Give a product team a solution, and the best they can do is build it. Empower a product team to learn from customers and devise their own solutions, and they'll build not only something more likely to work, but an understanding of what it takes for your business to succeed.
If your product org is able to successfully decentralise decision making, by enabling your teams to learn from customers, and make their own decisions about what to build, you'll scale your ability to continuously discover new opportunities and quickly capitalise on them.
In short, scale your ability to succeed. Sounds like something worth exploring right?
Here’s a couple ideas for you to start thinking about.
1. Think user tasks, not projects and features.
Stop referring to features or projects and start referring to your users’ tasks in their language.
Completing tasks and projects isn’t a predictor of success. Helping users complete tasks they care about more easily is.
The simple act of identifying the tasks your product supports and using these as the reference point for your work keeps people focussed on what matters, in language everyone across the business can understand. The nice thing about tasks is that they come in different sizes too, to handle different levels of granularity. So there’s always a task formulation for high level strategic views or in-the-weeds details.
For bonus points, start matching these up to business goals. “Increase customer acquisition” at a bank might be linked with making tasks like “Open a new bank account” or “Find a relevant mortgage package” easier.
Further reading: The new user story map is a backlog (Jeff Patton)
2. Start watching your users and share these.
Start watching and recording users use something you’ve built, to complete one of more of those tasks.
There’s nothing like watching people struggle to use a thing you built to kick-start effective learning practices. It begins building humility within the organisation and ensures more decisions about what, how and when to build stuff is grounded in facts rather than bias and assumptions based fiction.
Further reading: Fast path to great UX (J. Spool) and Chapter 9 of Don’t make me think (S. Krug)
That’s it. There's lots, lots more stuff, but the ripple effect of these two simple steps (that you’ll spend a lifetime improving) will begin laying the foundations for successfully empowering teams and scaling your organisation’s ability to succeed.
I’ll leave it there, but rest assured we’ll be digging into this stuff lots more. From my own experience and those at the worlds most successful product organisations.