Empower your shipping operations with product pipeline management for Shipping

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hello everybody this is Theo lista with the next segment let me share the presentation and get started so actually quite interestingly as as we come to this talking about the product pipeline and what can come and of course it's a useful distinction to have at this point what the difference between a pipeline and the roadmap is there's been a lot of talk over the past week about companies that exist as feature factories and what that quite means and the general take on feature factories is it's a prior organization that is solely focused on features and will effectively produce a spreadsheet of once and then slap due dates against them and then just start going which it can be easy to see companies in that vein if there's no underlying vision or underlying strategy to what the company seems to be trying to accomplish but that is of course counter pointed against the fact that features really matter the the exercise used here is the 2019 launch of the iPad version of Photoshop where it got completely panned and Adobe's chief product officer effectively said this is a humbling lesson in the fact that when you do ship in MVP you have to be ready for the the negative criticism that comes out of that and in that case it was that critical features were missing it missing like filters pen tools vector drawings color spacing so and become something of a balance where companies can't be seen as feature factories but also have to produce features and and understand where that comes in and I don't have any neat answer for that it's a balancing act of having a vision and executing all the features needed but what I'm what I'm gonna talk about here with a little more detail may go sort of the way towards creating a more new understanding of that and that would be if you build your product pipeline properly then you start to get to a point where you're solving the right questions and you're building the features needed but with further and serve of your company's vision so not all companies refer to this the same I quite like referring to the product pipeline because it's it gives you that understanding of how something progresses from the idea stage to something that comes out to the concrete feature but of course there's there's so many different possible entry points into the product roadmap or the development pipeline so this is a fairly standard sales pipeline people live and die by this but this is where the idea comes from effectively you have all of your leads being sourced through multiple different reasons so this might be you know inbound email it might be seeing somebody at an event called outreach there's so many different way is that information and in this case prospects or potential leads come into a company and then there's this process of curating and processing them so qualification dealing with the the leads that's probably aren't going to go anywhere the best way of focusing your efforts is to only really continue with those prospects that seem like they are interested or they have particular needs that you feel you're able to meet and then and so on and so on and so on you get to the bottom of the triangle and then the sale happens for a a smaller smaller proportion the of the inbound leads you're only gonna get a fraction the people that come in and I see the product pipeline there's something something quite similar it's everybody is able to come up with ideas everybody has theories and desires on our product should go but it's only through multiple layers of filtering that you get to something which is the end results and the things you actually build so this is one example I this is not the litera strategy we we have multiple conveyor belts of information flowing through this process but we don't have anything like this visualized but this does give an example of what you could be looking at so you see this as a funnel as well you have on the left hand side there's a filter and then you move through a series of processes so the first item and it's good to have this visualized here because you can see lots of dots all pointing in different directions and the strategic filter for a company is making sure that the ideas that you have in front of you are those which mean that you're roughly heading in the same direction all those ideas so the bigger a company gets so the bigger its teams gets the more the more strategies you might have going on at the same time but that's that's an aspect of the capacity rather than an aspect of an aspect of being able to balance multiple items so you can have if you have three development teams each can perhaps be contributing towards a different aspect of the company's strategy but as a general rule of thumb the more focused you are the more results you get out of this process so this filter that blue thing is what's being carried through the process everything else you effectively put in a shoe box and when it aligns with your strategy again it gets brought back out but up until that points is left which is kind of the first place where product teams and product managers have to learn to say no it's it can be very frustrating and also quite disheartening to have an excellent idea put in front of you but it doesn't meet your strategic vision and has to go and pause but it happens and as long as the strategy is sound that's not necessarily a bad thing it just means that you're building evidence changing strategy in the future then you get to the selection points we have to work out whether it will be viable or whether it will make good business sense so if you have a strategy of wanting to expand into the Australian market and the the solution might be and I'm talking as a business rather than as a as a product organization just to begin with is we could fly over from North America our entire sales team and then just go door-to-door cold calling and knocking on doors and talking to people and trying to drum up interest that way that might pass the strategic filter because it's in line with the vision you want to extend in Australia but then there's the economic filter one that will cost thousands upon thousands of dollars and - would that actually be effective so you start to filter the this pure and unrefined refined idea through the lenses of justice make sense to the business does this make sense to the direction we want to move it to and and then you get into building the actual project pipeline and this is where the the road map can be helpful so what we see here in this actual pipe here corresponds more to the very short-term product roadmap so to say you're building something over the span of a year what's in here it could just be over the course of say three months but it does start to create that link to how the ideas come in and how everything that goes through that process links to the higher roadmap which in turn links to the strategy which in turn applies to all these ideas that are coming through which we're either being continued with or being being left to the side for the time being this is why it without regularly reviewing the strategy itself product you know products and companies can become a bit stale and maybe they do turn into the future factories that I mentioned earlier if that strategy never changes then it effectively just becomes a self-perpetuating cycle the strategy remains the same you produce the features and they in turn dictate what the strategy is and that in turn dictates the idea there's no real new input so this process here has analysis of failures to understand whether you're not hitting the mark I mentioned about two weeks ago how the product team sets okay our