The Prodify Blog

At HelloWallet, we sold web and mobile apps that helped employees improve their financial wellness.  The product was offered as a benefit to employees by their employer, who was our our client.  The B2B2C model is complex to manage – here are some tips I learned along the way:

“Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” -- John Wooden Unfortunately, it’s all too common for product organizations to focus on the wrong thing. In this case I’m not referring to building the wrong features, though that happens too. Specifically, many teams get caught up in how many features are launched rather than whether those features enhance the product in a significant way. It’s easier and sometimes more visible to ship a bunch of stuff, but that’s not always correlated with progress. At its worst, shipping too much can make the product worse by adding clutter and complexity that customers don’t find valuable. It’s harder to solve real problems in ways that are measurable, particularly since not all releases are successful in delivering a material impact. The best product teams judge themselves not by quantity or speed of releases (‘output”) but by how much those are adding value (“outcomes”). Here are ways to shift your focus towards what is really helping customers in ways that also improve your business.

I first started using the Jobs to be Done framework about 5 years ago, and while I never quite got it to stick, I've seen more of the product teams I work with start using it.  As you might imagine, many clients have asked about the relationship between our concept of Key Outcome KPI pyramids and Jobs to be Done.  So I figured it'd be good to clarify for those interested in using one or both.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. During my time at eBay, from 2001 to 2005, product management was run by a few different leaders. When I first joined as an entry-level product manager, Marty Cagan was leading product management and design, and there was a true appreciation for the innovative role that product management played. After he left, the engineering leader stepped in to fill his shoes. Her perspective was that product management’s job was to feed the engineering beast, producing volumes of product requirements documents (PRDs) that would keep thousands of developers busy. The joint product and engineering team became extremely efficient at delivering lots of code, less so at delivering consistent results.

A few years ago there was a new phrase that made its rounds through the product management community:  “love the problem, not the solution.”  That is, make sure you’re solving a problem for customers, and have a deep understanding of that problem.  Focus on the problem over your product (the solution).  All great advice.  But I’ve seen teams struggle when applying it.  In this post, I’ll talk about 3 common issues I see with this concept.

Many businesses operate under a B2B2C model, with business customers who are disparate from end consumers. They facilitate key outcomes for a set of business partners (such as revenue, distribution, consumer behavior change) in a way that leads to a valuable offering for consumers (such as selection, convenience, consolidated services). Common examples include e-commerce companies, reviews sites and food delivery services In B2B2C companies, a “one size fits all” approach to your product team and process won’t serve your customers and business optimally. Instead, you should organize in a way that accounts for the unique needs of each part of your business. Some quick tips to navigate your team through this:

While consulting with a client last year, one of the challenges I helped the team with was their process of planning and releasing new features.  In particular, they wanted to get better at:

To illustrate the concepts of Vision-Led Product Management, we use an imaginary app we call Chuckwagon.  Let's take a detailed look at the process of: