Closing the Product Delivery Gap

Welcome, Where You’re Joining From & Opening Banter

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:01:05
All right, everyone. Welcome to the Go ahead, Raj. to the latest product side webinar. Today we’re covering closing the product delivery gap. How product teams can optimize execution. We’ll let folks join and settle in for a moment. And we’ll get started in a minute or so.

As you’re joining, why don’t you pop in the chat where you’re from? Welcome, Abraham. Yeah. Oh, Jordan. All right. Jordan. Yeah.

I always like it when see people from around the world join us. Absolutely. Yeah. I can put Suzanne is from Vienna. Excellent. Thanks for joining us so late. What’s I can put in where I’m from, too. We’re in Canada, Bart. It’s a big country.

Vancouver. Nice. Oh, all right. Our time zone.

This morning, Marger’s up in the hills. Yes. California. Welcome, Cindy. Cindy, Washington State. I’m usually from Where in Washington State? Again, a big state.

Spokane of the east side over the mountains. Excellent.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:01:05–00:02:10
All right. Well, we have lots lots to cover, Kenny, so let’s dive in.

Introductions: Roger and Kenny

Roger Snyder | 00:02:10–00:03:05
All right. Let us get started. Hold on just a second, and I will get us going.

All right. Welcome. There we go. All right. Well, if you were looking for uh closing the product delivery gap, you are in the right place. Absolutely.

So, my name is Roger Snyder. I’m a principal consultant and trainer from Productside based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California about an hour south of San Francisco as the crow flies.

And our main presenter today is Kenny Cransler. If you’d introduce yourself, Kenny.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:03:05–00:04:05
Sure. and Krenler and I am from Seattle, Washington. Spend most of my time there, but right now I am uh wintering a little bit being a rainbird as I call it in Palm Springs, California. Getting out of out of the rain. I think it’s not raining today up there.

Roger Snyder | 00:04:05–00:04:15
Excellent. Very good.

Productside Overview & Session Logistics

Roger Snyder | 00:04:15–00:06:20
All right. So, a couple introductory slides before we get to the meat of the presentation.

If you’re not familiar with Productside, we are focused strictly on helping the disciplines of product management and product marketing. We help product managers, product owners, product leaders become more effective in their practices as a product manager.

We focus on helping enterprises transform their their teams. We also help individuals improve their skill sets. And we pride ourselves on really soaking in deeply your particular situations and working to actually tailor our solutions to your context.

And all of us are invested experts. We all have at least 20 years of experience in the product management discipline. You can visit productsside.com to learn more.

All right, we want this to be an interactive session today. So, take a look at the bottom of your Zoom screen. See that little Q&A button? Pop that open and please put your questions in as they occur to you. Just go ahead and pop them in there.

We will save time for questions at the end, but if a question seems particularly topical in the moment, I might interrupt Kenny and ask him to entertain that question. So, please pop those in at any time.

The number one question to receive is, so I’m going to answer it now. Hey, can I watch this webinar later? And yes, you absolutely can. When you registered with your email address, we will now use that email address after the webinar to send you the recording link so that you can watch it at your leisure.

Join the Productside LinkedIn Community

Roger Snyder | 00:06:20–00:07:30
All right. Excellent.

We also want you to join our community on LinkedIn. There’s over 40,000 product management professionals in our LinkedIn group where you can share your best practices, share your questions, discuss issues of the day, what’s going on right now that’s really addressing a challenge for you or represents a new opportunity.

And it gives you an opportunity to network with your peers. So use that QR code and join our LinkedIn group today and you’ll be able to really get into a good community of practice on all things product management.

And with that on closing the product delivery gap, I turn it over to you, Kenny. Take it away.

Why “Delivery” Is the Biggest Product Gap

Kenny Kranseler | 00:07:30–00:10:40
Thank you, Roger, and welcome all.

Today we’re going to dig into what those of you who attended our webinar just before the holidays heard was probably the biggest area of need for product managers and was also a prior a priority for product executives.

It was really that gap in skills and capabilities among their teams around what we call deliver or delivery depending on how you want to refer to it.

So I will first recap a little bit the need and the requirement that we heard from product teams around delivery. Then I’m going to dive into some of the root causes of that gap, lay out a little bit about what high-erforming product teams do around delivery and give you hope all a little bit of a path for how you can get your teams to that level.

We’ll end up I’ll talk through a case study that Roger and I worked on here at Productside uh that actually saw some of these transformations occur and then we’ll open it up to a little bit of questions and answers. I know it’s a lot to accomplish in an hour or less than an hour. Uh so let’s dig in a little bit.

All right.

