Pavel Samsonov’s Post

To mitigate product risks effectively, focus on these four core areas: 1. Value Risk: Research and Validation: Start with thorough market research and customer interviews to understand real user needs and market demand. Customer Feedback: Share your product concept with key customers early on to gauge interest and gather feedback. Prototyping: Develop low-fidelity prototypes or MVPs to validate assumptions before full-scale development. Iterative Approach: Continuously iterate based on user feedback and market validation, be prepared to pivot if necessary. 2. Usability Risk: User-Centered Design: Prioritize user-friendly design principles throughout development. Usability Testing: Conduct usability tests with real users to uncover and address usability issues. Effective Onboarding: Create an onboarding process that helps users easily understand and use the product. Clear UI Design: Ensure that the user interface is intuitive, making essential features and actions readily accessible. 3. Feasibility Risk: Early Engineering Collaboration: Involve engineers from the start to identify technical challenges and feasibility constraints. Proof of Concept: For complex features, consider creating a proof of concept to assess implementation feasibility. Continuous Communication: Maintain regular communication with the development team to address technical concerns promptly. Risk Mitigation: Identify potential technical risks and establish strategies to mitigate them. 4. Business Viability Risk: Cross-Functional Collaboration: Engage stakeholders from sales, marketing, finance, legal, and other relevant departments to ensure alignment with the business's core capabilities. Stakeholder Buy-in: Obtain approval and support from key internal stakeholders, particularly in critical areas like finance, marketing, accounting, and legal. Relationship Building: Cultivate strong working relationships with various departments to encourage open communication and address their specific needs. Transparent Communication: Clearly communicate your product idea and strategy to internal stakeholders, addressing their concerns and requirements. By addressing these areas systematically and collaboratively, you can minimize uncertainties and enhance the prospects of a successful product development and launch.

🚀 Ever wondered how a Proof of Concept (POC) is born? It’s a wild ride from 'Eureka!' in the shower to 'Please don’t crash' during the presentation. 🛀💻 Here’s a sneak peek into the journey: 1. Idea Generation: "Where wild ideas meet too much coffee. You know that 'Eureka!' moment in the shower? That’s your billion-dollar idea... or just a need for more shampoo." 2. Feasibility Study: "The reality check. Is this idea genius or just the caffeine talking? Time to find out if it's really possible or if it belongs in the 'nice try' folder." 3. Designing the POC: "Drawing the blueprint of your brainwave. It's like sketching your dream house, but for tech geeks. Let's hope the foundation is solid!" 4. Development Phase: "Where the coding magic happens. Watch your idea turn into something tangible, one bug at a time. Remember, every error message is just the computer saying 'I love you' in its own way." 5. Testing and Validation: "It's alive! But does it work? Time to poke it with a stick and see if it does what it's supposed to. Cross your fingers and maybe some wires." 6. Review and Iterate: "Feedback time! Because the first try is never the charm. Iterate, iterate, iterate - it's the tech world's mantra." 7. Presentation: "Show and tell for grown-ups. Time to dazzle everyone with what you've created and hope it doesn’t crash mid-demo. Spoiler: it might." 8. Decision Time: "To scale or not to scale? That is the question. Will your POC become the next big thing, or just a cool experiment? Either way, you’ve learned something!" Remember, every POC journey is unique - embrace the chaos, enjoy the coffee, and keep innovating! Want to learn more ? https://lnkd.in/et_Gan6t 🚀💻☕ #TechHumor #InnovationJourney #POCSteps

