The Evolution of Product Management in Silicon Valley and what you can learn from it.

1. Leading The Product 2017
Speaker Slides
Melbourne and Sydney, Australia
Ken Sandy
UC Berkeley
For more information go to
www.leadingtheproduct.com

2. The EVOLUTION OF
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT in
and what you can learn from it

3. Key Trends Affecting How PMs Work
Plug and Play
Platforms
Design & Coding
Developer Kits
Project Management
Team Communication
QA Automation
Development Methodologies
01
Tools and
Process
Open Source
Integration & Deployment
Compute & Hosting
Measurement & Reporting
Marketing & Sales
A|B Optimization
Customer
Collaboration
Requirements “Discovery”
Prototyping & Beta Testing
More Frequent Deployment
Accelerated Feedback Loops
Lower Competitive Barriers
PM Role
Standardization
Increased Consistency
Training & Coaching
Less Documentation Heavy
Increased Strategic Emphasis
“360o” Ownership
• Build and deploy cheaper,
easier, faster, and more often
• Self-organize around work and
adapt priorities
• Frequent learning and
optimization through feedback
• PM focused on customer and
business value delivery

4. HOW GOOD ARE WE AT DELIVERING VALUE?
Josef Oehmen/Eric Rebentisch; Waste in
Lean Product Development, 2010 (MIT
Lean Advancement Institute)
77OF PRODUCT ENGINEERING
ACTIVITY IS WASTE
50-64OF FEATURES IN PRODUCTION ARE
RARELY OR NEVER USED
5UNIQUE USER TESTS UNCOVER
85% OF SIGNIFICANT ISSUES*
% ”
02
%
Johnson, Standish Group
(First reported in 2002 and updated in TCO
studies yearly)
Jeff Sauro (measuringu.com), 2010.
Building upon Turner, Lewis, Nielsen
study “Determining Usability Test Sample
Size” (2006)
*affecting 31% or more users

JUST

5. Product Management has become
less defining and building a product,
and more discovering and optimizing
a product to deliver demonstrable
value to customers.
03

6. Roadmaps as a date-
driven commitment.
Roadmaps to drive collaboration and
alignment on goals and priorities –
flexible to change and learning.
Engineering as a Product
Manager’s key partner.
Partnerships across an organization
– notably elevating those with user
experience and data analytics.
Defining PRDs. Driving
development.
Discover and validate requirements
through iterative customer feedback
loops – throughout the lifecycle.
04

7. 1. ESTABLISH ITERATIVE CUSTOMER
FEEDBACK LOOPS AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE

8. 06
Scope
Build
Validate
Learn
Testable Unit
Insights
Data
Hypotheses

9. 07
Case Study – Consumer Mobile Application
Situation Solution Results
Built confidence and
momentum
De-scoped secondary
features from MVP
Launched within 3
months
No risks realized –
Revenue lift
Social Networking
Millions of DAU
1000+ min
~400k
2 years
Internal prioritization
and design decisions
Excessive features
Business risk
Weekly Validation
Five users
Minimal preparation
Directionally useful
Balance internal review
Three-stage Beta
1000 users
KPI benchmarks with tolerances
1. engagement
2. conversion
3. subscription revenue

10. 08
Case Study – Enterprise Services Company
Customer Council
20 1-2 per year
✘✘

11. 09
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Validate everything
2. Discover more… define less
3. Ship smaller, more often

12. 2. ROADMAPS
ARE NOT
BLUEPRINTS,
THEY’RE
COLLABORATION
TOOLS

13. Quarterly
Refresh
11
Annual
Planning
Initiatives
Identified
Resourcing
and
Timelines
Create
Roadmap
Communicate
Roadmap
✘ Infrequent, inflexible
✘ Unproven value, prescribed
✘ Guesswork, arbitrary
✘ Presumes timely execution
✘ Uninspiring, over-committed
A Typical Roadmap Process

14. 12
RISK INCREMENTALISM
LOSE CONTEXT
LESS MANAGER ABILITY TO
GUIDE TEAMS
NO VISIBILITY FOR CUSTOMERS,
STAKEHOLDERS

15. Definition Frequency
Tangible problem to be solved
from customer’s perspective
12 – 18 months
Most critical business needs to be
addressed
3 - 6 months
Outcomes quantified and
measurable at the product level
3 - 6 months
Prioritized by likely impact –
changed with learning
4 - 6 weeks
13
Rethinking the Roadmap Process
End-states
Themes
Metrics/
OKRs
Candidate
Initiatives

16. 14
An Example – End-states
On-Boarding
To engage and delight new members during their initial experience which is personal, approachable,
informative, adaptive to different learning goals, unobtrusive, and delivers immediate value to the user.
Personalization
To offer a site experience that adapts over time to a member’s desired learning style, evolving learning
goals, and preferred content exploration and functionality; through explicit and implicit means.
Discovery
To better match our members to the content they seek quickly, accurately and with relevancy. Provide
a well lit path through continuous content experiences to achieve an ultimate learning goal.
Destination
To inspire our members to develop a regular habit of engaging with offerings by providing a variety
of content experiences that are timely, engaging, provocative, and motivational.
Community
To foster sharing between members and authors to facilitate learning in a safe environment through
inspiration, encouragement, sharing of best practices, and providing mentorship to encourage learning.
Interactivity
To enable a participatory learning experience empowering members to own, practice, and validate
their mastery of skills and knowledge.
Understand
the
member’s
goals
Match
content to
the
member’s
goals
Enable the
member to
reach their
goals
1
2
3
SANITIZED

17. 15
An Example – Themes, Metrics, Candidates
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4+
Theme
Guide new users
into goal-driven
learning
Drive deeper engagement
with tools to complement
video learning
Increase retention
through career
credentials and skill
validation
Metrics
Ø Increase new member
conversion by X
Ø Deliver requested enterprise
feature (#1 sales request)
Ø Increase course
engagement by Y
Ø Competitive parity with other
technology learning services
Ø Increase existing member
satisfaction by Z
Ø Match member successfully
to jobs (TBD)
Candidates
Interactivity: To enable a participatory learning experience empowering
members to own, practice, and validate their mastery of skills and knowledge.
SANITIZED

18. 16
Case Study – Enterprise SaaS Company
18
Three themed
4-month periods per
year
Core Business
Goals
Delighters
Innovations
1 1
8
Each potentially a mix of…

19. 17
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Don’t sweat planning
2. Avoid arbitrary project dates
3. Create three roadmaps

20. 3. UX AND ANALYTICS ARE KEY
PARTNERS TO SUCCESS

21. USER EXPERIENCE
19
Partner on discovery, until you have
high confidence in a solution. And
continue with lightweight testing
throughout development.
Invest in high-fidelity prototypes
Don’t treat design as engineering input
Allow UX time to test and iterate

22. PRODUCT ANALYTICS
20
Access to dedicated support so
product decisions are anchored with
data, and new hypotheses can be
rapidly tested and evaluated.
Keep simple and hypothesis driven
Don’t starve PM’s or de-scope tracking
Integrate with A|B testing platforms

23. THANK-YOU
QUESTIONS
linkedin/in/kensandy
www.kensandy.com
kenjsandy@gmail.com