If you subscribe to our Google Calendar, you might notice we’ve added the dates for Product Anonymous’ evening sessions in 2015 – starting with February 19th.
Things are already starting to fall into place for an exciting panel discussion on the 19th. More details to come early in the new year.
If you’re not subscribed to our Google Calendar, go to our Events page and click the ‘add calendar’ button on the bottom right of the embedded calendar.
Normally we have a end of year party in late November & then take a break til the new year due to how busy everyone is in December. This year we had to change our plans because we couldn’t pass up having a session with Rich Mironov.
For those who don’t follow him on Twitter or his blog, Rich is the author of ‘The Art of Product Management’, he’s been a product manager, a coach, a consultant, a CEO, worked in agile environments, been at start-ups & otherwise – and I’m probably missing a bunch of achievements. 😉
When Rich started talking about a trip to Australia and a workshop for Brainmates, obviously he had to come to Melbourne for Product Anonymous 🙂 BTW, check out Rich’s roadmapping workshop … Sydney only.
Thus, why you should RSVP now for Thursday Dec 4th when Rich will be talking about product management at start-ups and specifically ‘Why your start-up will (eventually) need a product manager’. More on Meetup RSVP page…
RSVP
Hello all,
Liz & I have been so busy with Product Camp Melbourne that I just realised we haven’t updated the website with ProdAnon happenings!
Due to camp, we’re not having an evening talk in October but there will be a coffee on TUESDAY the 21st at noon (so a coffee/lunch) at Little Mule. Note the different day as some folks said Thursdays aren’t good for them.
And as usual, November will be our end of the year party. It’s an evening to talk about product and so much more on a rooftop somewhere (as long as Melbourne behaves!).
Usually we take a break while there’s too many xmas parties to attend and people are out of town but we’re going to have 1 more very special session this year – join us on Thursday December 4th in welcoming Rich Mironov to town & ProdAnon. We’re really excited about being able to have Rich join us. We’ll have more details soon re: topic & location.
Our usual speaker evenings will start back up in February 2015.
If you’re feeling a void of professional conversation at the Christmas parties, come along to one of our coffees scheduled for both November 26 (breakfast) & December 18 (lunch) plus there’s always the monthly newsletter for some ProdMgmt intel.
And you may have noticed we have a new logo. We’ve been using the ‘keep calm’ crown visual since day 1 and figured after almost 3 years, we needed our own identity. We hope you like it.
Last Thursday evening, we had a full house for Rob McLellan & Will Fettke from Telstra Design Practice to talk about understanding your customer through design thinking and customer journey maps.
Customer Journey Maps document your customer’s end-to-end experience in order to understand how they interact with you. Maps will help identify areas that need improvement but they can do much more – use them to help shape your roadmap, prioritise the backlog or even find pain points that need to be mitigated before launch.
Of course, this is also another tool to help you understand your customer! Try using the map as a communication tool to help your entire team (or company) have more empathy towards the user.
The map visually represents the experience with information like customer goals, touch points, the customer’s emotions and more. Internally, since the maps are highly visual and often on a wall, they get more interest than a text document sitting in email.
During their time at Telstra, Rob & Will have seen a company wide shift towards understanding the value of design thinking including helping to guide strategy. When the internal teams have been involved in mapping, there’s no need to sell the learnings to them… they have personal experience in creating the learning. Rob & Will have witnessed how the maps enable people to have empathy for the customer, even when that requires them to swallow their pride. Out of all the design thinking tools, they use customer journey maps the most at Telstra.
Rob pointed out the value of these tools come at the upfront stage – to guide you to the problem space and getting everyone to think about it in the same way. Customer journey maps are not going to help you with the interface. Rob said the other big value is using this tool to help identify the opportunities to take it to the next level.
Maps are great for showing nothing happens in isolation. One thing the guys have witnessed is anything you do with customers is ‘a conversation’. An advert, text on a bill, etc come back as ‘Telstra told me’. A great insight for so many parts of the business!
When starting a project, Rob & Will have their stakeholders map the experience first to get the internal view of what’s happening then they they map the experience with customers. Looking at the gaps between those 2 maps are some of the most valuable pieces of information.
As usual at a Product Anonymous session, it was time for the audience to get involved. Rob & Will outlined our task – to redesign an experience such as shopping or public transit.
