Why does our product’s functionality not consistently exceed customer needs?

Business leaders today define functionalities that need to be worked on and pass down to technical product managers verbally or through documentation of various degrees of quality.

Technical product managers are then responsible for translating these requirements into working software by working with EA and engineering teams.

Business leaders are responsible for running the whole business line often have many other responsibilities aside product management. They do not have the full bandwidth to talk to customers, study data, experiment, innovate, work with user experience design, work with compliance, risk, finance and every other internal role needed to be consulted.

The lack of a deliberate and careful product discovery process stemming mostly from lack of bandwidth is what has led to products that are are just functional and rarely exceed customer’s expectations.

Why is our product UX shit?

Most of our user experience design team do not design anything today, they just paint.

They often do not own the user journey, test it, mostly lack technical depth in human interaction design and are sometimes disconnected from the product development process. Vetting designs has been the responsibility of the business leader or even TPMs rather than with customers themselves.

Why is our product engineering quality is not great?

1. We lack mature software development practices that should include unit tests and automated functional tests

2. Engineering teams do not have complete ownership and observability of production. This role has been solely given to the technical support teams

3. Engineering teams do not know the limits and scale ratings of their services

4. Engineering teams are sometimes not given clear specifications that can allow them design the systems to work appropriately and allow for change in the long term

5. Engineering teams spend valuable time building products that do not provide value to customers, and have not been not validated with customers. This means they needlessly incur technical debt, and consumes their time so they do not have capacity to work on strategically important projects

6. Business product teams are not prioritising paying technical debts.

Why are most product team members disconnected from business realities, meaning empathy is lost?

Most teams get handed instructions and deadlines with some briefing of the reason for the initiative from their business leaders.

TPMs and engineers often participate in turning these instructions into working products but do not participate in the risk and rewards of the outcomes.

Many other functions are often not aware of the initiatives and only hear by happenstance either through the grapevine or from customers.

The lack of ownership of business outcomes hence often make the teams disconnected and lose business and customer empathy.

Solving these problems

How will our product’s functionality consistently exceed customer needs?

The process of producing products that customers will love is not by accident. It comes from understanding the customer through qualitative and quantitative analysis of customer’s needs and behaviours, superimposed with internal considerations from functions such as growth, compliance, risk, market share, sustainability, etc.

Business leaders with medium to large scopes do not have the bandwidth for thorough analysis of these considerations. To do this properly, Business Product Managers, shortened to ‘Product Managers’ will need to fill this role.

Product managers will now be responsible to achieving the organisation’s product objectives by co-owning KPIs that are assigned to them together with their product teams.

They will be working with the various other functions to meet these objectives by launching initiatives with them that will cause changes to these KPIs to reach the goals set. Essentially, we are elevating the role of product management.

How will our UX no longer be shit?

Once product managers have clarity on what needs to be built, the responsibility of crafting this into an awesome, well thought through user experience is on the UX Designer role.

Working from a position of thorough understanding of human interface design, they will make protoype designs which they will go test with customers and ensure the customers don't need to think to use the product.

They will decide using existing design framework the layouts, actions, animations, nudges, layering etc. that ensures customers find our product intuitive and easy to use.

UX designers will no longer be painters but owners of user’s experience through embracing world-class design systems, feedback and iteration through qualitative and quantitative analysis.

How will our product engineering quality be better?

1. We will now mandate automated functional testing, fuller unit test coverage, static code analysis etc. Engineers will now be responsible for automating functional tests while working with QA analysts

2. If you build it, you own it. There will be automated measurements of service level KPIs and the results will affect team appraisal

3. Engineering teams will be expected to load test and rate their services to know their production limits

4. Improved product management will ensure requirements are clear and minimise changes in the product specification. Deliberate product iterations will afford engineering to also deliberately evolve the services to meet business objectives

5. Engineering teams will no longer spend time building products that do not provide value to customers, or are not validated with customers. This will reduce the volume of tasks they are required to complete, allowing them to focus on the most important work

6. The Product Manager directed teams will now have a complete view of all the initiatives that need to be worked on from growth to compliance and to technical debt. This will allow the teams to balance the need building new features with cleanups along the way.

How will product team members will be connected to business realities and gain empathy?

Everyone in teams and sub-teams will now be appraised on the basis of the performance of their teams and sub teams as a community.

Team and sub-team KPIs are visible to everyone. With this visibility and community appraisal, we expect everyone to be accountable to each other and band together to reach business objectives.