Kwan’s Product Process for continuous Product-Market Fit
Influence | Product Management | Storytelling February 1st, 2022 15 minute read
Imagine your team on a bus. You tell them to drive to the top of the highest mountain in the land. And they set out to get there. Except in this special bus, the driver doesn’t do all the work. The entire team has to come together to navigate and arrive at the destination together.
The bus represents your product management process
The Tour Bus
Perhaps your process is like a tour bus.
Tall, luxury row seats mean each team member can only see out their own window. Cushy, reclining seats mean your team is not motivated to change seats to get a different vantage point. Curtains on the windows mean some team members can opt-out of helping with navigation entirely. On such a bus, you often see a driver driving solo, long into the night.
The City Bus
Perhaps your process is like a city bus.
Standing room in the front make it easy for your team to talk to each other. With large windows, your team can easily see out the sides, helping with navigation. With lots of hand-holds, your team can walk around on the moving bus. With such mobility, it’s not unreasonable for your team to take turns at the wheel.
Just as the design of the bus influences how the team interacts and executes, so does your product management process. With a great product management process, you can have sales, marketing, design, product, and engineering working together to reach the highest mountain in the land. Without it, they might just leave it all up to the driver.
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What is a bad product management process?
The difference between a winning and losing product is the product process behind it. Are you listening to the right audience? Are you digesting the insights well? Are you building the right stuff?
A bad product process is ad-hoc. Decision pathways are unclear. Members do not buy-in to the path forward. The majority of what gets built needs to get thrown out. Or worse. Nothing ever gets thrown out and your engineering team is maintaining a bohemeth of a product.?
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What is a great product management process?
A great product process keeps the team running smoothly. Research is intentional. Listening to customers occur continuously. There's open collaboration, testing, and feedback. A great product process keeps your product in continuous product-market fit.?
Kwan’s Process for Continuous Product-market Fit.
There are 6 steps to achieving continuous product-market fit:
1: Listen
2: Digest
3: Prioritize
4: Build
5: Ship
6: Validate
These steps work together, it’s not a linear process but a circular one. For example, your team may complete step 3: Prioritize, and move into 4: Build. But as your team builds they realize that the project will take a lot longer than previously estimated. A great product management process would enable the team to quickly go back to 3: Prioritize, and make a call about whether to move forward with the new estimation or build something else.?
43Step 6: Validate loops back to 1: Listen again. They’re intimately connected and keep your product in continuous product-market fit.? The links between parts are just as important.
Let’s talk about how to set up each part of your product management process to drive product-market fit.
1: Listen to your customers
Listening to your customers allows you to gather a diverse and weighted set of inputs. The worst thing you can do is start building without knowing where you're going. That’s why these inputs need to be chosen intentionally because it will guide the bus.
The steps are simple:?
The nuances of each step may be difficult.?
a. Choose your target audience
Choosing a target audience is relatively simple for a mature product, but may be the hardest step for a new product. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to narrow it down. If you need an example, here are Product Maestro’s two target audiences for the storytelling class: “Mid-career Product Managers ready to step up and influence through storytelling,” and “Seed-stage startup founders in tech, who need storytelling to fundraise, recruit their team and set product vision.”
Be careful about the ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’ effect. Some of your most vocal customers may not represent the majority.?
b. Set up a way to listen to your audience
Lining up a way to listen is relatively easy to accomplish. But it gets complicated quickly. There is a litany of products to help you with this task. You might choose to listen through customer interviews, customer surveys, or looking at product usage analytics. In fact, you need to choose multiple ways. This way you are listening to what your customers say and also what they do. Here are a handful of different tool examples that set up different listening pathways for you:?
C. Collect the data
Now do the work and collect the data. Here are some of the tools you’ll use for collecting the data:
These are the specialists who can help you with data gathering:
2: Digest your data and sort signal from noise
This is the messy middle, where data turns into opinions.?
You want to avoid this. How?
By setting up a system for how to digest the data ahead of time.?
This is a tricky part. Because you don’t want to lead the data by making assumptions before you look at the data. You want to walk in with a structure for digesting the data before opinions take over.
Stay objective.
That’s the goal of the product process in this step.?
When I was at Atlassian, we sorted NPS responses by the issues the customers were commenting on. First, they set up a table of categories they care about like the one below. Then each mention merits a point.?
This is a great structure. Even if you don’t know the categories yet, you have a category column. That’s good grounds for debating the relevant categories and digging into the data while staying objective.?
During this step, you start drawing patterns. Ideally, you walk away with an idea of the top 10 areas to address. We will then further dig into these areas in the next step.
Some of the tools you might use:?
The people involved in 2: Digest are:
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Source: https://medium.com/@ariellecason/journey-mapping-to-understand-customers-emotions-68ee2104b438
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3: Prioritize your product roadmap
This is what you hire a Product Manager for, right??
