1-N Product Management

Product Management for established products

Congratulations. You have product market fit. Now what?

Surprisingly, not much has been written on product management for existing products. Even when this is is 90% of all PM Jobs and perhaps all the lower risk, high paying PM jobs.

There are 7 things that a lead Product manager has to do to run the 1-N journey efficiently for their product. These are:

1. Align on strategy

2. Compile ideas into a backlog

3. Estimate impact of each idea

4. Measure baselines, where missing

5. Analyse impact post-ship

6. Improve decision making process

7. Repeat

Sure, a lot of this sounds obvious and simple. But simple things are sometimes hard to do. For example: It is difficult to align key stakeholders on product strategy if their incentives do not align. Similarly, it is difficult to estimate the impact of each activity you in your backlog. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

In this post I’ll only talk about aligning on strategy.

Aligning on Strategy

Aligning all stakeholders on the why before the what helps us manage the “bias to build” which exists in most teams. Successful software teams know how to build. They have trouble aligning on the why though. So, very often teams add things that are cool but do not lift any business metric.

Every team has an in built bias-to-build. People like Shreyas Doshi and Melissa Peri have made videos about it about it. Both have tried to brand it differently:

1. Bias-to-build

2. The Build trap

Both are worth watching because they will help Product Managers understand how to navigate challenges they’ll face as PMs.

How to align on product strategy

Following steps will help

1. Merge all the problems the business faces that product can solve into a single list

2. Every stakeholder should agree that their item is in the unified list

3. Have individual conversations before you have a “Group alignment” meeting. Making sure stakeholders feel heard and involved from the beginning is key to getting buy-in.

4. Ruthlessly priorities top 1 or 2 items every year since most teams can’t solve more than 1 or 2 big problems a year.

5. Ensure that the problems are assigned to the right team. Often, in large companies there are teams with expertise in different areas. Try to leverage the “dot com” team for SEO and SEM instead of putting this on the product team. Similarly, “Save initiatives” that try to save customers that want to cancel should be assigned to a team or individual with the expertise in this area.

6. Ensure there is a Story holding the priorities together so that product marketing can communicate one message with multiple proof points throughout the year.

7. Share and lock down the 1-2 problems to solve (why) before moving on to the the features / capabilities (how).

Try to answer this strategic question first, “Are you in a large market with Product Market fit? Or, have you already saturated the market you are in?”

If the answer is former, then keep building your product to gain access to a larger meeting with high engagement. KPI could be month 1 return rate or 6 month return rate for established products.

“If you have product/market fit in a large market, you should be disincentivized to work on anything outside of securing that market for a very long time.”

- Casey Winters, CPO Eventbrite

https://caseyaccidental.com/feature-product-fit/

Here is another issue for established products as an example:

Every established product has a lot of capabilities. As you add new capabilities to the product, you complicate the product and new capabilities become hard to discover and value remains unrealised for your users.

I haven’t seen established products do a good job with new value discovery without irritating existing users. Is this a problem for your product? Is this bubbling up as one of the top two priorities for the year for the team. If yes, then can you design a few experiments; establish a baseline and see how to move the needle for that metric?

If UX design and PMM teams are aligned you will see much great velocity in solving this problem then otherwise.

1. So, list your problems.

2. Get agreement on the completeness of the list

3. Prioritise based on business impact.

4. Go build capabilities that solve the problems only after 1, 2 and 3 are done

—Anubhav