SI 5 - Product Reflections

🎵Hello, it’s me…🎵

Yes, you read that right—our newsletter is back, rejuvenated with some fresh takes for those focused on shipping impact.

To get us in the Shipping Impact spirit, I’m sharing some product reflections from the past year of advising, supporting, and building products and product teams with various organizations.

It feels good to reconnect again! I can’t wait to share more perspectives, stories, and learnings from the world of impact and product - mine and others in our community.

— Lenae

🤔 Product Perspective

Some context - a lot of the work I do in the product space includes helping organizations develop and evolve their product practices and teams. This involves coaching their product people and leaders, stepping in as a fractional product leader, or first (sometimes founding) product manager role for a new product concept (think zero to one type product stage). Over the last year, my experiences with different clients have revealed consistent themes that resonate with broader observations from my product career. 

Despite product type and customer segment differences, these organizations share some commonalities. They want to leverage software products and digital services to deliver their mission at scale, boost product management experience as their team grows, and enable a product operating model that works for their environment and needs. 

Reflection #1 - Building products is about value and outcome delivery

Above all else, it's essential to understand that a product's purpose is to deliver value. If you're starting to build or evolve your products and product team, everything centers on this. Value is relative and different for different people and organizations. Products alone are not inherently valuable. Value comes from a product's ability to solve a problem or do a "job" that meets a customer's or user's needs. It must do this better than solutions users can get elsewhere, including competing with manual processes they use today.

People often tie value to the amount of technology delivered. It's also seen through the lens of financial gain. However, value takes a more holistic, people-centric dimension in the impact space. It's about the meaningful outcomes that products and services enable for people and communities in the long term. These outcomes can lead to many benefits for organizations, such as maximizing federal or grant funding, reducing internal costs, fostering better community connection, enhancing policy effectiveness, and cultivating engaged employees and trust.

This underscores the mission of product teams—continuous value delivery. The purpose of the product manager role is continuous value management. Product management focuses on managing product risks to maximize value delivery while aligning teams to deliver the right value in the right ways. It ensures that the shipped outputs lead to desired outcomes for your users, customers, stakeholders, and organization. It doesn't matter who you are: a VC-backed startup, non-profit, or government agency. If you're investing in product development, those products should result in shipped value, not just shipped tech. 

Reflection #2 - Product thinking is a culture shift, not just a job role change

Using the same basis for a product—value—the organization, not just a single role, has to operate through a value-driven, outcome-focused operating model. For organizations hiring product roles for the first time, they may not fully understand the role and end up indexing for management of the team’s work over driving product value delivery and product strategy. Use the role to drive change, but the role’s value depends on the organization's ability to become a learning and outcome-driven culture. 

For teams at any stage or sector building product, product thinking remains the driving force for enabling product-led and customer-oriented action in the organization. Product thinking means continuously answering the questions 'Is this value?' and 'Is this useful?' while defining outcomes and measures for how we'll successfully answer those questions. We use evidence-based tactics throughout the product development process to do this. We verify user needs with users, test product concepts with users, create experiments to test demand, and build initial versions of products with complete experiences to validate solutions with users. 

Products are a series of assumptions and decisions. Applying product thinking to this reality helps create a discipline of continuous learning and experimentation. It also boosts the chances of product success. It takes embracing and enabling rapid and continuous learning as a core value that a Product Manager can steward and champion with organizational support.

Reflection #3 - Principles First, Frameworks and Templates Later

Product management is not Agile, Scrum, or Kanban. It isn't just making mural boards or creating prioritization models for feature priorities. Those are tools in product management. The foundational principles of product management get lost in the sheer volume of frameworks, templates, and methods that enable product management work. Sometimes, we skip the why and what (principles) for the how (process and techniques).

Product management is a discipline. As a discipline, methods, frameworks, and templates exist to help. They enable a model for delivering value that works for the organization. How well these tools work depends heavily on how the team and organization view and value product efforts. For example, using data-informed methods to drive product work can be challenging if the organization doesn't care about customer feedback. That's why understanding the core principles of product management is important when shifting to a product approach. These principles are the stable, underlying beliefs that guide action and decisions at any scale. Everything else in product management and product development builds off these principles.

In the impact space, we often operate with limited specialized resources or roles. In these organizations, individuals may perform product-related tasks without realizing it. If you're moving from traditional IT or project management to a product-driven culture, skipping these principles will leave a gap. You'll miss the underlying beliefs that drive successful product management and product-led efforts. Principles are essential to scaling your product model, practices, and teams.

Reflection #4 - Product portfolio management is the next maturity milestone

As organizations evolve, their product strategies shift from simple, single-product endeavors to simultaneous, multi-product initiatives. This transition underscores the importance of product portfolio management, an area of opportunity for product leaders.

Product portfolios are groups of products or product initiatives. Smaller organizations may have only one product portfolio led by a product leader (Head of Product, VP). For larger organizations, you likely have many product portfolios led by a group of product leaders, such as Product Directors or Group Product Managers. The groupings depend on the organization. They can be grouped by likeness, like all consumer-facing web apps. They can also be grouped by shared value proposition or service enablement, such as shipping fulfillment. 

Product portfolios contain groups of concurrent product initiatives. Their goals - individually and together - are to deliver value and outcomes. When you align these initiatives into a portfolio approach, you can drive larger impact returns like an investment portfolio. Using a portfolio brings systems thinking to product strategy. You do this by defining shared vision and outcome targets for the portfolio. The benefits are better end-to-end customer experiences. They also include clearer visibility into conflicting priorities and effective resource allocation. Managing product portfolios also helps you balance product risk management. Think of this as the value portfolio.

Defining meaningful product portfolios and portfolio strategies that help align and drive day-to-day product decisions is a stage of maturity that directly relates to the role and responsibility of product leaders. Without this direction, your product teams will quickly do their own thing. Their products and experiences won't drive the larger whole. This will lead to fragmented experiences and more complexity.

Interesting product reads 👓

1. Product Management: Theory Versus Reality—Based on my reflections above, Kasey Fu shares their experience moving from product theory to product reality. Great considerations and a key takeaway is: Don’t let the ideal state bring you down if your environment doesn’t exactly fit the textbook version of the product. Stick with the principles; they’ll serve you well. 

2. The internet was supposed to be democratic. Why isn’t it? I cannot wait to read this book, Governable Spaces, by Nathan Schneider after New_ Public introduced it in their fabulous newsletter (if you care about community spaces and haven’t subscribed to this newsletter, here’s your call to action!). 

3. Responsible product management is a lot of what this newsletter is about. This great article by Product Teacher talks about our role as product managers (and the everyday actions we can take) to help fight climate change in our product efforts. I’ll be assessing my online digital presence as a result of this article.

📌 Impact Job Board

• Technical Product Manager @ industrial

• Product Manager (VA) & Senior Product Manager (Dept of State) @ Mo Studios

• Senior Product Managers & Sr. Product Director @ AdHoc

• Technical Product Manager-in-Residence @ US Digital Response

• Staff Product Manager & Director of Enterprise Products @ Regrow Ag

• Head of Product @ Mae

*Note: I do not receive any referral bonus or compensation for promoting these roles. This newsletter section aims to provide resources to product folks interested in roles at impact-based product companies.

That's all for this round of Shipping Impact!

Thanks for reading, and happy shipping!

Lenae 👋

Shipping Impact is a newsletter produced by Lenae Storey. It highlights how product thinking and product-based approaches can help impact-driven people and organizations deliver their missions using digital products and services.

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