Product Development

As a Product Manager, it's our role to discover the product to be built. I firmly believe this isn't about capturing stakeholder requests, or even customer requirements, this pursuit is all about finding the point of innovation between desirability, feasibility and viability. It requires a product manager to ask WHY and go beyond what a customer wants to give them what they don't yet know they want. As a PM who has built multiple products from scratch, one of my strongest skillsets is in product discovery. Using a range of development frameworks and processes including jobs to be done theory, customer journey mapping, and rapid prototyping, I build product strategies that ensure business outcomes,  product market fit, and technical feasibility. 

As a global product portfolio manager, I have had the privilege of designing multiple products alongside our UX/UI designers. From facilitating early stage ideation workshops, researching competitor products, prototyping, and validating designs with end users, I have been involved in every stage of product design. I'm a firm believer that this is also a critical time to engage architects and engineers to design the product experience and solution in tandem. Aligning engineering and design teams around product artefacts like user story maps, or collaborating together on problem solving activities such as event storming ensures my teams understand our common goal and shared mission throughout the product design stage. 

When defining a product's minimum viability, my strategy is to learn as quickly as I can. I'll confess, I haven't always achieved this, but every time I fail in doing so it challenges me to ask: what could I have done to catch this insight earlier? By releasing multiple products to global markets, I have learnt that experimentation and measuring success are as critical to designing a successful product as working through flows with prospective users. Gaining deep understanding of your customers, and building strong support from stakeholders to help you identify where you might need to pivot, are crucial to defining a products scope. 

Delivery to me is about more than shipping features, it is about collaborating with your team to solve a pain point and ensuring your product delivers that outcome. Right from the outset you should know how to measure the success of your delivery.  Your code went to production, but did the benefit get realized? Or did we learn something new that means we need to adjust our approach? I am incredibly proud to have delivered 100% globally adopted enterprise software. But that did not happen on day one. We talked to our customers and stakeholders, we explored new avenues for meeting their needs, we tracked our analytics and we released new features to solve use cases we hadn't caught earlier. In doing so, we overperformed on every business case metric we set out to achieve. That is what I call successful delivery.