Product Management in the Desert of Delivery
The hard-fought journey from a spark of an idea to a full-fledged product is exhilarating. It’s a badge of honor for product people. It’s invigorating to put the first iteration of your innovative new prototype in front of real people. It’s like watching a child take their first few clumsy steps. It might be wobbly, but we all know they’ll learn and grow. Product Managers want to be on the front lines of innovation. We shine when we’re talking with everyday users, identifying real-life problems that matter, and working with a team to solve those issues in delightful ways. This is where the magic happens. This is what gets out of bed in the morning.
So what happens when a PM needs to incrementally tweak an already launched product? What happens when we’re put in charge of a product that’s in maintenance mode? What do we do when given a requirements list for the next six months of work from upper management? The role can become prioritizing between a list of product defects and small tweaks. There are varying levels of this experience. It all depends on your organization’s product development philosophy. But all these different modes of delivery can feel a bit stifling. They can start to feel a bit like what I like to call…the desert of delivery.
I’m fortunate to work at an organization that embraces experimentation and innovation. Our culture promotes a healthy balance between discovery and delivery. It’s about finding the sweet spot between a focus on the future and delivering value to real life users tomorrow. From executive leadership on down, it’s valued and practiced.
However, it’s inevitable to have phases where the product needs maintenance or straightforward execution. I’ve recently been working on a project that had already found product-market-fit. Our job was to make small, incremental improvements and ensure its stability at scale. There were no major, product changing assumptions to test. There were definitely no brand new, innovative features to be prototypes. After six months, we’re nearing the end of this phase of execution and maintenance. I’ve learned a host of important lessons and have been able to do an exciting amount of discovery that I didn’t anticipate.
We don’t have to become glorified project managers amidst the Desert of Delivery. We can embrace these types of product cycles as an Oasis of Opportunity. Patent pending for the over-the-top and cheesy analogies.
Do Whatever it Takes
First, when you know your team is heading into a stretch of delivery, it’s an opportunity to take on a grittier mindset. It’s a time for doing whatever it takes to help the team meet the goal of the day, week, or sprint. It’s not uncommon during these seasons for work to seem a bit hectic. It might be that usage is peaking for the feature the team is maintaining. Or maybe it’s time to actually ship tens of thousands of units now that the product is close to complete.
Whatever the cause of chaos, there are tons of different ways to be an asset to your team. One effective way to do this is hopping in the support queue. First, It’ll help you show some love to the customer success team. But it’s also a great opportunity learn from users and hear about their biggest pain points. Besides looking for ways to help stakeholders, look inwards within your own team. It’s a great opportunity to help QA test the branch that needs to get out the door. It’s a chance to sit with the designer to help with wire-frames or user research.
Make sure you aren’t stepping on the expert’s toes in any of these areas. But do your best to be an asset to the team when the stakes are high. You’ll be able to have the most impact by helping out in areas that you have skills in. But don’t be afraid to try your hand at something new during this time either. You’ll help get the work done and learn new skills. But arguably more important, you’ll build trust and respect across the team.
Strengthen Bonds with Stakeholders
Some stakeholders love delivery and execution. It means that they have a stable product to market or sell. It means that the business line is moving in the right direction. It means that strategy is more straightforward and clear.
Yet, for other stakeholders in the company, these phases can add a lot of stress to their lives. They have to deal with supporting the product that’s in maintenance mode. They have to figure out logistics associated with a product delivering at scale in the wild.
You’ll be working with various stakeholders during these phases. Use as an opportunity to build strong rapport and trust. The credibility you gain by executing well will pay off. Especially when you’re trying to protect and develop that promising infant of idea someday in the future.
Look for Red Flags
If your product is in one of these phases, it probably has already found product-market-fit. This means that there are fewer eyeballs on the quality of the product. The rest of the company is likely focused on the next big product launch or milestone. Who’s watching the important metrics associated with sustained success? You should be! It’s on you as the PM of that product to be diligent in analyzing the data and trends. Are things really going that well?
Scour your database of interactions from the support team, surveys, and interviews. What are your users saying? There might be a growing dissatisfaction about that bug the rest of the team doesn’t think is that big of a deal. Is that one-off feature request actually a deal-breaker that’s causing lots of churn? Don’t settle for the occasional glance at a high-level dashboard. Dig in deep with queries and raw data. Is engagement down with the product year over year? Is a key performance metric starting to dip? If you do find a red flag, don’t stop there. Go a step further and figure why the troublesome trend has started rearing its ugly head. Then you can figure out the best solution to nip it in the bud.
Hone Your Processes
Execution can seem pretty straightforward. We usually know our estimates, our roadmap, and our dependencies. There’s not a lot of unknowns around the corner. There’s not huge, risky assumptions that need to be validated. And while that can feel a bit restrictive, it’s actually a great time to improve or tweak the way you work as a team.
You can use all that extra mindshare both personally and as a team to focus on honing your process. It doesn’t matter if you use Scrum, Kanban, or some other form of agile development. Use this slower and more straightforward time to practice whatever processes you use. Or even better, try out a whole new way of working. Maybe you’ve been organizing around quarterly OKRs and that’s starting to feel a bit ineffective. Try experimenting with Basecamp’s six week work periods. Or maybe you’re all in on Scrum and don’t want to blow up your way of working. Take the time to get better at refinement and retrospectives.
When things get crazy, the process is usually the first casualty. This work to improve your team’s internal processes will pay off big time. Especially when you enter into a more stressful and uncertain phase of discovery. It’ll be easier to stick to what matters after you’ve been building muscle memory for months as a team.
Utilize Micro Discovery
You may be thinking to yourself, “I never have time to experiment and learn.” It’s true that you’re not going to be taking on huge new initiatives during these phases. But, it’s actually an opportunity to get better at lean product development cycles.
Working in time-boxed experiments and research into your working iterations can be helpful. As in, the team is going to spend half a day on this during the sprint. This will help ensure we’re actually tweaking this thing in a way that solves the right problem the right way. That means you can account for the discovery work in planning and prioritization. Which we all know is important during an execution phase. This will help you practice the build, measure, learn cycle. Build small features or tweaks. Measure by dig into the numbers around the change. And learn by talking to users. This can also be a great time to practice working through riskiest assumptions on a micro scale.
I get that it feels like you might not have the time during an execution phase. But this type of micro discovery has two major benefits. First, it ensures you’re delivering the right pieces along the path of execution. Even when everything seems straightforward, there are still assumptions lurking around every corner. And second, it will make it that much easier for your team to do top-notch discovery. Especially when it matters most with huge unknowns, larger risks, and looming deadlines.
Thriving in The Desert of Delivery
Most product managers will experience the desert of delivery at some point. They’ll need to execute, maintain, or oversee a straightforward roadmap. But it’s a huge mistake to see this phase as stifling and empty. These are not periods of time to just get through.
We can use these cycles to strengthen relationships across the organization. We can use these times in our career to hone existing ways of working and experiment with new processes. And it’s the perfect opportunity to grow our discovery and analytical skills. Embrace these perceived deserts for what they truly are. It will surprise you how much both you, your team, and your product can grow.
I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with delivery and discovery. How do you balance the two? What techniques have you utilized during seemingly stale times of product development? Drop a reply to the article or shoot me a tweet @nichols_austinj.
