Field Trips and Career Days

Part of facilitating a successful product team is to have developers that buy into a market-driven vision for the product. Developers have a natural tendency to be motivated by cool technologies and features that may work against a product that solves real problems in the market. Company executives and the product manager can work together to overcome this tendency, but only by building consensus in the development team for a market-driven approach.

One way of fostering buy-in for a market-driven approach is field trips. On top of the normal prospect visits he should be making, let the product manager bring developers to customer sites to observe and experience use (or non-use) of the product in real life. Better yet, have career days in which each developer actually sits in for a customer and plays her role for the day. You will have to get permission from customers, of course, but you have two strong arguments to convince them:

Your team, for free, will do your customers' work for them.
It ultimately benefits the customer for your developers to understand the user experience.

Use the field trips to draw attention to the problems that the product is supposed to solve. Use them to gather new information that developers learn.

A product manager's role is to understand the market and communicate that understanding to the product team. To get buy-in from developers, it's not enough to throw market requirements documents at them. Field trips give developers the perspective they can get only from first-hand experience.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem...

Cauvin

Search This Blog