Most important PM document

I’ve shared this document more than any other template I’ve ever created. It’s call the Product Initiative Summary. The goal is to get the core details of a product initiative onto a single page so that everyone (developers, designers, stakeholders, sales, marketing, etc.) can have the most important info available in a single place.

Anatomy of the document:

• Initiative Name — the title the company will use to refer to the product initiative

• Goals — the desired outcomes of the initiative and how are they related to company objectives

• Customer/User Groups impacted — the segment will this initiative serve, quantify when possible

• Current Issue / Situation — the problems you want to solve

• Proposed Solution — the current idea you have about how to solve the problem (it is open to discussion and change)

• Prioritization Reason — the thought process behind choosing to invest in this initiative over other options

• KPIs — the metrics you’ll monitor to know if the initiative is a success

• Milestones / Roll-out Plan — the high level outline of who will get access to the parts or all of the solution and when.

• Screenshots / Mockups — the visual representation of the initiative which could be a wireframe, a clickable prototype, a system diagram, or a user flow

Please note that all portions of the document may not be ready at the outset of a project, but hopefully they are all filled in before the Kickoff meeting for the initiative. Also, this document is 100% designed to be edited post-kickoff as you and the team learn new things throughout the development and launch process. Therefore share and save it in a way that you are sharing a link to the document instead of a hard copy… and keep sharing the link as things advance and more stakeholders get involved.

How to get better estimates

#noestimates doesn’t work…

I was interviewing a potential engineer today and asked them about their philosophy about estimates. It seems odd that a person can have a philosophy about something as simple as estimating work or effort, but it’s a totally valid question in the tech space.

Their answer suited my needs… they are OK with estimating effort but tended to buffer when providing a timeframe. They also mentioned that when working with other engineers they added more buffer because no one seems to get it right. The second part I found funny because somehow they thought their estimating ability was superior to others.

At least they understood two fundamental things:

1. Estimates are needed when prioritizing work so that value/effort ROI can be calculated and understood

2. Estimates are often wrong because humans aren’t great at it

How to get better estimates

I’m not the first or last product person who wants estimates and I’m not here to explain why they are needed. I want to share how you can overcome #2 above, the inevitable reality that estimates are going to be wrong because humans are fallible.

• Explain why estimates are important to your company. Simon Sinek has taught us to always start with why. Invest some time in ensuring that the engineers understand the value of knowing when a feature will be available not only to the sales team, but the customers. If you can tie estimates to customer empathy they will be less resistant.

• Talk with the developers about how they like to estimate. Do they prefer to estimate using points? weeks? sprints? hours? t-shirt sizes? something esoteric? By allowing them to be part of the decision, they will start out with more buy in.

• Establish some rules and limits. Agree to things like if an estimate is larger than 2 weeks that the request needs to be broken into smaller pieces. Or that if engineering estimates across the team are too varied that some time-boxed dev research needs to be done. Empower the entire team to create and enforce the rules.

• Look back to look forward. Retrospectives aren’t only about what went well with the team, at strategic points in a project look back and see how on target the estimates were and discuss options for improving accuracy in the future. When you do this, don’t forget to remind people why estimates are important in the first place.

What have you done to improve the estimation process at your company?

A New Feedback Formula

A while back someone thought it was a great idea to sandwich criticism between praise. But it has been established that this technique is ineffective time and time again. It turns out that people start anticipating the criticism when you provide them with praise, and stop hearing the praise all together.

An Alternative Feedback Formula

When you’re providing feedback that the goal is to change someone’s behavior, there’s a formula I use which I find much more successful than the sandwich. It starts by being in a humble mindset that though you think someone has done something wrong, that they may have had some information that you didn’t and thus their actions were appropriate.

Step 1: Tell the story of what you observed. Only the facts!

Step 2: Mention the explicit part of the behavior which you think could have been done differently.

Step 3: ASK the person WHY they took that action / said what they did… and LISTEN to the response. Try your best to understand if the issue is a skills gap or the will / desire to do it correctly.

Step 4: Explain why the chosen action is problematic and where the thought process that led to it is missing critical information which will help the person evaluate future situations with a new lens.

Step 5: Provide some alternatives for what the person could have done or said which would have better accomplished their goals.

Step 6: ASK the individual what they think about the alternative perspective and options.

Step 7: ASK them how you can support them in changing their behavior. When should you check in again? How can you best provide additional feedback if you witness or hear about similar mishaps?

You may notice that a lot of this feedback formula involves ASKING the person about their thoughts. It is a much more conversational approach and less of a lecture which is reminiscent of being sent to the principal’s office in high school. This is intentional because it positions you as someone who assumes that they had no bad intentions when they did the action you are correcting.

