Shifting Gears: From Feature Factory to Outcome-Driven Product Management
The term “Outcome Driven” gets thrown around a lot these days. This is something you might have heard from the leadership of your team one to many times when working on a product. But are you really working with an outcome-driven team? Is your business actually focused on outcomes?
There have been many instances where although people are talking about becoming outcome-driven, they are still performing as a “Feature Factory”.
In Product Management, being called a feature factory is rather derogatory and is used as a way of indicating that the business is moving in the wrong direction. Before looking into how we can avoid becoming a feature factory, first, we need to understand what it is, and how we might fall into this trap.
What is?
When we call a Product Team a Feature factory, it means that the team is releasing features after features without adding any value to the product.
It refers to a business that is focused on delivering output rather than outcomes.
The businesses that measure success by how much and how often new feature is shipped without measuring the Return of Investment makes them a feature factory.
Sounds familiar? Now, no team wants to go down this path. But we fall into this trap unintentionally when,
We do not validate the idea before building and take no feedback from the users after releasing.
It’s like the team is jumping from one feature to another without looking back at what impact they just delivered. For these teams, getting the features out means they are successful.
What leads to becoming a feature factory:
Intuitive Leadership:
Leadership demands features based on what they “think” is valuable. When the leadership is over-confident in their intuition without gathering any information or evidence, Product Managers become less confident about delivering value. The team then delivers what the leadership wants to see, not what is actually valuable.
Lack of a clear Product Strategy:
The teams that do not have a clear goal as to why they are doing what they are doing, are focused on only delivering what is asked to them. These types of teams do not have a clear vision, and strategy which makes them output oriented. They don’t think about how they can make the product better. They are only focused on developing the feature and meeting the deadline.
Un-measured feature impact:
After a product team delivers a feature, it must be measured with respect to user adoption, retention, and how it has or has not played a role in revenue generation. When product teams do not measure these metrics and focus on new features one after another without taking a buffer time for proper research and analytics, they end up losing the bigger picture.
Moving on…
Now that we know what the feature factories are doing, let’s get into what we must actually do.
Becoming outcome driven does not happen overnight. It happens when teams put effort to build systems for feedback and analysis. We must work on the process, people, and much more.
Here are some steps we can take as product managers to make create a culture of delivering outcomes:
Collaborate
When an idea is brought up by the leadership, try to analyze it with respect to the current state of the product. Collaborate with the stakeholders to take a design thinking approach and come up with creative and strategic ways to bring the idea to life.
Work on the Product Strategy, Vision, and Objectives
For the product strategy and Vision, you would want to work closely with the leadership to understand their aspirations and vision. Try to build your northstar metric and align your short-term goals with the broad strategy. Outline the objectives of each feature and their impact to the Product strategy. Create milestones for the product as well as the team.
Listen and Analyze
Listen to the customers but do your research. Sometimes the users’ feedback can be overwhelming which can drive Product Managers to go along with the requests without necessary research. The goal is to spend time with your users and try to find the underlying pain points, not just build their feature requests.
Deliver value, not just requests.
Another important thing we can do as a Product Manager is to change the way we communicate. Instead of communicating about features, try providing updates about the value you are targeting to provide. Do not just talk about the features, talk about the impact. Talk about why we are doing what we are doing.
Understand what the lifecycle should be.
Conclusion
The first step toward solving a problem is knowing that there is a problem. Not validating an idea before building it is a problem, not analyzing the impact of that idea is a problem. Wearing a product manager’s hat means you have to focus on outcomes rather than outputs.
Hope this has helped you in creating a mind map of how you can transition from being output driven to outcome driven.
Keep building awesome things!
