Dan Martell - June 17, 2019


How To Create a World Class Product Management Process


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

195.26013

Word count

2,068

Sentence count

114

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell talks about how to create a world-class product development process so your product doesn't end up looking like this guy. He talks about the 5 strategies you need to know about in order to make your product stand out from the pack.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Hi there, Dan Martell here, a serial entrepreneur,
00:00:01.800 investor, and creator of SaaScademy.
00:00:03.840 In this video, we're going to figure out
00:00:05.840 how to create a world-class product development process
00:00:08.400 so your product doesn't end up looking like this guy.
00:00:11.760 Anyways, pass that to Jarrett.
00:00:13.200 And be sure to stay to the end where
00:00:14.560 I'm going to share with you my precision scorecard framework,
00:00:17.760 which is going to actually give you the metrics
00:00:19.600 that you should be monitoring in your product development
00:00:22.280 process, but let's get into the content.
00:00:30.000 So a few months ago, I was hosting my SaaS Academy
00:00:40.240 clients at the Intensive in Boston.
00:00:42.720 And the topic of creating world-class product
00:00:45.200 management came up because many of them
00:00:47.100 are not technical founders.
00:00:48.500 They don't come from innovation and technology.
00:00:51.660 They're just business or marketers
00:00:53.640 or people that saw opportunities in the market
00:00:55.180 and wanted to build a software solution.
00:00:57.080 So we kind of unpacked the different things
00:00:59.780 that I thought were required to not only manage the product
00:01:03.440 development process, understand the right metrics,
00:01:05.540 but really lead the team towards an outcome
00:01:08.900 and understand their role in that process.
00:01:12.080 So I want to share that with you in this video.
00:01:14.060 But before I go any further, I want to kind of give you
00:01:17.180 a pro tip.
00:01:17.920 And I got this from HubSpot.
00:01:19.160 I've been fortunate to have learned and seen from the inside
00:01:22.640 from some of the best companies like Trello and Dropbox
00:01:25.120 and many others how they manage product.
00:01:27.680 And one of my favorite strategies was from HubSpot.
00:01:30.780 We actually got to go visit their office
00:01:33.080 and sit down with their team.
00:01:34.440 And it was something they called science fairs.
00:01:36.500 Now, they got this from David Cancel from Drift.
00:01:39.140 So he's the co-founder of Drift.
00:01:40.860 But he was also their lead product manager at HubSpot
00:01:45.380 from their acquisition of Performable, his previous company.
00:01:48.140 Long story to say, science fairs are awesome.
00:01:51.260 So essentially, what they do is, I believe,
00:01:52.920 on a monthly basis, or every two weeks,
00:01:55.740 Their product teams could demo, but here's the kicker,
00:01:58.800 only if the feature was live in production, the stuff
00:02:02.280 that they've been working on.
00:02:03.620 What's cool about that is it creates an artificial timeline
00:02:06.340 for pushing things to production.
00:02:09.300 And it also allows the team to kind
00:02:11.780 of share with the rest of the organization
00:02:13.440 some of the cool things that they're building.
00:02:15.520 So I wanted to give you that tip,
00:02:16.860 but we're going to dive in to the five strategies now.
00:02:19.320 Number one, outline your vision.
00:02:21.920 So here's what I always ask my clients
00:02:24.420 when they're starting off, is when you grow up
00:02:26.640 in your industry, in your business,
00:02:28.860 what are you going to look like?
00:02:30.080 Because there's only so many big markets,
00:02:32.520 unless you're creating a new one, which
00:02:33.900 is very rare in the B2B SaaS space,
00:02:36.860 you need to understand where you're going.
00:02:38.560 And my favorite strategy to figure that out
00:02:42.300 is obviously figure out, as we grow,
00:02:44.500 we want to be in account-based marketing,
00:02:46.000 or we want to be in email automation,
00:02:47.580 or we want to be in data analytics or security,
00:02:49.980 whatever it is for you and your business.
00:02:51.840 But Airbnb, what they've done is they were really inspired
00:02:54.380 by Disney, and the concept of storyboarding the perfect
00:02:58.040 product experience.
00:02:59.360 So what they did, and you can Google this
00:03:00.920 and find a bunch of stuff online about it,
00:03:02.660 is they sat down and said, what would,
00:03:04.460 I think it was a seven-star experience be.
00:03:06.980 Now, obviously, it's five-star.
00:03:08.440 A seven-star experience.
00:03:09.900 And they exaggerated the whole thing
00:03:12.200 and kind of mapped out this visual storyboard
00:03:15.500 of the possibility of the future for their product
00:03:19.040 experience for their customers.
00:03:20.760 And I just think that having that vision of where
00:03:23.900 your product should go and where you're going to grow up
