This is the last post in my series on 1-N Product management and perhaps the most important.
Now that you have
Aligned on the business problems to be solved
Methodically compiled all backlogs into one
Prioritised your backlog and picked items for a sprint based on impact
It is time to ship and celebrate. Right?
Product teams celebrate shipping when they should be celebrating learning instead. Traditional ship trips, ship parties, etc should be replaced by learn parties and learn trips.
Great product teams list down what they expect to happen post a release.
These are your release hypotheses. Post release, product teams need a “lookback” to see if any of their assertions held true or not.
This is not to blame a particular function but to ensure stakeholders are learning together. This shared learning leads to better functioning teams because:
They discuss and debate what is working and what is not
They review metrics (OKRs) in the lookback meeting
They figure out what they need to change to meet Key Results
They are much more aligned and move faster than other teams
Hence, they succeed in meeting objectives faster than other teams
This needs to become a habit.
A part of your product development process.
Sr. Leadership should ensure lookback meetings happen and OKRs are updated regularly.
When should lookback meetings or the “Discuss and Debate” meeting happen?
30 or 60 or 90 day lookback periods are common. The duration of the lookback review depends on:
How quickly you can get stable data?
How quickly do users adopt your latest release (not an issue for web apps)
How quickly is your roll out complete?
Documenting learnings by Product Managers
It is very important to institutionalise knowledge in any team so that you are not always starting from zero.
Documented learnings help onboard new people to the team faster.
They show what has worked and what has not worked in the past.
They prevent teams from trying the same thing again or blaming each other.
And this builds a high performing, cooperative team culture.
I’ll talk about Objective and Key Results (OKRs) in my next post