what your customer needs are but majority of the time, most PMs or Product Teams don’t and will build solutions no one wants.

– Ahmed Bashir

C] I disagree entirely because of scalability. you going to go out and interview millions of customers? No, you’re going to talk to a few hundred at best and make decisions off of that feedback. Also, if you build well enough for thousands, its likely you will accommodate millions. I don’t have all the answers, and I can be wrong. But I will say I can easily detect if something is shit before it sees the light of day.

– Rohit Kumar

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Question 2) What activities have you seen Product owners do?

In an organization that has both Product Managers and Product Owners, what activities have you seen POs do, other than managing the backlog, participating in all scrum activities, and reporting on sprint results?

– Samantha Yuan

Discussion

A] TLDR is that product role shouldn’t be split, it requires both strategic and tactical decisions every day. But in short – if you look a the product career ladder at any company that we would consider good or strong at product, none of them have a role called product owner.

– Jesus Rojas

B] As someone who has been both, I disagree. It is difficult to be both roles and still maintain a 40-hourish-work week and sanity. It’s especially difficult to be both roles and have the bandwidth to support your team AND stakeholders AND customers.

PM has a longer, strategic roadmap outlook, whereas PO is working with on the immediate needs. PO’s still own the responsibility of discovery and should be working with customers to execute on the roadmap built by the PM.

– Nathan Endicott

C] At the end of the day in the simplest terms someone has to be strategic and long term focused and someone has to be boots on the ground tactically focused. This typically is denoted by level of seniority…Director of product may be more focused on strategy, PMF, etc. while the product manger may be focused on getting the work that ladders up to the strategy done. There is overlap as @Nathan mentioned and everyone should always have the best intentions to ship quality product that solves customer and business needs. If you try to do it all you get into a world where something has to give in terms of quality.

– Ahmed Bashir

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Question 3) How do you communicate product improvements, to those inside your company?

Currently, my company updates a small leadership team about the awesome improvements we’re constantly making to our product. How do you communicate product improvements, large or small, to those inside your company? I’m looking for ideas on how to inform the broader company to keep them informed, interested, but not overwhelmed. Any tips about what to avoid would be appreciated as well! Thanks!

– Vlad Podpoly

Discussion

A] Do you already do any kind of monthly or weekly update emails? Do other departments do? Is there a company wide one? Depending on what you release and how often, a monthly “here’s what we released this month” works pretty well.

– Amy Walker

B] For smaller iterative improvements my product team used to hold bi-weekly (in order to coincide with our sprint cycle) meetings with Client Success, Support, Relationship Management and Sales folks attached to our products.

We’d go through what was coming out, higher priority bug fixes, etc. etc. and demo/walk through them. Especially earlier on in our faster-paced start-up days this was really helpful in keeping everybody informed.

– Karan Trivedi

C] Going to play a bit of devils advocate and highlight that you’d much rather have over-communication versus under. While 4 touchpoints might seem to be a bit much as the generator of said touchpoints, I can definitely seeing each of those being generated for very different audiences and purposes. There’s so much noise for the consumers of the updates from product. I do agree with @AmyWalker in that it maybe helpful to dig into what the underlying “pain point” is for each of those desired updates, both to consider consolidation as well as refine how each update is framed/created.

– Mario Romero

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Top Learning Resources

10 exercises to train product thinking

Others may think quite the opposite – our brain needs relief. However, elite sports athletes know – it’s constant systematic training and relaxation cycles that bring up the best results. Without the consistent approach to exercising you won’t be able to achieve the desired effect.

How to work with designers?

More often than not, these aren’t too far off from each other. For example, you might be talking about setting a goal of optimizing conversion rate on a registration page by X%. Said another way, what you’re trying to do is to remove the barriers that make it hard for users to sign up for your service. But see, the language here matters. Make it easier for users to sign up vs. Optimize the conversion rate on the sign-up flow. One approach speaks to the value for the end user. The other approach focuses on what the company needs to do to be successful. Designers generally think and operate in the mindset of the user.

Training your product intuition.

Product people are obsessed with product intuition and we’ve ceded it to the small group of people who’ve been anointed as product visionaries. This is evident in how we speak about product intuition — as if it’s an innate trait that people either “have” or “don’t have” rather than something that anyone can develop. I rarely hear from PMs or founders about the steps they’re taking to build their product intuition in the way that people build technical or design skills. Anxiety about whether we have it is rampant. Let me help you find a different approach.

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