Escaping the Build Trap

John Deere, the farming technology company, encourage product managers and software engineers from urban areas to actively go out and see farmers in action.

They send their people to a fully-functioning farm set up a few miles from the office to learn more about farming.

This is what it means to be customer centric. Knowing that the most important thing you can do to create great products is to deeply understand your customers.

When you do not understand your users' problems well, you cannot possible define value for them.

In product-led companies, this is baked into the culture.

It's about avoid ending up in the build trap where we measure value by the number of things we produce instead of associating value with the outcomes we want to achieve for our business and users.

Products and services are not inherently valuable. It's what they do for your customer or user that has the value - solving a problem, or fulfilling a need or desire.
  • A great product manager understands the market, how the business works as well as the company vision and goals.
  • A great product manager has deep empathy for the users of the product.
  • A great product manager needs to be strategic enough to help craft the vision of the product and a strategy to get there, but tactical enough to ensure a smooth execution.
  • A great product manager works with the team in developing and validating ideas and in marrying business goals with the user goals to achieve value.
  • A great product manager says things like "I think the most costly thing we can do is build this product without knowing it's the right product to build. How do I test it and ensure that this is actually what we want? How do I become more confident that we are on the right path before I invest money in this?"
Easy? No. This is a discipline that must be mastered as a career. You need to develop the skill set through experience and practice.

Transparency

Be transparent. The more leaders can understand where teams are, the more they will step back and let the teams execute.

When leaders don't see progress toward goals, they quickly resort to their old ways: Providing and demanding more detailed information, providing more detailed instructions, and putting more controls in place.

Tell them where you are, what you plan to achieve next and how much money you need to get to those next goals.

How do you avoid the build trap?

"Escaping the Build Trap" by Melissa Perri

What's value?

What's the value of water? It depends on how thirsty you are.

Something that is worthless to one person or organization can be of immense value to someone else. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Value can be the importance, monetary worth or usefulness of something.

The value of your work

I produce stuff at work. Is my work valuable by just existing? No.

It's what it does for the ones consuming my work that has the value.

My work creates value by solving problems worth solving. Fulfilling someone's needs and desires while helping my organization achieve their strategic goals and priorities.

Communicate value through numbers

What's the value of natural gas? $3.5/MMBtu, ish. That's every possible characteristic of natural gas combined into a single dimension. However, it tells me nothing about its potential, history and other qualities.

We describe and communicate value like a map, an abstraction, to simplify complexity and decisions.

Maps are useful, but with a specific purpose in mind. They cannot be everything to everyone. If we don't understand what the map does and doesn't tell us, it can be useless or even dangerous.

Concrete numbers can be useful, but you better have a story for the receivers of the value you intend to provide. You need to understand what they value, what they are interested in, and be able to translate your work and offering into their language.

Don't assume that what we value is what everyone values or should value.

Business value and user value

Business value is what the business values, often framed as economic benefits to the company, but could also be safety, security and sustainability.

User value is what the users value. The ones directly using the technology products to achieve and address their own desires, needs or problems.

Why is this distinction important? Products that people don't use or know how to use will not create any business value.

A team delivering a product can rarely control or influence the business value directly. But you can change the behavior of the ones using your product and make them take certain actions that can lead to and be measured as a predictor of business value.

That's the gap you need to close. That's the story you need to tell. Find the signals of business value.

Business cases

A business case tries to describe the potential value, cost, and risk at some point down the road. When there is a lot of uncertainty, this is difficult. We must make assumptions.

According to Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg's data from 16 000 projects from 20-plus field in 136 countries, only 0.5 % delivered on promised cost, time and benefits.

Avoid the illusion of certainty, "If we do X, then Y value will be result".

Don't set and forget. Treat it as a hypothesis that needs to be tested. What's the absolute smallest action that you can take to test out the riskiest assumption you have about your business case?

"We believe that ... To verify that, we will ... And measure ... We are right if ..."

What's value to you, and how do you evaluate it?

Make things worth making

Do you want to make things worth making? 

Here's my key takeaways from Tony Fadell, "the father of the iPod", co-creator of the iPhone and co-founder of Nest labs.

Cool technology isn't enough

A great team isn't enough. Plenty of funding isn't enough. You have to time it right. Customers need to see that your product solves a real problem they have today - not one that they may have in some distant future.

You can't wait for perfect data

It doesn't exist. You just have to take the first step into the unknown. Use what you have learned and take your best guess at what's going to happen next. It's not data or intuition; it's data and intuition.

