How can agile product management secure market success?

In our experience of helping pioneering organisations, those that succeed do so because they test new ideas and find good product-market fit early, before investing all their time and money into a ‘finished’ product. They’re masters of product management.

But a vast number of organisations, both start-ups and established businesses, don’t give their product management capability the authority to work with the customer to generate and test pioneering ideas in a cost-effective way. Those organisations end up flying blind, developing products and services with little idea of what customers really want and need.

This stark contrast between pioneering winners quickly innovating to steal a march on the competition and other organisations slowly working towards an untested ideal raises one question: How can organisations use product management to secure success?

Establish a product management culture that embraces pivoting

A well-functioning free market system shows how failure leads to progress. Weak ideas are discarded. Successful ideas are replicated. And the whole system becomes stronger. Organisations should embrace this thinking. The risk of investing in weak ideas, even if they used to be strong, is too high.

At a portfolio level, your product management leaders should develop product visions with measurable strategies, be bold enough to pivot away from initiatives that aren’t meeting expectations and persevere with those that are. The goal of your product portfolio is to build and maintain products that will power a sustainable business long into the future.

At a product level, leverage small-scale product releases to test customer expectations. This will let you pivot away from those that ‘fail’ and make more informed product prioritisation and design decisions.

For example, Airbnb started by renting air mattresses in a San Francisco apartment to conference attendees. But this proved unsustainable when conference numbers reduced. So, the co-founders pivoted their concept to travellers looking for cheap accommodation and an authentic local experience. The company is now worth around $90 billion.

Enable rapid, cost-effective testing of new ideas to reduce time to value

It’s impossible to effectively plan and build a single solution to a customer problem without their involvement and multiple iterations. Testing new, potentially pioneering ideas using a traditional product development method can take months to uncover whether the product meets the customer’s needs. For example, a recent study showed that 80 per cent of digital, cloud-based product features are rarely or never used.

Organisations should adopt three principles to create more lightweight and cost-effective ways to test and build new ideas:

1. Design Thinking to generate ideas

Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative process for cultivating and prototyping new ideas. It helps develop empathy for your customers’ needs and expectations. It starts with customer research to understand and reframe the customer problem within the context of your organisation. It then uses the resulting information to rapidly generate innovative ideas that will solve the customer challenges before rigorous evaluation assesses suitability. Design Thinking has helped a range of innovations, such as the development of a dignified and clean sanitation system for people in rural Africa.

2. Lean Start-Up to validate ideas

Lean Start-Up is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable. Taking new ideas and building small increments in short build-measure-learn cycles enables the organisation to test solutions with the market. While meticulous use of metrics to measure product usage supports ‘pivot or persevere’ decisions. DropBox famously used a simple video to demonstrate their product vision and learn from early adopters in a cheap and simple way, helping secure investment to build and scale the product.

3. Agile to build and scale ideas

Agile is an iterative, incremental, customer-centric method of solving problems. Self-organising teams build and scale new ideas iteratively, releasing value on a regular cadence. Products are broken down and delivered in small chunks, enabling a faster time to value. Zara, the fast-fashion company, for example, releases small batches of clothing to the shop floor in different locations, releasing value while learning from customer behaviour.