Episode 31: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Democratizing User Research, Product Team Visions, and Too Many Features
Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about which part of an organization really owns user research, the scope of a product team’s vision and strategy, and how to tell when your product has too many features.
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Q: How do you delineate the goals of product manager and product marketing research? [2:03]
A: First off, we need to get rid of this notion that one team owns user research at any company. User research needs to be democratized, and it needs to help everybody; the closer a company stays to its customers the better the products are… What we need to start doing is defining why we're doing user research. What hypotheses are we actually answering when we go out and do it? Which teams are doing that?... We all have to be product people… staying in touch with our customer is the whole point of building great products, so I would focus on what you're trying to learn and how it's different from what other teams are learning. [2:41]
Q: Should every product manager have a 2 to 10-year vision and strategy, or should each respective PM rather craft division and strategy only covering the current strategic intent? [7:27]
A: Here's the thing about visions: 2 to 10 years is a very wide range for visions, and it does make sense, but it depends on what level you're at. There are many many different levels of visions; there’s a company vision which should be 5 to 10 years out… then there's the product suite vision which is what the CPO is responsible for and should be 3 to 5 years out. Now we go onto the individual product visions, which is what the product managers own: how do these individual products or value streams roll up into that vision of the suite of product, and what does each one do to deliver value? That's gonna be in a shorter time horizon than the suite of products and it really just depends on how far along and mature each product is. If you believe you can reach the vision of your company in five years, sweet! Your strategic intents are probably going to be on a six month to one year time horizon, maybe one year to 1 and a half. [8:40]
Q: How do you know when you have too many features in your product? Any suggestions on how to change the mindset that more is better? [13:26]
A: Everybody forgets that it’s not free to maintain software, so introduce the notion of cost into your organization, especially your product organization. I [would] advise product leaders to do an audit of their features and products from a cost and revenue standpoint. Step one is to figure out what you spend in the year to maintain all your features… Also, don't just think in terms of tech, look at support too. Once you have that, let's think about any improvements you’ll need to make for the next year to maintain it, and how much that would cost as well. So now we have a cost, and now we compare it to the revenue that we get from those features. [14:01]
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