Best tool stack and processes for product managers & innovation teams
Best tool stack and processes for product managers & innovation teams
Digital Transformation in a changing world
Product managers and innovation teams work in an environment of constant change and disruption, ranging from trends toward sustainable and carbon-neutral sources, to digital products and experiences accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Highly capable Product Managers and innovation teams are familiar with a wide range of tools to help them build and adapt their organisations and products to the changing environment they work in. The only constant for these organisations is the constant of disruption.
Organisations need to adopt a new perspective on what ‘fitness’ looks like to survive in a constantly changing environment. Traditionally, size, reach and efficiency were hailed as the common indicators of business fitness, but disruption events such as the COVID-19 pandemic very quickly disproved this as scores of large brick and mortar businesses crumbled under new external forces. The pandemic showed that only businesses that had the most agility to adapt could survive, such as retail brick and mortar stores that could rapidly tap into digital channels for marketing and distribution. Product managers and innovation teams have always been important in business strategy and product development, but have grown in importance as a rapidly changing world demands more responsiveness for them to stay competitive.
We find that Product Managers and Innovation teams follow these general principles to enable their organisations to adapt to a changing world.
Adaptive teams spend less time on developing and more on designing
Many teams fall into the trap of allocating more time to development over design, in the hopes of delivering a product faster. Taking the time to build the right product has proven to be more successful than building a product.
In a changing world, innovation and product teams need to be constantly revalidating assumptions and designing products and features in a way that can meet the market’s current and near-term expectations rather than what they expected 6 months ago. Agile methodologies and the concept of minimum viable products (MVP) to test assumptions have evolved for this purpose, ensuring that the product delivered meets the needs of the consumer today.
Shift to transformative value drivers
The traditional measures of value creation no longer apply. Historical value drivers such as scope, scale, and efficiency have now been replaced with transformative value drivers which focus on humans, technology, and innovation. In the same vein, Product Managers and innovation teams will also need to reimagine how they will create and sustain value in the future aligned with these transformative value drivers that deliver dynamic competitive advantage, over the sustainable competitive advantage that historical value drivers provide.
A shift to transformative value drivers involves:
Putting humans at the center, starting from within the organisation in embedding purpose throughout, to designing the business, products, and services around people.
Driving innovation at scale and staying ahead of disruptions. People’s perceptions and needs can change rapidly, and Product Managers and innovation teams will need to be able to rapidly innovate to stay ahead. Product managers can support the organisation in scaling innovation through a clear business model and technology strategy while embedding a fail-fast culture in the organisation that rewards innovation.
Delivering at pace is crucial to enable organisations to execute innovative ideas to stay ahead. Innovation teams often focus on coming up with innovative ideas but can fall short of delivering on these ideas in time before they lose their competitive advantage. Delivery can be enabled through a holistic digital transformation strategy, expansion of partnership opportunities and ecosystems, leveraging technology advancements, and automating workflows to improve efficiency and optimise costs.
Being nimble and less focused on the process
There can be a natural tendency to be prescriptive and obsessed with processes, methodologies, and frameworks. While they can be very helpful, these frameworks are meant to be adapted to the needs of the organisation. Common sense is a Product Manager and innovation team’s best tool.
With general principles for Product Managers and innovation teams to be able to adapt now outlined, we now explore a number of tools that are essential in their tool stacks to deliver on transformative value drivers.
Industry analysis
Adaptation begins with understanding the environment that the organisation plays in. Industry analysis can contribute to a product strategy and overall business plan. Research firms such as Gartner or Forrester collect and aggregate data that can help form a view on the direction a particular industry or domain is heading in, and provide insights that can be critical in building a business or product strategy.
Industry analysis can also provide views on possible futures. Thought leadership in scenario planning can enable Product Managers and innovation teams to plan ahead on the ‘now’, ‘next’, and ‘beyond’ horizons and innovate ahead of these disruptions to sustain competitive advantage.
Feedback and data capture
Getting data from customers is a really important step in getting feedback on the product. There are many powerful survey tools such as SurveyMonkey, Microsoft Forms, Google Surveys, and Typeforms that can be used to gather data quickly and efficiently.
Raw data also only forms half the equation without context. Innovation teams and Product Managers need to be hearing directly from their users, which is particularly important in user acceptance and feedback gathering. Zoom and Microsoft Teams have become increasingly popular to converse directly with their users and get instantaneous feedback and context.
While choosing the right tool is important, it is worth noting that the biggest determination of success is designing a survey or interview that asks the important questions in a way that navigates the uncertainties of how well users understand themselves and interpret questions.
Flowcharting
Products often involve a process that unfolds as a user uses the product, which can be reflected in flowcharts. Flowcharts can provide visual storylines of a customer or persona’s interaction with a service, brand, or product and layout all the touchpoints for how a customer interacts with a product and brand.
Flowcharting tools like Microsoft Visio, ARIS, and OmniGraffle can be invaluable tools in the UX design process to rapidly prototype the user journey in a visual and easily shareable way.
Collaboration tools:
Collaboration tools have become increasingly important in a pandemic environment where in-person conversations can be replaced, and teams can collaborate on digital documents without the need for a physical whiteboard or sending versions back and forth.
Sticky notes have long been in the toolkit for Product Managers and innovation teams looking to design and deliver their products collaboratively on physical boards. Digital tools such as Mural and Microsoft Whiteboard have taken sticky notes digital, and allow for teams to collaborate on ideas quickly.
Tools such as Slack , Confluence, and Microsoft Teams have become indispensable tools for team messaging, while collaborating on documents have become easy on Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, and Dropbox.
Protoyping tools:
Minimum Viable Products (MVP) is an important concept in designing and delivering products to adapt to changing environments. Big bang delivery was once the common way of delivering software, but the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has emerged as a popular option for delivering value quicker and incremental solutions that quickly address needs, compared to a product built over a long period of time. It’s a powerful tool that involves creating a basic version of a product and it’s features that can be used to test with real customers and get valuable feedback.
While prototyping physical products had huge time and cost barriers, innovation teams and Product Managers can now quickly develop prototypes with the decreasing costs and advances in 3D printing technology, where they can quickly develop and tweak a product and get feedback from customers in a short period of time.
With digital products it is now easier than ever to build MVPs compared to physical products that could drain time and money. User interfaces form a substantial part of the user experience for digital products, and a benefit of building MVPs for software user interfaces is that parts of it can be easily built and adapted in response to feedback gained through iteration. Paper mockups were one of the earliest ways of designing interface MVPs, and while they are still valuable today, wireframing tools like LucidChart, Miro, and Invision make it easy to create powerful mockups to evaluate the potential success of a digital product design.
Project management tools:
Project management tools have been around for a long time, and are invaluable for Product Managers to track delivery of their products and features. Tools like Microsoft Project, Trello, Jira, and Azure DevOps share the ability to track tasks, share information, and monitor delivery health to ensure that the product development is progressing to plan.
Many of these project management tools support agile project management, and can be easily used for Scrum projects which have become popular as a delivery framework . Scrum is often used by modern software development teams, using the concept of sprints to deliver value quickly through an iterative process of planning, execution and review, and retrospectives.
I discussed a number of tools in this paper, but it is important to note that these tool stacks should be adapted in a way best suited to an organisation’s people, technology, structure, and processes to enable these tools to operate at their fullest potential in an ever changing environment of constant disruption.
References:
https://brainstation.io/career-guides/what-tools-do-product-managers-use
https://www.ey.com/en_us/innovation/the-importance-of-adaptability-in-an-increasingly-complex-world
https://mixpanel.com/blog/future-proofing-your-product-strategy-with-adaptive-teams/