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:

• going to Oaks Day
• renting a car
• dealing with a lost myki
• buying tickets for the Grand Final
• finding a job/recruitment
• renting a car for a business trip

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:

• Entice – how does the customer become aware
• Enter – how does the customer begin the engagement with your service
• Engage – what are the points of interaction they can have with you and your offering
• Exit – how does the experience close out
• Extend – how could you extend 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

• Starting is the hardest part.
• Mapping takes time. Ensure you have committed time with stakeholders and time to both learn AND fail.
• Your maps will evolve over time.
• This isn’t rocket science! But it is a powerful tool to share with others in order to gain agreement & understanding.

Interested in learning more?

• The Anatomy of an Experience Map / Adaptive Path
• Designing CX

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!!

RSVP

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:

• a visual tool for capturing and presenting key insights into customer interactions
• an important tool to build empathy with customers. A way to ‘step into the shoes of the customer’ by understanding their current reality.

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!

RSVP

Building a mobile product is a hot topic, as everyone struggles to be the next Angry Birds.  But in the mad rush to ship a product everyone loves, we often forget to think through the user experience and what is necessary for a great user journey.

That’s where the Innovation Game ‘Product Box‘ comes in. At our August session, Luke Chambers introduced us to the game and said we were going to work on a mobile variation.

For the digital crowd, ‘Design the box’ takes us back to our software roots when software was packaged in boxes. It also builds on decades of consumer packaging to work out what is important to get a user to buy this cereal or gadget.

The object of the game is to take a real life physcial box and decorate it to represent the product. What are the features? Benefits? System requirements? Logos and taglines?

The physical box is both fun and important because there is limited real estate, different viewpoints and it becomes a tangible thing for the team to discuss.

Luke led us through the user experience journey and common pitfalls in the mobile space.

We were then challenged. We needed to create a fitness app. Easy! That required no user input. Hmmmm…

One group, Simplifit, aimed to allow users without any energy to create fitness goals and compete with their friends – and to aim low mysteriously.

iCoach brough Skynet to life as an exercise app

Pole Position was a bio sensor that tracked your movments, gave feedback on your technique and naturally compared against your friends.

Finally we had to sell the box. A representative from each team would explain the features of the app and how they designed the outside of the box to suit.

Prizes were awarded to the Pole Position team; Matt, George, Nadia and Steve.

Overall we had a great time and people were keen to take this technique back to their teams to help clarify the vision and purpose of the products we are managing.

We would like to thank Luke from UX Mastery for leading the fantastic session and inspiring the participants.

Our session for June was about balancing the customer need and stakeholder demands. The session was run by Mat Vine who has a wealth of experience to draw on for this topic. Mat organised his presentation into the top 6 factors to look out for to keep the customer need in focus as stakeholder demands creep into the product design process.

A perennial business challenge is the balance between delivering customer value vs business success. Developing a new product is complex and as you begin to get into the details, sometimes you get too far away from the original customer need you were planning to solve! To keep from “diluting the proposition” you need to champion the need through the entire process.

6 Factors to Help Balance Customer Need & Stakeholder Demand

1. Pick your business outcome

The outcome can be a range of things but make sure it is what people actually strive for and not what your KPI is.  For example, it is quite common for profit share to be the KPI at a company, yet people will be drawn to a different measure such as growing market share. Examples of business outcomes you could use:

• Profit
• Revenue
• Market Share
• Sales volume
• Revenue per sale

2. Be very clear on your customer need

[pullquote]You can never be too passionate on the customer need in the business[/pullquote]

An example Mat covered here was Adidas sponsorship of the London Olypmics. Adidas set up Adi-zones around London that had free use of sporting equipment. The intention was to help get young people, who might not otherwise have an opportunity, active and involved in sport. It worked out well for Adidas as they ended up with a 2% growth in market share, and £100M increase in apparel sales.

3. Choose your time horizon but never ignore the long term

One of the stories shared here was about the strategy of HR companies in the US going aggressively after market share. To gain customers they dramatically undercut the price of the software which meant in the short term they were not making profit at all. This approach eventually led to being able to sell the company off for a significant value due to the customer numbers they had to offer to whomever acquired them. The question in the back of the audiences mind however, is how much work the new company will have to do to be able to move those customers to a profitable state.