Productside Blueprint: Deliver Beyond Launch

Kenny Kranseler | 00:10:40–00:14:10
First a little background on what we at Productside have identified as that delivery gap among product teams.

We identified this gap in our annual survey of product managers. As some of you might know, we compile all the results we receive from product managers on our team assessments every year. Pull it all together.

This team assessment, it’s con really configured around our Productside product management blueprint and the key work streams that we see in that blueprint. Team leadership and strategy, context, investigate, define, create and deliver.

These work streams, they form the basis of how product managers identify and solve key customer and business needs in order to optimize the development and optimization of arcs for their product.

Context that covers internal strategy, company values, the market, the environment, and the customers and the users of your product.

Then we look at the two discovery phases. Discover investigate where we find valuable problems. Discover, define. we start to identify solutions that the market would actually pay for. It’s where a lot of the testing and some of the small bets happen though to be fair testing happens everywhere.

Then into create uh it’s more than building. It’s about planning ahead, road mapping, defining key performance indicators and then we get into the point of delivery goes beyond launch. It includes how the product’s performing in the market, some of the ongoing decision making and even portfolio level uh choices that we’re making about retiring products.

And again, while leadership is part of context, we separate it because support can also give leaders a way to reflect on and think about their coaching and leadership practices as part of their understanding.

Poll #1 – How Mature Is Your Team at Delivery?

Kenny Kranseler | 00:14:10–00:16:40
I want to uh run a quick poll.

I’ve heard from our general survey um uh respondents. How would you rate your own product team’s maturity around deliver or the capability to optimize how your product performs in market beyond launch including ongoing iterative evaluation of inmarket performance to drive effective and proactive decision making even portfolio level choices.

All right, let’s see how our team our how our panel is doing here.

Thank you for your honesty. Those of you who are saying very low maturity.

All right, so looks looks like our webinar panel looks like our our general survey. We’re uh pretty low to fair maturity somewhere between one and one and a half here as I would calculate it.

All right. All right. So, good. You’re in the right place.

Why Delivery Is Hard: Root Causes

Kenny Kranseler | 00:16:40–00:22:10
So, let’s get let’s start to understand why do these patterns repeat.

More maturity is needed around keeping launch products aligned with changing business, market, and customers.

So why is this such an a need and deficiency among product teams?

First, teams and organizations don’t have a unified division of what success unified vision of what success looks like for their products.

Second, even if there is some agreement on what success looks like, there’s not a good or a set cadence for evaluating the effectiveness of the product on how it’s moving towards that level of success.

Thirdly, even if we are mining the store, we either don’t have the proper level of measurement or we haven’t had created a good way to measure if the product is delivering on that level of success.

And there’s sort of sometimes the ultimate sort of he said she said challenge where a product manager has a different lens to view success or lack thereof than organizational leadership might.

What “Deliver” Actually Means

Kenny Kranseler | 00:22:10–00:26:40
So let’s let’s get to that notion of when I say deliver and delivery, what practices am I really referring to?

A lot of us are pretty good at at launching products. That’s the fun part of product management.

But if you want to be an excellent product manager, you want to measure how the product’s performing on a continual basis, use the evaluation of that measurement and further discovery to learn about what’s going on with our product in the market.

Then use that learning that we’re picking up along the way to iterate on the product and how it’s delivered in the marketplace.

And if we’re doing this effectively, once we iterate, we’re going to go back and do it all over again with the iterated products on a continual basis until someday that products outlived its usefulness and we make the decision to retire that product.

Roger Snyder | 00:26:40–00:27:05
So again, to emphasize your point earlier, it’s not just launch. It’s not just throwing it over the wall and saying, “Okay, I’m done.” No, that’s actually the fun begins.

High-Performing Delivery Teams: The Lifecycle Mindset

Kenny Kranseler | 00:27:05–00:31:20
So what do um some of these high performing teams do to optimize their product delivery?

First and foremost they view delivery as a life cycle.

They carefully and meticulously start to plan out the launch of their products with a definition of what success for that launch is, and they continue to monitor the performance with a set of pre-identified KPIs that assure that that product is delivering the level of success.

While all this is going on, we’re continuing to scan and monitor changes in the marketplace and reporting these KPIs and marketing discoveries broadly across the organization and use that information to persistently enhance iterate their products toward that hoped for performance.

And they have a strong end of life governance practice in the organization where products are evaluated to make sure they’re meeting their objectives and those that are redundant or past their useful life are set up for retirement and that retirement speech is really a positive activity.

Practical Delivery Practices to Adopt

Kenny Kranseler | 00:31:20–00:36:55
Few practices product teams can start to adopt that can help them get to that cycle or that level of maturity.