objectives and key results to have something to measure against and give an opportunity to just be clear about what you're achieving or what you're missing as a company litera what we generally do is we review this entire cycle once a year so towards the end of the year or start of the year we'll review everything that's come in through these filters and then also our business objectives and what the strategy is that aligns to that and then then see whether it needs to be changed or not and most years will think we'll discover that maybe one project level will need to extend into the year and that's fine but over widen company themes change so if that fits under that umbrella then it can stay if it doesn't fit under that umbrella then we need to start wrapping it up and putting it to bed because it's not going to last much further into the new year so this is a short overview of I suppose our process and how our pipeline would work it's not a pipe of course but it gets a little bit of the way towards showing what you would expect to be so this first part here is all of those individual ideas as they crop up and as they come into the company so multiple different ways that this can crop up it's meeting the customers it's hearing from customers through all sorts of different channels and there's also what competitors are doing and and the adoption of the things that we've released in the past to assess where there's something that we released because we thought that it would contribute towards a particular strategy if that's gone well then it seems like we had the right idea if it's not going well then it seems as something additional that we should be considering that maybe we weren't and then it's just prioritizing and working out which need to come first and that's a little bit of that is the is the business economic filter so you can have say a hundred ideas and I mentioned earlier putting them into a shoebox or keeping them to the side that is one way of looking at it it's whether you make the formal decision to say we're not going to commit to this and we're not going to move it forward effectively at all whereas some companies will say ok we have a hundred items we're going to rank them from most to least important and the least important though they may never be done but if we get through the top 99 then nothing else comes in then we'll do it we we tend to again do a blend of that approach so we will pick the likeliest items prioritize those and be the unlikely items effectively put a stamp on them saying we're unlikely to cou continue with this and every so often we'll review that see whether it remains the case so again here roi demand market but these are all business and economic filters and then there's multiple methods of stakeholder review to assess whether these items which are now in the pipeline are valid or not and I've already mentioned product council's product committees those are two of the key ways this is covered but of course we can't have them right now but things like water cooler conversations and in-person meetings and just ketchup Steve these are all additional methods of sharing this information and trying to make sure that you're on the same page as things have been progressed and then it's just this cycle I mentioned that our product release cycle occurs on a quarterly basis the wide a strategy cycle I suppose occurs on an annual basis and that's all about making sure that's whenever we have the opportunity to step back and assess what's happened that we are able to understand the magnitude of what's what's been delivered so a few of these items here mostly correspond to that forecasting of courses for the more advanced items which might require an entire project of themselves rather than a quarter to be achieved and deal desk deal desk I may go into in some detail in a future session that is effectively our way of managing and triaging issues that affect customers so every every bug that a customer reports every everything that could be potentially going wrong with a customer every every week and for some products that's multiple times a week that is is reviewed by a kind of a much like a product committee a multidisciplinary group of people who all have either some inputs or some connection with the customer to make sure those are progressed and understand what additional information is needed if any and as you see here this iterates this cycles and this continues so this is an illustration it gets a bit messy as has all practices do and they hid the reality of building something in a company with multiple people so this illustrates the concept of when companies and it could be the entire company it can be a subset when when people get excited about the idea of a product and then require the product manager themself to define it this illustration here is is hopefully the ideal situation where multiple steps and multiple measures occur but it can happen as well that the desire for a particular product need as identified and then somebody is asked to go and run with it so you have this task to define something you know that maybe the engineering team will be finished with what they're currently working on in about four weeks so that means you have four weeks to define the problem you can use all sorts of best practices assess the opportunity and I'll go into a little bit more about opportunity assessment in a bit and starts interviewing users better understand the problem that needs to be solved identify early requirements and then by week two you should be able to start designing the the prototype whether that's where the interaction designer whether that's wire framing and then in the third week you'll start user testing using that prototype or framework and then in week four you're flesh out the details of the use cases and review the prototype at the engineering team that sounds pretty good to me but the the reality of things isn't always in that case so you can effectively find that's in these initial user discussions sometimes users aren't actually as excited about the idea as say the management team was when they suggested it or it's difficult to produce a prototype that users are able to understand or walk through properly and users might just not be as excited about the ideas and the prototype when they try it but at that point you you're finished you have your time have your four weeks the engineers are ready and then for the next three to six months it might just be that they have to build that it's the the product that you prototyped identified but it's kind of boring an exciting unusable and then you get the point where you ship and of course the results are lackluster and the management team is questioning what was done so the problem there is not the software it's from the engineering teams faults they they're built to code and they built to spec and the blame can fall upon the product manager and ultimately what that means is unless you're able to change your prototype adjust as you're creating as you're testing with users yeah you're not going to produce the right thing and you're not going to get the results you want so this is a bit more complicated and that simple four week four step process but it has multiple multiple stages and multiple different interactions it's I'd say trying to create this neat characterization of what the product discovery cycle should look like that can be one of the biggest traps for a product manager it's it's very very tempting to want to have a reliable consistent understandable way of finding customers talking to them wire framing but the reality is you're on week one you'll start reaching out to people they won't get back to you for two weeks you'll arrange meetings with people they'll flake and you'll start wire framing on what little information you would be able to get from customers and then you'll start showing it to those customers and they don't like it then the people who flaked on you'll get back in touch with you and your show then the wireframes and they'll suddenly like it and you get all of these different different points different customer interactions at different stages in the refinement process and it could be challenging and product discovery makes it sound kind of as amorphous as it is and ultimately this can be a process of debate but whether this process is more art or science and and I would say the the urge to get processes in place you can create a framework which gets most of it but the house does have to be some art or some creativity to pushing through the rest of the the way you can you can engineer the building blocks that will make something robust and supportable but to get to that point of user delight and here this is indicated by hearts and value being delivered but delight is an actual metric that many companies measure and that it takes a bit of a mental rewiring process to get through and yeah so you need to get the product solution that's usable useful feasible sometimes delightful and you effectively need to design the validate with customers and the engineering team and charge straight through this amorphous mass so even with the help of multiple people it's it can still be a challenge the pharmaceutical company industry sorry they provide a pretty good example of this we work with a lot of people in life sciences and their discovery process is incredibly rife with potential ambiguity so let me say the markets discovery it isn't necessarily very difficult so there's all sorts of problems that need to be solved in terms of healthcare whether that's creating vaccines creating novel drugs for managing completely mundane illnesses you know all sorts of those all sorts of those problems would be great to solve so there's no shortage of those the issue is discovering what the solution is and drug companies go into this discovery phase completely cognizant of the fact that there's no guarantee that you'll come up with anything and only vague I'd understandings of how long that's actually going to take so as a company they have to build in that element of uncertainty into their structure and also into their pricing model so software I think we can get a little bit closer to that because there's I'd say with fewer complexities in software but that may be an amateur's understanding but it is a phase shift that management teams find difficult to reconcile and that is one I would say this lack of predictability of the discovery process there's this fear that you'll spend months and months working on discovery and then end up with nothing to show and if you did at least build something and then ship it you can point to something to say we built and ship something of course if you go into this without that understanding and with a commitment to and we build something which you know will solve a active problem and delight people but you may never get to that solution that can be challenging and it can also be a fear of moving into scrum or agile processes because you can start out with a commitment to one particular release goal and of course with agile that could completely flip on its head at any point if the justification is that and I would say second the fault of the engineering team sitting around without anything valuable to do again can can drive people up the wall because R&D spend is is usually a fairly proportion proportionate part of the business huge as well the amount of salary that's been thrown around the amount of technological investment so I think that's this discovery process here it works it's just that it can be difficult to expand the benefits of it but if you're doing this you you will ultimately produce items for for your roadmap or for your pipeline and they'll be well designed and well validated and then there are additional things that you can you don't have to do as much validation for theirs there's always maintenance there's always direct customer requests and canvassing the different end points to account the number of people that requested it and these can certainly be very simple things that they actually need much wireframing a much more prototyping or even much user validation sometimes it is just as simple as you need this done and you can flip a switch and make it happen so I mentioned that I will talk about this I will do so quite briefly but this is opportunity canvas there's all sorts of different different evolutions of this different people who built them I I don't know who originated this it might have been Marty Kagan I think I first picked this up from the strategize er series of books but effectively this is aiming to walk you through some of this discovery some of these necessary questions that need to be asked so opportunities exist all around we've seen that in the pipeline we've seen that in the number of ideas that come in and things are always changing so new tech new people with different talents competitors rising and falling and this is a way of trying to quickly map which opportunities are promising and which ones aren't and also I use this quite a lot of time for product ideas that we're not ready to deliver on but we might want to be ready ready for in any air or so so if we leave the process of deciding whether or not to build a product or a particular feature to intuition this this intuition there's large customers either offering to fund the creation of a particular feature or just saying it needs to be done and and expecting it to be so there's a two of the large way is that features can get built that's that's quite a lot of the time that's what businesses will be faced with that'll be one of the pressures being spanned across the product team and one of the things that seem to be aware of so typically somebody in the the business side or marketing side will have a requirements document for marketing and what this does is describe the opportunity rather than the solution and so this here is is the product team's approach and that very thing so rather than leaping to understand what the solution needs to be this starts with the premise that you can't quite do that until you fully understand what the problem is and I've gone through multiple stages to understand that so these have stressy there's 10 items here although this one says one twice and never lets a glaring inaccuracy like that get in the way of of doing something that might be beneficial but usually the hardest one is is the first question to answer which is what problem is this going to solve and effectively what what is the value proposition so I will leave you with that the next session I I don't actually have worked out yet so we will see it may be that we have a short break on this series and then continue with the semi frequent round ups of what's been happening in the product councils and private committees so now if you are involved in not just management's butts any roll which involves incoming requests and being asked for particular items it this is a useful framework just to be starting to think about I'm actually solving what's not a problem I'm solving when I say yes I'll help with this and what kind of solution can we giving that provides more value than simply doing something in the way that the person who's asked has strictly defined for me so I guess that's more of a life lesson rather than the product management lesson but that's generally how these things go so I'll leave you with that thank you for listening I hope you enjoy the rest of the day and hopefully we'll be seeing more of this soon bye for now everyone