Product Thinking

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about changes and new features in SAFe 6.0, how to improve alignment and transparency between project managers on the same team while meeting the needs of the different stakeholders, and what it takes to implement business OKRs successfully.

Q&A:

Q: I just finished a significant dev project in the FinTech industry. There were about thirty-five product managers in the company. I took a role as a senior product manager, and they made everyone go through SAFe. Their commitment to SAFe was about a ten, and their commitment to outcomes was about a two. So what is the deal with SAFe? Have you seen this improved output in any of your encounters with it? It didn't seem agile or lean to me.

A: I have not seen anybody actually succeed in implementing SAFe in a way where we focus more on the outcomes instead of doing the actual process. People turn to SAFe because they want the instruction manual. But the problem with that is they stop thinking for themselves about what is right and wrong and whether we are actually delivering outcomes. And that's my biggest issue with it. But this is a great time to look at SAFe 6.0 and see what's happening here.

Q: I'm a product operations manager at a medium size company operating in the field of digital health. The company has been growing fast in the last couple of years, and the number of PMs and projects has also grown, making it more difficult to collaborate and stay. ...To improve alignment between the main people involved in those areas, we decided to form a PM designer's team. The team currently includes five product managers, including senior and junior PMs, and is led by a Head of Product, as well as three designers and senior designers led by a Head of Design. However, we've been struggling to identify how to set up things to become a well-functioning team. ...On the other hand, the team has an urgent need to align on the product roadmap, but we haven't found an effective way of doing that yet. Do you have any recommendations on how to set up this kind of team while meeting the needs of the different stakeholders? What kind of virtuals and processes could help us?

A: The main idea behind product operations is one of enablement, not micromanagement. When you think of product operations, cadences and governance are a big part of your role, and it's about getting the right people in the right room so that you can review the things that you need. Now, if you have this new product management and design team, the leaders will want some transparency in the roadmap. But they don't need to know everybody's tiny task. Here’s what I think could help your team.

Q: Our tech department is small and in the growth stage, and we have recently implemented business OKRs with key results, but we're not sure what to do next. We don't have the team structure set up correctly. We don't empower the teams. We don't seem to have a product or business strategy for digital products. How would you approach a situation with our product lead and stakeholders?

A: If there's no guiding strategy, how did you come up with the OKRs? To me, they're probably going to be a little messy, and they're not gonna be focused on the outcomes we are trying to achieve. People put the OKRs all on the team level and don't roll them up. You should have three levels of OKRs that roll up to the business goals. So that might be a good place to start with your business leads and stakeholders. 658076

Do you struggle to get buy-in for your product-led initiatives? Are you having a hard time convincing executives and colleagues to embrace the change? In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa Perri talks with Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. They explore the key elements of successful product transformations: through his years of experience, Christian has observed that emotional intelligence, humility, and a willingness to transform yourself are key drivers of successful organizational change. He shares valuable insights on how to build trust and read the room, in order to transform your organization into an empowered, customer-focused team.

Christian Idiodi is a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), where he advises and coaches executives, product teams, and leaders on how to build great products. With over 200 products built in his career, Christian has experience in the HR technology space, financial services, and marketplaces. Before joining SVPG, Christian led a major transformation at Merrill Corporation for several years.

You’ll hear Melissa and Christian talk about:

Emotional intelligence and awareness are critical for product managers to gain buy-in from stakeholders and executives.

Arrogance and ego can hinder organizational change and transformation efforts.

People are often promoted to leadership positions without adequate training or development, leading to insecurities and impostor syndrome.

To get buy-in, seek to understand the needs, goals, and reward structures of key stakeholders and executives.

Product managers should do discovery on key people in the organization, including executives, to understand their perspectives and challenges.

It's important to understand the reward structure and incentives of executives, and it's okay to ask about it directly.

Creating a user manual for managers or stakeholders can help product managers better understand their perspectives and motivations.

The true stakeholders of a transformation effort are usually a small group of people with high levels of interest and influence, and understanding their perspectives is critical.

Ask open-ended questions and show a genuine interest in the success of stakeholders and executives; this can help to build trust and facilitate buy-in.

All problems in a transformation are people problems, and leaders need to coach their teams to play a new game.

Success in product management is not about the title, but about the impact on the environment.

Emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room are crucial skills for product managers and executives to succeed in their roles.

Arrogance, ego, and imposter syndrome can hold product leaders back from developing their emotional intelligence and reading the room.

Building trust is essential for product leaders to establish themselves as competent and credible.

Positioning yourself as ignorant and seeking to learn from others can help you build trust and establish productive relationships.

Tailor your presentations and communication style to your audience’s preferences can help you connect with them and read the room effectively.

Organizational transformation starts with individual transformation of leaders who are willing to put in the effort to change themselves and their environments.

Successful transformations often have strong product leadership, competent product managers, and an empowered culture.

