Product Festivus
Product Management far from the bright lights
I work in B2B product management and am fortunate to have worked on a diverse number of software products across industries. The core of the role is to build a differentiated product that solves pressing problems for customers. One of the most challenging aspects of the role is being able to prioritize amongst multiple conflicting items and making decisions amidst uncertainty & lack of data. In working with my team around understanding areas of poor customer experience with the products I manage, I was grappling with prioritizing product improvement items over new features. How does one prioritize germane product improvements vs new features. It’s like bringing fists to a light-saber-fight. New features are shiny objects as they bring in new revenue and often align with key organizational initiatives - They get all the attention. Prioritizing product improvements is often navigating a byzantine maze of engineering resources, enough customers speaking up about it (vs tolerating it) and a product manager’s gut instinct. It’s really hard to put a number on it. Ultimately it’s about bringing to life, the blood, sweat & tears that a customer goes through with the sub-optimal product experience. In other words, it’s about framing. For the left-brained, it’s a really important problem to solve - as product improvements drive product engagement, customer stickiness and ultimately lower SaaS revenue churn.
Recently I drew some inspiration to help frame the problems I was working on - while watching re-runs from one of my all-time favorite dark comedy sitcoms “Seinfeld”. Of course this was during the Festivus episode. To the uninitiated, one of main characters George Costanzo is forced to relive his traumatic childhood when his father Frank forces him to relive his made-up anti-Christmas holiday - Festivus. Frank invented Festivus in protest against the over-commercialization of the Christmas holiday. Dark comedic moments of relief during the Festivus celebration include a bare-aluminum pole as the anti-christmas tree, party ceremonies include the airing of grievances - where-in Frank would insult the the party attendees with stories of how they let him down during the year and of course demonstrating feats of strength where an unsuspecting soul would be selected to wrestle with Frank till Frank won. Beyond the dark comedic genius, Festivus is part of pop-culture folklore now.
Enter the Product Festivus!. It’s a ceremony for the entire cross functional product team (Customer Success, PM, Sales Engineers) to come together and just rant about the problems customers face with using your product. You can choose to call it instead the weekly bug scrub - but you get out of it what you call it :-)
There’s something powerful about framing, the way people relate to words, their shared experiences, notions about them and of course the underlying emotions about language. Initial reactions might be one of glee, laughter and welcome comedic relief in a corporate work setting. Once you get past them, the elements of the Product Festivus really come together where it’s a shared bonding experience around singularly ranting about the product, the pains experienced by customers with a view to help improve the product and the ensuing customer experience.
The Festivus Pole - aka your product
No PM egos allowed in here. No marketing fluff or sales deflections around the product allowed here. Check the egos and untruths at the door. It’s just the bare bones product here that everyone gathers around.
Airing of grievances
This is probably the most empathetic part of the ceremony. Every one brings their own unique perspective to the conversation. This would involve channeling frustrated customers conversations, personal gripes about how the product should work etc. The end result at least for me is where I get to experience through others a shared sense of pain customers feel with areas of the product that are lacking. A PM is often pressed for time and doesn’t have the luxury of being involved in every customer discussion, support tickets etc to obtain the same experience.
Feats of strength
Now comes the most interesting and challenging part of the ceremony. No, you don’t get pinned down by the head of the household nor do you get to pin anybody down. You get to wrestle with the problems you brought up and pin them down instead! No moves a.k.a ideas are bad ones. It’s a healthy rumble of ideas around the table in terms of how best to solve them.
With me so far ? The participants get to enjoy acting in the play while you as the PM are exercising all your PM skills and taking notes, asking questions, marking action items and of course diligently reviewing them afterwards for inclusion on a chosen spot in your product backlog! One can quantify the impact of such stories from a tactical standpoint but my personal experience has been that empathizing the customer impact of product improvements with impactful stories is the foundation that’s needed to proceed further. As they say, product management is part science, part gut. In that spirit, here comes the disclaimer :-) - This post is intended to evoke ideas, thoughts rather than provide answers.
Hope you enjoyed reading this. Are you a PM or want to be a PM? Have any strong reactions on my thoughts here ? Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line badridotraghunathanatgmaildotcom or DM me on twitter @wwb.
Happy Festivus!