Building Products By Leveraging Outside-in And Inside-out View

In the previous blogs, I talked about leveraging customer outcome driven approach supported by lean product development model to build products that customers want. This approach can be significantly complemented by leveraging key strengths of the inside-out strategy development.  Inside-out view allows the product leaders to recognize and appreciate the velocity of changes to determine the pace as in certain situations incremental change is more realistic than wide-ranging and deep-seated change. It also enables them to determine distinctive capabilities and skills essential to be successful in delivering products goals.

For example, reaching out to key engineers working on the product helps in many ways.  An informal lunch conversation with lead engineers working on the product would help develop a better understanding of the team’s capabilities and areas of improvements that you may not have even thought about.

As a product leader you want to process outside-in and inside-out view to shape your strategy. Such discussions with your engineering, web operations and tech support teams can provide an opportunity to refine the product strategy and road-map as you learn from this added insight.

Here is a simple checklist for processing inside-out views:

1.       Identify key players to mine their brain trust. 

• This will allow you to refine your product strategy, where needed, and provide a deeper understanding to synergize resources and capabilities.

2.       Determine training needs.

• The gaps that you need to help fill in order to achieve the product goals.

3.       Build informal networks.

• This will significantly enhance your ability as a product leader to gain buy-in and develop greater cohesion in support of the product program.

4.       Identify slingshot opportunities.

•  Explore how you can leverage core capabilities of the team to create slingshot opportunities or deliver product enhancements that you had not thought about before.

5.       Explore opportunities to improve product.

• Inside-out views can help improve product architecture, enhance user experience, and identify untapped capabilities of the product.  Additionally, one can proactively find contradictions and patterns to evolve new ideas to improve the product and increase its adoption within the target user-base.

The Art Of Product Management - Blending Quantitative Framework With How We Think

In my previous blogs I emphasized the importance of using a metrics driven framework to build a set of hypotheses, then test and develop the product using lean product development approach to deliver the outcomes that the customers value. 

Very often, interpretation of metrics becomes challenging as many stakeholders have their own confirmed biases and ‘gut feel’. Sometimes gut feels do matter but that should not be the reason why one should ignore what the metrics tell. So, the question for the product leader is how to interpret metrics to make the right choices while processing views of some of the stakeholders which are driven by confirmed biases?

While reading an excellent book (gifted to me by a good friend and colleague of mine), Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I learned several lessons that can be applied to making right product decisions.

Inspired by the book, here is my checklist to avoid pitfalls in interpreting the metrics while dealing with confirmed biases of your own or other stakeholders:

1.       Avoid jumping to conclusions

·         Generate enough data samples to develop metrics. This will help avoid the temptation to conclude something with very little repetition. We have a propensity to constructing a favorable interpretation of the situation with minimal information.

2.       Guard against confirmed biases

·         Some stakeholders are likely to look for confirming evidence, defined as 'positive test strategy' by Daniel Kahneman. As a product leader one must test the hypotheses by trying to refute them instead.

·         Watch for halo effect!

3.       Test the hypotheses by asking difficult questions

·         Make sure you gather metrics to test various hypotheses by asking complex questions (eg. Why would you use my product over what you already have? Will you buy the product if we deliver x outcome? What is my product’s Net Promoter Score?).

·         Avoid substituting a difficult question with an easier one.

4.       Avoid overconfident judgments

·         Do not depend on intuitions alone. Intuitions often deliver extreme predictions.

·         Be aware of situations where you are attempting to use a part of the feedback as a kernel to decide your future course of strategy. This could lead you down a wrong path.

The art is to blend quantitative framework analysis with how human mind interprets the data to make right product choices!

Developing Product For A New Market

Last week my wife asked me to read an interesting HBR article on Tri Sector Leadership (http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/02/why-the-world-needs-tri-sector/). This article talks about transferrable skills across business, government and non-profit organizations. Inspired by that, I believe, product leadership expertise should also cut across business domains, and a product leader must not be limited to developing products for a given industry only.

The question then is, as a Product Leader, where do you start and how do you develop creative product ideas particularly when you are dealing with an unknown environment?

Here is a simple checklist to work off of:

• Take top-down and bottoms-up approach with the customer outcomes in mind.
• What outcomes your end customers want?
• How can you enable
• Your customers to do an existing job better.
• Your customers to do new tasks not possible before.
• A new set of customers to do a job that others are already doing.
• What improvements/ values can you introduce over what’s currently available to them? Are there additional tools you can provide?
• What's the current economic model? Supply chain? Key constituents?
• What is the value creation by various elements of the supply chain?
• What outcomes can you enable for various elements of the supply chain?
• And, is there an opportunity to disrupt the business model? Can you disintermediate elements, which are not adding value, by bringing in more efficiency?
• What value would you create thru this disintermediation? Can you measure the impact in terms of cost, speed and convenience? Ultimate goal is to assess value creation for the end customers.
• How do you leverage new innovations to disrupt industry? Social networking, Crowdsourcing, Mobile, and others? 
• What elements of the supply chain need to be nurtured, destroyed or created? And, why?
• Understand the eco system – Identify key players which can enable customer outcomes, assess their motivation to participate in the supply chain, in other words, what’s the outcome they are looking for.
• Build hypotheses in support of your findings above, and test them using Lean Product Development Framework. Make ‘pivot or persevere’ decisions based on value and growth metrics.
• Execute on your winning hypothesis!