9. 49 % UnplannedPlanned 51%
PLANNED VS
UNPLANNED
40 %
34 % Working out what is
the right product
Helping to sell the
product
Helping to deliver
the product 26%
PRODUCT ACTIVITIES
47 % Post-launchPre-launch 53%
STAGE OF LIFE
CYCLE
Grey
ownership
56 %
Covering
othersMy
responsibility
17%
ACTIVITY OWNERSHIP
What PMs Think They Do?
Source: Product focus – Industry Survey 2018
PM
12. Cognitive Skills
Influence without Authority
Building Trust
The Art of Decision Making
Effective Communication
PM Key Skills Quantifiable Cognitive
14. Inspire team to share your vision
PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Cognitive
15. Help them address those in
alignment with your product goals
Understand Other’s Motivation
Empathize their Struggle
Know their Objective
Career Development Goals
Make their problems your own
PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Cognitive
16. PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Cognitive
Invest in relationships
17. The Art of Decision Making
• Establish as curator and the creator of
ideas
Ideas can come from anyone from the team. Curate the
ideas and bubble up to the top
• Make team’s opinion feel heard
Do not immediately shoot down ideas you don’t agree with
Make yourself accessible to hearing ideas from the team
• Communicate the DM process
Make sure the team understands the decision making
process
Make it clear to the team what the decision is, the
reasoning behind it
• Favor decisions today over tomorrow
Decisions today can move the product forward and reduce
speed of execution
PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Decision MakingCognitive
18. Vision Lead
Listen Understand
Communicate Contribute
How can you Build Trust
Clear goal for the team
Ensure team understands
Use Reports to keep leaders in loop
Be clear and focused with the plan
Own the plan
Be transparent
Listen to your customers
Make feel team members are heard
Ensure team getting valuable feedback
from customers, leaders & partners
Understand other team’s work and how
does it impact
Cross team relationship
Visibility on overall business
Communicate clearly
Use data to back your plan
Constant lookout to contribute
Roadmap, Prioritization
Understand the needs of Stakeholders
PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Decision MakingCognitive Building Trust
19. Mastering Effective
Communication
• Vision
Communicate the audience you are targeting
The distinct problem you are solving
The unique solution by which you’ll win the market
• Execution
Agile activities
Weekly/Monthly Report
Weekly/Monthly Demo
• Listen first
• Meetings with clear agenda
PM Key Skills Quantifiable
Influence Without
Authority
Decision MakingCognitive Building Trust
Effective
Communication
27. Design for Delight
Evoking positive
emotion by going
beyond customer
expectations in
delivering ease and
benefit
...so people buy more and tell
others about their experience
28. TO:
Designing for
Delight
(aka Design Thinking)
FROM:
Traditional
Thinking
Flawless planning
Avoid failure
Rigorous analysis
Presentations
Arm’s length customer
research
Periodic
Thinking
Enlightened TRIAL & ERROR
Fail FAST
Rigorous TESTING
Lightweight EXPERIMENTS
DEEP CUSTOMER IMMERSION
CONTINUOUS
DOING
29. FROM:
Traditional
Thinking
4 + 4 = 8
TO:
Designing for Delight
(aka Design Thinking)
8 = 4 + 4
2 + 6
12 – 4
4 x 2
24 / 3
Discovery of what
is “right”.
The so-called
“correct” answer
Discovery of
what WORKS.
An infinity of
POSSIBLE
answers
35. Set Up
Location & set up matters. Know what you want, and what to do with it
Clear purpose: customer problem you are trying to solve
Invite the right diverse group of perspectives to consider the problem statement
Brainstorming: uncovering new ideas and approaches to solving a specific customer problem
36. Rules of Engagement
Defer judgment – No Bad IDEAS
Go for QUANTITY
Be visual
Encourage wild ideas, visit the extremes
Brainstorming: uncovering new ideas and approaches to solving a specific customer problem
37. Example Schedule:
Intros and Customer Problem we are trying to solve - 5 min
Rules of Engagement – 5 min
Individual Time (10 ideas/sticky notes) – 10 min
Sharing/Grouping Time – 15 min
Force a specific constraint – what if?
Individual Time (5 ideas/sticky notes) – 5 min
Sharing/Grouping Time – 15 min
Summarize & Wrap up – 10 min
Brainstorming: uncovering new ideas and approaches to solving a specific customer problem
38. The Output: Lots of Insights, grouped in strategic themes
Insight Theme 1 Insight Theme 3Insight Theme 2
39. Variation – FOG
Facts, Observations, Guesses
Goal: clarifying what teams already know, where
they have early insights, and why hypotheses we
need to go research
40. Got a big, hairy customer problem, and a team with lots of tribal knowledge?
FACTS GUESSESOBSERVATIONS
42. Streamlined
guidance for
Developers -
or thru
Partners
First Use
Experiments
Target
Customer
Segments
1
2
3
Key questions How we’ll answer Timeline Status / comments
▪ What are our Target Customer
Personas?
▪ What customer benefits drive first
use, and repeat use? Which drive
preference and switching?
▪ Which collections of features solve
for which personas?
Can we map our Target Personas to
Cohorts and track 120 Day Tenure?
▪ What onboarding challenges drive
the greatest drop off?
▪ What unique First Use ‘Maps’ solve
for our targeted personas?
