How a product manager can waste your money
This blog post seeks to answer the following questions
How can a product manager keep their team busy without adding revenue?
How can this appear healthy?
What should I do to reduce costs or increase revenue?
How can a product manager keep their team busy without adding revenue?
As soon as I ask this question, I suspect you are coming up with some answers. Throughout this blog post, think about your own role or the people you work with and see if you are following these anti-patterns.
There are many possible things to do, from reducing technical debt to building customer requests. All of these things are not bad in and of themselves. The issue is opportunity cost. In other words, what else could I be doing that would move the organisation forward? Next, we’ll explore how these can be avoided.
Reduce your time on defect fixing
You should aim to reduce the overall number of defects in your work. “Built-in quality” is an important Lean principle. If you have a large defect backlog, refocus on quality. I find using root cause analysis to determine the origin of bugs can be very helpful. For example, were there coding issues, were tests missing, or were requirements unclear?
Reduce your time on technical debt
There can be several causes of technical debt. Here are a few you can avoid:
Continually selecting the cheapest but “hackiest” solution.
Moving proof of concept work into a live environment without recognising it is not high enough quality.
Pushing the timescales to such an extent that teams have to cut back.
Having a lack of coding and testing standards.
Most importantly, ensure that your technical debt reduction provides business value:
Does this technical debt stop you from achieving your strategy?
Does this technical debt mean I am spending a large amount of additional time when making changes?
Reduce your time on client requests
These are a very common form of waste that people miss. Here’s how it usually goes:
Important client X sends a feature request to a client manager.
The client manager lets the senior team know that a request has come in.
The request is handed to the product teams as a priority. Work is stopped to accommodate the change.
The change is made, and the client is informed.
The client doesn’t use the feature for weeks, if at all.
This anti-pattern is especially bad as the product can bloat with low-value features, making the experience for other customers very poor. Another reason for this is brainstorming requests with important customers, which can result in a wish list of low-value items. To avoid this:
Discuss what problem the feature would solve and how large it is.
Discuss the impact on the customer’s business of this feature not being in place, including any current workarounds they have.
How can this appear healthy?
Appraisals showing how much product has been delivered.
Metrics showing an increase in team efficiency and speed.
Regular show and tells.
Good customer feedback from product requests.
Product owners can fill a backlog and look like they are creating value.
What should I do to reduce costs or increase revenue?
A good place to start is the health of your company KPIs. Things like Customer Acquisition Rate (CAC) and Revenue Churn can be helpful. Look for trends with these. For example, is the CAC rate increasing?
Consider your costs:
Are you spending excessive amounts of money on onboarding new customers?
Are your run costs very high, either people or technology?
Is the cost of developing new features or making changes very high?
Additionally, look to gain a competitive advantage:
What important customer problem can I solve that isn’t well provided for in the market?
Why are customers choosing a competitor?
There are many factors to consider when considering this section’s question. I strongly recommend a strategy layer. This can be linked to your company KPIs and provide changes that improve your organisation's financial health.
How healthy is your organisation?… let me know below