Alexandre Serrurier, Lead Product Operations at ManoMano, puts forward a holistic approach to understanding and improving your ‘product environment’.
What is the product environment? Why is it relevant?
If you are into product, there is a high probability that you have heard the words ‘culture’, ‘organization’ and ‘framework’ many times. These terms are commonly used when product people discuss ways to improve their daily life … sometimes not very wisely.
Of course these elements are important. However, during my 10 years in the field, I have often witnessed people, teams or leaders changing their organization or adapting that latest framework without questioning if this move was right for their team. In fact, very often they would act based on an article they read or because they heard about a new shiny set up in the hottest company.
Does any of this ring a bell? If it does, this type of action is known as ‘survivorship bias’, when product managers take authority as reference. This bias is why I want to take a step back and introduce a more holistic attitude towards the ‘product environment’. This is an approach that I developed at ManoMano after I took the position of product ops a year ago.
In a nutshell, the product environment is the whole in which product people evolve. It displays all the steps, interactions, material and moments that build the product journey in a company. Of course, culture, organization and frameworks are part of it, but as they are mixed with other components you will be able to figure out which is the most mature for your team.
What is a product environment? Representation and components
Because a picture is worth a thousand words, the image below shows the concept of product environment. Note that this is an average version that could be applied to many companies (but you can tweak it if needed).
Its value lies in the display of all the interactions, moments, workflows, and processes that shape the life of your product team.
The concept of product environment by Alexandre Serrurier
First, you have all the external elements represented in light gray: these are input data, company’s strategy or stakeholders you have to deal with and that help you feed your reflection about which product to build.
Then, let’s consider the elements that actually represent the characteristics of the product moment. You can see that this representation is not restricted to a specific part (product lifecycle, roadmap, discovery, …), and this is the point: you have to consider every building block and put them at the same level. Then, let’s go deeper into those different color boxes.
Green — Product leadership: This part concerns the product leaders and their impact within the enterprise. Is there a product vision, a product strategy? What is the position of the product in the company leadership team?
Blue — Product team organization: This point covers different parts such as the purpose and missions of the different teams, the roadmap process, how autonomous and empowered teams are in their decisions and plan delivery (to paraphrase M. Cagan: where do you lie between mercenary teams and impactful teams?). But it also covers the relationship between technology and innovation (another point from M. Cagan here): whether the company is willing to take risks, the level of collaboration with the engineering team and so on…
Purple — Delivery efficiency: For this part, “delivery” is more to be understood as the overall feature lifecycle process. From framing the problem and scripting the business case to releasing in production and measuring the impact, all of these steps need to be mastered by product managers and be as smooth and relevant as possible in your company. In the end, this is about making sure that product managers are in the right seat to deliver features with optimal adoption and impact.
Orange — Data-driven mindset: Data, under many forms, is at the heart of product thinking and should back many of the product decisions. From creating user empathy through continuous discovery to allow for SQL training, this is all this value chain that is highlighted here.
Red — Continuous learning and cohesion: A thriving environment is also about development and growth. This is not only about delivery but ensures a profound team cohesion. Make sure that seniors can coach juniors, that your career path is understandable and relevant, that everyones finds its own way and can develop skills to stay motivated and focused.
Why is this important? Your product environment is a product
As a product leader, but also as a product manager, your objective is to effectively deliver value to your customers and business. Finding ways to reach for high efficiency then becomes an important challenge.
Actually, efficiency can be improved in many ways: new framework, developing culture, changing your organization or setting up a school of product, for instance. But it triggers important questions such as ‘where do I begin?’, ‘what action will have the most important impact?’, or sometimes no questions are triggered and you directly enter ‘delivery mode’ with a high risk of losing energy.
For instance, you may want to consider shape-up or discovery discipline as they are frameworks everyone talks about, but what will be the point if your team’s problem lies in a poor data mindset? You won’t solve anything. (Note: I have nothing against these frameworks, this is just an example).
The product environment provides you with an exhaustive view of each possible building block that shapes your product team. No more blind spots, all of these elements can be assessed to find where the most important pain points are and then where you should act first.
Now wait … let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. All the interactions, moments or processes that are mapped here can be considered as features of your product environment. Besides, the visualization itself could be seen as the first step of a feature map (where the little color boxes represent features). Here we are, you can consider your product environment as a product. A product where your customers are the product people (from product managers to product leaders).
Think about it, everyday, product managers follow processes, consult dashboards, use tools or even attend specific meetings, all of that in order to deliver the most impact for their customers. This is close to any product delivering services for their customers who have to reach for a specific objective.
