(2019-02-17) Cutler Do This Now: 8 Ways To Focus Your Product Team On Impact Not Features

John Cutler: Do This Now: 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features. 1. Reframe feature requests as ‘bets’ (Experiment)

2. Write the recap before you begin

design a recap presentation in advance (a precap if you like).

3. Fill up a learning backlog/board

To prioritize your learning efforts, consider the maximum amount of money you would you pay for the information

Frame each item in the learning backlog as a question paired with the decision (or decisions) that answering the question might inform.

4. Hold quarterly product decision reviews

The goal here is not to focus myopically on the outcome–what ended up happening (which is often luck driven)–but rather to

Review the decision-making process to understand opportunities for improvement

The output of this exercise might include: some heuristic checklists, agreeing to instrument new parts of your application, trying new research techniques, timeboxing decision making, moving it closer to the front-lines, etc. One of my mantras is “high decision quality, high decision velocity”, and this exercise helps hone those skills

5. Meet regularly for insights workshopping sessions

cross-functional, cross-team insights/analytics workshopping lunch.

Settle on a short, five-minute presentation format, and leave a full ten minutes for a spirited discussion. Try to fit three or four presentations/discussions in per lunch. Importantly, make it “safe” for work to be unfinished and for non-experts to share their progress.

6. Add a behavior component to personas

Imagine I ask you to create a segment in your insights-tool-of-choice that identifies the “target” of your “intervention” (I prefer intervention to feature because to me it better describes what’s happening). What does that query look like? How do you go from all of the humans in your product to this specific set of humans?

But by really focusing on a narrow “Who”, you’ll be able to guide the discussion around impacts and outcomes more persuasively.

7. Write one pagers 2018-12-18-CutlerGreatOnepagers

Make a point of writing one-pagers–ideally sharing a common structure to make scanning and comparison easier–and make them visible for teams to see.

The practice alone of clarifying the “bet” on a single page can reorient the organization towards impacts.

8. Design (and iterate on) an always-on dashboard

The solution? A big shared monitor and an always-on dashboard. Invite editing and tweaking. With time, you’ll come up with something that hopefully informs decisions.