One key element of Product Ops is to foster a product lifecycle that achieves business goals. As previously stated, the key goal for most product-led organizations is to deliver valuable products to users. This is not always monetary, so regardless of whether you’re a for-profit, non-profit, or hobby business value is still a critical concept. Product Operations can support this by creating a lifecycle that emphasizes finding and delivering value.
Research & Ideate Phase
Discovering Value What problems does our market have? What solutions can we give them?
Validate Phase
Creating Value Building Prototypes and proving concepts Testing Value Testing hypotheses with real users
Implement Phase
Delivering Value Release valuable functionality to our users Measuring Value Listening to user and buyer feedback
Iterate Phase
Adding value Adjusting our products and services to capture more value for our users and buyers
One of the easiest measures of the value of your product (or a feature) is to attribute revenue to the product. However early stage startups and pre-revenue products don’t have this yardstick with which to measure their value. In my current role, the product I primarily support is pre-revenue, but that hasn’t been an excuse not to provide stakeholders a sense of the value their features bring to market.
To support the decision-making processes, each feature is scored for its value–a combination of impact, pervasiveness, risk tolerance, and alignment to corporate strategies. In the current iteration the equation is:
(How many people want it × How big is the market opportunity × Risk tolerance) × % Aligned to Strategy
While not required for the mathematical operation, the purpose of the parenthesis is to illustrate that first half of the equation sees us increasing the value while the second half decreases the value the further the feature strays from the strategy. This is done to counteract executive whims that may otherwise overtake the prioritization process.
My team re-evaluates the scoring equation each quarter, so unfortunately comparing quarter over quarter is more difficult, but we’re okay with that–because we want to know the value of the feature right now.
I do, however, track how the value estimated is delivered to users. Stealing from the concept of Earned Value, our team scores all the features expected in a period (often a month, quarter, or release) and we award ourselves those points when we release the feature to market.
Feature
Estimated Value
Awarded Value
Total Awarded
A
10 points
10 points
10
B
15 points
not delivered = 0
10
C
5 points
5 points
15
D
10 points
10 points
25
At the end of the period we sum the points awarded to give us a sense of our earned value for the period. We also compare the estimated value (40 points in the above table) and the awarded value (25 points) as a ratio (25:40 = 62.5%) to measure ourselves on our ability to deliver the perceived value within the period in question.
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SAFe has a similar, albeit much simpler process: you simply ask the business owner to score the value of a given feature at the beginning and end of the program increment. One could compare the two measurements to better understand if the delivery of the feature met the business owners’ expectations. My current employer struggles with this method (and thus the more complicated equation above) because they discount the business owners’ opinions and instead prefer to rely on other data.
One important tool Product Operations can help deliver is standardization of product roles. Even in small startups where everyone-does-everything-all-the-time, a job description can help team members and stakeholders ground themselves in the work of the product team.
— Product Vice President— Leads the department. Helps determine what the products will solve based on understanding and development of business goals and objectives. Sets the governance of the product development lifecycle.
— Product Directors and Assistant Directors — Content authority on the product strategy. Helps the team understand What problems to solve. Shares strategy through product roadmaps.
— Product Managers — Understand the market and its problems, and determines what to solve. Helps translate strategy to requirements by defining product themes and features. Coordinates closely with Product Owners, Sales, and Marketing.
— Product Owners— Define stories and prioritize the Development Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or for the team. Is a full member of an Agile development team.
— Business Analysts — Assist product owners and managers by collecting, analyzing and summarizing product data and processes. This can be future-looking by providing market analysis, or current-looking by reviewing and synthesizing existing feature functionality.
— Technical Project Managers— Provides project manager expertise to the product development process. Primary role is as Release Manager for the software.
— Project Managers — Supports the business overall, and Product specifically with project management expertise. Reduces risks and improves transparency across intra- and inter-team work initiatives.
Product management takes a broad view of the work of an enterprise focusing on the customer and success of the product. Product management deals with planning, forecasting, and production or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product life cycle.
A product is anything that can be offered to a market that solves a problem, or satisfies a want or need.
Products have a life cycle consisting of multiple stages, but generally: ideation, development, introduction to the market, growing and evolving the product, and sunsetting.
With a product there is no clear definition of what has to be delivered. even while product management may have a clear deliverable. Customer needs naturally evolve over time, and products must evolve to serve these customer needs. But in the the end product management is about finding and delivering a product to your market.
With products, there are no clear deadlines. A customer might expect a product to meet their needs right NOW and not some future date.
