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A Voice of the Customer program can help you maintain a strong understanding of what customers are thinking about your company and its products or services, and it can be a great way to get many people from across a … Continue reading
(Note: This post applies to features as well as products, but I’m only using “product” for simplicity)
For a long time, everyone seemed to use “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product) to refer to the first version of what they’ll release as a product. “MVP” has been used in books about product management and startups, blog posts, etc. I still hear “MVP” a fair amount.
A couple of years ago, I started to hear “MLP” (Minimum Lovable Product) used by some people instead of “MVP.”
I personally like “MLP” more than “MVP” because a “lovable” product sounds more appealing and valuable than a “viable” product, but if you asked 10 people to define what an “MVP” or “MLP” is intended to represent, you’d probably hear several different answers. Most of the answers might generally point in the same direction, but there wouldn’t be alignment in the definition.
Now think about how important it is for a team within a company to be aligned on what they’re setting out to do. Whenever “MVP” or “MLP” is said within that team or company, each person hearing it might have a different mindset about that first release.
Is the first release meant to test a hypothesis? Is it meant to help establish a new revenue stream? Is it meant to make a specific customer happy (in the enterprise world)?
Should the first release look perfectly polished? Should it be adequately polished? Is it okay to be somewhat ugly (as long as it’s usable)?
Different people think about these things differently, even within the same team/company. This is the problem with using “MVP” or “MLP.”
Instead, I use “V1” (Version 1) to represent what will be in a first release, and I accompany that with a story and artifacts (e.g., goals, flow diagram, wireframes, a design) to provide context and details. “V1” simply means the first version, while the purpose of that first version — the goals, etc — vary from one situation to another.
The same person (product manager) could take a different approach for a first release in different situations. For example:
There’s no one size fits all in product management. Use an approach that relies on YOUR definition, not someone else’s assumption. “V1” can help you do this.
I like to stay updated on tech news and world news, but with work, family, etc there’s not enough time in a typical day for me to look around for such news — so I have the news delivered to me. While there are many good news sites and apps, it’s relatively easy to set up a system where you can automatically receive the type of news that you’re interested in, direct to your email inbox. This allows me to get updated on what’s going on at convenient times (e.g., while on a train), regardless of whether I have an internet connection.
The best email newsletters for this purpose are ones that include summaries or snippets of each story so that you often don’t need to click for the full story, since you’ve learned enough from the text in the email. If you want more details, you can click to get the full story.
Here’s my current list of email newsletters:
Launch Ticker – Tech news
The Hustle – Focused on tech and business
theSkimm – Covers general news, including U.S., world, and entertainment
CNN Five Things – The top 5 stories that a CNN editor decides to push on any given day
The Journal – A collection of tech, business, and human interest stories
I’ve used this system for a couple of years now and it’s kept me informed in an efficient way.
I also occasionally use the Apple News app, but I get a lot of the same news in the emails.
I also receive new blog posts via email from several blogs for the same efficiency reasons mentioned above about newsletters. If a blog doesn’t provide an email subscription option but does provide an RSS feed, you can use Blogtrottr to send you emails with the new content that gets added to the RSS feed (i.e., new blog posts).
Do you receive a different email newsletter that you’d suggest others take a look at? Post a comment or send me a message and I’ll check it out.
Since “strategy” can mean different things in different situations, here’s a definition of how I think about it related to product management:
Finding efficient ways to achieve the company’s goals through product solutions
Another way to think about it is:
Finding ways to maximize value at minimal cost
A good product strategy can give you a leg up in a race against the clock (or the competition), and it can increase the odds of your team and company being successful.
This comes down to translating company/business objectives (including key metrics / KPIs) into a product plan that helps the company achieve its goals.
Product folks are tasked with helping their company achieve its goals while also helping customers (aka, users) achieve their goals, and while also keeping their team informed, efficient, and motivated to get it all done. (Project managers or other roles in an organization can also help a lot, but these roles don’t always exist.)
Sometimes, there’s a clear path for how product work can help the company achieve its goals, such as when an integration with a partner can propel a business strategy. Other times, the team needs to explore possible solutions to meet the company’s goals, which factors in:
After this, solutions need to be designed, built, tested, and released.
After releasing something, it needs to be measured and potentially iterated on to build out further or to optimize.
I could write posts to cover each of these steps, but in a nutshell, this is what needs to be done in order to maximize value. Depending on timelines and resources, you might be able to skip some steps, or at least move through them faster, while still achieving the goals (and perhaps revisiting in the future for further improvement). In general, I’ve found that it’s more important to be practical with how you go about things than to try to follow a process according to every detail as it’s written in a book.
There can be several types of costs with product work, including:
Do multiple current customers, prospective customers, current partners, or prospective partners have similar needs? If so, you might be able to leverage a new product capability that can provide value across a broad spectrum of users / entities. In other words, doing a single body of work that results in more than one win is a strategy that could be explored.
1. Create a product plan (roadmap) 12 to 18 months in advance
I’ve used a few different roadmap formats over the years and currently employ the following two for different purposes:
Template A:
(this is good for high-level discussions around significant high-level deliverables)
Template B:
(this is good for mid-level discussions that gets more detailed than Template A)
Template B also helps to facilitate update meetings with any stakeholders about progress, what’s been accomplished, if there are risks or dependencies, etc.
Beyond Template B would be a backlog that gets very granular (often tracked in software like Jira, Trello, or some other project/task management tool), which typically only needs to be reviewed with scrum team members (e.g., developers and QA).
(I’ll save for another post why it’s better to have a goal-based or theme-based roadmap than a feature-based roadmap.)
2. Meet with your company’s executive leadership team (e.g., CEO, CTO, the heads of Marketing / Sales / Business Development / Customer Experience)
The main goals are to:
At some companies, it’s easier said than done to get executives in a room together, so you might need to sell this kind of meeting in advance by setting expectations for what’s going to be covered and what the goals are (which should clearly sound beneficial to the company as a whole and also to each department)
Strategy is a skill that can be developed over time. The more you think about it, work through exercises, collaborate with others, and read about examples, the better you’ll get. Just always keep the main purpose in mind: finding efficient ways to achieve the company’s goals and finding ways to maximize value at minimal cost.