A powerful indicator of an empowered organization is when engineers can articulate their work in the same language as top executives.

Resources:

Christian Idiodi on LinkedIn | Twitter | SVPG

Silicon Valley Product Group

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how to respond when people say product development doesn't go fast enough, getting the business to understand that subject matter experts are not the same as PMS, and how to work with a customer success team.

Q: I have often heard … stakeholders saying, ‘Product development doesn't go fast enough. Your product team spends too much time thinking; can we do less thinking and more doing?’ This usually comes from tech leaders who are more used to IT as a service, and salespeople who always feel we are one feature away from winning our new client. I have learned that trying to evangelize about product discovery is usually a lost battle. …Sometimes discovery, once done, looks obvious and when we avoid the risk, it's hard to prove. …Also, sometimes product people get too deep into discovery, try to validate too many hypotheses. …What do you think here?

A: This is a great question and something I do run into a lot with companies. I have also been in the position where people are like, ‘Oh, we don't need discovery or we don't need to do that.’ I have realized over time that there is a balance. Here's one thing that might actually help you in this situation.

Q: How do you shift the business perspective when they tend to view a subject matter expert as the ideal product manager? As such, the primary value they want is to write contextualized stories for the scrum team. They don't have knowledge of the rest of the discipline and don't want teammates that can go outside that box. That role is typically reserved for the business general manager who is the true CEO of the product

A: People don't really understand the role of a product manager and in your case, it sounds like they are definitely operating like product owners and not full product managers. A lot of times people think that product management is like 100% subject matter expertise. …Product managers do need to have some subject matter expertise, but they don't need to have all of it. Here’s what I think you should do.

Q: My company operates in the B2B space and has grown a lot in a short space of time. In the early days, the product team had daily contact with our customers and dealt with all kinds of customer requests and feedback apart from commercial queries, which were handled by an account management team. As we scaled, the company has created a customer success function, as we recognize that product couldn't handle all inquiries from customers. The customer success team is great and provides fantastic insights on our customers and their needs. However, it can sometimes be difficult to tell where to draw the line and responsibilities of the teams. What is the best way for us to work together collaboratively but with clear distinction of responsibilities? 

A: Customer success is the nature of a growing team. You'll always have some kind of customer success, sales team, account management, all that wonderful stuff in a B2B space as you grow. And those teams are actually gold. You know why? Because they deal with all the customer inquiries, all the questions that you can't deal with as you start to scale and as you come up with more and more things that you need to build. Here’s what I would do to solidify the team, so everyone knows what is and isn’t their responsibility.

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

Melissa Perri is joined by Christina Pawlikowski, a teaching fellow at Harvard and co-founder of Causal, to help demystify machine learning and AI on this episode of Product Thinking. Christina discusses language models, the different types of machine learning, how they can be used to solve problems, and the importance of good data and ethical considerations when using machine learning algorithms. Christina Pawlikowski is a teaching fellow at Harvard University and co-founder of Causal, a company that helps businesses make better decisions with causal inference. 

You’ll hear Melissa and Christina talk about:

How machine learning is essentially creating an algorithm or a model that can make good predictions based on data. There are three types of machine learning: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Good training data is crucial for machine learning algorithms to be effective.

When considering using machine learning, it's important to ask questions about things like how complex the decision that needs to be made is, whether the model has to produce a definitive answer, how high the stakes are, and how quickly the answer needs to come back.

Ethical considerations are important when feeding data into a machine-learning model, especially when making decisions with high stakes.

GPT-3 and Chat GPT are examples of language models that use neural nets to generate predictions about what word or sentence comes next based on probabilities. The accuracy of a machine learning model is only as good as the quality of the data that is fed into it.

When incorporating ML into a product, it's important to plan for scenarios where the model is wrong and to consider ethical considerations such as false positives and false negatives.

Data scientists play a crucial role in assembling and cleaning training data, building and testing the model, and deploying it in production. The process may involve collaboration with machine learning engineers or other teams.

The cadence of working on machine learning is different from working on traditional UX-focused teams, with more downtime and exploratory time upfront. Slack time is important for data scientists and machine learning engineers to keep up with new techniques, write papers, and attend conferences.

Artificial general intelligence is probably further off than we think, and AI alignment is an important field to prevent any negative outcomes.

Resources:

Christina Pawlikowski on LinkedIn | Twitter 

Casual Labs

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how to do a product strategy audit, offering professional services to one-off clients, and how to choose whether to stay on at the company in a new capacity.

Q: What steps, processes and resources would you recommend for conducting a product strategy audit? I'm considering a new role in product strategy, and I think the best place to start is a comprehensive review of the current strategy to the extent that it exists and how our product plans align with it. 

A: That is the best place to do a product strategy audit, but you have to hit it from two sides. This is what I do when I go in to do a product strategy audit.