In the end they will see you as a partner in their success.

5 Tech Giants … and my MOM

This past weekend I was explaining what each big tech brand is really about… to my MOTHER. I went through how they each have a different vision and employ their own business models and product strategy to accomplish it. I shared it with the students I teach at Kellogg and figured it deserved a wider audience.

Google wants to be the world’s source for information and pays for that via the biggest ad network. They build tools for you to use which allows for them to know more about you which lets them target users with more and better ads.

Facebook wants to be the way the world connects and pays for that via ads as well. They build tools which encourage you to share about your life in a way that they learn about you which lets them target you with more precise ads.

Apple wants to be the best brand for high tech personal devices, they are almost a fashion brand. They sell devices and do so at a nice margin, but they want to create a brand that has a following that means a large percentage of their customers will purchase the new hardware every year. They have created an annuity out of hardware and the software they build is designed to help you get tied into their ecosystem. The money they make off the app sold in the app store is significant, but they are part of the strategy to get people to buy hardware.

Amazon wants to be the world’s store, and optimizes everything towards users buying more and more things through them. That’s why they purchased Whole Foods and Ring so that you had more things you could buy, more storehouses for fresh foods, and a way for the delivery to be done securely. The Kindle is a way for customers to purchase more books, audiobooks, videos, and other content through Amazon. The Echo devices are a way to make it easier to add things to your shopping cart and to buy things more easily while at home.

Microsoft is about selling software that helps businesses and their employees. Even their push for Azure right now is about serving tech businesses’ needs. Their current business model is subscription of these tools which they consistently improve to be not only best in suite but often best in breed.

Don’t think I’ve got this right? Look at each of the company’s largest acquisitions and think about it some more. I’d love to hear what you think, it certainly helped my mom :)

Why Slack Acquiring Rimeto is BRILLIANT

Yesterday it was announced that Slack was acquiring Rimeto, a corporate directory product. I think this is a brilliant move by them.

Slack has been the golden child of the internal communication space for the past few years, first taking over every tech company and recently they have been inching into the corporate space. While going upmarket they are going up against a few competitors but mainly Microsoft’s Teams product, who is fighting back. If you are a big corporation, using the Microsoft suite is a no brainer, and that’s why they can claim 91% of the large companies in the US.

One of the reasons companies opt for the MS suite is that the functionality of Active Directory, a product you may have never heard of, but every CIO and CTO has. Active Directory has been the source of truth for user identities since the turn of the century. It allows your head of IT to manage every employee’s access to a variety of other services. Though Google, OKTA, and OneLogin have been nipping at their heels, Microsoft’s AD product is still omnipresent.

If you are a leader at Slack, you are thinking about how you can go up market right now. That common strategy makes a lot of sense for Slack. In the past few years they have captured a lot of the TAM in the middle market and are the go-to option for smaller startups who start with the free package and upgrade when funded.

As a result of this strategic intent shift up towards corporate customers, Slack added more features around security and to support larger organization in the past year or two. They’ve promoted these “enterprise grade” features and recently launched Slack Connect.

Now that you have some background, let’s go back to the acquisition of Rimeto and why it’s brilliant. This is Slack’s way of attacking Active Directory users, aka Microsoft’s strong hold on the large corporate space. Though they say Rimeto will remain stand alone (because otherwise it would cramp current negotiations to partner with Okta), I’m sure some of their functionality will be incorporated into Slack packages and default functionality to boost user productivity. Rimeto also has a a small but mighty portfolio of clients who can now be cross-sold Slack as an upgrade.

I’m excited to see how this will play out.

Why Product is Key to Freemium program’s success

Many people think of Freemium as a sales / marketing initiative, but in fact the success of the program will depend on alignment with the product team.

Freemium is a Product Initiative too!

Though the freemium may start on an ad or landing page, the result is a customer using your product. The product team needs to be involved to define what their online onboarding experience should be, what tier of features they should receive, and what on screen info will encourage them to become paying customers. You also need to work with the product team to make sure security standards are up to par and to think through A/B testing.

Product design can encourage freemium engagement and upsells

How you show freemium customers what the base vs. premium features are will drive conversion and that maybe different dependent on the segmentation of the users. Sometimes you’ll want to start with a higher tier and threaten to take it away, other times promoting what a expanded features available thought upgrade will do the trick. Utilize the product design team’s expertise in user testing to continuously improve the freemium channel.

Product usage data is key for sales/marketing automation that fuels freemium

Always ensure that key data on product usage is available to understand which customer behaviors and characteristics predict that they are good candidates for becoming paying customers. This will make the sales and marketing automation which keeps CAC low more efficient and effective.