Goals must be measurable or have quantifiable targets. Maybe it’s shipping a certain number of products or hitting a release schedule... we have to be able to track and measure the goals.
1. Definitions
- Product-market fit is how much product satisfies strong market demand, i.e., target customers truly need and want the product.
- First Round Capital calls product-market fit "a state of widespread demand for a product that satisfies a critical need and crucially can be delivered repeatably and efficiently to each customer".
- A North Star Metric is a single, primary metric that best captures the core value that a product delivers to customers.
- A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product development strategy used to quickly get a basic version of a product into the market for initial testing and validation from real users.
- XY Problem - often in customer service - is where someone seeks help for a solution (X) they have chosen as a way to solve a different problem (Y). Helping with X won't help solve actual problem if it's not a good approach in the first place.
- Project management is plan-driven (timelines, people tasked, execution plans), product management is user-driven (user adoption, customer satisfaction, business impact).
2. Goals
- Make products that solve real problems for users
- If users keep asking why do I need this product and how do I use this, you've got a problem.
- A product is something that's useful to users, customers. Project management is a constituent, not its whole.
- Customer/user feedback makes its way back to change the product.
- Have a go-to market plan - public sector products should not get a free pass.
- If a product solves a real problem, people will want to join in, no matter how "bad" it seems to be (see: Twitch).
3. Questions
- Who is the target customer?
- What problem does your product solve?
- How does your product solve this problem?
- What are the key features and benefits of your product?
- What is the product vision?
- What is a minimum viable product?
- Do you see product-market fit for your product?
- What is the market size for your product?
- Who are your competitors, and how is your product different?
- What is your go-to market plan?
- What is the development/iteration timeline for your product?
- How will you measure the success of your product?
- Are you replacing/refactoring for the sake of it? (common when trying to rewrite existing/legacy services in latest framework)
- What were the surprises you had while coming up with this plan/prototype/product?
4. Dealbreakers
- Product is a suboptimal solution (read: XY problem)
- Product solves only a small part of the problem or doesn't solve any real problem at all.
- Product is managed as a project, with paper requirements and delivery timelines overriding questions on product value.
- Product has no viable market, no users, no product-market fit.
- Users don't like the product, don't use the product, but are forced to use it because of mandates or management pressure.
- Market has (new) alternatives, we either don't know or we hid our heads in the sand (insisting that ours is better).
- Existing products that have no traction, users keeps getting life support with no end in sight.
- X product has Y% of weekly active users, never mind that these are captive users who are forced to use the platform.
- If user anecdotes are contradicting your data (that everything's alright), you might be measuring the wrong thing.
- Are the gains marginal? We spend 10mil to cut one process by 2 days but overall process still takes 5 months because of other manual processes.
- Everything's a native app, no matter if all you do is provide info (i.e. a static url or webapp is more fitting).
5. Suggestions
- Do user research, market research, talk to users.
- Slash and revamp business processes in support of product, not the other way round.
- Use OKRs in your product planning and tracking.
- A product is not a project, don't manage it like one.