Products and Services: What’s in it and what it enables
Products and services are the practical manifestation of your strategy. Formally they are the things you sell, but informally there are a number of products and services that support the process of selling your core product. By identifying and managing them separately, with a clear boundary allows us to invest in them, and sell them to customers. ‘Product’ can also include digital services, and is often used to refer to the process of creating them as much as the output itself.
A focus on developing Products & Services will allow you to:
Assign ownership and budget (P&L)
Increase clarity of offer to customers
Improve ability to build systems and tools for supporting customers
Grow revenue through customer acquisition, and or increasing existing customer value
Build capability in the organisation to continually deliver value, rather than focus on Ad-Hoc projects
Key factors that make your product or service useful to the organisation:
Clear Product Vision
Customer / User Personae
Validated Problem Statement
Prioritisation of Ideas
Ability/ Process for going from idea to customers hands
Your Product needs a clear vision. The vision is defined as part of the broader organisational strategy and is primarily an inherited goal or outcome of that strategy. The vision must also take into account the unique proposition offered to customers and users. This vision must be well enough defined in quantitative AND qualitative terms that success metrics can be developed and attached.
Good practice will mean your vision unambiguously links to strategic outcomes and metrics are attached. It will also include enough detail to allow decision making within teams. Without a clear vision teams will struggle to prioritise relevant work, and may even develop ambiguous grey areas of responsibility.
Your Product needs to know its customer & user personae. In order to build a successful product you must be clear about who that product is for, their goals and the context in which they live. It’s critical to understand their problems, but it’s also important to understand their demographics, their behaviours, and their interaction preferences and capabilities.
In practical terms it means you have done the research work to identify and understand the key personas in all value streams. You will have simple and understandable documentation providing rich qualitative and quantitative information about them for teams to use. Without Personae, solutions developed are likely to be both undesirable, and unusable by the people who matter most.
Your Product needs a clear problem statement(s) relating to customer and user needs. Understanding problems takes time in research & insight development, and must result in clear problem statements or hypotheses. This format provides focus on the right area to solve, in a format that should include enough information so that context and assumptions can be understood when comparing it to tangible results.
Quality problem statements are short and to the point. Good practice is to write them in the hypothesis format to ensure they include a statement about the relevance of the problem, and allow very focused experiments to be designed. Without clear problems, statements and hypotheses, it will not be possible to design or validate a solution. It’s highly likely the whole product will fail.
Your Product needs a disciplined approach to Prioritisation of Ideas to ensure you build the right thing. Solution ideas generally come from everywhere; customers, staff, you and your team. If you are short of ideas you may need to add a capability here to generate solution ideas. Assuming you have an oversupply of ideas, the task is to qualify them against the strategy, and proritise them based on the likely value that can be added to the product.
Good practice in prioritisation includes selecting the right prioritisation process on the strategic reasons for this product. It must also provide a clear method for making decisions, as well as be accessible to those who need to contribute to decision making. Without a method of prioritisation, teams will invest in the wrong things, leading to waste and product failure.
Great product delivery must have a clear process to go from idea to the customers hands. At its most basic, your product has no value if it is not in the hands of the customer, so your process must include a path all the way from creation, through to delivery to the customer (and feedback). Further, the standardisation of this process allows for varied teams to see what is required to deliver a quality outcome, and they can contribute accordingly.
Modern product development practices incorporate steps to get the product into the hand of the customer very early in the design process, and it continues as a critical component all the way through to the final product.
Good practice means that the organisation likely runs many experiments and most of them fail, with the few that succeed being the best ideas that deliver the most value to the customer and the business. Therefore it's critical that Product Owners have the freedom to run low cost experiments without explicit approval. Failure to standardise will result in major delays caused by teams having to re-invent the same process and information, whilst failure to include quality end-to-end process will result in low quality, misaligned products going directly to the customer.
Three key takeaways
Does each product have a clear vision that is defined as part of the strategy?
Do your products and services have explicit ownership to ensure active decision making?
Do you have an agreed process for taking the product from idea to hands of the customer?
