Main Principles

Product work is the process of finding the most impactful things to deliver. Here are three main principles to follow to make sure you keep doing impactful things.

Start from the business problem and what is the desired outcome. Whether it's expressed as a visionary future state, a press release or numbers to achieve in the product's key metrics, you can work from the outcome backwards to map the path that leads you there. All work and decisions along the way can and should be reflected against the outcome. Mapping the path to the desired outcome helps you see where you are making the biggest leap of faiths that you need to validate in real life as fast as possible.

Product work is not a one-off thing; gather market and customer knowledge at the beginning of starting something new, and that's it. It is a continuous and parallel process to delivery, aiming to constantly maximise the impact of product development. It is advisable to have a separate and a routine process for product work, which then feeds into the delivery work with the same cadence. This should not be considered a process with hand-offs, rather the same team or a subset of the team working on two different aspects: first, finding the most pressing problems to solve with most impactful solution and then delivering the solution.

Uncoupling the product process from the delivery process gives you more freedom to explore the problem space and consider alternative solutions beyond the boundaries of the existing delivery team structures. This process can and should happen at all lifecycle stages of a product. The same techniques can be applied in different contexts; launching a new product, extending the product to new markets or distribution channels as well as iterating on new features for an existing product. Depth and duration of the product work depends on magnitude of the expected impact and the investment appetite. Instead of reinventing the process every time building something new, big or small, the key is making this work a routine process, which you can then modify based on specific needs.

This can not be emphasized enough: keep a direct conversation open with your customers at all times. Direct customer conversations keep you aligned with user problems, jobs-to-be-done and how your product is being used and experienced by your users as your product, market and users’ behaviors evolve.

For your product's success it is essential for you to go out there, physically and metaphorically: talk to the customers, observe what they do and validate your business and product assumptions continuously. Don't let your past knowledge hinder your curiosity to constantly gather new knowledge.