Community Talks: Agile for Product Managers
Over the years, product managers and organization owners have constantly been looking for ways to take their products to the next level and reach higher coverage customer-wise. In fact, the product’s improvement and agility have always been one of the biggest concerns for any manager, therefore we’ve decided to get insight from experienced PMs on this matter during this month’s Community Talks.
In this session, we’ve had the pleasure to learn all about Evidence-Based Management from Richard Brillantes, who’s an agile consultant at Palo IT. In addition to that, our second guest speaker, Rodemir Reyes, a senior product manager at Manabie, walked us through his product management journey with agile.
By listening to what both product managers have to say, we learned a lot about improving a product’s value, getting a better return on investment, meeting clients’ needs more efficiently, building better relationships within the organization as well as with its customers, and much more.
Richard Brillantes introduces the concept of Evidence-Based Management as a way to help product managers or owners focus their work effort and take their products to the next level, therefore reaching their improvement goals.
Richard proceeds to explain that Evidence-Based Management is a framework meant to help measure value and enable the improvement and agility of a product or an organization. In fact, it’s really measuring, diagnosing, and improving the value of the product using an iterative and incremental approach. He explains how using this approach, you would need to determine the use of the product as well as its unique selling point (what makes it different from the competition). Then, you make sure that the measures you’re applying to the product are delivering the right results. These measures should be able to improve the outcomes of the product by reducing the risks of delivering the wrong thing to the market at the wrong time for example and optimizing the investments by choosing to market the right things for the right people and for the right reasons.
The Question of Measuring the Team’s Output
When it comes to measurements, Richard explains how organizations are a lot more focused on teams (team-centric). By that, he means that they’re constantly measuring teams’ outputs and it’s causing people to focus on their own deliverables instead of working as a team. That leaves organizations and product managers unable to deliver a result that is valuable to their customers.
Richard thinks that as leaders/managers of your product you must understand that measurement is strategic in nature. It has to be able to address the strategic needs of your product or organization so we have to ensure that these measurements target the right things and don’t become obstacles on our way to delivering better products.
” Tell me how I’m measured and I’ll tell you how I behave. Tell me how I’ll be rewarded and that’s all I’ll focus on”
- Eli Goldratt
According to Richard, this quote explains how too much focus on key measures of progress and motivational tools can push people to deliver outcomes for their benefit more than it is for the benefit of the product itself.
Why Evidence-Based Management?
Given the errors of our ways in the past, the use of Evidence-Based Management and the framework formulated by scrum.org will help limit risks and improve the delivery of value to customers. As a result, the right products are put out in the market for the right people (products are able to respond to the market’s demand and adapt to its changes) and organizations are able to optimize their return on investment making way for an optimal product funding cycle.
With that being said, the use of Evidence-Based Management is a win-win for organizations and their customers.
Benefits of Evidence-Based Management
There are multiple benefits to the use of Evidence-Based Management. For instance, it leads to a better understanding of what product features should be kept, changed, or removed to achieve customer satisfaction.
In fact, by having their client’s feedback, organizations enter this constant learning process and start making their decisions based on tangible evidence instead of predictions and random assumptions. They build a better relationship with their clients and get the opportunity to consult with them and test new ideas before launching them.
Evidence-Based Management: The Empirical Approach
Evidence-Based Management is applied through what’s called an empirical approach. It actually starts with understanding the current conditions of a product or an organization, creating and setting performance goals, then creating small experiments meant to take said product/organization from its current state to the target state through experimentation followed by adjustments.
This approach relies heavily on the assumption of a complex adaptive product environment where the unknowns outweigh the knowns and where we need to be able to address market demands quickly with a well-formulated plan.
Another way to visualize it, according to Richard, would be an experiment where we create the hypothesis of what would make a significant difference in a product. Then proceed to experiment and measure, check if the measures were affected by the changes made, and finally adapt the plans and ideas to the outcome of the experiment.
Key value areas applicable to Evidence-based management
On the topic of measurements, there are 4 key values that can be applied to Evidence-Based Management: Current Value (CV), Unrealized Value (UV), Ability to Innovate (A2I), and Time to Market (T2M).
