PITA 044

TOPIC 1 How do you balance folk [dis]liking practices with those practices being [in]effective?

• Change is all about the learning curve - it gets worse before it gets better.

• So... can I embed with the team for a sprint or two to empathise and then move on with the change?

• Need to see and believe the problem first and then look at the right way to solve it

• You can only solve for things people agree is a problem - so outcomes must matter before you work on outputs

• Frame things as experiments, so you can back out of it if needed, be clear about your first time-frame and also make sure to revisit and reflect if the expected outcome was reached

• Get aligned on where you are NOW (“point A”) and where you want to BE (“point B”) as a starting point (inspired by Janice Fraser - see this post)

• Situational leadership - determine what type of leadership does each person need for a given issue. Determine if things are a WILL or a SKILL issue

• There’s some great stuff on team contracts in Christina Wodtke’s The Team that Managed Itself

TOPIC 2: How are UX, UCD, Customer Success and Product Design taking away from vs augmenting the product job family?

• It’s all been positive for me - there’s so much to do in a PM role, and it’s just getting more complex (customer journeys, etc) - so more collaboration is very welcome.

• I see PMs with no training in these areas trying to do these roles - and it’s not great.

• +1 It really pisses off user researchers when PMs tell them how to conduct research. Excuse my French.

• We have designers in the same job family - so the challenge has come from Acct Management or Customer Success - they look at one customer at a time, not the big picture. So we bring them into a customer council to give them a wider perspective.

• +1 to challenge of GTM or success teams having a myopic view of a single or few customers instead of the entire customer base - “Squeaky wheel syndrome” 😂

• It works really well in some B2B teams, where the personalities jell - but it can be a mess when a new role is introduced. People already on the team may feel like they’re losing a part of their responsibilities. We had to redefine the team’s RACI to get it sorted, and had to sell them on why the new role is a good thing.

• Every time a new person joins a team, it’s a new team

• How people are compensated also comes into this mix

• Where Product is the new kid on the block, it can generate a perception of screwing up existing practices. I like to get everyone in the room and talk about competencies and outcomes without job titles - then mapping them on.

• People who had bad prior experiences can come with biases based on that.

• Some people care deeply about craft and doing it ‘right’.

• When people try to do things in a new way, some cling to the old processes - and try to hack around them instead of working with them

• +1 to picking folk who have migrated from another discipline to be the comms person to that discipline.

TOPIC 3 Operationalising Customer Insights

• We used ProductBoard to create bite-sized insights, linked to user stories…. But no one used it

• We started including Insights & Experiments it in the Sprint reviews, which brought other parts of the org into it

• Ensure the research is topical and useful, relevant & timely

• Before we do any new research, look into what we’ve done - when did we last look at this question? How can we build on that? Avoid discovery fatigue amongst the customers

• Qual and quant info, owned by & generated by different parts of the org - bringing the big picture together is really hard.

• We put ProductBoard & ZenDesk together to do path analysis, etc - but the important thing is that PB was just for the Product team to own and use

• +1 - we had a similar problem with ProdPad (non-product folks considered it to be the “PM tool”)

• Can be a recruiting issue - we have the wrong kind of user researcher. All theory, not effecting change in the org

• Give the researcher the challenge of documenting ‘ How are decisions made in this organisation?’ - if the answer is that the PM makes some crap up and puts it on the board, that’s not a problem that research can solve. But if the decisions are made at a big strategy meeting, it’s critical to get the info to the right people before or in that session.

• If you value evidence-based decision making, it should be folded into the reason WHY decisions are made. 

• Prioritisation is not about value, it’s about confidence (Ant Murphy) 

• Data can go to information… but it needs to go to Insight to be useful

• “Insight” in itself is an emergent thing, you can’t simply “give” someone else an insight. They need to emotionally invest to the extent they come to the same conclusion themselves.

• The key thing is the ability to find answers quickly

• Set experiments within the teams to operationalise insights - decisions made based on things we learned