Companies that don’t have a PM often prioritize with these techniques:
Sometimes companies with PMs also do this. Since you’re reading this post, I’m guessing that the above techniques don't serve you anymore.?
So how do product managers prioritize? There are a million ways to do it. None of them are perfect. But all of them fall into this pattern:
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a. Set the product vision
Features are personal to people. Every single feature reflects someone’s hard work and opinion. Joey, the UX designer, spent weeks tweaking the onboarding flow. Only 20% of the improvements got shipped last time, so he wants to see the rest built. Sue, the engineer, heard about bad load times, and she’s super passionate about migrating databases to fix it.?
If the team doesn’t agree on the big picture, then they certainly won’t agree on a single feature.
That’s why your product manager’s storytelling ability is such an important asset. No product vision results in dissent in the team. Or worse, incoherent parts of products getting built.
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b. Choose themes toward that vision?
Themes are groups of features that align with a company goal, product vision, or overall strategy. This way you work on features that are most important right now.
Decision paralysis can happen even if you’re all agreed on a shared vision. A vision is too big to build in one quarter, one sprint. That’s why we choose themes. Those are smaller chunks of the vision.?
In the previous step 2: Digest, you identified 10 areas to address. We can use that now. In this step, filter the themes that fit your product vision, then prioritize those themes.
For example:?
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For the team, your chosen themes specify the portion of your vision to spend your focus.
c. List and score product features by ROI
At this point, you have a product vision, 3 to 5 themes, and 5 to 15 features under each theme. Maybe that’s enough for you to do prioritization. If you have tens of thousands of feature requests in your backlog, you might want to get a bit more systematic and scientific. How?
You can implement a scoring system.??
There are many ROI calculators to choose from. All of them balance effort with payoff. Here are some options:
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Prioritize with scoring is a great system but there are a few things to watch out for:
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4: Build
Now it’s time to build. Build culture depends on the release cadence of the teams. Most software teams have 1-6 week release sprints. Modern, collaborative tools have replaced lengthy product specifications. Most teams make use of tools like these to communicate user stories and feature intent:
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Shorter release cycles are better for efficiency from a product-testing standpoint. So the more you can chunk down a feature and release over time, the faster you can get feedback to see if that feature is on the correct side of product-market fit.?
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But some features may lose value if it’s cut down too small, or a project simply takes a long time technically, such as migrating a database. So those tradeoffs must be taken. By having your team work closely together, you can continue to refine the release cadence that is most suitable for your product.?
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The important thing to remember is that there is no perfect length for sprints. There is a perfect fit though, and it highly depends on the type of product you have, the attributes of your tech stack and code, and the comfort level of your customers in accepting product changes. That’s why great teams set up check-in habits such as retrospectives to continuously update each other. Just as you are seeking continuous product-market fit, your team is seeking continuous process-team fit as well.
Your team here consists of:
5: Ship the feature
To build a great product process that achieves a continuous product market, you’d want to make sure that everything you ship is hooked up to analytics. Tools like Pendo and Mixpanel lets you track user actions on your new feature. Feature flagging tools like Launchdarkly let you release the feature to a selection of customers.?
Common Tools:
A great product process is set up to have control over who sees your new feature. This is important to ensure you can do a limited release to a subset of customers. Why? So that you can test out a feature at lower risk, see the adoption, before releasing it more broadly. Killing features is necessary but erodes customer trust, so you don’t want to do it too often.? If you release to 1000 people instead of 100,000 people first, then if you need to pull back it will be less painful.
At this stage your team is primarily:
Not all feature launches require marketing. You can set up an understanding of tier 1, 2, 3 launches, each of which requires a different level of marketing involvement. For example, a minor patch would be a tier 3 release, a new product line would be a tier 1 release.??
6: Validate with user feedback
This is the most important and most overlooked step of the product process. There is a tendency to ship and forget. There are 3 reasons for this:
But to overlook this step is to shoot yourself in the foot. All the work done prior to this definitely gets you closer to product-market fit, but this is one lever that helps your team:
It’s obvious why learning from mistakes is helpful. How customers use a feature may not be how you envisioned it. To see usage patterns helps improve the feature. But more importantly, it shows you new custom pain to be addressed that may become entirely new product lines for you.
Killing zombie features is important because it simplifies your product, creating less cognitive overhead for your users, but also lowers maintenance overhead for engineering and support.?
These tools have been mentioned throughout because they need to be set up early so that you can have the data to look at later. Your analytic tools are:?
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Setting up product management process for success
Your product process is only as strong as the weakest link. So it’s important to pay attention to where the weakest links are, and elevate the standards of all links together to hone your product process.?
At the center of a great product process is communication.
These are common tools used by great product companies:
Great communication habits unpin the success of your product process and are worth paying attention to.
Now that Kwan's product management process has given you all the steps, you have all you need to drive continuous product-market fit. I wish you and your team much success at reaching the highest mountain in the land.
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