Current Value (CV)
Current Value is meant to reveal the instant value of a product and how much of that value is being delivered to customers. Consequently, it helps maximize the value delivered by the organization to its customers at the current time. It also only considers what’s present at this moment, right now, and not what may exist in the future. That way, it can be used as a reference point in order to measure customers’ satisfaction, and stakeholders’ satisfaction as well as the product’s state in the market at the moment.
Unrealized Value (UV)
Unrealized Value suggests the potential value that can be realized if the organization is able to perfectly meet the needs of all potential customers. Therefore, this is something we need to determine and use to improve or uplift the value of a product. In fact, Unrealized Value can be used to make a decision when it comes to choosing features to keep, add or remove from a product based on knowing how much value they can potentially create and how it would affect a potential percentage of customers in the market. It could also predict the risks and the effort required to add a certain feature and that way organizations can make easier investment decisions.
Ability to Innovate (A2I)
It describes the organization’s ability to deliver new capabilities that might meet customers’ needs in a better way. For instance, if an organization acquires a product holding a new feature, how well and creative can it be at delivering it?
This key value is in indirect correlation with the ones we mentioned before as it raises a few questions such as: what are the things that prevent organizations from delivering new value? And what prevents customers from benefiting from that innovation?
Time to Market (T2M)
Time to Market expresses the organization’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, products, or services. In short, it helps us see how long it takes for an organization to deliver value and consequently understand the product’s life cycle, its changes over time, and how long it takes to have an actual return on investment. So basically trying to understand how fast an organization can learn from new experiments.
This key value answers the questions: how to learn from new information and adapt your decisions from a PM or an organization’s point of view? or how fast can an organization deliver new value to customers?
EBM Key Value Area Metrics
Looking at this EBM (Evidence-Based Management) Key value areas there are several metrics or measurements relevant to each one of them. For instance, Current Value (CV) can be measured through NPS Score or Market Share and Unrealized Value (UV) can be measured through Customer Satisfaction gap or Value of a New Feature…etc.
Based on these metrics, there are many applicable ways to improve practices in EBM through several methods such as the improvement CATA, the EBM canvas, the product strategy canvas, the hypothesis template, or even a Google doc called the EBM dashboard (where a PM can introduce data, select the items he wants to be able to discuss and introduce them to a conversation with stakeholders moving forward).On top of these practices, there are other ways to integrate EBM, such as other product metrics or product feature capabilities…etc.
Lastly, Richard gives a piece of advice to product managers and owners. According to him, they should start by identifying an ambitious goal for their product, then go from the starting point, plot the target state, make small experiments and change the way they work on that product. Finally, after checking the progress of new ways of management over time, determine what needs to be worked on and discuss it with stakeholders in order to reach the product’s goals.
Product Management Journey with Agile
Rodemir Reyes shares his journey as a product manager with Agile. It all goes back to Rodemir’s family background, as they had a restaurant and he got into the food and cooking business at a very young age. Rodemir was always business oriented, and throughout his career of ten years in IT, he’s learned that it’s all about time, knowing your value, knowing what motivates you to work, focusing on self-love and self-respect, knowing what motivates your team, and finally learning from your mistakes and working on constant improvement.
Rodemir also feels like one of the most important lessons is to not stay hung up on certain ideas or solutions when they clearly don’t work out. In fact, he encourages product managers to look into alternatives, consider input from their team members, and be more open to other possibilities. He also explains how sometimes taking shortcuts may not have the best outcome and it’s better to take it slow and focus on collaboration with partners with fresh ideas and a handful of experiences rather than random successful and rich people.
Product Management is not an easy job and what may work for some doesn’t necessarily work for others. This is why Evidence-Based Management explained by Richard or even the lessons learned from Rodemir’s product management journey may not benefit everyone. However, giving them a fair shot may be able to take your product management skills to the next level, and hopefully help you reach the highest goals set for your products and organizations.
The Q&A session of the event is not included in this article. You can start listening to it through this link or jumping to the timestamp 46:48.
Do you want to get involved in the Philippines’ Product Management community? Check out Product PH at Meetup or on Facebook to learn more.
