Melissa Perri

Product managers connect the dots. They take input from customer research, expert information, market research, business direction, experiment results, and data analysis. Then they sift through and analyze that information, using it to create a product vision that will help to further the company and to solve the customers’ needs.

How do we determine value?
• How do we measure the success of our products in the market?
• How do we make sure we are building the right thing?
• How do we price and package our product?
• How do we bring our product to market?
• What makes sense to build versus buy?
• How can we integrate with third-party software to enter new markets?

Meghan explained to our team what one experiment entailed: manually taking on the work to understand how to establish an online system for uploading and verifying required documents for mortgages. The team worked with select first-time applicants and had them email the documents. The bank designated a person to review documents and to approve them during this experiment. Over that time, new applicants completed their applications 90% more often than those who had come into the office to have them verified.

Start with Why
Now, let’s talk about what made Meghan and her team so successful. She began by asking Why?
• Why are we making everything digital in the mortgage space?
• Why even do this project?
• What’s the desired result that we hope to achieve here?
• What does success look like?
• What happens if we make it all digital and nobody applies for mortgages?
• How are we mitigating that risk?

Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future state and that aligns the teams around the work.

We create the senior people we need by giving junior people a chance.

dictionary defines strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” This definition seems to be the common interpreta-tion of good strategy across businesses.

Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.

Think of the major pieces of work you do that are actually bets. Henrik Kniberg, a former consultant at Spotify, explains that this is how Spotify thinks.1 The company operates using something called DIBBs, which stands for Data, Insights, Beliefs, and Bets. The first three things, data, insight, and beliefs, inform a piece of work called a bet. The concept of thinking of initiatives as bets is powerful because it sets up a different type of expectation.

Figure 12-2. “The Four Steps to the Improvement Kata” from Toyota Kata Practice Guide, by Mike Rother (reprinted by permission of Mike Rother)