(2022-09-20) Cagan Moore Changing How You Solve Problems

Martin Cagan/Jon Moore: Changing How You Solve Problems. Changing how you build, test and deploy is important no matter what you choose to build, but for too many companies, they just become a more efficient feature factory.

In most companies, the percentage of features and projects that are on your product roadmaps today that actually generate a positive return on investment is depressingly small. Most industry analysts place it in the 10-20% range.The root of the issue is that these feature teams are set up to serve the stakeholders in your business, rather than to serve your customers in ways that work for your business.

lack of trust between stakeholders and feature teams is such a common complaint.

Another serious consequence of this way of working is that we end up with a great many “orphaned” features – features that don’t produce real value, but are waiting for the day they might get another iteration, which rarely happens

Let’s contrast this with an empowered product team.

Rather than simply implementing the features desired by the stakeholders, in an empowered product team, the product team is tasked with coming up with a solution that works for both the customer and for the business

strong product companies understand that the single most important source of innovation is actually our engineers, and empowered product teams are designed to tap into this powerful asset

When these empowered engineers are exposed directly to users and customers, you can start to see where nearly every innovative product or service you love originates from.

When combined with a strong product designer trained in the craft of designing effective and engaging user experiences, and a capable product manager trained in understanding both customers and the constraints of your business

the incentive moves to being able to quickly determine if a particular product idea or approach will work. This is referred to as product discovery.

The product team could simply build their various ideas and see what works, but this would take much more time and essentially use our customers as guinea pigs. Instead, the product team has a full battery of tools and techniques in order to quickly test out ideas and approaches. Mostly the product team creates prototypes

prototypes are two orders of magnitude less (cost) than the product.

3-5 iterations can happen in 1-2 weeks, and the product version is in customer’s hands generating the necessary business results usually a few weeks after that.

Beyond saving money and time, the more important benefit of changing how you solve problems is that you are creating the mechanism to consistently create value for your customers.

But be warned: Some key stakeholders will not be happy about losing control over the technology resources

Also, some of your current product managers, product designers, and engineers may not be willing or able to take on this additional responsibility

Strong, cross-functional, empowered product teams of product managers, product designers and engineers working together to solve customer problems in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business, is the essential core competency of a product-led company.