In a Design Sprint, focusing on one idea that would solve the problem is a critical aspect of the process. While the initial stages involve generating a variety of ideas and exploring different possibilities, the goal is to converge on a single concept that the team believes has the most potential for addressing the challenge effectively. Here's how this is typically done: Selection Criteria: 1.    Alignment with Objectives: The idea should align closely with the objectives and goals defined at the beginning of the Design Sprint. It should directly address the problem statement or opportunity identified. 2.    Feasibility: The team considers the feasibility of implementing the idea within the constraints of time, resources, and technology. It should be achievable within the sprint timeframe. 3.    Impact and Innovation: The selected idea should have the potential to make a significant impact and offer an innovative solution to the problem. It should provide value to the target audience. 4.    User-Centricity: The idea should be user-centric, meaning it addresses the needs, preferences, and pain points of the target users. It should create a positive user experience. 5.    Differentiation: The team evaluates how the idea sets itself apart from existing solutions in the market. It should offer unique features or benefits that distinguish it from competitors. Decision-Making Process: 1.    Group Discussion: The team engages in a structured discussion to evaluate the different ideas generated during the Diverge phase. Each idea is examined based on its merits and potential impact. 2.    Voting or Dotmocracy: To facilitate decision-making, the team may use voting techniques such as dot stickers or a similar method. Each team member votes for their preferred idea based on the selection criteria. 3.    Consensus Building: While individual preferences are considered, the goal is to reach a consensus on the idea that the majority of the team believes is the most promising and viable solution. 4.    Facilitator Guidance: The facilitator plays a crucial role in guiding the decision-making process, ensuring that discussions remain focused and objective. They may provide prompts or ask questions to help the team evaluate and compare ideas effectively. 5.    Iterative Refinement: Once the idea is selected, the team may engage in further refinement and iteration to clarify the concept and develop a detailed plan for prototyping and testing. By focusing on one idea that has been carefully evaluated and selected by the team, Design Sprints streamline the development process and enable concentrated effort and resources towards creating a solution that has the greatest potential for success.

Original (excerpt): Hey there, product professionals! Ever feel like you’re embarking on an epic adventure when crafting products? That’s because, in a way, you are! Product design is like navigating through a galaxy of intricate relationships. Each decision made sends ripples through this cosmic web. This shapes our creations in ways that are both obvious and hidden. But fear not! To simplify the complexities of product design, there is a secret weapon. We call this “systems thinking.” Systems thinking is a way to solve problems and understand the world. We do this by seeing everything as a connected system, not separate parts. It helps us see how different parts interact to affect the whole system. Systems thinking is not a method; it’s a new way of thinking. Join us on this journey into systems thinking. Here, we’ll explore complexity and discover how different pieces shape our decisions. ----------------------------- Actual Intelligence version: Do you ever feel like building products is hard? That's because it is! It's so complicated we should use lots of metaphors to make the point. Something called "systems thinking" can help. Systems thinking is a way of thinking. Particularly, thinking about a system, rather than just its individual parts. It helps us see how individual parts combine to create a system. Systems thinking is a way of thinking--that's why "thinking" is in the name. Let's talk more about systems thinking. Systems thinking systems thinking systems thinking.

Minimum Features: An MVP contains the minimum set of features necessary to deliver value and solve a particular problem for users. It is stripped down to its core functionalities, avoiding the addition of unnecessary bells and whistles. Rapid Development: The MVP is developed quickly and released to the market in a shorter timeframe compared to a fully-featured product. This rapid development and release cycle allow for faster learning and adaptation. Learning and Feedback: The primary goal of an MVP is to gather feedback from early users. This feedback is used to identify potential improvements and validate assumptions about the product's value proposition. Risk Reduction: By releasing an MVP, you mitigate the risk associated with building a full-featured product that may not meet market demand. It allows you to test your product concept with real users and make informed decisions. Iterative Development: Once feedback is collected, the development team iterates on the product, adding new features, refining existing ones, and addressing issues identified by users. This iterative approach continues until the product evolves into a more complete and robust solution. Cost-Efficiency: Building an MVP is often more cost-effective than developing a fully-featured product upfront. It helps allocate resources wisely and prevents investing heavily in features that may not be valuable to users. Customer-Centric: An MVP is focused on delivering value to the end-users and addresses their needs, ensuring that the product's development aligns with real-world requirements. Market Validation: An MVP can help validate product-market fit by assessing whether there is a demand for the solution in the market.