00:03:25.740 into being will allow everybody to make aligned decisions
00:03:29.560 today.
00:03:30.140 So that's number one.
00:03:31.300 Number two, connect customers.
00:03:34.020 I was talking to a founder on a growth session yesterday.
00:03:36.780 And one of the things they asked me was,
00:03:39.140 how do you manage product development
00:03:41.440 when it comes to showing what you're
00:03:43.820 doing with customers and not having your team,
00:03:45.660 because this is what he was running into,
00:03:47.000 just build stuff but not know if it's actually
00:03:48.940 going to have an impact.
00:03:49.900 So one of my strategies that I teach my clients
00:03:52.500 is to create what's called a CAB, a customer advisory board.
00:03:56.040 And these are people.
00:03:56.960 They're not.
00:03:57.700 One of the rules is you don't let them self-opdate.
00:03:59.800 You actually want to select the right customers
00:04:01.820 so that you get the right feedback.
00:04:03.120 A lot of people can be the vocal minority
00:04:04.980 because they want to help guide your product roadmap.
00:04:07.240 Those are not the people you want on there.
00:04:08.680 You want the best customers.
00:04:09.840 So a customer advisory board is a group of people
00:04:13.140 that you actually share not only roadmap, but more importantly,
00:04:17.100 product clickable prototypes of the product
00:04:20.100 that your features you're building.
00:04:21.300 because in the early days, it's actually
00:04:23.640 what you do to be successful.
00:04:25.300 Ideally, you're showing customers potential wireframes
00:04:27.900 to get them to maybe pre-purchase your solution,
00:04:30.480 get buy-in.
00:04:31.680 And then for some reason, as you get traction,
00:04:33.540 you kind of stop doing these things
00:04:35.160 that you used to do to be successful.
00:04:36.860 So I'm a big fan of building a customer advisory board,
00:04:40.740 creating clickable prototypes for all the new features,
00:04:43.180 and making sure you show that to them before you go to code.
00:04:46.600 Why?
00:04:47.460 Because it is way cheaper to change
00:04:49.980 a screen and a PowerPoint deck around the prototype
00:04:52.920 than it is to change it in code.
00:04:54.900 And your customers will give you so much incredible feedback
00:04:57.620 around the flow and the language and the microcopy
00:05:00.820 that you have on your screens that it will literally
00:05:03.160 transform your product development process.
00:05:05.980 Number three, inform backlog.
00:05:08.080 So if you're using, hopefully you are,
00:05:09.980 some kind of agile development process,
00:05:11.800 you have a backlog of features and bugs and issues
00:05:15.540 and things you want to get done, the engineering team.
00:05:17.820 That's not what I'm talking about.
00:05:19.200 When I say informed backlog, that still exists.
00:05:21.580 But what you want to do is build a roadmap.
00:05:23.640 And this is what I was teaching my clients at my intensive.
00:05:26.200 A roadmap at a high level has three kind
00:05:28.620 of big categories of states, right?
00:05:32.080 There's the now, the next, and the later.
00:05:34.580 And the way I think about that is it gives your team
00:05:38.480 a level of prioritization to say, look,
00:05:40.600 these are the things that we're focusing on now
00:05:42.420 that are really important.
00:05:43.700 And on a monthly basis, you might change things around.
00:05:46.380 And that's where you'll take the next, which could be kind
00:05:48.580 of a window of the next two to three months,
00:05:50.920 and grab those and put them into now.
00:05:53.320 And those big projects, big features, big outcomes
00:05:56.560 you want to achieve are then informing the backlog
00:05:59.820 for the engineering and the development team
00:06:01.180 to actually build out.
00:06:02.000 Product and engineering are two different functions
00:06:05.060 in your organization.
00:06:06.700 And this is the way that Twitter does it,
00:06:08.900 and Trello, and a bunch of other companies
00:06:11.920 think about product development.
00:06:13.420 So just think about creating a roadmap of the product features
00:06:17.820 or big outcomes you want to get for your customers
00:06:19.900 and put them in those three buckets. 0.99
00:06:21.460 Now, next, and later.
00:06:23.620 Number four, glue metrics.
00:06:26.460 So I can't tell you how often I'm
00:06:28.440 reviewing a product roadmap with one of my clients,
00:06:31.060 and they don't know what specific metric or KPIs
00:06:36.500 actually going to move based on building out a certain feature.
00:06:39.880 You know, yes, well, a client wants this,
00:06:41.700 and we think it'll make us more competitive.
00:06:44.260 I agree.
00:06:45.000 But at the end of the day, if it doesn't allow you
00:06:46.500 to increase conversions, or reduce churn,
00:06:49.740 or expand revenue better, then you really
00:06:52.980 need to evaluate these things on those levels, right?
00:06:55.880 So one of the strategies to glue the metrics
00:06:58.800 of the product features that you're building
