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Welcome to Product Monk, a 3x/week newsletter where we share the case studies of the most exciting tech products.

We wrote these three stories last week, hope you love them ❤️:

• Canva's Journey to a $40 Billion Valuation

• From 0 to 300 Billion Views: The Visionary Product Managers Behind YouTube's Meteoric Rise

• How has Amazon Echo's Design Made Users' Lives Smarter?

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🧃Juicy reads to check out

This section includes some relevant articles/videos, people to check out, and links you might find interesting from around Product management.

👉🏻 What Generative AI Means for Product Strategy and How to Evaluate It. (Link)

👉🏻 Understanding The Product Requirements Gathering Process (Link).

👉🏻 7 Habits of Highly Effective Product Managers (Link)

👩‍💼 Hot PM job postings added!

Find the latest PM jobs for apprentices, interns, and beginners at the end of this post. Read this case study to crack them!

Better Products Faster: An Outcome-Oriented Approach to Optimizing Your Ways of Working

Building successful products is hard. Really hard.

That’s why we all constantly try and struggle to find and implement better practices that can help us have a higher and faster success ratio.

Unfortunately, we are losing the battle. Most companies are trapped with ways of working that produce mediocre results.

Features factories, lack of “time” for discovery, constant change of priorities, slow deployment practices, lack of experimentation tooling… we can probably enumerate over 100 ways of working that cause the typical high failure ratio that we have in product development and innovation.

The wrong approach to practice improvement

Let me share a short personal example. 

Around 2012, I was working as Head of Product in the largest OTA in Latin America, leading the (back then) shiny new Mobile division. It was the boom of smartphones, and we very quickly grew from 0 to 10% of the company's total revenues. 

The company had multiple business units (flights, hotels, cruises, etc.) and operated in over 20 countries. All of those have their corresponding business manager. And all of them wanted to be on the mobile roadmap.

At the time, we were using a feature-oriented roadmap that was closer to what I would now call a release plan. It was painful to discuss priorities because we had to go over 20 different items that didn’t provide any clarity on why they were selected, so every stakeholder challenged us and vouched for including their requests at the top of the list. As a head of product, this was driving me crazy.

I decided to work with my team to generate an outcome-oriented roadmap. We picked the template of one of the thought leaders who was preaching it and worked for a few weeks in creating it. 

We were very proud of the result. It was a much simpler format, less packed, and more clearly articulated what we were trying to accomplish with our efforts. 

Full of confidence, we shared it with our stakeholders. They loved it. They saw the clarity, the simplicity. For a moment, we felt great. But a second later, our hopes met reality: “Great! So when is feature X launching?”. We went back to the exact same conversations we had before and discussed the same details and priorities we had with our previous release plan—total failure. 

The underlying problem preventing us from transcending these inferior practices is our approach to change. 

Most of our efforts are guided by a desire to change a practice, either removing a painful one or introducing a new shiny framework. We fail to understand the goal or shift in behavior we need and fail to recognize that any single practice is part of a bigger set of interconnected actions.

How can you succeed? Treat your ways of working as a product.

When developing products, the most critical element to be successful is to use an outcome-oriented approach. We analyze current results, discover opportunities for growth, and implement solutions iteratively, reviewing the results for further optimization. 

We can apply the same principles to successfully improve our ways of working.

Instead of simply thinking about the implementation of the new practice, we must evaluate the outcome we want to produce. 

When I discuss this approach with teams that are trying to improve their practices, the first and biggest obstacle is knowing how to measure the outcomes of how we work.

How can we measure how strategic we are? Or how solid are our discovery methods? Or how good is our ideation collaboration?

Teams and leaders are tempted to give themselves scores. This is possibly the worst option. You will be extremely biased, resulting in prioritizing an area of improvement that usually is not the one that will bring more impact (as in my roadmap example). 

In the rest of this article, I will explain how to get out of this predicament.

Evidence-Guided Approach to Evaluate Your Practices

1. Holistic

Imagine you are trying to optimize an e-commerce product. You can jump to work on “conversion rate.” But it would be wise to see if that is the biggest opportunity… you may also want to consider the number of visitors or average order value to see if you can have a higher impact pursuing those other options. 

To define outcomes for our practice improvement, we need to understand our methods holistically and see what area has a better chance of making a significant difference.

That’s why we use the 3D Model to map the universe of frameworks and tools that we use in the end-to-end product development process.

Simply put, we have 3 phases that help us do 3 different “jobs” of the product cycle:

• Product Direction: select the problems and goals on which we want to focus to ensure aligned discovery and delivery processes

• Product Discovery: decide the best product to solve the selected customer and business needs. It involves activities directed at understanding the problem and validating the solution, framing and reducing the value, usability, feasibility, and business viability risks.

• Product Delivery: iteratively builds and optimizes a robust, reliable, and valuable product based on the discovery’s findings to capture the desired outcomes.

2. Evidence-Guided

Now imagine that to optimize the e-commerce product mentioned before, we say: “The conversion rate feels wrong. I think is a 2 out of 5”. 

That would be quite ridiculous. Yet, it is almost exactly what we do with our practices.

Over time, we have developed over 100 aspects we analyze to assess a product organization's practices.

The goal is to be precise and to define assessment questions that we can evaluate with evidence. The example below relates to assessing Discovery Planning and Tracking.

This is where you will need to invest some time. How do you create criteria for scoring your practices and relate them to evidence you can collect in your organization?

We suggest the following 3 steps:

1. List the desired practices: note that you won’t do it in your current ways of working but for the ones you envision achieving.

2. Questions: define guiding questions to clarify what you are trying to assess and why that aspect of the practice is important.

3. Evidence: describe what evidence can give you a measurable result of how the practice is being performed.

Conclusion

In this article, we covered 3 big topics:

1. Why our approach to practice improvement is incorrect, trapping most companies in never-ending mediocre ways of working.

2. How can we treat our ways of working as a product, applying outcome-orientation to achieve high-impact improvements?

3. How to set outcomes for our process and practices, solving the hardest obstacle most teams have to overcome to start an outcome-oriented transformation.

Implementing an evidence-guided evaluation of your practices will set you up for success, providing the foundation to identify gaps and achieve measurable progress.

If this resonates, I’m interviewing product people investing in improving their practices and skills, to learn more about the most common challenges and obstacles. I would love to have a coffee chat.

👩‍💼 Hot PM Jobs for Starters!

1. Product Management Internship

Microsoft
Dublin, Ireland
Hybrid
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2. Product Manager I

Flipkart
Bangalore, India
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3. Graduate Inside Product Specialist

Dell Technologies
Chiswick, United Kingdom
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