Q: One of our clients requires a custom SSO integration with a good amount of complexity. The client is expecting us to deliver it as professional services. They are paying for it, so they want a clear Gantt chart project plan and a project manager that can deliver on time, on scope, and on budget. I don't have technical project managers on my team, only product managers who are more discovery oriented and are used to building products, not as a service. I don't have enough professional service work to hire a project manager to be fully dedicated to this kind of work. …Any tips on how to handle this situation in the short term? While we can't hire someone specific for this role, how should we share roles and responsibilities between product tech and customer service?

A: I feel like there's some underlying problems that I'm picking out of this that are not just related to roles and responsibilities. Here’s how I would deal with this issue.

Q: I'm a team lead in a three person business intelligence team for a small company. We're currently undergoing a merger into a much larger enterprise with over 8000 staff. I'm seeing indicators that the product people in the larger enterprise have little interest involving me in product discovery and strategy, which areas of the previous environment that I really enjoyed. One stated they judge me as one of their technical people, which I interpret as they don't see a place for me in product discovery and direction. I believe I need to decide if I want to be a purely technical resource or find another job where I'm more welcome at the product discovery and strategy table. Are you able to give me any advice on navigating this situation? 

A: I'm slightly mad that all of these product managers are completely dismissing you, and you are a fantastic resource. This is crazy. So here's the thing. Business intelligence is a critical skill. They might not understand what you actually do. So let's start with that…

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

What challenges do product managers face in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance? In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, Melissa Perri speaks with Colin Anawaty about his journey to co-founding First Dollar and the challenges of navigating a highly regulated industry. Colin shares his insights on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), the benefits of utilizing them, and why he thinks they should be more widely available to all Americans. He also discusses the importance of personal and career growth within startups, and the value of providing clear career paths to employees. He describes how First Dollar evolved into a platform, and how their focus on addressing healthcare inequities and tying together healthcare and finance can lead to incentivizing better outcomes for all. 

Colin Anawaty is the Chief Product Officer of First Dollar, a health wallet platform that provides its services to plan administrators to help consumers utilize their health benefits more easily and effectively. Colin has over six years of experience in healthcare and previously worked in the prepaid industry. Before joining First Dollar, Colin worked at athenahealth, where he and Melissa first met. Colin is a product management expert with a strong focus on healthcare and finance and has a passion for helping people make the most of their healthcare benefits.

Here are some ideas you’ll hear Colin and Melissa discuss:

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are a type of account created by the US government to make healthcare more affordable through pre-tax contributions. Unlike other benefits, such as FSAs and HRAs, HSAs can be kept even after leaving employment and can be invested for future use. Colin believes that HSAs should be more widely available to all Americans.

The healthcare and finance industries are complex and highly regulated, and it can be challenging for product managers to become subject matter experts in both areas. Colin and his team learned about the industries by using resources such as industry experts and advisory boards, and they also hired people who had a mix of product management experience and expertise in either healthcare or finance.

When hiring product managers for a startup, Colin looks for people who have the drive to learn and grow, and who have taken courses in product management. It's important to align product managers with the product lines they oversee and to focus on problem discovery and working with customers.

Product managers need to be curious and open to learning about new things, especially when dealing with complexity.

Formal training, subject matter experts, and nonprofit organizations can all help product managers get up to speed on regulations and compliance.

Embedding security ops and compliance into the culture of a company can make it less scary and more manageable for everyone involved.

Creating a consumer advisory board or incorporating customer engagement into terms of service can help companies navigate legal and compliance issues when trying to work directly with end users.

Big companies prioritize change management and stability, while startups prioritize velocity and rapid iteration to achieve product-market fit.

First Dollar started with a mission to help people shop for care but pivoted to become a platform for HSAs and FSAs.

Resources:

Colin Anawaty on LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram 

First Dollar

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how product managers and product owners should work together, product management trend predictions and what the future of product might look like, and what to do when your CEO is misdirecting blame toward product management. 

Q: You've been involved in product management for a while, and I would love to see where you feel the evolution of product management is headed.

A: I think it's really hard to talk about where PM is going because it's still not fully functioning in many companies yet…I'll tell you some of the trends that I am seeing, though. 

Q: My organization is scaling, and now we have product managers and product owners. How should we work together?

A: You know that I’m not a fan of the split of product managers and product owners- here’s why.

Q: Our CEO is putting the blame on product management because not as much as we want is being delivered. How can we change the perception that product management is the cause without throwing our devs under the bus? 

A: We're going to start from a place of everybody is trying their best. You need to educate the CEO about what the problems are, and you need to do that as a united front. Here’s how to do that. 

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

Melissa Perri welcomes Jared Spool to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Jared and Melissa talk about how user experience as a discipline has grown over the years, the challenges that come with it, and how to improve UX for both product leaders and customers.

