Hi, there.
Dan Martell here, a serial entrepreneur, investor,
and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video, we're going to figure out
how to create a world class product development
process so your product doesn't end up looking like this guy.
Anyways, pass that to Jared.
And be sure to stay to the end where
I'm going to share with you my precision scorecard
framework which is going to actually give you the metrics
that you should be monitoring in your product development
process, but let's get into the content.
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So a few months ago, I was hosting my SaaS Academy clients
at the intensive in Boston, and the topic
of creating world class product management
came up because many of them are not technical founders-- they
don't come from innovation and technology,
they're just business or marketers or people
that saw opportunities to market wanted
to build a software solution.
So we kind of unpacked the different things
that I thought were required to not only manage the product
development process, understand the right metrics,
but really lead the team towards an outcome
and understand their role in that process.
I want to share that with you in this video,
but before I go any further, I want to give you a pro tip,
and I got this from HubSpot.
I've been fortunate to have learned and seen
from the inside from some of the best companies,
like Trello and Dropbox and many others,
how they manage product, and one of my favorite strategies
was from HubSpot.
We actually got to go visit their office
and sit down with their team, and it was something
they called science fairs.
Now they got this from David Cancel from Drift--
so he's the co-founder Drift, but he was also
their lead product manager at HubSpot
from their acquisition of Performable,
his previous company.
Long story to say--
science fairs are awesome.
So essentially what I do is I believe on a monthly basis--
or every two weeks, their product teams could demo--
but here's the kicker-- only if the feature
was live in production the stuff that they've been working on.
What was cool about that is it creates an artificial timeline
for pushing things to production,
and it also allows the team to kind of share
with the rest of the organization
some of the cool things that they're building.
So I want to give you that tip, but we're going to dive
in to the five strategies now.
Number one-- outline your vision.
So here's what I always ask my clients when they're
starting off, is when you grow up in your industry,
in your business, what are you going to look like?
Because there's only so many big markets,
unless you're creating a new one, which
is very rare in the B2B SaaS space,
you need to understand where you're going.
And my favorite strategy to figure that out
is obviously figure out like as we grow,
we want to be in account-based marketing,
or we want to be an email automation,
or we want to be in data analytics, or security--
whatever it is for you and your business.
But Airbnb, what they've done is they were really
inspired by Disney and the concept of storyboarding
the perfect product experience.
So what they did-- and you can Google this and find a bunch
of stuff online about it--
is they sat down and said, what would--
I think it was a seven-star experience be?
Now obviously it's five-star.
A seven-star experience, and they exaggerated
the whole thing and kind of mapped
out this visual storyboard of the possibility
of the future for their product experience for the customers.
And I just think that having that vision of where
your product should go and where you're
going to grow up into being will allow everybody to make
aligned decisions today.
So that's number one.
Number two-- connect customers.
I was talking to a founder on a growth session yesterday,
and one of the things they asked me was, how do you
manage product development when it comes
to showing what you're doing with customers
and not having your team?
Because this is what he is running into,
just build stuff but not know if it's actually
going to have an impact.
So one of my strategies that I teach my clients
is to create what's called a CAB-- a Customer Advisory
Board.
And these are people.
They're not-- one of the rules is
you don't let them self-update.
You actually want to select the right customers so that you
get the right feedback.
A lot of people can be the vocal minority
because they want to help guide your product roadmap--
those are not the people you want on there.
You want the best customer.
So a customer advisory board is a group of people
that you actually share not only a roadmap,
but more importantly, product--
clickable prototypes of the product that-- or features
you're building, because in the early days,
it's actually what you do to be successful.
Ideally you're showing customers potential wireframes
to get them to maybe pre-purchase your solution,
get buy-in.
And then for some reason, as you get traction,
you kind of stop doing these things that you
used to do to be successful.
So I'm a big fan of building a customer advisory board,
creating clickable prototypes for all the new features,
and making sure you show that to them before you go to code.
Why?
Because it is way cheaper to change a screen in a PowerPoint
deck around the prototype than it is to change it in code.
And your customers will give you so much
incredible feedback around the flow and the language
in the micro copy that you have on your screens
that it will literally transform your product development
process.
Number three-- inform backlog.
So if you're using--
hopefully you are-- some kind of Agile development process,
you have a backlog of features and bugs
and issues and things you want to get done,
the engineering team.
