Many product teams fall into the trap of fixating on the work they need to do and forgetting about the impact their work is supposed to have. When that happens, the work often doesn’t produce the desired result. When you work as part of a product team, five questions can help you to avoid this trap by re-focusing on the customer problem you are trying to solve – and why.
Product teams exist to produce customer outcomes that are valuable to both the customer and the business. If a team solves a customer problem in a way that the business can’t support, that’s not valuable. If they deliver what the project plan says – on time and within budget – but it isn’t appealing to potential customers, that’s not valuable either. Successful products, services, and projects satisfy both sets of needs.
Teams Naturally Focus on “How?” and Forget “What?” and “Why?”
Teams often go astray because it’s easy to focus solely on the “How?” instead of the “What?” and the “Why?” “How will we complete the work in our backlog?” is the primary focus of many product teams. Team members are experts in that work. They think about solving problems in that domain often and a lot. They face those problems every day, and it’s what their organizations reward them for doing. It’s not surprising that their default approach to any situation is to look at it through this lens – particularly if they are told “just focus on getting the work done” and “not to worry about that other stuff.”
Whatever the reasons, “What customer outcomes is our work intended to create?” and “Why does the business want to create those outcomes?” are questions most product teams don’t discuss every day. Unless they interact with customers and business stakeholders, they might never talk about them. Even having those interactions is not guaranteed to spur that type of discussion. Only when a team comes to those conversations with empathy – with genuine curiosity about how others see and are affected by the team’s work – do those interactions help shift the team’s focus. Most teams can’t escape conversations about the deliverables and outputs they need to build. Meanwhile, customer problems and business results often live “out there” and are easily forgotten.
When you focus on work instead of value, it’s easy to do work that isn’t valuable. Behind every piece of work is a theory about the value it will bring. That theory might be right or might be wrong; you have to test it to find out. When you focus solely on delivering work, you don’t run those tests. You don’t find out that the beautifully designed implementation that you spent three months tweaking makes no difference because it’s in a part of the product people never use. You don’t find out that the amazingly easy-to-use service costs you three times as much to deliver as customers will pay for it. It’s actually likely that someone does find this out, but it’s after your team – who could actually do something about these things – has moved on to other work. When you have magically perfect, crystal-ball-like knowledge of exactly what the effects of a team’s work will be, the team doesn’t need to worry about the what and the why behind their work. Most of the time our knowledge of the future is imperfect and our teams need to learn from the work they are doing. Understanding the what and the why helps teams to pay attention to the right things and make the right adjustments.
Re-focus on the Customer Problem and the Business Results
Effective product thinking is about matching opportunities to capabilities to achieve results. Teams usually over-focus on how to apply their capabilities. For myriad reasons, they often lose sight of what they are trying to apply them to and why. I’ve found that regularly asking and discussing the following five questions helps teams to re-focus on the customer outcomes and the business impacts behind the work they’re doing:
- Who has the problem we’re trying to solve?
- How do we know they have the problem?
- How is solving it valuable to them?
- How is solving it for them valuable to our company?
- How can we know when we have a good enough solution to their problem?
When each member of a team can answer these questions – not necessarily in great depth, but at a high level and with good understanding – the team tends to make better decisions. They have a guide for daily problem-solving that includes the customer and business perspectives. These questions need to be asked and talked about by the whole team. These are not the exclusive domain of the product manager or product owner. If you want to avoid doing work that fails to deliver value, you need the whole team to be talking about what value is every day.
There’s nothing magical about these five questions. It’s absolutely possible to just “check the boxes” with these. When used properly, however, they can disrupt the “How?” conversations in a team just enough to invite the “What?” and “Why?” perspectives. They do that in a few ways. The most critical is that they are questions that invite curiosity. Stepping out of certainty and into curiosity is necessary if you want to do change. They ask you to clarify who has the problem you are trying to solve and to look at the situation from their perspective. This helps you to better evaluate possible solutions. It also builds empathy, which is a key ingredient in high-performing teams. In addition, they ask you to evaluate the evidence that you have for your theories about how you should solve the problem. Examining how you know what you know is critical when working in conditions of uncertainty. Finally, they ask you to draw connections between the three perspectives. Does your plan for solving the problem address it in a coherent way? These techniques – inviting curiosity, clarifying the situation, creating empathy for other parties involved, grappling with uncertainty, and crafting a coherent response – are more important than the specific questions. I don’t care what questions you use. Use whatever words make sense for your team and your organization.
Shift Your Team’s Conversations
You can introduce these questions to your team by first asking them to yourself. Do you have clear answers to each of them? If you’re a product manager or product owner, the answers might seem obvious to you. If you’re a product developer, you might never have thought explicitly about them before. You might have assumed – or been told – it was someone else’s job to answer them. You might not have been invited to have conversations. If you don’t have answers to these questions, do you know where to find them? Regardless of your role, once you have your own answers to these questions, get curious about other people’s answers. What’s the same and different between their answers and yours? Where do that sameness and difference come from? How might you resolve those differences – and do you need to? Once you’ve gotten comfortable using these questions, you can bring them into a discussion whenever the team seems stuck. “Stuckness” is often a sign that a different perspective is needed. “How should we proceed?” is a question that is easier to answer when you have clarity about the “What?” and “Why?”
Shifting a team that’s stuck in the “How?” takes time. It’s also one of the most useful things you can do to help your team and your organization to solve your customers’ problems more effectively.