The product death cycle is a terrible trap. Many PMs forget about the "Why" and become waiters. To please everyone, a waiter collects and waterfalls all "feature requirements" to the team. But no matter how much the team delivers, it gets only worse. Features shipped in a hurry do not solve anyone's problems and do not drive the expected business results. The feature factory. Fortunately, you can prevent or escape that trap. Try this: 1. Respect your vision and strategy 2. Do not let your customers design solutions 3. Experiment to test your ideas 4. Push back on things that are handed down Now in detail: 1. Respect your vision and strategy Ask yourself: - Why are you building this product? - Where do you want to be in 2-5 years? - For whom are you building it? - What's the unique value of your product? - How is it aligned with the company's vision and strategy? - What are the key tradeoffs? - What are the customer jobs (functional, emotional, social)? - How will it create value for the business? - How can you get there? Recommended books: - Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder - Playing to Win by Roger Martin - 2. Do not let your customers design solutions Focus on understanding their problems, needs, and desires in-depth. Interview them regularly, map opportunities, and brainstorm possible solutions. Make sure the designer and engineers are included. This will let you build a shared understanding and stay open to different perspectives. The best ideas often come from engineers. Recommended books: - Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick - Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri - 3. Experiment to test your ideas Learning by delivering is expensive. Run small experiments in a front-of-funnel to validate ideas in the cheapest and the fastest possible way before selecting them for implementation. Key risks you need to tackle: - Value. Will our customers desire it? - Usability. Will they be able to use it? - Viability. Can different parts of our business support it? - Feasibility. Is it possible? - Ethic. Should we do it? Ask yourself: - What needs to be true for this idea to work? - How can we test our assumptions? Recommended books: - Inspired by Marty Cagan - The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen - Testing Business Ideas by Alexander Osterwalder and David Bland - 4. Push back on things that are handed down Respect your stakeholders, but don't let their authority influence what is important. Question solutions and push back on things that are handed down to you. "A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have" - Tim Ferriss Recommended book: - Influence Without Authority by Allan Cohen and David Bradford - Even though knowledge about what works is easily available, most companies keep falling into that trap. Any ideas why? - The product death cycle credits: David Bland.

Great advice in this post. It’s so easy to fall into this trap as a product manager. That’s why it’s so important to know when to say no, make sure what you build aligns with the vision and strategy, and when your prioritizing features focus on solving the real problem(s).

Yes!! Wow! This was a lesson hard learned at a previous startup that I worked with. We had worked on the product for years with stagnant growth. It wasn't until the end of my time there that I said, "wait . . . we're asking our current users what they want . . . that's not really all that important!! We should be asking the tire kickers why they left . . . and we should advertise to our target market and ask them why they never came." It's like inviting 100 people to your birthday party and only 10 people are there. You run around all night asking, "what would make this more fun for you?" It's so appealing to think about that. It's an easy trap. I even saw an article on linked in the other day talking about not wasting your time chasing the people who left your party. And I do agree with that. But, if you want to have a bigger party, keeping the 10% who stayed satisfied may not be the most pressing problem? The 90% who either didn't get the invitation, declined the invitation, or came to the party but left to go to another party . . . those are the problems I want to solve first. I guess, what I'm saying more explicitly is that, "the features that keep existing users may not attract new users as well as the features that attract new users will keep existing users." That's my hunch. I'll bet that's been studied. Anybody have science about this?

If your #ehr #oncology #vendor #productmanagers are liking posts about #deathcycles…. Contact us for an #RFP template to ask the hard questions on the completeness of feature sets and the commitment and turnover of key vendor talent.

Pawel is spot on. Many teams fall into the trap of becoming a feature factory as customers will always want feature after feature without knowing if the new feature is the solution they need. That's why there is a need for a product vision and the need to test hypothesis on a regular basis to understand if they are what the client or the end-users need. #product #productdevelopment #featurefactory #features #vision #hypothesistesting #hypothesis #productvision