▪ What is the right ‘Map’ for Day 1,
Week 1, Month 1?
▪
▪ What are the most relevant adjacent
services through partners?
▪
▪ For each category, define the
mandatories for an awesome
integrated partner experience?
▪
▪ What pain is unique to partner’s
user onboarding, and how do we
address?
Journey Map the direct Merchant
experience with PPCP, developer
portal and professional services touch
points as these businesses sign up,
complete account setup and technical
integration, and process their first
transaction.
Learning Plan
SAMPLE
43. Vision. A bold statement about how you’ll help
your customer
Goal: Inspires your team, and drives focus on the
customer, not the business
44. Qualities of a strong Vision?
Transforms how teams think about the problem
Suggests more than one potential solution
Does NOT include a specific solution or idea
45. The Customer PAIN
What is the biggest PAIN POINT
or OPPORTUNITY you are
focused on?
The Customer Benefit
What is the most important
GAIN for your customer?
How will you MEASURE the amount of
improvement in what matters most to the
customer when choosing this product?
PRODUCT:
Who is your CUSTOMER? Be specific and narrow—for multiple target customers, focus on one per page.
Who are you NOT designing for?
Our VISION STATEMENT
Make it Inspiring, Specific, and Customer-Back
46. Make sure your vision is described in customer-back language?
What EMOTION do you want the person to feel?
What SPECIFICALLY are we doing to make a
STEP CHANGE in ease?
How SIGNIFICANT is the BENEFIT that we are
delivering - in MEASURABLE terms? How does it
go BEYOND EXPECTATIONS?
43
47. PRODUCT: Mobile payments (phone & tablet)
WHO has the biggest pain? Be specific and narrow.
Invoice-based/service-based businesses that transact in-field [home improvement,
professional services, simple retail)
WHO are you NOT designing for?
Healthcare, fin svcs/real estate, 100% retail (micro, restaurants), B2B
Our product vision
What is the BIGGEST
PAIN POINT you are
focused on?
What is the INSIGHT
that leads you to focus
here?
Time to payment is the biggest
pain-point
Insights:
It often takes me time and effort
to get paid, and delays in
payments impact my cash flow
and makes it hard to run my
business.
I accept multiple forms of payments
and spend 2-4 hours/week reconciling
them.
Any payment,
anywhere…
instantly on
your books
What is the INSIGHT that
makes you believe you can
SOLVE THE PROBLEM?
1.Mobile blurs the line between in-
person and remote, and helps
SBs get paid faster.
2. Our ability to offer a single payment
account reduces time to payment for
all payment types.
3.Integration with QB saves time of
reconciling with my accounting,
and provides cash flow insights.
SAMPLE
48. 45
Team Collaboration is …
One passionate and empowered team that collaborates to deliver delight at
every customer touch point.
Looks Like:
• We perform like a champion
baseball team with each player
specializing in their position,
working together as one team to
reach a common goal
• We do this by communicating and
partnering together to build a
bridge toward a seamless
process
• Lots of satisfied and empowered
employees engaged in delighting
our customers
Feels Like:
• One team, One goal
• It is part of our DNA
Employees:
• We are confident & empowered
to delight our customers by
resolving customer needs in a
manner that shows we CARE
Customers
• Intuit makes me feel like I
matter and they understand my
issue. I am confident that
Intuit will resolve my issue
quickly and easily
Sounds Like:
Customers say:
• “I can’t believe how easy it was. I
am confident that Intuit will solve
my payroll and tax needs.”
Employee’s say:
• “I understand the process and trust
that the issue will be resolve even
if I don’t do the work myself.”
• “I understand how best to support
my customers needs.”
Shareholder’s say:
• “If you want an example of great
customer service, contact Intuit.”
SAMPLE
50. What makes a good experiment?
Make sure you test your riskiest assumption
Set numeric targets for your hypotheses
Measures real behavior – No Surveys!
Capture surprises as well as data
51. Our Insight(s) – an a-ha that changers your perspective and
makes you think beyond your customers expectations
Our Vision – A bold statement about the opportunity based on our
customer-backed insight(s)
Our Idea – A concept that delivers on our vision and customer needs
Key Assumptions – Riskiest assumptions that keep us up at night.
Sequence assumptions and tackle them 1 by 1, riskiest first.
Hypotheses – Brainstorm a list of solutions/features that could prompt the
behavior change underlined in the assumptions. If we do X, Y% of people will behave in way X”
Experiments – NO SURVEYS! Brainstorm experiments that you can run quickly and test with real customers. What did you learn? – What did we learn about our hypothesis,
what surprised us, what new insights?
Change the idea, Pivot? Or Keep going,
Persevere?
Our Riskiest
Assumption
High ValueLow Value
Low Cost to Test
High Cost to Test
52. 2 x 2 for Prioritization
High
Customer
Value
Low
Customer
Value
Low Cost to Test
High Cost to Test
53. Be Right More Often. Quicker.
… market research, focus groups and other theoretical
methods of arriving at product and business decisions
could be as wrong as they could be right.
─ Scott Cook, Intuit
54. Leaders are not required to be
superhuman.
Play the role of a coach, enabler and lay out the culture that
encourages cheap, quick, relevant experiments and ensure
that these are data driven.
─ Scott Cook, Intuit
55. www.productschool.com
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