As a product owner, keeping your distance from the product seems like a strange recommendation.
It’s all too tempting to fall in love with what you’re building, but it’s also a common pitfall that can get in the way of what you’re trying to achieve.
In this 20m webinar, we’re discussing why product owners need to focus on outcomes over outputs, putting distance between themselves and the product to keep the team on track.
This session covers:
- Why teams often fail by focusing too much on the specifics of their product
- Why focusing on outcomes helps great product teams success
- A case study of product failure, and tips on how to shift your teams focus
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"The more dispassionate the team can be about the specifics of the product, the more likely they are to focus on making the product as a whole achieve its purpose."
Video transcript
Hi and welcome to this 383 Snapshots Webinar. My name is Ross Harper. I'm a Digital Product Manager at 383 and today I'm going to be talking to you about the dangers of falling in love with your product, which can seem like a contradictory topic, given that product people tend to be really passionate about the products that their teams are building. However, focusing too much on product specifics can be detrimental to overall success. Today, I'm going to talk you through some of the warning signs and how shifting your focus to outcomes can deliver results that really matter.
Let's get started. Let's take a sneak peek at what topics will be covering. To start off, I'll be telling you a bit about product-focus. What happens when teams tend to get too focused on the products that they've fallen in love with?
We'll then cover outcome-focus, which is a different way of thinking, which really helps teams to stay focused on what matters and try and achieve the goals that they've been set out to achieve.
We'll then look at a case study of an app called Vine, which was the six second video app that you might have heard of from a few years ago, which has since been discontinued. It's a classic case of failure by product-focus.
Finally, we'll talk about making the change. If you feel like your organisation is too focused on the specifics of the product, then we'll give you some helpful tips on how to shift your focus towards outcomes rather than on the product itself.
Product-focus in action. What does that tend to look like?
It tends to look a bit like this. In an organisation, somebody gets an idea for a potential product, they rally people around, they showcase the idea, and everybody slowly starts to get involved. Eventually you have to go through things like buy-in with senior stakeholders. If they're successful, then this idea gets bought into, and the organisation says, yes, we're going to put money behind it, it's going to change our fortunes. And suddenly the team are up and running.
Why is falling in love with their product idea potentially harmful for product success? Firstly, how we define that word success is very important.
To illustrate that, let's take a hypothetical example. Let's just take a product team, hypothetically, who have come up with an idea. They start to get excited about it. They start to flesh out all of the requirements and document it so that they can hand it over to product development to build the product. Then let's imagine they actually managed to successfully launch it. It's pretty bug free, they've managed to start driving traffic to it.
And what happens is, users actually are a bit 'meh' about the concept. Maybe it doesn't quite have the features that they wanted. Maybe it's just not solving a problem that they particularly struggle with and they're just not all that enthused.
It's a surprise to the team, with all of that excitement that they had about their idea. A few weeks later, it's tumbleweed. People have come and gone. All of that traffic didn't really stick around and the team kind of feel a bit sheepish. Senior management have kind of lost faith with the idea. Funding dries up. They've spent it all and they can't afford to go and make the changes that they need to get users to engage. Really, they fell in love with the idea too early and they didn't succeed in what the business hoped the product could deliver for them.
There's an amazing quote by Eric Ries, who is the author of a book called 'The Lean Startup', a book that I absolutely love. He's phenomenal. He's written further books after that about applying startup thinking in bigger workplaces. He defines this term called achieving failure, which is successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.
That's exactly what this hypothetical team did. They managed to build the product exactly how they wanted it to, but it ultimately led them nowhere. Unfortunately, this is all too common in teams who strive to build their version of the perfect product. They haven't taken the time to understand what their users need or how this product could contribute to their vision. They've just thought about, this is going to be the perfect thing, and they've cracked on and unfortunately, this is what tends to happen.
Instead of focusing on products, instead we would recommend to focus on outcomes. Now I'm going to explain what that means and what it can mean in terms of delivering success.
Let's go and revisit that word success. In our previous example, successfully executing the team's plan actually led to failure. While initially they might have seen themselves as being successful and successful in launching a product, that didn't deliver what they wanted. Instead the team should have focused on achieving a successful outcome.
What exactly do we mean by that word, outcome? Outcomes are the changes in the customer, user or employee behaviour that lead to good things for your company, your organisation, or whomever is the focus of your work. It's a really good quote from Josh Seidon, who wrote a book called 'Outcomes Over Outputs'. It takes less than an hour to read. It's a really, really good read. This really sums up what we're talking about.
What an organisation looks to do is serve their users to enable some kind of change in behaviour which is going to give back to them the levelling up in their organisation, whether that be increasing revenue or customer satisfaction. They want to serve customers and in turn get a return themselves.
