How PMs Should Manage Ideas for the Best Outcome
One of the biggest problems that Product Managers come across is knowing which feature is the “right” feature to build. In this session, Eddie from Migo shares how to dig, validate, and make decisions for the best outcome for your products and your company.
The job of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. — Marty Cagan
When considering what to build for users, it is the Product Manager’s job to determine which tasks are important and which to prioritize considering the different priorities of each department in the organization.
The common problems a Product Manager encounters are:
- Poor prioritization. “This ticket has been created for months, why hasn’t it been done?”
- Without qualitative/quantitative support. “The quickest way to increase our conversion could be pricing, let’s redesign the pricing page and try lower pricing strategy.” (i.e. decisions not backed up by data)
- Highest paid person’s opinion (Hippo). “Let’s follow the industry best practice.”
To address these problems, a PM has to improve their Product Discovery process. This process describes the period where you and your team are focused on building the right thing. It has two spaces, the Problem Space and the Solution Space.
In the Problem Space, it all starts in finding a good problem to solve.The first part is Alignment where you have to talk to all the stakeholders to make sure everyone is on the same page in what kind of problems we want to solve. And based on this understanding, you move on to Research phase where you look at quantitative and qualitative data to see what could be the cause of the problem. Once an assumption is made, then we can move on to the Solution Space which starts with the Ideation process. This is where you can brainstorm on what potential solutions can be considered before proceeding to the Creation stage to execute on the assumed solution. Everything comes full circle in the Refinement stage where you can iterate and refine the solution created.
Migo’s example
Migo is a content platform that allows users to download at migo hotspots and enjoy content offline. For Migo, it was important for them to give users this seamless experience so they can focus on enjoying the content they earned by traveling to the hotspot.
With the Migo app, users can view a video catalog and choose the content they would like to consume. They then find a migo hotspot nearest them, buy a pass, connect to the hotspot’s WiFi, and download the titles they wanted to see. They can then consume content seamlessly without needing to worry about their own data cap.
Through usability tests with real users, the Migo team realized that their users didn’t understand why they needed to connect to a Warung Migo hotspot. They thought that the app was just like all the other streaming services.
The Migo team thought that the red banner on top was good enough to inform users about this difference but their regular usability tests proved otherwise.
As a result, the Migo team went through the Ideation process again and decided to add full-page instructions at key points of the user’s experience. For example, once the user has added content to their queue and want to view the list so far through the Downloads tab in the app, a screen with explicit instructions to find and connect to a Warung Migo hotspot appears.
With the proposed change above, Migo’s product team held a stakeholder’s meeting to get buy-in across the organization. During this meeting, a team member asked “Why don’t we think about fundamental changes if our current flow can’t deliver our value proposition perfectly?”
It was this question that triggered succeeding thought processes because if the product team continued with their initial proposal, they would be at risk of optimizing the app locally rather than creating a process that would be good for scaling globally. After realizing this, they started to ask questions like “Can we ask users to select a physical store even before viewing the content catalog?” considering that physical stores are so central to the Migo app’s user experience.
In the end, the Migo team created a new tab with an embedded map of nearby Warung Migo hotspots which made it easier for user to intuitively find the nearest hotspot where they could download content.
This change was simpler for the user rather than bombarding them with screens of information that may be too much or too confusing.
As a takeaway, if the Migo product team did not process the quantitative and qualitative data they collected from user feedback, they might have ended up creating unnecessary and more costly features that didn’t truly communicate the value of the product to the user. And without involving stakeholders in the Ideation process, then the key big picture question would not have been asked and the team would have fallen into the trap of optimizing locally rather than globally.
Now that the Migo product team knew what to build, how do they then deliver this feature to the field? Upon assessment, this story was an epic and would take one to two months to finish. This is not a timeline that Eddie encourages nor something his team wanted. Features should be shipped as soon as possible (around one to two weeks) so more feedback can be gathered and the featured can be iterated quickly so, the Migo team broke down the epic into smaller sub-stories that can be worked on and deployed in various chunks.
Final Takeaway
How to manage ideas for the best outcome?
- Find the right problem — which is really hard. You might need to spend a lot of time finding a real problem.
- Generate ideas and involve people when appropriate.
- Deliver MVP and gather feedback as quick as possible.
Dream in Years, Plan in Months, Ship in Days.
Some common challenges a startup team may encounter in this journey are getting alignment with stakeholders, balancing between short-term goals and the long-term product roadmap, and requesting from other teams for supporting features.
Getting alignment, in particular, is very difficult when identifying what the cause of the problem because people have different views. It is easier to agree on business metrics because external tools can be used but the questions that really matter need to still be addressed in detail despite how difficult they can be.
All the project management problems are communication problems.
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 25:01.
Do you want to get involved in the Philippines’ Product Management community? Check out Product PH at Meetup or on Facebook to learn more.
Helpful Links
Event Playlist that you can chill to: https://youtu.be/BItv_aY5Xbs
Six Thinking Hats — method used to amplify creative conversations, by making sure that a broad variety of viewpoints and thinking styles are represented.