Then it becomes a product where your users are your team of product managers, also including the leaders. All of a sudden you can apply product ways of working: UR, discovery, measuring value and impact, iteration. These are all things that you should master and you do every day!
How to take care of your product environment: ManoMano case study
What I liked to do when I worked as a product manager, was to measure the maturity of my product. I would ask myself whether it was meeting or above market standards and question the gap between competitors and customers expectations. I developed the same strategy for the product environment at ManoMano.
Measuring the maturity of the product environment is very important as it allows you to have an exhaustive view of where the most important problems that the team encounters are. As a product leader, this can be particularly interesting as it gives you insights into whether a product is leading or lagging in your company.
The principle is simple. For each thematic (or feature) that was explained previously, prepare a set of affirmations in the form of a survey. I called this exercise Product Barometer. Here are some examples — note that they are not exhaustive:
– Product leadership > I receive enough communication about product vision and strategy.
– Product organization > I feel fully empowered to create and own my roadmap.
– Data driven decision > I spend enough time with my customers.
You can see here a full version of what I used at ManoMano (don’t hesitate to adapt it to your company and context).
Each affirmation can be graded from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree) to give you a consolidated score (NPS like).
Then send this survey to each product manager (or the relevant product people) in your company and wait for the results. The first time I did it I spent 45 minutes with every product manager to get a 100% completion rate, then the second time I reached a 96% completion rate in summer with only two recalls. Given the amount of work of product managers, it means the exercise was pretty well accepted and relevant.
You can also ask questions about tools usage or time spent in product management activities, so you have an overview of where they spend their time and if the money you spend on tooling is well oriented. You can further ask open questions to have a very complete view. For instance, I like an exercise in which you give yourself a specific budget (100$) and you have to split it to solve three problems. You have to ask yourself, where do I put that budget?
Thanks to the granularity of questions (find the right balance though) you know exactly where the most important frustrations are that prevent your team from moving forward (e.g should I work on implementing shape-up or developing data mindset of my product managers?). You can also segment the information by seniority, teams or offices to focus on a specific part of your team and if you have to adapt your work after that.
This works well for the PM/Group-PM population, but is less adapted to product leaders (Head of, VPs) as it is operational. Then you can have two different surveys or you can also make them speak about the different thematic and disclose their 3 most important pain points.
These three images illustrate what the output of the product barometer can look like. You can spot big problems and if some teams are more impacted than others (on the example below team 2 seems to struggle), you can spot trends as well (if you do it on a frequent basis) and then deep dive onto a specific theme.
Then, all of this quantitative and qualitative data gives you opportunities and areas for work (ie. whether you should work on improving data mindset, develop tooling or improve your roadmap process) that you can put on a roadmap (I used Now > Next > Later roadmap depending on the priority of topics with a one year max temporality).
Then I reviewed the conclusions with the product leadership so that we were all aligned on the issues to tackle (if product managers are customers of the product environment, product leaders can be considered as the stakeholders) before communicating to the rest of the team.
Doing this exercise has several virtues:
– First you set up a culture of continuous improvement where everyone is involved, can speak up and also participate.
– You are honest with your situation and know exactly where your issues are objectively as you treat feedback equally.
– Every company will experience inflexion points (fundraising, staff growth, new priorities, pivots, lay-offs). This is a good tool to navigate clearly when in these moments or whilst anticipating them.
– I recommend making use of this exercise frequently so you can follow your progress (positive or negative).
– Be careful as for every poll exercise, you may experience biases. Consider whether it is anonymous or not (I recommend it is). Are people answering alone or was someone there to explain the questions? Do you have enough data (e.g. respondents) to deep dive on specific areas? What is your company context?
Attention point:
This exercise is time consuming (creating the survey > gathering answers > summarizing the answers > creating a plan). Then if you want to enter that, you should have your leadership’s support (or you are yourself a product leader, or a product ops)
Wrapping up
Understanding your product environment is key to making sure that your team moves in the right direction and develops in efficiency. You wouldn’t develop features for customers for the sake of it so don’t do the same for the people working in your company, the latest framework may not be what they need!
Whether you are in product operations, or working as a product leader or a product manager, and you are willing to improve your peers’ life, remember to assess the maturity of your global environment, listen to people, and work with them to build the road for success.
We ❤️ learning and sharing
If you’d like to get in touch or just talk about TOPIC in general, I’m always reachable through my LinkedIn profile . Drop me a line! Whether you had a similar or totally different experience, I’d love to hear about it.
Understand your product environment and take the right actions to improve it. was originally published in ManoMano Tech team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
