A Winter's Tale

Consider this remarkable Earth upon which every Pollinator reader resides. It rotates and spins; it even wobbles. These concurrent motions, plus the Earth’s axis’s convenient 23.5 degree tilt against the sun, give us remarkable things like seasons and weather. As I write this introductory essay, the temperature here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA lurks well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. That frigid temperature affects things. Just ask my dog.

Many businesses and therefore products are profoundly affected by industry-specific seasonal cycles. These cycles can—or should—influence product decisions and priorities. Some I’ve seen in my own career and life:

• An online university adapts its user experience to match a school quarter and school year cycle.

• An agtech firm’s agronomist customers will need new functionality timed to match the spring planting or fall harvesting seasons.

• An accounting product must update tax tables and calculations according to annual filing deadlines and annually updated regulations.

• A company providing services and technology to fishing guides, golf courses, and ski resorts delivers features to match the seasonal cycles of those hobbies.

Your business or industry may be influenced by other seasonal cadences. How do you align those cadences to your product planning, prioritization, and releases?

Several years ago, when leading product management and design for a company in an industry deeply affected by seasonal cadences, I maintained a simple data table that depicted the relative focus of our primary users during each month of the year. You can make your own in a few minutes with an Excel worksheet and an area chart.

Here’s an example for a fictional business that provides digital tools and services to help school administrators manage K-12 schools. Those users have quite different needs throughout a year, depending on where we are in a school year cycle. This is an area chart I generated in Excel for such a business (again: this chart is both fictional and overly simplified).

You can probably see how this simple visualization might help a product manager determine when to deliver new functionality to help the school staff prepare, for example, for summative annual assessments, which usually take place in the spring.

Now here’s the important thing: these seasonal cycles of your customers and your market may not align with your own business’s fiscal year, or with product planning and funding cycles that fit that fiscal year.

Right now, in January, many businesses might default to resource allocation decisions that prioritize the funding established for the new calendar and fiscal year. “Hey, let’s hit those 2025 delivery goals. Of course you’ll start with the biggest thing we funded, won’t you?,” say your well-meaning colleagues. But they may not consider how those priorities align with the seasonality of your market.

As always, the wise product professional, like The Pollinator’s readers, starts by considering your users. Know their rhythms. Live in their seasons.

Your product and business will be better for it.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Cracking Product-Market Fit

Check it out: First Round Review’s Product-Market Fit Method, First Round Review

First Round Review is a newsletter and editorial platform from First Round Capital, a venture capital firm. A lot of its best content is targeted squarely at product leaders and teams of any funding structure or maturity stage. Their Product-Market Fit Method website is a detailed resource for product leaders looking to make the leap from idea to impact by reaching that most elusive but essential milestone: Product-Market Fit (PMF).

The website is partly a content marketing piece promoting or possibly accompanying a recurring in-person retreat. Selected applicants can fly to California and enjoy four days of intense content and immersive programming with other early-stage product leaders. Admittedly, that may be part of the reason I found this guide valuable. When you’re a Minnesotan in January, words like “Sonoma” and “Wine Country” have a certain appeal, no matter where you are in your journey to PMF.

But even if you have no intention of applying for the retreat, the content on this Product-Market Fit Method website demystifies the process of uncovering a product that fits its market. You’ll find actionable frameworks, hard-earned lessons, and tactical, take-able advice, like this:

Whether you’re just working from a napkin sketch of a product idea or are leading product for a well-established enterprise, check it out.

Are you down with AOP?

Check it out: Annual Operating Planning (AOP): A Practical Guide for Product Leaders, Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group

Product Discovery Group’s guide to annual operating planning (AOP), written by Jim Morris, is a helpful map of a process that we product folks can find challenging, even maddening. The Pollinator Perspective on this process: annual planning is valuable, but it often struggles to meet the dynamic realities of product development. This guide is especially useful for the season-sensitive product manager, who might be nobly striving to bend her employer’s annual funding process to fit a product-driven, iterative discovery and delivery model.

The article lays out a structured approach to aligning cross-functional teams, defining measurable outcomes, and prioritizing with focus. Morris wrote it after facilitating a roundtable with leaders who reflected on the challenges of reconciling annual planning with responsive delivery. We liked his advice about balancing flexibility with precision:

Like any description of a process, it’s best read with a shake of skepticism and a hearty dose of adaptability. Still: it’s well-organized, well-written, and well-worth reading.

Internal products deserve love, too

Check it out: Design Tips for internal products, Kent McDonald, Inside Product

Kent McDonald’s brief, clear Design Tips for Internal Products addresses a subset of digital product design where SDG spends quite a bit of time: designing software that’s used by a business’s internal users. McDonald shares practical advice for designing internal products that are not only functional but also user- and business-friendly. Much of his advice is immediately applicable, like this bit of wisdom:

We like how that advice can be converted into a metric that is meaningful for a particular user persona.

As with much advice in this domain, the clarity of McDonald’s tips may belie the complexity of execution. Designing for internal teams often comes with tight timelines, limited budgets, and competing priorities, which aren’t always easy to reconcile. While McDonald’s tips are valuable, you’ll still need to consider how to navigate organizational constraints and make tough trade-offs.

Wandering the Garden: Minnesota PDMA event

I (Jason, editor of The Pollinator) will be the featured speaker at an upcoming session sponsored by the Minnesota Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association. My topic: The Requirements Trap: Are Your Requirements Sabotaging Your Success?

The session is virtual, and it takes place on Wednesday, February 19 at 5:30 PM Central time. See details and register here.

Outside the Box

Library Extension is a simple web browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge that recognizes when you’re browsing a web page that contains details about a book—for example, on a site like Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, or BarnesandNoble.com. Once configured, the extension adds a content module to the page showing whether that book is available at your local library. It’s almost like a book merchant’s detail page is showing you how to get your hands on a book without buying it from them. Readers and other library-lovers are sure to appreciate it.

Check it out at https://www.libraryextension.com/.

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.