Product Management Weekly - Issue #13
Weekly curated resources for product managers and strategists
👋🏽 Hello!
Welcome to another week of the PM Blog. This week we focus a bit more on Strategy and Leadership, alongside sharing some insightful articles on Retrospectives and Apple’s $19 price targeting. Enjoy!
As always feedback is highly welcome, so please do let me know on how we can make this newsletter better via comments on this post. Thank you 🙏🏽
📜 General
Remote Retrospectives: 11 Tips for Leading Retros Remotely
Article: https://blog.planview.com/remote-retrospectives-11-tips-for-leading-retros-remotely/
tl;dr; Product retrospectives are an incredibly helpful tool giving team members an opportunity to celebrate, learn and bond with each other. They not only help highlight gaps, but also help provide space to the team. Engaging in a healthy and open discussion in retrospectives can be tricky, and doing it remotely adds another dimension of challenge. Alex in this articles suggests 8 tips for running successful remote retrospectives:
8 tips from the article for running successful retrospectives 👇🏽
Tip #1: Make sure you get the right people “in the room”
Tip #2: Allow participants to invite others
Tip #3: Make sure everyone knows what the retro is about
Tip #4: Find the right facilitator
Tip #5: Carefully strike a balance between ‘what went well’ with ‘what could be improved’
Tip #6: Encourage shoutouts (acknowledge contributions to the project/event)
Tip #7: Give everyone the power to unmute themselves!
Tip #8: Acknowledge contributions to the discussion
📜 Product Leadership
Article: link
tl;dr; Gergely in this article shares an aggregation of tips from PMs and founders for EMs and engineers to work better with them. Some key highlights include:
Communicate and clarify the tech debt being introduced and its effect on future user experience
Over-communicate on blockers, delivery and execution
Occasionally do a two-way re-phrasing of customer needs (from EM) to technical implementation (from PM). This helps ensure product and engineering understand each other
Keep decisions visible and discoverable, as this makes working a lot easier
Don’t hesitate to share ideas and brainstorm with your PMs
📜 Strategy
Article: https://www.reforge.com/blog/the-product-strategy-stack
tl;dr; The article goes into details with example illustrating how the perceived difficulty in prioritization is often a strategy issue and not an execution issue. It is often hard to make rigorous prioritization decisions when the guidance or framework on how to do so is missing and unclear. The article proposes a product strategy stack which comprises of mission, company strategy, product strategy, product roadmap and product goals. Each layer in this stack builds on the previous layer i.e. each layer serves as a prerequisite for the successive layer.
The article describes common misconceptions which the teams might fall into while using this stack, namely:
Misconception #1: Goals = Strategy
Misconception #2: Achieving Goals = Achieving Strategy
Misconception #3: Product Strategy = Company Strategy
Misconception #4: Goal → Roadmap
The article goes into details on what a poor Product Strategy feel like? Some elements of these may include:
There is difficulty in prioritizing between features for different user segments
There is miscommunication within teams and teams are doing overlapping and disjoint work.
The UX gets muddied because of unclear UX as a strategy is missing, and ultimately user’s have to pay a price.
Teams are focusing on short-terms wins mostly rather than longer term value creation.
Lack of a poor strategy has a bad effect on team morale and may ultimately lead to churn.
📜 Growth/Adoption/Retention
Why the $19 price tag for polishing cloth *actually* makes sense for Apple
Article: link
tl;dr; If you have heard of the “Odd Pricing Effect” i.e. prices ending in 9 signal a deal and drive more consumer demand as compared to a round whole number, along with the “Left pricing bias” i.e. people read numbers from left to right and are anchored on the first digit, you may have already guessed the answer.
If you have the same item priced at $34, $39 and $44 - the item priced at $39 will be your best seller (mostly*). Since Apple products signify a premium product in the market, and taking into account above principles, pricing at $9 would not make the product be perceived of “premium category”, whereas $29 might be too expensive, hence $19 is the sweet spot.
📜 Design
Article: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-impact/
tl;dr; This articles shows the results of the survey conducted by NNGroup on Journey Maps. To make this summary more meaningful, I have aggregated the learnings with Journey Mapping 101 to present an interesting read for the user:
Survey Results:
Most successful journey maps are created collaboratively with a team of individuals as compared to those which are created independently and have a lower success rate.
As expected with the shift towards digitalization, today most of people create journey maps with digital tools rather than tangible tools (wall-mounted paper, sticky notes, stickers)
Based on survey results journey mapping has moderately successful results
Journey maps are useful generally if you are building a product because they not only force you to have a conversation on user experience and but also help create a shared understanding for the whole team. Such a shared understanding is crucial not only for understanding the end state and success metrics, also for achieving faster buy-in.
📜 Fun Learnings
That’s it folks!