There are two kinds of outcome that really we should be focusing on, and the first is user outcomes. This is the positive change that you want to enable in your users' lives. That could be, for a banking app, we want our users to be more confident with handling their money.
There are so many different ways that they could do this. It's not just to fall in love with one idea, it's to explore all the different ways that they could achieve this outcome for their users. They also want to be able to measure those outcomes. How do we know when we've succeeded in this? It could be through surveys, it could be through actual measurable data in, potentially, number of customers who use their overdraft as they should and not default on things like loans and overdrafts.
Really, they want to be able to measure the benefit that they've had in their users lives and not just leave it to, we think we're doing a good job. Now, this really does contribute to business success. You want to be able to measure these user outcomes.
The second outcome type is organisational outcomes. This is the value that your product creates for the organisation, both tangible and intangible. So in terms of tangible organisational outcomes, that could be increasing revenue, driving efficiency. Again, these are things that we can measure. Or there could be intangible outcomes. Maybe that could be improving the perception of the brand, say, if the brand is seen as slow-moving in the tech space, if they suddenly launch a product that changes people's perceptions then that can lead to more good things.
User outcomes and organisational outcomes are inherently linked. Often an organisation needs to serve their users in order to fulfil the company's overall purpose, their overall mission. Also, it doesn't make much sense to deliver an amazing product for users if it doesn't pay back the organisation. Ultimately, they won't be able to keep managing that product. It's going to be potentially costing them too much money. Senior management tend to want a return for whatever an organisation builds for the users. Even a charity will want some kind of output for them to say, yes, we've done good, we can go and get more sponsorship money. It enables them to go and achieve their goals. User outcomes and organisational outcomes need to be thought of together to really get the overall benefit from building a product.
Ultimately, the more dispassionate the team are about the specifics of the product, the more focused they can be on delivering positive outcomes. That is to say, there are so many different features that a team could potentially build in order to achieve the outcomes that they've been set. It's not just about someone coming up with one idea and then going and building it. It's thinking, where does the organisation want to be in the next few years? What's the change that we want to enable for our users' lives?And then of all of the ideas that we can think of, what are the right ones to back? What are the right ones that are going to deliver those outcomes and what is essentially going to lead to dead ends and not be delivered.
Let's look at a case study for an app called Vine, which was a classic case of a team being overly product-focused and that's what contributed to their failure. Vine was an app which was launched in June 2012. It was all about creating six second videos. That's kind of what it became known as, the six second video app. It allowed users to record six second videos, the videos looped through, they could be shared with friends, and it actually created Vine celebrities who became known for their short videos. These would get shared, they'd go viral, people would copy them. It was one of the really early players in the short form video space.
At it's peak, Vine had an audience of around 200 million users, which is really significant, especially given their early lead in the space. They were acquired by Twitter for a reported $30 million in October 2012, which is really not long after the company was formed. Fast forward four years, though, and it had been discontinued by Twitter in 2016.
How did they fail, despite having an early advantage?
First off, they lacked a cohesive company vision and purpose. Again, they were the six second video app. That was this thing that they put out there into the world because they thought it would be fun, but it didn't seem clear as to why they did it. That also falls on the team at Twitter as well, who acquired Vine. They didn't seem to have the vision for how this was going to be a cohesive experience, with Twitter being about short form text and Vine being about short form video. They didn't integrate at all. They didn't seem to have an idea of how buying Vine would contribute to the company's success, or how it would contribute to better user experience. They just didn't seem to be able to communicate that.
They lacked commercial focus. They had all this traffic, but they didn't really manage to monetise it, which meant that the organisation wasn't benefiting from all of this traffic. They also didn't manage to look at other ways of raising funding, if they had ambitions to take this further. They just had the app, it had six second videos, and it didn't go much further than that. They didn't have the commercial acumen, and that ties very closely with the organisational outcomes just not being achieved.
They also failed to spot unmet user needs. They clearly could see that people liked the restrictions of six second videos, the fact that it was quick, short form. There wasn't lots of setup to record the perfect video, it was just about picking it up and recording and seeing what happens. As we've seen from other players in this space, there are so many features that people gravitate to that make apps sticky that Vine just missed out on, Again, they just stuck with being the six second video app, they fell in love with that concept specifically.
That meant that they failed to innovate, and that meant that they became disrupted by other players in the space. Shortly after Vine came Snapchat and took a big chunk of their market share, then Instagram stories, now Instagram video really came into the fold and made a much more cohesive experience than Vine could offer. And more recently, TikTok, which is probably the closest competitor to Vine and has exploded.
Ankur Thakkar, who was the Head of Editorial at Vine, said on the record, "A couple of things plagued Vine and it all stems from the same thing, which is a lack of unity and leadership on a vision." If they knew where they wanted to take the company and the experience that they wanted to deliver for their users, then they would have managed to achieve their organisational and user outcomes, but they just didn't.
