Best Practices For Setting Outcomes - Deepstash
Top 7 books for Product Managers

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Top 7 books for Product Managers

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Best Practices For Setting Outcomes

  • They are negotiated between the team of designers, product & engineering people on one hand, and the leadership.
  • Ambitious outcomes work better than SMART goals. 
  • Some learning missions should proceed with performance outcomes. "Improving retention is a useless goal if you don't understand what causes the churn". 
  • No individual outcomes. They have to be felt by a multidisciplinary product team. 
  • Don't chase too many outcomes. One or two per quarter should be enough. 

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Continuous Discovery Framework

  1. Begin with the end in mind. Decide the main business outcomes that require discovery.
  2. Assemble the team, a trio (ideally) made of a product manager, a designer & an engineer.
  3. To reach the desired outcome(s), a product trio must discover & exp...

141

838 reads

Opportunities (Not Problems)

Opportunities (Not Problems)

We are thought that products have to solve problems to be valuable (vitamin vs aspirin analogy). But the best products started without a clear problem to solve. Facebook, Disney etc....

Opportunities encompass customer needs, pain points & desires. Think opportunit...

145

755 reads

Opportunity Mapping

Opportunity Mapping

The insights from interviews should allow a product team to evolve a map of opportunities that could be considered for solutions:

  • The map is presented as a tree. Some parent opportunities can have multiple nodes. The product team needs to combine similar ones or maintain a hierarchy.

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Visualize what you know: Experience Map

Visualize what you know: Experience Map

It represents an artifact that helps a team uncover opportunities. It starts with a question related to the outcome (for example "how do people entrain themselves with videos?" if the goal is to increase time spent with a streaming app):

  • Each member of the team shares a doodle...

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540 reads

Keystone Discovery Habit: Continuous Interviewing

Keystone Discovery Habit: Continuous Interviewing

Customers don't know what they want but talking to them is still useful. "What needs, pain points or desires matter the most?" is the fundamental question:

  • Instead of direct questions ask users to share stories about their experience. We lie to ourselves all the time so direct...

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446 reads

"Whether Or Not?" vs "What Else?"

"Should we build this feature?" is a question product people ask themselves a lot. It's a mistake. 

  • Instead, develop a "compare and contrast" mindset. Ask instead "which of these customer needs is more important?"
  • Instead of falling in love with you...

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633 reads

Types Of Outcomes

Managing by outcome is only as good as the defined outcome. There are 3 types, starting from the general to the actionable:

  • Business outcomes start with financial metrics(revenue, costs) or market share. 
  • Product outcomes. Measure how the produ...

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508 reads

The Hidden Assumptions

The Hidden Assumptions

Every proposed solution is based on assumptions, which are hard to spot. One way to spot them is to imagine the solution is already functional and then draw a story map with all the steps. Assumptions will become clear:

- The user will engage with our product: Desirability Assumptio...

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466 reads

Delivery vs Discovery

Delivery vs Discovery

Agile methodologies revolutionized how products are being built. But building is just half of the problem. Deciding what to build is just as (if not more) important. 

Deciding what to build is discovery. Shipping is delivery. 

Discovery needs to be treated as an activ...

146

1.97K reads

Mindsets For Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery requires a certain mindset. That is more important than a framework:

  1. Outcome-oriented: success should be defined by the impact of the code not the quantity of the code.
  2. Customer-centric: the user is the key shareholder.

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1.18K reads

Discovering the Solution Space

Once the product team decides to pursue an opportunity solutions can be considered:

  • Avoid brainstorming - an illusion of group productivity. Groups generate few similar mediocre ideas. Best ideas are generated alone and discussed as a group.
  • Ideally, you should have 10-15 solut...

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440 reads

The Opportunity Solution Tree

The Opportunity Solution Tree

Is a simple way to visually represent the path one may take to reach a milestone. It is the main system of record for tracking the discovery process:

  • The root of the tree is the desired business outcome
  • Next are the opportunities, the needs, and desires of the customers we can ...

146

655 reads

CURATED FROM

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vladimir

Life-long learner. Passionate about leadership, entrepreneurship, philosophy, Buddhism & SF. Founder @deepstash.

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