Hey, happy Monday,
nice to see us back here after a short break that was far from relaxing, but very productive. This middle part of 2022 will be exciting!
As you are reading this newsletter, I will be in Amsterdam facilitating an OKR workshop for a large European foundation that provides researchers with a network of supercomputers to combat, among other things, diseases such as Alzheimer’s or to develop complex climate change simulations or to search for the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s particle accelerator. 🤯
I am proud of how tools developed at STRTGY are now being adopted by such portentous teams!
And I believe that this would not have been possible if we had not adopted, from day zero, a product mentality. At STRTGY everything is a product. Being product led is so important to us that we decided to sponsor a series of initiatives related to the figure of the product manager.
First among them is Product Management Day 2022. It is the largest Italian conference on the topic. I participated as a speaker in the first edition, and if you missed it, or want to see it again, find all the talks ( including mine).
This year’s PMDAY will be in hybrid mode. Live and physical in a beautiful location in Rome on June 22. Martina and I will be there, physically, but not on stage. We will have a small booth where we would love to meet anyone who wants to learn more about OKRs for a product team (and beyond!). There will also be a surprise that I cannot reveal now. 🤫
But what I can do is offer you 15% off your ticket right away so you can minimize any thoughts about whether or not to participate.
Use and spread this link as much as you can. There are no commissions, I don’t make any money! But you do!
👉 https://strtgy.design/pmday22-strtgy-member
During this period I have interviewed all the guests and in the next newsletters you will find previews of their talks. I start by introducing you to the first guest: Raffaella Roviglioni of Thoughtworks Italia. Happy reading!
I look forward to meeting you in Rome or at one of our events!
But if you want to anticipate, just choose when!
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS
Antonio
● PRODUCT / Problem Space
The value of discovering the right problem
A: Raffaella, what is your role and how has your career brought you closer to product management?
Raphael: I started working 22 years ago but only the latter part of my career introduced me to this reality.
For the past 14 years I have entered the world of design and user experience, initially as a freelancer specializing on the research side. I was involved in user research in the round. The consulting role involved me from the initial stages of exploratory research to understand who the company was targeting and what they wanted to design, to product validation. Throughout my different experiences and ongoing work supporting clients, I realized that as design skills and the strategic level of discussion with clients grew, other aspects that were not purely design-related also needed to be addressed.
Let me explain: design impacts other metrics. So I found myself having to learn how to dialogue with the client, to understand what their goals were.
A: How can we define your role in the company today?
Raffaella: I currently serve in the role of Product and Design Co-Lead. Together with a fellow product manager of mine, we are responsible for giving direction to the customer experience and product & design of Thoughtworks Italy.
I bring my design and research experience, he brings his product management experience.
A: So your role is to connect research, users and…
Raffaella: I would say the Business.
Sometimes the business is represented by product management, other times the business does not yet have the maturity to have fully understood this role or to have, if anything, codified it.
A: What exactly is Thoughtworks Italy involved in?
Raffaella: It is a globally operating company best known for software development. Its founders include proponents of theAgile Manifesto, so it is a company that has brought technological innovation in terms of how software is worked on and how the Agile philosophy can be implemented in enterprises.
The company has been in the market for almost 30 years and has expanded worldwide. The Italian office, compared to those in other countries, is still small but growing: alongside software development we are bringing in design skills, product skills, data analysis skills. We really deal with quite a few areas and the people on the team have very different skills.
What is product management?
A: How would you define, in your own words, product management and why do you think it is important to have product managers in the company?
Raffaella: We need to get away from the old way of thinking about the product behind closed doors as if it were left inside a room, and develop it based only on the internal knowledge of stakeholders.
Maybe they are people who have gained a lot of vertical domain experience in the company, but that is no longer enough today.
In today’s reality, where products follow one another and are replaced by others quickly, where there is so much competition and people’s needs evolve rapidly, different business decisions need to be made.
We need to ask ourselves, for each product, what needs to be included or left out, what aspects are best to focus on.
It is also important to analyze the market because of the many data we have available.
The product manager is the person who can interpret this data and dialogue with other business stakeholders to think in business terms: we need to ask where it is worthwhile to invest and why.
Part of this data comes precisely from design: the designer, through listening and understanding, works by asking what people need.
Knowledge of the end consumer enables us to make useful products that meet real needs and are appreciated by the end customer.
And this is only the first part of the work!
Technical feasibility must then be considered, to assess the impact that research has on the realization of a product.
Finally, there are business needs and goals.
In every manufacturing company, we have the intersection of these three souls-analysis, feasibility, and business-and the product manager cannot take care of everything alone. The product manager plays the role of a facilitator, connecting the sources of information to the decision makers who need to understand them in order to make the best choices and produce their products. That’s how I see product management.
A: The best communication tool for a product manager?
Raphael: OKRs. They are very useful. In my work, it is important to understand what the goals are, to work together with the team, and to be able to measure the success of projects.
It is a continuous experiment: success is not something that comes out in a surprising way from a genius idea-I would like to say that-but it is the result of many iterations, modifications, improvements, refinements.
Being in that position and playing the role of designer in contact with product management, I realized the opportunity I had in my hands and how many relevant aspects I could still understand to optimize the work.
Synthesize and prioritize data
A: The title of your talk will be “In Search of the Right Product, Navigating the Problem Space through the Lens of People.” What will we learn?
Raffaella: In this talk, I would like to explore the concept of problem space: even before we understand what features our product will have, we need to identify the people we would like to target, understand what their intentions are and what goals they are trying to achieve.
Only at a later stage can we reason and ask how our product will infiltrate people’s lives, how it might support and help them.
In this approach there is the idea of finding opportunities, for example, needs that have not yet been picked up by our competitors and thus gaining a competitive advantage.
It is really a phase of exploration. During the talk I will talk about it in a practical way, it will not just be a theoretical talk.
I come from a very pragmatic background and like to talk about practices to extract useful reflections for action.
I will also address another important issue: companies need to figure out the right people to do research.
Because, in fact, it is precisely not enough to do research, but it must be done well.
If we do not act rigorously, what we discover and then base our decisions on could be totally misleading.
Precision counts in some phases, flexibility and agility in others.
I will also give guidance on how to make synthesis after acquiring the data.
Many people jump into the research phase with enthusiasm, gather information, discover lots of different metrics, and then don’t know how to use them. This is a shame.
I would like to give concrete guidance on how to synthesize, prioritize, and extract useful insights for designing and reasoning about the product.
So I will bring attention to the next step: the design of the product and its features, based on what we understood through the research.
I would like a key concept to go through: research should not be the sole preserve of researchers and designers; ideally, the entire project team should be involved to gain a deep understanding of the client’s needs.
A: A resource for furthering the concepts of your talk?
Raphael: I just published a book on this topic.
It is titled: Who Wants Faster Horses: Coaching Listening and Curiosity in Research with People..
I wanted to produce a manual in Italian precisely because literature on research and business in our language is scarce. It is a text that covers the whole phase of research, from objectives to analysis.
