(2022-09-23) Cagan Moore Changing How You Decide Which Problems To Solve

Martin Cagan/Jon Moore: Changing How You Decide Which Problems To Solve. It is not hard to simply take your existing product roadmaps, and for each feature or project, to determine what the underlying problem to solve is, and what the logical way to measure success would be. But are those really the most important problems to be solved for your customers and for your company?

So many companies spend their time reacting – reacting to new sales opportunities, reacting to competitor’s offerings, reacting to customer requests, and reacting to price pressure. Yet in strong product companies, while they care about these factors, they are not driven by them.

(strategic context)

What drives them is the pursuit of a product vision that can meaningfully improve the lives of their customers.

Note that the product vision is first and foremost about the customer. How will it make the lives of your users and customers better?

describe the future that you are trying to create.

You may have dozens or even hundreds of product teams, but the product vision is what unites the teams with the shared goal of making that vision a reality.

While the product vision describes the future, the product strategy is how we identify the most important problems to solve now. (see (2020-02-18) Cagan Product Strategy Focus)

The product strategy begins by focusing on the most critical areas for business success.

Once we have identified the few key focus areas, we then need to select the insights that we will be betting on.

It’s important to understand that product strategy is distinct from both business strategy and go-to-market strategy.

The product strategy identifies the most critical problems to solve in the quarter, and the product leaders assign those problems to the relevant product teams through team objectives.

Product teams are selected based on the areas they are responsible for, the skills on the team, the enabling technology used by that team, the data the team has access to, and the team’s ideas for pursuing this problem.

The product teams then work to discover a solution (product discovery) that solves the problem they’ve been assigned, and then they deliver that solution.

the leaders of product management, product design, and engineering are absolutely essential to not only changing how you decide which problems to solve, but also to changing how you solve problems and changing how you build.