Expanding your product team with no additional resources

I don't know about you, but I crave feedback. Whether it's about the job I'm doing in my role or about the products I build, feedback is the lifeblood that keeps me going, keeps me motivated, and keeps me innovative.

When it comes to Product Managers, we should feel the same way. Without a large number of diverse inputs, the chances of creating the right outputs are slim.

You may work in an organization with a dedicated research arm, but even then, you have to be proactive about taking that feedback, synthesizing it, and finding ways to leverage it for better product outputs.

But if you're like me and work for an organization too small to have a dedicated research team or person, then the need for proactively seeking out inputs is even more vital.

Our human nature tells us to take the path of least resistance, so what do we do? Either we don't look for feedback and assume we're right about our hypotheses, or we only look for feedback that confirms our hypothesis. Psychologists call this 'confirmation bias.'

Even when we ask our peers on the product team, our designers, our developers, and maybe our QA team for feedback, we're still only scratching the surface of the inputs we should be receiving.

Every department and individual in your company who touches your product will have a unique perspective from where they sit and what they do day-to-day. Whether you think your product impacts their processes or not, it does. And their processes impact user acquisition, activation, and retention.

Regardless of department of title, whoever touches your product is and should be viewed as part of your product team. And if the processes, from the top of the marketing funnel down to customer success and retention, aren't aligned and interwoven, then you'll never see the results you could otherwise.

In fact, without an interwoven process and cross-departmental alignment, you put your company at risk of finger pointing and playing the blame game. Is marketing not doing their job well, or does the product or feature not meet a real need? Does marketing even know the jobs your product gets hired for by the customer? - I wrote a separate article on this topic: https://jfontenot36.wixsite.com/startfast/post/you-re-selling-yourself-short-with-jobs-to-be-done

Rather than remaining in your silo and possibly coming out for ad hoc feedback every now and then, you should start treating members of other departments as part of your product team. They interact daily with the customer, and their inputs are incredibly valuable.

By unofficially adopting the folks marketing your product, selling it, supporting it, and testing it, you create a company-wide product team, and you become the decision maker of how that feedback gets shaped and shipped.

The benefits of systematizing this internal feedback loop are tremendous! Here are just a handful of the positive outcomes you'll see:

1) A better aligned organization

2) Greater levels of buy-in from the other departments

3) Product advocates who freely share information

4) Better products being shipped

5) Happier customers who are more effectively supported

So, let's get really practical about this. If you're serious about shedding your ego and shipping better products, here's a framework you can use to get started shipping better products or better features to your existing products:

Step 1: Market Research

It's important to get outside of your company. We can easily get biased by what our products do and the jobs they get hired for today. But if we never pick our heads up to look above the trees, we might never see the fire barreling down on us to destroy the forest we've grown to love. Think of DVD rentals being the forest Blockbuster enjoyed and Netflix as the fire.

Even outside of disruptive innovation, there are incremental innovations that could provide your competitors with a competitive advantage, and you should keep your ear to the market to understand how even incremental innovations could impact your business.

Customer Feedback

With an understanding of the market and why certain customers are hiring other products to do their jobs, it's important to understand your own customers. There's two key areas of focus for understanding current customers.

1) You want to know which of their jobs you solve really well.

You can use this information to equip your product marketing team with precise messaging around specific jobs that you may not even realize your products are being hired to do. Without talking to customers, you're left assuming. And you know what they say about those who assume...

2) You need to find out why customers are churning.

There's two different sets of customer problems. There are customers who complain and customers who churn. Prioritize fixing the problems that cause churn. Nothing will ever be perfect in this life, and your product is no different. So, as long as you have a product, there will be SOMEONE with SOMETHING to say. But if it's not causing churn, it shouldn't be prioritized over what is.

Internal Feedback

Ditto to everything about customer feedback. Members of other departments can provide similar insights as to what customers are complaining about and why they're churning.

The other type of feedback you want to understand, and needs to come from inside the company, is around process. The better processes can be optimized, the better experience your customers will have, and the likelihood of churn goes down.

However, there can be things about your product that drive the processes of other departments. If there's ways you can tweak your product that helps improve the marketing, sales, support, or implementation of it, then you've found a major win!

Prioritization

This is really your job as a product managers. You have to take all the inputs and prioritize them. Your prioritization matrix may look different from another product manager at another company, but variables such as time/cost to develop (feasibility), the return on investment from the effort (viability), and the level of market/customer demand (desirability) should usually drive the priority.

Wireframing

Now that you know what you need to do, this is the perfect time to wireframe or map out workflows of how you expect the product or feature to work. It's critical to involve your developers at this point, because they understand what goes on "under the hood" better than anyone. They'll be able to offer great suggestions and clarify what's feasible. I've seen even small suggestions on workflow reduce the amount of development time by weeks, and the outcome is virtually the same.

Prototyping

This is where things get fun (at least for me). You've gotten market feedback and done your market research. Customers have informed you of what they love and hate, and you know the difference between complaints and the reasons for churn. Employees in other departments help you understand their processes and what they see going on with customers at the different touch points in those processes.

You've taken all that feedback and prioritized what you're going to do differently (or in addition in the case of a new feature).

Whether simple mockups or iterations on high-fidelity designs that exist from your already shipped product, it's time to prototype.

The friendly customers who love to give feedback and the employees who interact with your product and your customers everyday, those are the same people you should involve throughout the rest of the product development lifecycle, starting now!

It's the perfect time to share your synthesis of the many inputs you received and how you came to the decisions you did. Transparency goes a long way for gaining trust, and trust earns buy-in. Don't let the initial feedback be the last time your customers and co-workers hear from you until the product is shipped...

If you can go through a few iterations on the designs and prototypes before any code is laid down, then you'll save yourself costly development cycles later on. Whether you're conducting usability sessions manually or using platforms such as UserTesting (https://www.usertesting.com/ ), it's amazing how many false assumptions you'll find you made in those initial designs and in your prototypes of how the product will work.

Ship It!

Have you ever shipped software or a physical product and only showed it off to the world AFTER it was shipped?

What happened? You might hear some applause, but often times you'll get questions that bring up points you never considered. You leave the "announcement party" dismayed and with a list of items to either hot fix or include as gap items for a future release.

But if you've taken your customers and your cross-departmental stakeholders along for the ride with you, throughout the software development lifecycle, the announcements party will actually feel like something worth celebrating. Everyone will feel part of the processes, and the level of cross-organizational ownership will only increase! And there's nothing better than a company filled with individuals who take ownership for the success of the business.

Conclusion

You may not have a ton of resources. You probably don't have a dedicated research team. But now there's a simple way to expand your product team, and you'll ship better products because you did!

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