Are you a Product Thinker?

Anna Kochanowska shared this week at Blackmetric's #BAcommunity her passion for building a product culture. You can watch it here (or read my notes).

Business analysis and product management are complementary disciplines, I totally agree :)

What can you take away from being a Product Thinker?

Since BAs help organisation bring change, adopt change, Anna claims that our profession also needs to change. Take insights from the market, how enterprises organise themselves around product.

The purpose being to evolve and elevate our BA craft and leadership.

What is a Product Thinking?

Doing now what your customer and business needs next.

What matters is that the need is satisfied and how quickly it is satisfied.

Four models to respond to needs

Depending on our relationship with demand and need:

1. A demands based model
2. Needs are recognised independently from the demand (but response is still delayed)
3. Short time to value when recognising needs
4. Deliver value before it is expected

The role of Agile: sometimes it fails, in Anna's experience

These are some failures she shared with us:

• building something that is not used (delivery "takes over", becomes a "feature factory"), it's far away from the reality of the customer
• immature ways of working: the team may not have the right incentives
• lack of metrics: not ensuring that the product is adopted regularly (as increments are delivered), so we hear from the users of the product "yes, this is what we need".

Product thinking "is the new Agile", with 3 pilars

When wanting to have more impact, let's elevate the agile mindset.

1. Customer obsession: facing the customer of the product the whole time. You know them so well, anticipate what they need before they even realise.
2. Respond to the need quickly
3. Elimination of waste: broader than delivery, product definition, assumptions made about them, plans, how we prioritise and execute our plans.

Products are contextual (not universal)

Products enable two things:

1. A change in people's behaviour
2. Impact people's business context (long term)

Product thinking is a journey from the problem space, through the right solution, into the business impact. The goal of this journey is to reduce the gap between customers and the business: how is the changed customer behaviour key to achieving the business impact we intend?

Product is no longer a technology: Product is the WHOLE experience

Product is not the result of software development, it's a vehicle to deliver value for somebody. It's a well-structured ecosystem where value can flow.

Product is made of components: IT and non-IT nature, everything that makes the product consumable. See the example of a restaurant, not one dish out of the menu, the table, the waiter/waitress, when the user reports a problem, the payment options..

Where can we (BAs) maximise the value for the customer here?

Product scoping: think about the whole experience and encompass the whole offering beyond the 'product stack' (the product components, functionality).

What organisational attributes support the business (from a customer perspective)? (the capabilities)

Does the organisation need new processes?

What to add or improve to increase customer value?

How to connect business needs with customer needs?

What capabilities and components are necessary to fulfil the needs of the customer? (What impacts the customer? higher value = higher impact).

Meet the Wardley map: see the ecosystem of what the user can see / experience / interact with, the net worth, the dependency relationships, the stages of maturity (moving from left to right).

• What customers and
• What customer needs are you targetting?

Feel free to go to learnwardleymapping.com for examples.

Anna shared another map for the restaurant example and reminded us that this map is customer specific. It shows the most common value stream.

If you work with several streams, you my want to re-design the big picture, add certain capabilities to target certain groups.

The experience that a product is associated with is never universal (because each group have their preferences). (i.e. gender, age, location, occupation, context of use, diet, mood, expectations..)

It's important to learn about the backgrounds and the behaviours of our users, to understand how the make choices.

Balance discovery and deliver: Experiment

Research informs experimenting (and the other way around).

Experiment about both problems and solutions.

It's not about validating assumptions, it's also about contextualising problems. Speaking the language of observable situations, becoming specific to the life of your customer.

You can put your strategy in the hands of reality. Eliminate vague strategies and vague requirements.

Watch out for cognitive bias

It will affect the quality of your analysis.

Let's be early product thinkers!