2) OPERATIONALIZE: Discovery & Decision-Making

Part 2 is a work in progress!

In the meanwhile, here's an overview on outcome-oriented development, discovery principles, establishing context, and decision-making:

In the OPERATIONALIZE stage of product strategy integration, a product manager’s objective is to enable iterative, adaptive, and strategic decision-making at the finer grains of solution implementation through time, evolving architecture, and shifting market landscapes.

To begin, I'd like to share my personal product management mantra:

My Operating Mantra:

Before we dive in to the discovery component of operationalizing product strategy, it is important to understand the relationship between different types of outcomes and which a product development team should focus their efforts on.

Building on the diagram introduced in part 1,

Product development teams OWN product outcomes and BUILD TOWARDS customer outcomes.

For a deeper dive on the different types of outcomes, their relationships, outcome ownership, and outcome-driven product development, see my article: Decoding Outcome-Driven Product Development.

Discovery

Converting product strategy into product development action begins with discovery. Discovery seeks opportunities to identify market-level problems, unmet needs, or unfulfilled desires and their potential solutions which are valuable, viable, usable, and feasible.

In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres provides a working definition of continuous discovery:

Guiding principles for discovery:

1. Discovery is continuous, messy, and non-linear

2. Discovery is an all-discipline sport

3. Discovery requires first-hand inputs by the team developing the solution

4. Discovery is guided by outcomes, not outputs

5. Discovery seeks and prioritizes opportunities, not solutions

6. Discovery tests assumptions, not specific solutions

7. Discover with empathy and customer-centricity

8. (respectfully) Your customers and stakeholders aren’t able to tell you what to build

Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs), pioneered by Teresa Torres, are the modern standard for continuous discovery frameworks. OSTs are comprised of a product outcome, an opportunity map, collaboratively ideated solutions, and assumption tests. Continuous discovery is supported by exercises like customer interviews, experience mapping, rapid prototyping, and experimentation, all while managing biases and examining assumptions.

Decision Making

Decision-making is empowered by context. Problem statement-based thinking is a powerful tool for establishing the context a product development team needs to shape solutions to deliver desired outcomes. Problem statements frame insights developed during continuous discovery activities. The problems, unmet needs, and/or unfulfilled desires captured in these statements are the plots of your strategic “stories”. They are your market opportunities.

A primer on problem statements:

A good problem statement should articulate:

1. Your impressions of what’s wrong/needed/desired

2. Who this problem/need/desire affects

3. Why addressing this problem/need/desire matters

4. How much better things could be if you can somehow find a way to solve for the problem/need/desire

…and there are two aspects of how you frame problem statements that are critical to delivering the right outcomes:

1. The Goldilocks Problem: is the problem/need/desire you are tackling the right size?

2. The Insight Problem: are you framing the problem/need/desire in a way which is meaningful and potent?

The Design Thinking Lifecycle provides another valuable approach to discovering, framing, and solving problems:

1. Empathize

2. Define

3. Ideate

4. Prototype

5. Test

In the "Define" stage, learnings from the "Empathize" stage are synthesized to develop a point-of-view. The point-of-view captures three elements: user, need, and insight.

(note the parallel to Spotify's "DIBBS" (data > insights > beliefs > bets) strategy framework noted in the introduction)

A North Star Metric should:

1. Capture the user’s “ah ha” moment when value is realized

2. Be a leading and not lagging indicator of business success

3. Represent the essence of the product strategy

4. Be quantifiable

Your north star metric should NOT be revenue (a lagging indicator). It should 1) assume the business model of the product, and 2) capture a user outcome. Your north star metric should be specific to your product and what your customers value.

Product initiatives make impacts across four product growth dimensions. They are: Breadth, Depth, Frequency, Efficiency. Initiatives in these dimensions will drive your NSM in different ways. Additionally, initiatives in a given growth dimension can (and should) be measured by their own intermediate KPIs in addition to evaluating their impact on the North Star Metric.

The brilliance of the North Star Metric framework is that it contextualizes major product initiatives with your product's business model and product-market fit.

Stay tuned for more!