4. There are many levers to work with – choose wisely

There are many levers you can use to achieve balance in customer value and business outcome. If you don’t have enough customer value but doing ok with profit, then you are in a great position to add value/ features consistent with your CVP. If you are not delivering enough profit then it’s much more difficult because you need to remove features and value… you can replace with other features that cost less but have high perceived value, or remove features that aren’t highly valued by customers

5. Know your stakeholder and embrace stakeholder management

The image Mat used in his presentation did cause the audience to laugh. A reflection of the fact that we know this is such a critical part of a product managers job, but every now and then it isn’t always the favourite part. Anyway, the advice offered by Mat was to work towards you stakeholders being:

70% convinced, 100% committed

One of our audience asked Mat if he used this statement in front of people, and he said he did. He found that calling out clearly where people were at with their belief in an idea, could help with uncovering what was holding people back.

The other piece of advice was to start early with stakeholder management, the earlier they on the path with you the better. At this point, Mat wondered if perhaps he should have had time on his list. Time can give you many advantages but one key on is to allow you to work through all stakeholder concerns.

6. Decide what’s important with your Customer Value Proposition (CVP) – and champion it

Some good discussion occurred around this point, with some thoughts shared on how to help make sure the core vision isn’t lost and does get communicated and cascaded to everyone. The audience had very mixed experiences with how hard or easy this is to do, and at times astonishment that it even needs doing. This led us nicely into further conversations at the bar.

A fantastic night, newcomers, old faces and time to chat with each other afterwards as well. Join us for our next event on the 24th of July or coffee on June 26th.

Join us on Thursday evening June 19th for ‘Do Stakeholders and Customers EVER see eye to eye?’

We’ll be discussing:

• How do you balance customer need against business requirements
• How do you connect the right customer need to the right business outcome
• The importance of identifying drivers for each stakeholder group – and their value
• What’s important? What can be compromised?
• What has worked & not worked
• What happens when things don’t go as planned

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 next event will be a session on Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

We’ll cover:

• what is MVP – and what isn’t it
• how do you ensure MVP is really testing your assumptions
• what you can learn from MVP

Hear from other product manager folk and founders about their trials and tribulations with getting to an MVP and if it worked or not.  We will take questions from the audience for the panel and encourage discussion amongst our speakers and audience.

Our facilitator will be Jock Busuttil, Founder of Product People.

Jock is a product management consultant, author and startup mentor with over thirteen years’ experience working in technology. He is the founder of Product People Limited, author of imanageproducts and has a book coming out soon to be published by Hachette / Grand Central. Flick him any questions you would like to ask on MVP or of the panel @jockbu

We have a great panel of product managers and start-up founders joining us to share their experiences. Let us introduce them:

Susan Teschner, Super Product Manager at 99designs

Susan’s degree in Political Science qualified her for nothing, but her journey through the ranks of product management sure has. Having tried her hand at all angles of product, Susan’s found that straying too far from either the thinking or the doing makes her seriously cranky pants. She’s most happy building collaborative, creative and generally ass-kicking teams, learning daily, delivering on a shared vision and laughing hard along the way.

Currently looking after a few teams of engineers, UX and product managers, Susan’s work growing 99designs — the world’s largest marketplace for graphic design — keeps the cranky pants away.

Tom Howard, Co-founder Adioso

Adioso is a new kind of flight search engine, that supports unmatched flexibility on destinations, dates and other travel motivators.  Adioso was initially launched as an MVP in January 2008, and due to the complexities of the travel industry, has taken till 2014 to reach maturity.  Tom is now working on a mobile-focused flight search & booking application.  He will talk about the MVP that initially launched Adioso, contrasted with the one he is currently building for mobile”.

Emma Stabey, Senior Product Manager – Candidate Experience, SEEK Limited

Emma Stabey is a Senior Product Manager at Australia’s #1 online employment site, SEEK.com.au. In her time at SEEK she has managed the experience and vision for SEEK’s first foray into iOS apps, and evolved the candidate profile on the desktop channel with the aim of creating a more personalised experience, and is about to take on a new role to head up the Product team for SEEK Learning.

Janet Horwell, Product engineer at Geoplex 

Janet Horwell is a Product Engineer at Geoplex, a GIS mapping services company. She’s been working in a team on a dashboard MVP and will be running through her experience in measuring risk and validating a concept to the point of MVP.

We look forward to you joining us!

Note the new day of the week and location: Wednesday night at 99designs, level 2, 41 Stewart St, RIchmond, which is just behind Richmond station.

Time: 6-6:30pm arrival & drinks. Talk starts at 6:30pm. We wrap up about 8pm.