First we had to take over other sections of the bar so we had enough space 🙂 Then each group had to define what experience to work on. Our groups went with:
They mapped out the experience then broke the experience into themes. Next, they looked at touch points along the timeline which lead into emotions and pain points. To finish up, each group focused on 2-3 really painful things and how they could solve them.
Some examples:
Themes for attending Oaks Day include organisation, preparation, arrival, interacting and leaving.
Touch points of finding a new job included: coffee chats with recruiters, searching online, going to meetups, lots of time at your computer crafting cover letters & resumes.
Emotions & pain points for dealing with a lost myki card include: annoyance, relief & satisfaction, frustration, confusion, more annoyance, more confusion and finally more frustration!
Each group presented their experience map & solution.
Mapping
Rob & Will gave a summary before we broke out into groups & coached each group though the process. For those who weren’t able to attend – here’s an overview!
Using your post-its, write out all the things that happen during the experience from the customer’s perspective. Moving the post-its around, you can put them in time sequence within a swim lane. Include items like who they interact with, how long the interaction lasted, direct quotes, etc.
Use the 5 E’s to help explain the experience:
Think about how you can cluster the steps into ‘episodes’.
Touchpoints – group the journey into the specific touchpoints they interact with you or your service, i.e over the phone, on a device, in a shop, whatever that might be. Draw out some of the emotions that might be felt by the customer at this stage. These steps can then be turned into customer needs, which leads to the discovery of pain points and real opportunity for change or improvement.
Look for the biggest pain points and brainstorm on how to solve those. At this stage be very open to any idea and only after you have put a lot of ideas forward narrow the options down again. Don’t kill ideas in the brainstorm phase as there are plenty of chances for narrowing the list down to only the most plausible.
The next step is to test out those ideas and see what will really work. Testing them can be as simple as a sketch. Will said they often put sketches in front of customers to test solutions.
Tips for Mapping
Interested in learning more?
Thanks!!!
Thank you Rob & Will for taking the time to share your knowledge! Thanks to everyone who came along! We hope to hear about mapping escapades soon! See you all at Product Camp on the 4th!!
Design Thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional. It allows us to innovate and design products that customers will love to use.
Rob McLellan, from the Telstra Design Practice, is going to lead us in applying one tool from the Design Thinking toolkit, called Customer Journey Mapping.
The Customer Journey Map is:
The Customer Journey Map focuses on what makes us human; what we think, feel and do as we interact with a product, service or ecosystem.
What actions do customers take to meet their needs or goals?
How do customers evaluate their experiences?
What emotions do they have along the journey?
It distributes key insights in a form that is easy to understand, while promoting customer-centric thinking.
6pm for a 6:30pm start. RSVP now!
For years now, ‘mobile’ has been the hot ‘new’ thing – in the press and possibly in your company. Most companies will have a desktop product that needs to be ‘mobile friendly’ but what exactly does that mean when you get into the details?
This month, Luke Chambers will help us understand the value of mobile and how mobile products are different to what we do on the web. He’ll lead an interactive session on mobile, ux and product vision.
I’ll let Luke tell you more…
People have evolved with two legs, making us inherently mobile creatures, yet we’re still relying on desks and devices that tie us to a static location. Mobile computing changes all that, and our designs need to keep up in order to create a compelling experience for users of mobile apps and websites.
As designers and product managers we need a clear view of what we’re creating and why – simply scaling down a desktop app or website is majorly problematic.
In this session we’ll explore the mobile landscape and run through some practical activities that help develop our mobile product vision and allow our teams to collectively make decisions about important features and other aspects that are otherwise more difficult to articulate. Make sure you RSVP for this one!!
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Luke Chambers is a brilliant presenter and he is a general tinkerer, web tailor, user-centred design soldier and tall-ship sailor. Luke is one half of the founding partnership behind UX Mastery. He learned his collaborative, visual thinking and storytelling skills while studying filmmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts.
He has worked in the web industry since his first startup in 1999, and came across user-centred design while himself participating in a user testing session for Sensis. He has since championed user experience design for both small guerilla projects and at large companies like Penguin Books, and consults through his agency Experia Digital. He enjoys sailing tall ships, writing retro detective fiction and creating lists (lots of lists).
Throughout his day he listens, sketches, tells stories and explains to people the ‘why’ of the design that happens behind the visuals. He lives in a tumbledown farmhouse in Melbourne with his wife, and has three chooks.
