the ultimate guide to maintaining product focus
DESCRIPTION
3 key principles for maintaining focus when creating a product in a team of developers and designers. Originally presented at ProductTank in London in May 2014.TRANSCRIPT
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FOCUSMAINTAINING
in Product Management
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We’ve got a recipe for maintaining focus.
Here’s what it consists of…
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things
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1) Align your team to your product roadmap
2) Spend less time in meetings
3) Have a process for deciding what to build next
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1
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Team alignment(with a fast paced roadmap)
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OKRs
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OKR
bjectives
ey
esults
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Here’s an example of an OKR:
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Objective: Get better at project management.Key results:ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.
Q2 OKRs
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Objective:project management.Key results: 90% of features ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.
Q2 OKRs
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Objective: Get better at project management.Key results: 90% of features ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.
Q2 OKRs
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OKRs ensure team is aligned with company direction.
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Set OKRs quarterly. Company & Individual OKRs are critical. REVIEW them.
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Developers
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It can be hard to predict how long development projects are going to take.
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It’s like planning a walk from San Francisco to LA…
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http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3
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See this Quora post. It’s awesome.
Awesome Quora Post
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Try budgeting time
(rather than estimating it)
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Beuncomfortablyopenwith metrics
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Share the metrics that matter. Not just the ones that are easy to share.
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Recap
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Team alignment
Budget projects with time
Be open + transparent with metrics
Set OKRs every quarter (this takes practice)
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Spend more time buildingLess time meeting
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FACT: Developers don’t like meetings
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FACT: (most)
People don’t like meetings
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Here’s what we do…
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StandupsMonday morning
Friday afternoon
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On Monday mornings we have a one hour meeting to plan the upcoming week.
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StandupsMonday morning
Friday afternoon
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Every day we do a quick standup catchup – everyone says what they are working on and if they are blocked by anything.
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StandupsMonday morning
Friday afternoon
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Friday afternoons we catch up over a beer to round off the week. We demo what we completed and show the team how much awesome we have added.
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Internal tools set culture
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We use Slack for team collaboration and communication. It rocks.
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We also use many other tools. Things like Recurly, Trello, Sequel Pro, and GitHub make our lives a lot easier.
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Recap
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Spend less time in meetings
Fewer but better meetings
Internal tools set the culture
The right amount of process
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Deciding what to build next
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Feature requests come fromcustomers
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Feature requests come fromcustomers
AND your team
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Keep trackHave a process
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A lack of ideas
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A lack of ideasis rarely the problem
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Focus is about handling requests like…
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Can’t we just…
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No
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It’ll only take a few minutes to…
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No
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It shouldn’t be too hard to…
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No
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If you don’t say “no” to enough feature requests your product will end up looking like…
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And that doesn’t look terribly comfortable.
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Funnily enough, a small company called Apple put it rather well in a beautiful animation they made.
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there are a thousand no’s for every yes
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Watch the video. Get inspired.
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Another trick we learned…
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Write the press release first
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It’s the best way to align everyone on the team with what you expect from the end result of the product.
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Recap
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Deciding what to build next
Say no before it gets into the product
Write the press release first
Process for handling feature requests
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Align team to roadmap
Spend less time in meetings
Know what to build next
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The GoSquared Team
Maintaining Focus in Product Management
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