Marty spoke about the importance of building a strong product culture within a company. He explains that a strong product culture is one where the company is constantly developing and delivering new revenue streams.

Marty went on to describe a number of areas that strong product cultures excel at, I thought of these as similar to design patterns – ie, formalised best practices that you should implement in your organisation. That of course means there are also anti-patterns. Lets start with one of those:

the single biggest reason for product failure is gathering requirements. don’t confuse what the customer asks for with what their problem is.

A product managers role, and the role of the whole team, is to invent a solution on behalf of the customers. A successful solution is one where you have a number of happy reference customers for the MVP.

Now we will turn our attention to some patterns of strong product cultures.

Define Success Upfront

How does a product manager ensure that they are going to have happy reference customers for the MVP? Define success upfront. Build a hypothesis that you want to test and specify the success criteria prior to writing any code. Let’s take a look at a simple example of a login page for a consumer SaaS:

We have a user story:

As a user I would like to log in with my Facebook account so that I only have to remember one username and password

This user story will also have acceptance criteria:

• display the Facebook logo on the login page,
• return to the login page if incorrect username & password are supplied,
• provide error message
• etc

The acceptance criteria is there to ensure the team is clear about what they are delivering to the customer.

Now, let’s add success criteria to that user story:

• ‘new user signups increase by 30% due to the simplified signup/login process’
• ‘requests to the forgot my password page cease’
• etc

Thus our user story has acceptance criteria and success criteria.

Instead of rolling out this change to all customers at once we will extend our definition of done to include meeting the success criteria. The team will then A/B test the user story with our customer base to ensure that the success criteria is met by the cohort that sees the new login page.

Assuming the cohort that sees the new login page leads to 30% increase in conversion and no password requests we would then consider the user story ’Done’ as it meets both the acceptance and success criteria. We would roll the user story out to all customers. Of course, if our success criteria was not met then we will reject that story — perhaps leading to a subsequent hypothesis in another story.

To visualise that these user stories have not met the definition of done yet you may have a board like the following, with a column for ’In A/B’:

This approach to defining the success criteria upfront is a great method to ensuring that features which are released to customers are actually worthwhile, actually used, that they provide value to the customer.

Product Discovery

Product Discovery is an approach to quickly testing and validating our ideas. Every product manager I have ever spoken with has more ideas that they want to build and provide to the customer than they could ever possibly deliver. While this is intertwined with Defining Success Upfront (above) it is really in the pre-user-story stage such as when we are aiming for an MVP. We don’t want to write production code for all of the ideas that we want to test as that is costly and leads to a lot of waste. Instead, we can do one of the following:

• User-clickable or paper prototypes
• Live data prototypes

I won’t got into detail on the paper prototypes here as I’ve linked to a great intro video above. You can also read a follow up post on usability testing with paper prototypes which gives some examples.

The live data prototype is similar to the A/B test that we put the user story through above. The key difference is that we are not writing production quality code — no unit or functional tests, for instance. There are two questions that the live data prototype will help us answer:

• Could the customer use the functionality?
• Would they use the functionality? If not, what would it take to get them to use it?

It is key that you are asking the customer whether they would use the functionality — for instance, would they pay for it? If not, why not?

Product Managers have a tonne of ideas they want to try out. This Product Discovery process is essential to finding out what resonates with your customers, what they can use and what they will pay for.

Product Discovery Team

Finding new product opportunities takes time and energy. Having a Product Discovery Team dedicated to this task will enable existing product teams to focus on optimising the value to their customers while still allowing the company to approach new ideas for testing and validation. Of course, this depends on the size of the company — perhaps you’ve got time to cover these alongside existing products or perhaps you’re a new company trying to find the MVP for your product.

In either case the Product Discovery Team will require three roles:

• Product Manager
• Lead Designer
• Lead Developer

Together these three come up with a solution to the customers problem. It is rare to find two of these roles in one person — hard too as they are probably out doing their own thing already.

One takeaway for me, from Marty’s talk, was that you should lead with UX as it is likely more important than engineering. I’m starting to see the constraint on UX, there are not enough good people and they are the bottleneck for many teams.

Random Tidbits

• Bring at least three customers into the office each week, watch them use the product and use this as an opportunity for product discovery. It can’t help to bring customers closer to the team either.
• You want a Founder / CEO that demands excellence. Better that than someone who doesn’t care about the product or customer and is only interested in the bottom line. Demanding pixel perfection is excellence — a real eye opener for me.
• Really, there is no reason not to test something these days — you can run a test over a few days and have the metrics handy when you have a discussion with the Founder / CEO.