You can follow Luke on Twitter at @lukcha.
Months ago we found out London’s Product People founder, Jock Busuttil, was headed to Australia and we were able to lure him to Melbourne (& Product Anon) with talk of good food and beverages. As Jock teaches ‘How to build a MVP Product‘ at General Assembly in London and we hadn’t talked about Minimum Viable Product at any of our sessions, we thought it was about time.
Drinks & pizza before the session starts
To join Jock, we assembled a panel of product managers from Seek (Emma Stabey), Geoplex (Janet Horwell) and 99designs (Susan Teschner) & a founder from Adioso (Tom Howard) to share their MVP success, failures and wisdom.
Jock kicks off the evening
MVP has been popularised by Lean Startup & Eric Ries who advise building a minimum viable product in order to get feedback and start the build-measure-learn loop.
One of the difficulties of implementing MVP is making sure both minimum and viable are given consideration. Susan Teschner at 99designs talked of a recent experience where the team’s MVP was too minimum and not enough viable but with some changes they’re now seeing interest in the idea and will continue to test their hypothesis. Susan found this great quote illustrating the importance of ‘viable’:
“One of the temptations with the MVP approach is to build a bridge that only goes halfway across a ravine and then to ship it so you can get iterative feedback. The feedback amounts to ‘this bridge sucks’ even if a bridge across a ravine is a brilliant idea.” – Startup Blender
And just because the concept of MVP exists, it doesn’t mean it should be used all the time. Emma Stabey talked about some of the considerations in deciding if an MVP process is right for certain products. For Seek’s iPhone app, they knew customers already had certain expectations, experiences with competitor products and the demand was there. This wasn’t a product to go in with ‘minimum’ or needing to test ‘viable’.
Janet Horwell from Geoplex described a MVP situation where the team identified & understood a problem in their industry plus had it validated by customers – only to find the customer wasn’t prepared to pay for it. She shared some of their ‘how-to’ for working through the MVP including using both lean canvas and empathy maps to test the hypothesis and understand users. As you go through the build-measure-learn process, Janet recommended going back to both the canvas & maps or any data or industry trend metrics to review and assess whether you should continue to move forward. Taking learnings from their unsuccessful MVP, Janet and the team have successfully moved forward on another MVP which has a validated problem and paying customers.
Is one target audience’s MVP, the same as another? While Tom Howard of Adioso uses MVP concepts all the time, he is looking to expand beyond the early adoptors. One thing that guides him these days is getting people to care about the product and how they would feel if the product was no longer available. Perhaps this is where MVP becomes MDP (minimum delightful product)?
While most of us in the audience & everyone on the panel focuses on digital, MVP can be used anywhere. Jock talked about Virgin using MVP in 1984. Instead of going big launch & incurring the expense of multiple airplanes, staff, routes across a range of airports, Virgin tested. They leaded 1 plane which flew 1 route which allowed them to test the new concept in air travel.
We all love those little secrets to doing things better so we wanted to know the panel’s top tips for for doing MVP.
Janet spoke about the need of having the MVP concept accepted by the company and all your stakeholders including the CEO. For some people, MVP will be a new idea and they won’t understand the benefits or process. Make sure you educate those stakeholders by providing examples, case studies and showing the benefits. This is something your entire MVP-friendly team can help out with – it shouldn’t fall just on the product manager’s shoulders.
Emma’s top tip is to define what success looks like upfront including what data you need to make that call. I have certainly been in the situation when I thought google analytics were being collected and it turned out the event tracking wasn’t working so I’ll echo Emma’s suggestion & recommend confirmation of the data collection 😉 .
[pullquote] A landing page is not MVP – it’s an experiment. – Jock Busuttil [/pullquote]
If Tom was doing it all over again, he’d try to get a better understanding of what he was getting into since the crowded travel industry is hard (though he loves it!). He would also decide up front if the product should be commercialised right away or if it would focus on gaining users and worry about commercialisation later (ala Facebook & Twitter). That decision will influence what you put into your MVP.
Susan, who has worked at both start-ups and large organisations, talked about MVP being a double edged sword at large companies. The lure of MVP… getting something out there quickly for feedback and being able to iterate on it… can be strong but it can be hard to keep an iterative cycle going in large companies. Be careful that ‘MVP’ doesn’t become the new language for ‘phase 1’ – and we all know what happens beyond phase 1, don’t we?!
