This Feature or That Feature — What Belongs In A Successful Product?
They say that management entails both skill and knowledge, but it’s surprising to realize how this knowledge lies in our flashbacks of daily life. Back in my school days, I remember myself as the best student in maths class, as I got hold of the concepts before everyone and could solve questions right away. It was my exceptionally performing brain that got me the highest marks in exams until my teacher was replaced, and the new one graded my exams. It turned out that I was graded average on that exam, even with all the right answers. After asking, I got to know that my question-solving method didn’t satisfy my new teacher’s requirements, and she wanted more and better. Apparently, she believed that quoting references to formulas or theorems used, in English, was the right way to attempt the question.
This objection of her pissed me off back then, but looking at it now, it seems like a simple matter of priorities. While for her, it was the ease of understanding; for me, it was time-efficiency. Overwhelmed by the pressure to meet both these requirements in all questions, my problem-solving skills began to fall apart, and questions became a mess.
It’s funny how this conflict of priorities persists as an unresolvable issue till date, even after the introduction of various methodologies and strategies in software development. A careful analysis reveals the delegation of “maximum responsibility and minimum authority” to software product manager as the leading cause.
“Having to satisfy all the stakeholders and their requirements in a single product is what messes up the product and its complexity, and therefore, a metric to evaluate the requirements’ significance in the product is a must.”
Realizing this issue at hand, Geordie Kaytes, Radhika Dutt, and Nidhi Aggarwal; renowned software product managers and CEOs came up with a unique solution, named the Radical Product Toolkit, to help the product managers filter out high priority requirements and implement them effectively. Freely available, this toolkit helps map out all the hindrances and plus points of each requirement, analyzing them against realistic and critical metrics and therefore forms the ground for requirement prioritization. The toolkit requires a four-step working process explained below.
- Determine the Product Vision
The process starts with the Radical Vision Worksheet, which includes statements with blanks to be filled in the presence of the entire team after reaching a consensus on each answer. The initial statements jot down the interest of each customer segment and the associated merit/demerit that promotes/hinders the success of the product, whereas the ending statements enquire about the vision, as to how the company/manager aims to achieve it through the product. This way, the worksheet effectively broadens the team’s horizon from the product specifications to the ultimate long-term goals accomplishment in a simple yet necessary exercise. Multiple iterations over each statement can finally devise the way forward, setting a roadmap that should be followed. - Derive a Strategy aligned with Vision
According to the radical product model, a product strategy must focus on nothing but the most crucial aspects of the product. A standard radical product model, therefore, takes the following four factors into account, i.e. the pain points, the product design, the capabilities of the product, and the logistics. An overview of all these crucial factors is given below:
- Pain Points
Pain points refer to the problem being experienced by the prospective customers and how a major chunk of them can be relieved by our product. - Design
Design encompasses the structure of the features to be implemented in a way that’s easy for customers to operate and developers to modify or evolve. - Capabilities
Capabilities point towards the unique abilities that encourage the company/manager to take up the product and build it for the customers. - Logistics
Logistics deal with the associated channels with the product, like its pricing strategy, launch method, license delivery, etc.
These four categories mainly cover the entire work related to product development and management, and therefore strategizing against these factors leads to the right decisions. The radical product worksheet recommends the use of grids as a simplistic and holistic approach to mapping the time of working versus these categories.
- Rank Requirements based on Vision
Next, to prioritize requirements, the sustainability of product and vision fitness is taken as the criterion against which each requirement is mapped on a 2-dimensional matrix. Here the requirement implementation becomes a trade-off between the financial resources and the product vision. Owing to lacking or abundance of one, compromise is made on the other with a plan in mind to make up for the lacking later. This way, situation-adaptive and realistic decisions are taken for the product. - Incorporate Measurability with Vision
After going through all of the prior steps, the most important step is to define a measurability metric against the vision to check for its usefulness and efficiency. This measurement metric helps realize if the prioritization will lead to a beneficial and optimal outcome or a better prioritization shall be taken up. Therefore, this is the step where, after careful consideration and statistical analysis, the prioritization is finalized and then acted upon to yield the best requirement and environment-suited product.
In short, there’s no simple way to judge by inspection if a product is successful based on its features. The selection of features and their prioritization requires a complete thorough study before they can be categorized and implemented, and to ease this tedious task; the radical product toolkit comes in handy and efficient.