00:07:01.180 is using a thing called the RICE score.
00:07:03.460 Many people call it ICE.
00:07:04.600 I think it's a simplified version.
00:07:06.220 But the guys over at Intercom, I'm
00:07:08.880 an investor in Intercom and saw their product development
00:07:11.380 process in the early stages.
00:07:12.780 They literally have the best product team I've ever
00:07:15.600 seen in any of the companies I've invested in, over 40
00:07:18.060 companies.
00:07:18.980 And they use a thing called the RICE score.
00:07:20.640 So RICE stands for reach, impact, confidence, and ease.
00:07:23.740 And I'm not going to get into it too deep in this video,
00:07:26.100 but there is an online article that really dives in.
00:07:28.840 But the high-level concept is every new feature
00:07:32.400 should have a specific outcome that it's trying to accomplish.
00:07:36.180 And then you give it a score on RICE, reach, impact, confidence,
00:07:40.720 and ease, and then you give it an average.
00:07:42.480 So that way you can have a list of 25 different features
00:07:46.920 or changes you want to make to your product.
00:07:48.320 Use the right score to then filter out
00:07:50.440 the ones that would have the biggest bang for your buck.
00:07:55.000 So just make sure you glue the metrics.
00:07:57.580 Number five, secure buy-in.
00:07:59.940 As you grow the business where you've
00:08:01.540 got a dozen plus employees, all of a sudden you've
00:08:03.800 got product development, you've got engineering,
00:08:06.220 you've got customer support, you've got salespeople,
00:08:08.760 You've got just different folks, professional services,
00:08:12.460 serving the customer.
00:08:13.700 And many of them get disconnected from actually what's
00:08:16.500 being built in your product.
00:08:17.920 So one of the strategies to secure buy-in
00:08:20.700 is on at least a monthly basis.
00:08:22.760 And even better, what I love, that Shopify did.
00:08:24.820 I went and visited their offices.
00:08:26.460 And they actually had their product managers
00:08:28.680 paste on the walls of the hallways around their offices
00:08:32.080 and other departments.
00:08:33.480 The interface changes that they're
00:08:35.340 going to be making, going to be making,
00:08:37.540 is the key word, in the product to allow anybody,
00:08:40.980 and this is the kicker, they had markers on the walls
00:08:43.760 and kind of like those magnetic markers
00:08:45.280 with the little cords that they could just grab and tweak
00:08:49.240 and change things on the interface.
00:08:50.980 So they would put up some mock-ups, some wireframes,
00:08:54.040 and then let people have a week or maybe a few days
00:08:56.720 to walk by and say, you know what,
00:08:57.940 I think we should change the button to this label,
00:08:59.880 or I think we should go step one, two, and then three,
00:09:03.340 and just change the ordering.
00:09:04.860 And what I loved about that is not only did you get buy-in,
00:09:07.220 meaning that people felt like they were connected to what's
00:09:09.640 coming and got excited about some of those features.
00:09:12.340 But more importantly, you got to crowdsource
00:09:14.740 the collective wisdom of your team
00:09:18.620 to inform the product development.
00:09:20.540 So to me, you need to secure buy-in from your team.
00:09:23.620 But more importantly, if you can,
00:09:24.860 put it out there in a way that collaborates
00:09:26.700 and collects their wisdom and shows up in your product.
00:09:30.200 So quick recap, five strategies to create a world-class product
00:09:33.560 management process.
00:09:34.540 Number one, outline vision.
00:09:36.620 Number two, connect customers.
00:09:38.800 Number three, inform backlog.
00:09:41.100 Number four, glue metrics.
00:09:43.100 And number five, secure buy-in.
00:09:45.720 As I mentioned in the beginning, I
00:09:47.060 want to share with you an exclusive resource
00:09:48.720 called my Precision Scorecard.
00:09:50.400 Now, this is a strategy for a weekly scorecard
00:09:53.180 that you can use with your executive leadership team.
00:09:55.660 But what's special about it is there's a section
00:09:58.360 on product development.
00:09:59.640 So most teams don't know what are the key metrics
00:10:02.580 that they should be holding their product leads
00:10:04.640 accountable to.
00:10:05.580 So in there, I list all of them, and can you
00:10:07.660 choose the right ones to make sure
00:10:09.520 that they're making progress towards improving
00:10:12.340 the product for your customer.
00:10:14.020 So click the link below to download your copy.
00:10:16.320 And if you like this video, be sure
00:10:17.640 to smash the like button, subscribe to my channel.
00:10:20.220 And if there's anybody that you care about that you
00:10:22.400 think this video could serve, feel
00:10:23.760 free to share with them directly.
00:10:25.220 As per usual, I want to challenge you
00:10:26.760 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:10:28.620 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:10:31.340 Yeah, I'm going to actually use it in my prop.
00:10:33.960 I'm going to get ready to catch it.