To recap, the more dispassionate the team are about the specifics of the product, the more focused they can be on delivering positive outcomes. If you take one thing away, it's definitely this; don't be so focused on what your product is or what a particular feature could be. Think about the end result and all of the different ways that you could get there.
To wrap us up, let's take a look at how to shift your focus from thinking too much about the products and more on the outcomes that you want to achieve. In terms of steps that you should take, the first would be to find and share your vision. Knowing where you want to get to with your organisation, how the product is going to help you get there, and the impact that you want to have on your users' lives.
If we were to take Vine as an example for this, they started as a six second video app, but why? That could have been just to get some early millions for the founders, which it might have been, or it could have been let's play the long game. Let's accept the offer from Twitter and create this cohesive experience and become a multi-billion dollar company in five years. Or, make ourselves the home of short-form video for years to come. Ultimately, none of these things happened. They needed to define their vision and stick with it and share it so that everybody knows how to contribute to it.
The second would be to create team OKRs. OKRs stands for objectives and key results. This is a form of managing by objectives which has made popular at Intel in the 80s but more recently at Google, and that's really what drives their teams. This is defining success on meeting goals, not just shipping features at random.
Again, for Vine, their objective probably would have been to become more of a sticky product, so a product that users go to more often and spend more time on. That would have meant that they could have thought of all of the different ways they could become more sticky, which would have meant that it would be more difficult for their users to go to another video app. If their objective was stickiness, there are key results, and usually you want to have about three key results for each objective. Key results could have been to reduce the time between sessions, so that they were releasing features that bring users back more and more often. If they were measuring time between sessions, they might want to reduce that, say, from two days to one day. It could have been to increase the retention rate of new users after four weeks. When new users arrive, how can we make sure that they stick around? And again, this is focusing on the outcome and not the features to enable that. There are so many different ways that the team could do that and in focusing on the outcome, that means that they can open their eyes to all the possibilities of how to achieve it.
Third would be to engage in continuous product discovery. This really could be a webinar all on its own, but it is ultimately for teams to keep uncovering user needs, testing new ideas before committing to them.
Again, in the case of Vine, they must have realised that the six second video format was working. But why? What's next? That would, should, have kicked off going to speak to customers to understand what is it about this format that you like? How are you using it? Ultimately trying to uncover what's next. What are the features that are going to increase, say, the stickiness, if that was on their OKRs, which would help achieve their vision?
Ultimately, users aren't going to be able to tell you what it is that you should be building for them. They're not very good at predicting the future or what they really want. For example, in the case of, say, Snapchat, nobody could have said, I want augmented reality filters with headbands and dog faces, or I want to be able to swap faces with my friends. Those are things that users just couldn't come up with. But if you could create prototypes for them to test out and see how they behave, if they're really engaged with it, then you know that you're on to a winner and that's something that the team should go and develop versus, features that users just don't seem to engage with at first look and ultimately shouldn't progress any further.
Those are the three steps in that order that should definitely be taken if you want to focus more on outcomes and less on product specifics.
Ultimately, what are the benefits? If you are looking to focus on outcomes rather than product, what can you hope to gain from it?
The first is that you are actually more likely to deliver positive outcomes if you know what you want your end state to be for your users and for your organisation. If you start with that end state in mind, you're more likely to achieve it, whereas focusing too much on an idea ultimately leaves you at the mercy of whatever outcome you end up with. It's more like potluck.
Focusing on outcomes allows you to be disruptive rather than disrupted. Ultimately, if you want to be the home of short-form video, you can keep innovating and keep trying things to stay as the home of short-form video, in the case of Vine, rather than being a six second video app that stays as a six second video app, that gets overtaken by something more interesting. Focusing on, again, the end state and always having that front of mind means that you can disrupt yourself before someone else comes and disrupts you.
That gets the team into the mindset of learning fast and cheap. Knowing that they've got lots of ideas on the table that could achieve an outcome means that they can test them out quickly to find out which are likely to work and which aren't, and therefore be able to discount features which don't look like they're going to hit the money before building them. Because if you build them, then you might find out that they fail and that's very expensive. You've already spent too long and too much money on it.
If the world does change quickly, then at least you can respond to it. You haven't committed to building features, you haven't brought senior managers along the journey and built this product up so that you have to deliver the whole thing. If you focus more on the outcome, then you can change plans at a moment's notice and the team's used to responding in that way.
Ultimately, focusing on outcomes means that you can respond to change quickly, you can be more likely to get where you want to go and you can deliver an experience that users are ultimately going to love.
Thank you very much for joining me. I hope this has been useful to you if you are ultimately in a product-focus team and are looking to shift your focus. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with 383, and thank you for joining me.
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