I spend a decent amount of time reflecting on my past roles and how the Vision-Led Product Management framework would have been a valuable tool if I had the foresight to use it at the time. A lot of the product approaches I took were very similar to VLPM, but utilizing the framework would have been a helpful tool for visually articulating the needs of our customers and showing how that influences our long-term vision.
I have particularly reflected on my role as the VP of Product Management at WeddingWire and I have wondered how I would have specifically utilized the Outcome KPI Pyramid to clearly articulate the needs of our customers and how our product KPIs rolled up to them. If you are not familiar, WeddingWire is a marketplace where we connect wedding vendors (the paying customer) to wedding couples (users who access the site for free). We did a lot of customer research during my time there (and am sure the team still does). If I were to have used the Outcome KPI Pyramid during my time there, I can envision the process I would have gone through during customer research and what I would have learned. It would have gone something like the below.
BINGO - ROI is the main outcome that wedding vendors were looking for.
Similar to a B2B Buyer, they are paying for a service and they want to see a return based on that payment. It is pretty common to hear that the person paying for the service wants to see an ROI (below is our standard B2B Buyer Outcome Pyramid, which works in many situations). So, maybe that is an easy one!
However, talking with the wedding couples would not have been as straightforward. I could envision it would have gone something like this:
If I stopped here, WeddingWire could be a million things. Perhaps we would have launched a custom site to wedding planners based on this. But instead...I would dig further in order to get to the heart of what the outcome truly is. It is rarely the first thing you hear.
BINGO - The couples are looking to WeddingWire to give them the confidence that we can help them plan their dream wedding.
(This was, of course, a very simplified version of how the conversation would have gone. I would imagine this could have easily been a 30-minute conversation to unlock this knowledge. But for your benefit - I sped up the time it took to get to the conclusion!)
From there, I would build out an Outcome KPI Pyramid based off of confidence being the top outcome that the wedding couples want. Confidence is much more difficult to measure than ROI. It is a feeling, not a concrete number. Based on that, I’d have to be really thoughtful about how to build the pyramid in a way where I can get to measurable KPIs that are the leading indicators of confidence. I’d dig deeper to understand what they want to build confidence in. The pyramid structure would help me break this down. What do wedding couples need more confidence in? Selecting a vendor, budget, and the process for wedding planning would likely rise to the top. I would then map out the product KPIs that show the couple is able to make confident choices in planning their wedding. I envision this would be a mixture of feature usage, and also a sentiment survey to help us determine how confident the couples felt in the choices that WeddingWire helped them make.
It is common when you identify outcomes from customers that are not the direct buyer that their desired outcome is harder to measure. Sometimes their outcome is more emotional, just as indicated here with the outcome of confidence. This is why the Outcome KPI Pyramid can be so powerful - it can take something that seems difficult to measure and help you break it down into measurable KPIs to ensure you are building what actually matters for your customers.