Next, we opened the floor to questions.
The idea of ‘dog-fooding’ was raised and whether those on the panel ate their own dog food. Seek & 99designs dog-food their products. Adioso is so dog-food’d that Tom had only gotten back to Melbourne a few hours before our session.
But eating your own dog food isn’t always as straight forward as you might think. Jock reminded us that we and our team mates are not always the target market.
Janet had a great example of this as using their own product helped them discover a need – but when they got customers involved they found the feature was indeed wanted but customers weren’t prepared to pay extra for it.
Question time for our speakers
When asked about what advice would you give yourself, both Emma & Susan went right to the customer – make sure there is an actual need for your product and that you understand the problem your product is trying to solve.
Making sure you have a common understanding of the measure of success amongst your team is the advice Janet would give herself. She had a start-up experience where the measure of success was very different across the team which lead to difficulties when defining an MVP. I think I saw some nodding heads across the crowd when Janet talked about the members of a team having different ideas.
Tom’s advice would be to keep going towards the goal – as long as you have validation – and Jock said to keep going as long as you’re learning and adjusting the product with those learnings.
Drinks continued after the talk
Our next meetup is Thursday June 19th with Mat Vine leading the discussion on ‘Do stakeholders & customers ever see eye to eye?’. RSVP or read more…
A huge thanks from Liz & myself to our speakers for sharing their MVP & product management experience!!
If you’d like to hear more from them, check out:
And another huge thanks to our sponsors for the evening who provided the venue, beer and pizza!
Join us on Thursday evening June 19th for ‘Do Stakeholders and Customers EVER see eye to eye?’
We’ll be discussing:
A product manager has a unique role in a business – one of the only roles in an organisation that is satisfying two masters – both the customer and the business. It needs to be in the DNA of the product manager to strike the balance between meeting the customer’s need and delivering on business outcomes.
Taking into consideration the various stakeholders (both inside & outside the business) plus the customer need may not lead to the best business outcome. What steps can you take to make sure it does? How can you make sure you are satisfying both sides? Is the need you are satisfying connected to the right business outcome?
Mat Vine, former Head of Product & Policy at Bupa Australia and current consultant for start-ups, not-for-profits and health projects will lead this discussion. See his full bio below.
Product Anonymous is now on Meetup & we’ll be using it for event RSVPs. Please join us there and RSVP now for this event.
6pm for a 6:30pm start at Royal Melbourne Hotel on Bourke St
Mat Vine is an experienced commercial executive with nearly 20 years experience in product and marketing and thrived in environments with P&L accountability. He has worked with brands such as Sensis, NEC, London Electricity and Bupa. More recently at Bupa led the teams responsible for developing and delivering customer value propositions that resulted in significant uplifts in profit and revenues in B2C, B2B and international markets. Mat also spent some time in the UK headquarters where he led the customer value proposition agenda for Bupa businesses around the world – cross fertilising high value initiatives and building global CVP development capability. He is currently consulting on interesting projects in health, not-for-profits and start-ups.
Our February session focused on product-tising APIs and our speaker, Jason Cormier from Mashery, has put together the following post in case you missed anything.
You can also check out Chris Chinchilla’s summary of the night.
Take it away Jason…
Product Managers: Start Taking Control of Your API Strategy
Let me take you back some 15 or so years ago. The Internet was in its infancy, and the World Wide Web was something mysterious and scary for most people, let alone businesses to think about. Getting yourself online required getting off your land line telephone first.
There were trailblazers of course, those who saw the potential of a new emerging technology and put the first commercial websites online. It was a technical challenge, but they succeeded. They invented the blink tag, the splash page, the shopping cart. E-commerce was born.
During these early years, almost all websites were built and managed by people who worked in IT departments who answered to the strange and slightly kinky sounding title of Webmaster. Eventually however, the power and influence of the technology was recognized as being too valuable and important to the business. Marketing and Product Managers took control and we haven’t looked back since.
You wouldn’t let your IT department plan and run your website strategy today. Yet in most companies, history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to their APIs.
It’s understandable of course, since you may not even know what an API is, let alone why as a Product Manager you MUST own the strategy for APIs within your business. But rest assured, much like the World Wide Web 15 years ago, APIs today present a wide open playing field for businesses to embrace a new emerging technology trend. Whether you act or not there are already trailblazers leading the way, some of whom are likely to become your future competitors.