Your product isn't only your product

It's the whole experience that begins when someone learn about your brand for the first time and ends when it disappears from their life. It's when you give care and attention to every part of that journey you create something that people will love.

Every product should have a story

A narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. Make the story easy to remember, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people than your own talking.

  • The story appeals to people's rational and emotional sides. Recognize the needs of your audience and connect with something they care about, like their worries and fears.
  • The story takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
  • The story reminds people of the problem that's being solved. Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?

You can only have one customer

You cannot make a single product for two completely opposite customers for two different customer journeys.

You need constraints to make good decisions 

... and the best constraint in the world is time. By forcing a hard deadline on yourself, you can't keep putting the finishing touches on something that will never be finished. Don't allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget.

The best teams are multigenerational

Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass on to the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions.

Always be training someone on your team to do your job

There should always be at least one or two people on your team who are natural successors to you. Take vacations, they are a great way to build a team's future capabilities and see who might step into your shoes in the years to come.

"Build" by Tony Fadell

Testing business ideas

No business plan survives first contact with customers.

Testing is the activity of reducing the risk of pursuing ideas that look good in theory, but won't work in reality.
Design is the activity of turning vague ideas, insights and evidence into concrete value propositions and solid business models.

We test business ideas to reduce risk and uncertainty. You break a big idea into smaller chunks of testable hypotheses covering three types of risk.

First, that customers or users are not interested in your idea (desirability).

Second, that you can't build and deliver your idea (feasibility).

Third, that your business can't earn enough money from your idea (viability).

A well-formed business hypothesis describes a testable, precise and discrete thing you want to investigate.
  • Your hypothesis is testable when it can be shown true (validated) or false (invalidated), based on evidence (and guided by experience).
  • Your hypothesis is precise when you know what success looks like. It describes the precise what, who, and when of your assumptions.
  • Your hypothesis is discrete when it describes only one distinct, testable and precise thing you want to investigate.
Turn your most important hypotheses into experiments to create evidence you can learn from.
  • "We believe that ..."
  • "To verify that, we will ..."
  • "And measure ..."
  • "We are right if ..."
Evidence is what you use to support or refute the hypotheses. Insights are what you learn from studying the evidence.
  • "We believed that ..."
  • "We observed ..."
  • "From that we learned that ..."
  • "Therefore, we will ..."
Then turn insights into action. Make informed decisions to abandon, change and/or continue testing a business idea based on collected insights.

But testing ideas costs money. So then you just ask for millions in the big bang annual funding process and spend it all to avoid decreased budget next year?

No. Think like a venture capitalist instead. Invest and incrementally fund the teams and a series of business ideas and double down on the ones that are successful.

Set up a small investment committee that consists of leadership with decision-making authority when it comes to budget, because they will be helping the teams navigate from seed, launch and growth stages. Funding decisions typically take place at 3-6 months intervals.

To summarize: Key Hypotheses + Experiments + Key Insights = Reducing uncertainty and risks.

"Testing business ideas" by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder

Battles to be won, jobs to be done

In Equinor, we have now helped hundreds of people applying jobs-to-be-done to discover what their stakeholders are actually trying to accomplish or achieve when they use or are about to use their products.

It is about understanding the problem that you are trying to help someone solve.

Why? The extent to which their product helps their users and stakeholders accomplish their job to be done determines the value they perceive from their product.

We want to spend our scarce resources on products that the users and our business really want and need.

The four key takeaways?

First, look beyond the straightforward functional tasks

This is not about listing a bunch of functional tasks that your users and stakeholders currently perform. You instead need to understand their why and what they really seek to accomplish and achieve.

We see that the ones that struggle to come up with a meaningful value proposition have identified jobs that correspond more with straightforward tasks their stakeholders currently do.

Second, don't forget unmet or underserved jobs

When we do this with existing products, we tend to focus on the stakeholders and jobs the product currently serve, and we forget to explore unmet or underserved jobs or stakeholder segments.

What are the things they want to get done that your product (or any other product in Equinor) currently don't help them getting done? Are there any underserved stakeholder segments where your product could play a role?

Third, people also have social and emotional jobs

We experience that people are trained in articulating functional jobs, but their eyes light up when we introduce them to emotional and social jobs.

By exploring the emotional and social components we see value propositions that resonates better with their audience.

Fourth, test your assumptions

We stress the fact that the jobs the product teams come up with are educated guesses and assumptions you need to test afterwards. You can't figure out all this in a Teams meeting, a workshop or by using the right AI prompts.

You need to test and validate the jobs and the value proposition with your audience.