Recommended Reading

• Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience (available for pre-order) – Jeff Gothelf
• MVP vs Minimum Product – SVPG
• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love – Marty Cagan
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity – Alan Cooper
• Social Contract for Product Managers – SVPG

Conclusion

How can we come up with an experience worth building with the evidence to validate this?

At the end of the day the Product Managers role is twofold — customer discovery and product discovery. A product managers job is not to be right, it is to find out how to get to right, fast. Getting a new product into the hands of customers isn’t simply a matter of building something. It is much more than that, as we’ve explored above.

Once the product has launched the product manager will switch to an optimisation role — where the process is more iterative and defining success for new user stories is vital.

“think in leaps, iterate in steps” – Google

Build and deploy incrementally and iteratively, but make sure you have a compelling product vision. You don’t want to go faster and get nowhere — so make sure you have a vision.

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Next to working on your core product, focusing on positioning, marketing and support may seem like a waste of your time. It’s not. In fact, by integrating these things into your core product you’ll build a machine that’s fine-tuned to produce happy, loyal customers.

Positioning – is Part of your Product

When customers evaluate products they want to know who created them. They want to know where you come from and where you want to go. They need to know whether you will be a great fit for them now & going forward.

You want to be as clear as possible about who you are and what you stand for. This is the best way to make sure you attract the right customers.

Working on your minimum viable personality is at least as important as building the initial version of your product. Don’t be afraid to take a stand and state the obvious.

Find great answers to the famous Babylon 5 questions and you’ll be off to a great start …

• Who are you? – Do I like you?
• What do you want? – Do you want what I want?
• Why are you here? – What do you stand for?
• Where are you going? – Should I join you on your journey?

In the end it’s all about expectation management. If the wrong customers buy your product for the wrong reasons, chances are they won’t be very happy nor easy to retain.

Refine your positioning to attract the right customers & repel the wrong ones – killing two birds with one stone.

It is incredibly hard to satisfy customers who bought your product for the wrong reasons. On top of that it is way easier to improve your product if your main source of feedback is your actual target audience compared to people who became customers by accident. Ever got a feature request that doesn’t make any sense at all? Might have come from a mislead customer.

Invest in your positioning. Trust me, it will save you and your customers a lot of time and a lot of nerves.

Marketing – is Part of your Product

The “Build it and they will come” – mentality is a trap that many product people fall into. We just need to build the best product and the market will do the rest, right? Well, uhm … unfortunately not.

There are a ton of examples from the past where the superior product lost – often even vanished from the market. This happens over & over again no matter whether we look at the consumer space, b2b, developer platforms, protocols or laws. Fortunately we can do something about it.

Try to think of marketing as a service to your potential customers. It’s not a distraction. It’s not a waste of your time. Quite to the contrary, it is an essential part of your product. Marketing helps you to attract the right customers. It helps you to communicate what you and your product are about and why we should care.

Here are a bunch of tips to help you get started with product marketing …

• Read – the Customer Development Guide – it will help you to find the right words & phrases to use for your marketing material
• Learn – what your customers are buying your product for & what the job is they need to get done.
• Show – how people can use your product and what it is for – think “getting started guide” with focus on the value your product delivers.

I was quite sceptical about marketing myself but in the end great marketing helps your customers to make the right decision and to get the most out of your product. Great marketing is a service to your customers.

Customer Support – is Part of your Product

While customer support used to be a call-center designed to keep customers and their problems at bay, the best web & mobile apps of today are built with customer support in mind.

Poor customer support can cost you a lot of business. Did you know that 86% of customers leave because of bad customer support? By building customer support into your product you can not only improve your customers’ experience but also your product’s retention rate. In niches where great customer support is not status quo it’s also a great way to leave your competition behind.

If you are aiming for a great customer support experience, be …

• Coach-like – You win when your customer wins.
• Proactive – Build hints & links to support material and tutorials into your product
• Open and gregarious – Make it clear that you are always ready to communicate & learn
• Eager – Seek out new ways to be helpful.

Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot gave a great talk on customer happiness at Business of Software. His key message was to think about ways to produce happy customers instead of focusing on making them happy (again).

“Don’t make customers happy. Make happy customers”
— Dharmesh Shah

More than meets the Eye

Your core product is extremely important. It is the vessel. The carrier of solutions. But without soul, it’s just an empty shell.

Take your time to understand your customer’s journey through your core product and everything that surrounds it. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to find ways to improve your customer’s experience without much effort. I bet you can spot at least one low hanging fruit that you can tackle immediately.

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