First, the basics: What is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a technology protocol that enables disparate systems talk to each other, and share information. Think of it like a system of security doors you put in front of your most valuable data, making it accessible only to those who have been given a key.
For example, imagine your business has a proprietary digital storage service that you use to archive important documents. Perhaps you decide to develop a mobile app that requires access to those documents. If your storage service has an API, it makes it easy for the app to access your data. The app is given a unique key, which it uses to request access to documents whenever needed. The API recognizes the key and gives the app access to the documents. Pretty simple, right?
Well, to be fair this analogy is pretty basic. There is a LOT more to APIs of course, it’s a complex piece of technology. And at some point before any API roll out someone has to make decisions about things like data structures, object classes, protocols, authorization tokens, proxies, caching, and more. Given this, you can see why most APIs are currently managed by IT departments. However if you take a step back, if you think like a Product Manager and consider the potential of this technology and what it can do for your business, how it can power your products, how you can better enable external partnerships… you’ll forget about the specs and start to focus on why APIs have the potential to be one of your most valuable commercial drivers.
Value of APIs as a Product
No matter who you work for today your business has digital assets of some kind, from which you are already extracting value. There are 3 main types of assets that are suitable for sharing:
I can guarantee you that no matter what you are currently doing with these assets in your business, there are ways to extract even more value from them. And the key to optimizing the value of your assets is to make them easier to access, via APIs.
What kind of value?
When you have easy, fast access to your assets you can do things like:
Build and iterate your own products much faster. Has your website team built a new search feature? Your mobile apps team can get access to it immediately via the API. For example, Comcast now roll out new features across their products in just 30 minutes when it used to take months. Check out the Comcast success story & webinar where the Senior Director of Product Development & Technology and a Senior Engineer talk about the change and benefits.
Better business intelligence. Want to know which products on which platforms are drawing on your assets most frequently? When everything goes through a single API it’s easier to track. Sensis track all the advertiser impressions generated on their own products AND a range of 3rd party products via their APIs. More on how Mashery helped Sensis.
Facilitate strategic partnerships. Want to see your brand integrated into 3rd party products? It’s as easy as giving them their own API key. Fantasy sports platform, SportData was able to syndicate out to channel partners like Google and Facebook quickly and easily by providing access to their APIs. See how it drives results and ROI.
Introduce new revenue streams. If your assets are valuable to you, maybe they’re valuable to others as well? With APIs you can commercialize your assets by selling access. Choice Hotels are using Mashery technology to assist in generating additional booking revenue via the 6000+ partners they service via their APIs.
There are a myriad of ways you can create and manage your APIs, and that’s definitely something you will need to work with your IT teams to define eventually. But don’t let yourself get lost in those details too early, as can sometimes happen. Focus first on what business goals you as a Product Manager seek to deliver. Hopefully you’re starting to see now, that by treating your API services like a product, you are effectively creating a service platform. A platform that empowers you to make business decisions and take action, without having to engage your IT team to build you something new every single time.
What does a successful API platform look like?
A successful API platform will look like rapid prototyping and faster innovation on the product ideas you have now, preparation and readiness for unknown future opportunities, and a willingness to open yourself up and let others carry some of the burden and risk. It’s not something all companies are necessarily comfortable with – not even Google.
I’ll leave you with a link to the infamous leaked memo issued by Google employee Steve Yegge, who roundly criticized Google for failing to recognize the importance of APIs as a platform back in 2011:
“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.”
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Jason Cormier is the Director of Strategy and Business Development for Mashery in Australia. Mashery works with over 200 brands worldwide to help them manage their APIs in order to build new revenue channels, speed time-to-market, and spur innovation. Find out more at www.mashery.com
This month we have Jason Cormier from Mashery talking about APIs. His session is entitled ‘Your APIs are so product ready, it hurts’. We’ll be at the Mail Exchange at 6p for a 630p start on Thursday Feb 20th. RSVP now!
And our afternoon coffee will be the following Thursday, the 27th, at Brunetti’s at City Square (Swanston & Flinders Ln). We’ll be there from 2-3pm. RSVP now!
You can just turn up for any of our events but we appreciate it when you RSVP as it gives us an idea re: how big of a table to grab at coffee or organising space at Mail Exchange.