Getting Out of Your Garden

Here at Pollinator Headquarters, in the northern reaches of the USA, the garden days are ending. Our perennials are now dormant; a dusting of snow has covered the ground. With the end of the year’s green times, it’s tempting to put on an extra sweater, cook some soup, and hunker down, in our dens, away from the customers and the crowds. We can work remotely. We can wear slippers and sweatpants. Our dog likes it when we’re home.

Not so fast.

Over the past few weeks my colleagues and I have had the great pleasure of meeting with SDG’s customers and friends to explore a new model for our product and innovation services. We’ve listened to these fine folks’ insights, expectations, and frustrations. I left every session with new understanding and renewed appreciation for the challenges and opportunities faced by SDG’s customers.

This experience of talking with customers reminded me of the risks of insulation and the value of observing and talking to the real people who use our products— ideally away from our own homes or offices. We product nerds sometimes call this practice GOOBing, for “getting out of the building.” In my career, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with hundreds of customers and users in dozens of industries — and in many cases, I’ve met them in their own milieux.

When I worked for a major yearbook publisher, I visited a high school’s yearbook room and realized that our primary users — student staffs — are teenagers working in 45 minutes class blocks, in between Algebra and Health class, on shared computers. I’ve seen the chaos and joy that surrounds elementary school teachers using curriculum products that I managed. I once interviewed a dental practitioner using software to coordinate care through mobile dental offices for indigenous peoples in remote areas of Alaska. While working on a system involving agricultural data I saw first-hand how sunlight, weather, dust, and even the user’s clothing affect experience. In every case, being out in the world with the customers and users resulted in stronger products.

So if you find yourself tempted to hibernate and do your research remotely: resist. Swap out your sweatpants for work boots and get out of the building, into the dirt, into the world. Depending on your product, visit factories, hospitals, laboratories, offices, homes, schools, bus stops. Experience these spaces. Talk to your customers over the whirr of heavy machinery or under the pressure of a deadline. Put your tools in your users’ hands, and put your hands on their tools. You’ll never regret it.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Urgency first

Check it out: The Magic Prioritization Trick, John Cutler, The Beautiful Mess

This is a clever article from the always clever John Cutler. He walks through a product prioritization method that starts by organizing feature candidates along a single dimension: urgency. Once you have established urgency for these feature candidates, then you categorize them according to value, and finally, within the value & urgency groupings, according to duration. (I admit I substitute effort when thinking about duration.) The catch: urgency can’t be shifted while you evaluate the other dimensions. This results in a neatly cascading set of priorities based on multiple dimensions to produce a well-ranked list.

The method might be a bit hard to follow at first — I had to read through the sequence a couple of times, mentally applying the steps to imagined feature candidates in order to see what was happening. But once you get the hang of it, it is a simple and powerful exercise to align a team on product direction and understand the trade-offs between cost of delay and anticipated value. I’d love to hear from anyone in The Pollinator community who tries this with their own product opportunities.

Faster horses couldn’t drag me away

Check it out: When you should not listen to your customers, Maret Gruve, Product Coalition.

Famously, perhaps apocryphally, American automobile pioneer Henry Ford once said that if he asked customers what they want, they would just say a faster horse. In this thoughtful essay, product manager Maret Gruve uses this well-known Ford and horses anecdote to explore how product teams could approach customer research given the unreliability of what their customers might express. Gruve smartly breaks user needs into different types: expressed needs, unexpressed needs, unrecognized needs, and potential needs.

Having categorized needs, Gruve outlines research techniques that target each type of need. Perhaps this is just my lifelong personal bias towards long German names, but I appreciated learning about the Einstellung effect, the likelihood that the solution someone asks for will be similar to existing solutions they have experienced, rather than the optimal solution for their situation.

And I like the way she depicts this framework as a “user insights iceberg,” with only the expressed needs sticking above the visible surface. It’s a helpful image for product and UX teams to consider as they identify the needs of their users.

Ditch anything other than outcomes, really

Check it out: Ditch Epics and User Stories and Focus on Outcomes, Ant Murphy.

The gist of this piece from product consultant Anthony Murphy might be both controversial and obvious — and doesn’t that combo make for a great essay? Murphy argues that the product profession has gotten bogged down in definitions and classifications, resulting in too much consternation about methodologies and taxonomy and not enough attention to the outcomes we’re pursuing. His suggestions: dodge these conflicts by focusing on good behaviors — which can change mindsets and cultures. He suggests teams will be more successful if we revamp our primary taxonomy from a rigid structure of initiatives > epics > user stories to a more flexible and outcome-driven system of outcomes > opportunities > experiments.

I especially like his focus on clear expression and alignment. Murphy’s model emphasizes high-quality but small-scale written artifacts, in the form of one-page documents (at SDG we sometimes use a template called Opportunity Briefs), clear problem statements, and testable hypotheses. This requires your team to think carefully about the language they use and the choices they make. And that’s a product superpower.

Oh, we have opinions

Check it out:

• How to build an opinionated product, Jake Knapp, Google Ventures (2012)

• Intercom' Product Principles: Opinionated by default; flexible under the hood. Tatiana Sivo, Intercom.

• Is your Product Too Opinionated, Anna Debenham, Boldstart Ventures.

• Designing Better Products in a Growth-obsessed Industry, James Whelan.

An opinionated product is a product whose functionality and experience prescribes a certain way or working or completing a task. For example, in the domain of manufacturing and job costing, there are numerous methods for estimating and quoting a job. An opinionated MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning) product might be one that enforces a certain estimating methodology.

I’ve seen a lot of chatter across the productsphere lately about opinionated products. How do we make them? How do we market them? Exactly how opinionated should they be? These essays offer a few perspectives that will help you develop your own opinions.

• In a post from back in 2012, Jake Knapp (of Sprint fame) advises working with marketing teams in writing exercises to articulate the opinions you want to express through your product.

• Tatiana Sivo of Intercom explores her company’s principle of “opinionated by default but flexible under the hood.” I appreciate that she includes examples, like “the option to build a custom report” or “allowing custom data attributes on top of default standard ones.”

• Anna Debenham from Boldstart Ventures advises that a product can be too opinionated. I liked her reference to the “MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable)” and “optimal newness.” Following these principles results in a product that is opinionated, yes, but within boundaries.

• And James Whelan advises that strong opinions in products not only make products successful; they make cultures strong.

The summary? Be intentional about the opinions expressed through your product. Determine where you’ll provide flexibility, and where you’ll enforce your product’s opinions. Then empower your teams to make the choices that put those opinions into practice.

At least, that’s my opinion.

Outside the Box

World Time Buddy is a great little tool for working across time zones in our modern, interconnected, Zoomified world. It shows the comparative time in a list of places that you specify, highlighting the typical working hours for everyone. I used it when working with a project team whose members were distributed across the US and in Europe. It’s especially nice at this time of year, when daylight saving time changes on different dates around the world. At the very least, you can use it to imagine when you would speak to your family and friends if you moved to the South of France. Check it out at worldtimebuddy.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 business and technology consulting company. From ideation to implementation, we help transform organizations through well-made and well-loved digital products. Utilizing our customer-centric approach, and our wide array of capabilities, we deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and success for our customers.

• 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.