That's not what I'm talking about.
When I say inform backlog, that still exists,
but what you want to do is build a roadmap--
and this is what is teaching my clients at my intensive.
A roadmap at a high level has three kind
of big categories of states, right?
There is the now, the next, and the later.
And the way I think about that is,
it gives your team a level of prioritization
to say, look, these are the things
that we're focusing on now that are really important.
And on a monthly basis you might change things around.
And that's where you'll take the next, which
can be kind of a window of the next two to three months,
and grab those and put them into now, right?
And those big project, big features,
big outcomes you want to achieve are then
informing the backlog for the engineering the development
team to actually build out.
Product and engineering are two different functions
in your organization.
And this is the way that Twitter does it
and Trello and a bunch of other companies
think about product development.
So just think about creating a roadmap of the product
features or big outcomes you want to get for your customers
and put them in those three buckets--
now, next, and later.
Number four-- glue metrics.
So I can't tell you how often I'm reviewing a product roadmap
with one of my clients and they don't
know what specific metrics or KPI is actually
going to move based on building out a certain feature.
Yes, well a client wants this and we think that will add--
or make us more competitive.
I agree.
But at the end of day, if it doesn't
allow you to increase conversions or reduce churn
or expand revenue better, then you really
need to evaluate these things on those levels, right?
So one of the strategies to glue the metrics of the product
features that you're building is using
a thing called the RICE score.
Many people call it ICE.
I think it's a simplified version,
but the guys over at Intercom--
I'm an investor in Intercom and saw their product development
process in the early stages, they literally
have the best product team I've ever
seen in any of the companies I've invested in over 40
companies, and they use a thing called the RICE score.
So RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Ease.
And I'm not going to get into it too deep in this video,
but there is an online article that really dives in.
But the high level concept is every new feature
should have a specific outcome that it's trying to accomplish,
and then you give it a score on RICE--
reach, impact, confidence, and ease, and then you
give it an average.
So that way, you can have a list of 25 different features
or changes you want to make your product,
use the RICE score to then filter out
the ones that would have the biggest bang for your buck, OK?
So just make sure you glue the metrics.
Number five-- secure buy-in.
As you grow the business where you've
got a dozen-plus employees, all of a sudden you've got
product, development you've got engineering,
you've got customer support, you've got sales people,
you've got just different folks-- professional services--
serving the customer, and many of them
get disconnected from actually what's
being built in your product.
So one of the strategies to secure buy-in
is on at least a monthly basis, and even better,
what I love that Shopify did.
I went and visited their offices,
and they actually had their product managers paste
on the walls of the hallways around their offices
and other departments the interface changes that they're
going to be making--
going to be making is the key word--
in the product to allow anybody-- this is the kicker--
they had markers on the walls and kind
of like those magnetic markers with the little cords,
that they could just grab and tweak and change things
on the interface.
So they would put up some mockups,
some wireframes, and then let people
have a week or maybe a few days to walk by and say,
you know what?
I think we should change the button to this label,
I think we should go step one, two, and then three,
and just change the ordering.
And what I loved about that is not only
did you get buy-in, meaning that people
felt like they were connected to what's coming
and got excited about some of those features,
but more importantly you got to crowdsource
the collective wisdom of your team to inform the product
development.
So to me, you need to secure buy-in from your team,
but more importantly, if you can,
put it out there in a way that collaborates and collects
their wisdom and shows up in your product.
So a quick recap-- five strategies
to create a world class product management process.
Number one, outline vision; number two, connect customers;
number three, inform backlog; number four, glue metrics;
and number five, secure buy-in.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I
want to share with you an exclusive resource called
my precision scorecard.
Now this is a strategy for a weekly scorecard
that you can use with your executive leadership team,
but what's special about it is there's a section on product
development.
So most teams don't know what are the key metrics that they
should be holding their product leaders accountable to,
so in there I list all of them, and can you
choose the right ones to make sure
that they're making progress towards improving
the product for your customer.
So click the link below to download your copy,
and if you liked this video, be sure to smash the Like button,
subscribe to my channel.
If there's anybody that you care about
that you think this video could serve,
feel free to share with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge
you to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
Yeah.
I'm going to actually use it in my prop.
Yeah.
And get ready to catch it.