Do you have a Product Culture?
Product Managers live by post-it notes
Does your firm have a Product Manager? And if not, should it?
I don’t mean a Product Development Manager or one of countless other titles that, generally, mean a salesperson.
I mean a Product Manager of the kind that the world of tech now considers to be standard.
There’s nothing about the #TechCity way of doing things that is inherently right. A culture of beer fridges and ping pong suits some organisations; ties and hierarchy suits others.
But on this, techland has got it right; the Product Manager is a great invention.
Why a Product Manager?
The role of a Product Manager is to listen to customers, determine what they like and dislike about the product and then break down the necessary improvements into bite-sized chunks and monitor delivery.
If you’ve not worked with a Product Manager before, you’ll probably struggle to visualise one. When they’re pulling in from the customer, they tend to be a bit like a senior marketer. They listen a lot, ask questions a lot and try to find solutions. They tend to be data-driven, though, in working out which questions to ask.
When they’re driving through delivery, they’re more like a project manager. They tend to be one of the most important people in the organisation, and they get stuff done.
Crucially, however, they can only succeed if they have a mandate to do so. Their organisational environment needs to be one in which delivery of product improvement is the single most important reason why everyone comes to work.
“Customer… customer… customer? No, not getting it.”
This is where the traditional public transport industry sometimes falls down. Locked in a bubble of regulatory compliance and contract delivery, doing the right thing for the customer can almost feel like a dirty word. Customers can be treated by corporates rather like a greedy nephew by an up-tight uncle: grudgingly given a sweet in the expectation that it won’t do any good and will probably just encourage him to ask for another.
(Nina Lockwood talks about this culture more on The Freewheeling Podcast)
But the reality is that the Product Manager’s insight tends to be rigorously based in customer data, and entirely driven by reducing friction in the purchase funnel.
The vast majority of Product Managers employed today are employed in tech businesses, in which the purchase funnel is the journey through a website. But does it have to?
Experiments
Let’s imagine a Product Manager looking at your bus stop purchase funnel. They’d probably start by trying to calculate how many people want to make the journey that your service offers. Not people who are already your customers: total people. Then they’d talk to those that aren’t using your service to find out the barriers that put them off. They’d talk to those that are and try to understand their pain points in doing so. They’d figure that if they fix the pain points for existing customers, they’ll probably generate more demand from those that don’t use the product. Then they’d do some experiments to work out if making changes based on these insights deliver empirically better business results.
So, perhaps, if they found out that not knowing the times was a barrier and not knowing where the buses go to was another barrier, they’d put a leaflet through ¼ of doors in a street with a timetable, ¼ of doors in a street with a map showing the destination name from your local stop, ¼ of doors in a street with both and ¼ of doors in a street would get nothing. They’d give each a call to action to make sure each was personally attributable and find out who’s behaviour changed.
All this stuff is, of course, much easier online. But while, at present, most experiments are digital as Product Managers tend to be found in online businesses, I cannot think of a good reason why the skills couldn’t be applied to a more analogue environment as well. (Though they’d probably spend quite a bit of time trying to find ways to increase digital conversion as digital = data).
Involvement
Once they’ve done their small-scale experiment, they’d know the value of solving that particular customer problem. Let’s say it turned out that knowing the precise location of the bus stop had the biggest empirical benefit. Of course, it’s not sustainable to put a leaflet through every door on the patch, so they’d then summon together a working group of the relevant people and give them the task of solving the problem at scale. A good Product Manager will be entirely clear on the goal but leave it to the team to find out how to get there. Product Managers hate people ‘jumping to conclusions’ on how to solve a problem; and despises the corporate convention of the answer being decided by the most senior person present.
The working group would be given the space and freedom to come up with the ideas and the Product Manager would help test them to ensure that they actually achieved the empirical goal.
Once the answer was known, the Product Manager would break the solution down into bite-sized chunks.
One step at a time
Let’s say that the answer to this particular problem was to integrate bus stop destinations into Google Maps. So instead of the pictogram being simply a bus picture, it was a bus picture and destination; a bit like the way restaurants are shown with both a knife and fork symbol and a name (I am, by the way, entirely making this up: I have no evidence this would make anything better for anyone).
The Product Manager knows that this is a big, scary task, so they break it down into bite-sized chunks and give each bite-size chunk to the relevant person to do. With a deadline. Even better, of course, the team that the Product Manager is part of has become sufficiently fluid, that it does the breaking, allocating and deadline-setting itself.
Often a Product Manager will organise life through organised sprints. The company works to a two-week cadence and within the two week sprint, each person has a defined task that contributes to the overall goal. Crucially to this working, everyone knows that the Product Manager started this with experiments, and those experiments delivered empirical results. If we all do our bit, the company’s performance will improve.
Product Culture
A product culture can work wonders for an organisation but it has to be embraced. That’s a lot easier for a small startup that builds around it from the start than for a corporate monolith. But product thinking is all about small-scale experiments, creating empirical evidence and then scaling up what works.
Perhaps, therefore, now is the time for a few small-scale product culture experiments. If you’re a bigger company, where’s the business or territory in your business that has a forward-thinking leadership team, the desire to grow but no framework in which to do it? Perhaps that’s the place to drop in the traditional transport industry’s first proper Product Manager?