Jared is the co-founder, co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE, where he and his team “uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services.” Throughout his career, Jared has worked in the White House and has been instrumental in establishing digital organizations and shaping the future of UX. His extensive experience and expertise in the field have earned him a reputation as a thought leader in the UX community.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Jared explore:

Jared talks about how he got started in his UX career.

The biggest issue product management currently faces with user experience, according to Jared, is that user experience is both seen and treated as a service. This kind of approach to user experience work does not produce good quality products or results. Product management and leadership has to make sure the products aren't only being built right, but that they're being built for the right purpose and solution. 

The core basis of UX strategy is utilizing all the skills, resources, knowledge and experience available to help an organization achieve its goals. "[Strategy] involves having ways to measure, so it has some metrics capability. It involves understanding how to make sure we're solving the right problems, so it gets involved in the roadmap. You need to have a vision of where you're trying to get to. That vision has to be compelling so that everybody gets excited about that vision," Jared emphasizes. 

What differentiates a product strategy from a UX strategy is product strategy is about the progression of the product and UX strategy is about the progression of the user experience.

Product leaders need to understand the importance of having a UX department in their company. UX brings long-term value to companies. Melissa talks about the most successful product organizations having their management teams partner with UX. Understanding your customer user experience will do wonders for improving the quality of your product output.

Jared explains that his school for UX designers teaches all the relevant UX concepts, as well as how to work with product managers and organizations.

Smaller teams allow for UX designers to be able to share their thoughts more openly and freely, and brainstorm more. The product leader must create an environment that allows designers to brainstorm solutions to challenges without feeling like they are walking on eggshells.

Melissa and Jared talk about the challenges that come with company mergers that do not take into account user experience. Companies spend millions of dollars on mergers but have no idea how the product will look at the end of that merger or what the user experience will be. 

The more you can improve your user's experience, the more valuable they will see you and the more they will want to do business with you. 

Resources

Jared Spool | LinkedIn

Leaders of Awesomeness

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to pivot from product management to a career as an independent product consultant, how to handle coaching roadblocks when working with new product owners, and the ins and outs of book publishing. 

Q: My question is around how to pivot my career into an independent product manager, for example, a freelancer consultant or coach or a combination of any of those…Since you became an independent product consultant, what would be your guidance based on your experience and considering the current market conditions?

A: I didn't set out to be an independent product consultant, it kind of happened, and I just kept going with it. Here’s how I would approach it if that’s the direction you want to pursue, and some questions to ask yourself to set yourself up for success.  

Q: When coaching product owners, I bring a variety and volume of techniques to add tools to their toolbox for product thinking. How and why do the product owners tend to stick with what they know and not shift towards building new experiences as much as they could or should? 

A: If you bring [new product owners] a bunch of tools, it might be overwhelming. It's really easy to overwhelm people with a lot of different techniques while they're still trying to figure out what their job is. My first approach is to help them explain what their job is and what the purpose is. Listen in to learn what to do next.

Q: I want to write a book. Do I self-publish it, or do I go with a publisher?

A: Book writing is incredibly hard, but if you do want to write a book, I encourage you to do it. It was the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Here’s what to know about both publishing options, so you can make the right choice for you.

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

Welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. This week, host Melissa Perri is joined by Patrick Campbell, CEO of Profitwell. They discuss all things pricing, diving deep into the psychology behind pricing models and how to choose a pricing strategy. Patrick talks about the biggest mistakes businesses make when pricing, when and how often you should be raising your prices, how to align your price changes with your value metrics and communicate those changes to customers, and more. 

You’ll hear Melissa and Patrick talk about:

Patrick's team developed a financial analytics product and decided to give it away for free in order to get more data and improve their algorithms. 37,000 companies have used it in the past seven years.

Patrick's company was acquired by Paddle for $200 million in May 2022, with a mission to grow subscription companies automatically.

Pricing is a core competency for a business and should not be treated as a quick task to be done and moved on from. It is the very essence of a business as it represents the value of a product or service and how it is perceived by customers.

Businesses should experiment with monetization once per quarter and raise prices once per year.

Raising prices too often can lead to customer churn. However, this eventually normalizes as ‘fence-sitting’ customers leave.

Make sure your price increase is justified by the value you provide to the customer. Align your pricing with a value metric, such as revenue.

Packaging and pricing go hand in hand and can be thought of in terms of charging different prices for different pieces of value of the product.

Sustaining a social media platform like Twitter is difficult, and it can be hard to monetize.

Adobe's move from selling Photoshop for $1,000 to a subscription model of $32 a month was an "eye-opening" change that allowed for more investment in the product.

It's important to get the finance team aligned with the move to a subscription model, as costs will initially go up and revenue will initially go down.

Pricing is a whole company problem, not just a product problem.

Resources

Patrick Campbell Website | Email | LinkedIn

ProfitWell