First one is make sure you have a sense of outcome trees.

Start linking business outcomes to product outcomes to the metrics you’re going to track that allow you to get there.

Start to have standard definitions for success, adoption, retention, engagement.

Have outcome reviews. Are we achieving those outcomes? And why not?

Don’t have to be heavyweight. You can keep them as lightweight as possible, but make sure those discussions are based on evidence, not based on someone’s thought or someone’s ideas or someone’s hope of what future looks like.

Build in some experimentation loops.

And don’t forget about end of life.

Roger Snyder | 00:36:55–00:37:20
I think that monthly outcome review of all of these is is the one that you can probably implement most simply and that can start that cultural shift.

Step-by-Step Path to Improve Delivery

Kenny Kranseler | 00:37:20–00:41:40
First step make sure you establish those success metrics upfront.

What does success look like for your new product or product iteration? You should set that up before you even start building the product.

Maybe three, maybe five. Start with three and then go from there.

And make sure that if there are product metrics that you want to track that you instrument into your product ways to provide you insights into how your product is performing.

And again, don’t keep those success metrics to yourself. Share them broadly across the organization and make sure others have metrics they can track to understand their contributions toward that success.

Why 3–5 KPIs (Not 10)

Roger Snyder | 00:41:40–00:41:55
So Kenny, why why three to five? Why not 10?

Kenny Kranseler | 00:41:55–00:46:10
Good question.

If there are 10, we can’t we we don’t know. We get lost in the details.

I remember I worked at Amazon for a while. We would actually do weekly product reviews.

When I got there, those weekly product reviews had 50 pages of metrics.

So I actually trimmed it down and said, “Okay, there’s going to be three to five on the front page. We can have all the 50, but it’s all backup.”

Start with the ones that are important.

Roger Snyder | 00:46:10–00:46:35
And that takes us back to the K in KPI. There’s key performance indicators.

Improve Market Radar & Competitive Awareness

Kenny Kranseler | 00:46:35–00:49:40
Prove your market radar.

Make sure you are tracking the specific markets and segments of that market that are important for you and your product.

What are the impacts of things like political, economic, environmental, technological, social or legal on the segments you’re targeting?

Don’t forget about competitors.

We shouldn’t necessarily blindly copy what they’re doing.

But we still want to understand what are their capabilities and how can we effectively compete given their capabilities.

And these days, particularly with respect to AI, keeping track of the market landscape is crucial because that landscape is evolving rapidly.

Poll #2 – How Often Do You Review Products for End-of-Life?

Kenny Kranseler | 00:49:40–00:52:30
Let’s move into that discussion of end of life. I’m going to run a poll.

How frequently do you review your products for end of life candidacy?

Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or are we supposed to plan for end of life?

All right, let’s share the results here.

There’s lots of honesty.

Some people are doing it annually, some people are doing it quarterly.

I actually wouldn’t recommend that you do this weekly or monthly, but people doing it quarterly or at least annually or semiannually is probably a good time to at least think about it.

End-of-Life Governance & Courage

Kenny Kranseler | 00:52:30–00:57:40
You probably want to start making end of life a part of your product process.

Have a rubric that enables you to make decisions about whether or not you should end of life a product.

Have clear criteria around market attractiveness and product success within that market.

Make sure that end of life is viewed as a good thing, not a bad thing.

Communicate I’ve freed capacity and that is a win.

And it takes a lot of courage to be the one to raise the issue and say, “Look, we need to look at this product.”

If you’ve done a good job of creating KPIs and you start to see things like adoption rate or renewal rates sliding down, that’s the time to have the courage to say, our resources need to be put in the right places.

Roger Snyder | 00:57:40–00:58:05
And Kenny, we’ve got a question here from Suzanne.

Suzanne. Uh we make tailormade food recipes. Does it make sense to do end of life of those recipes?

Kenny Kranseler | 00:58:05–01:00:10
That’s a really good question.

I would argue at some level at least think and evaluate it.

It might be which ones are active and deactive, which ones we talk about, which ones we don’t talk about, which ones we work with our sales team to promote, which ones we don’t.

And in Suzanne in your instance the cost of maintaining another recipe and having it in the portfolio may be so small that you don’t care about end of life.

Case Study: Fortune 500 Insurance Delivery Transformation

Kenny Kranseler | 01:00:10–01:09:20
Let me talked about a case study we did.

We did some work with a Fortune 500 insurance company that was struggling with slow development cycles.

They were averaging more than 10 weeks per release.

Teams were shipping features but weren’t measuring outcomes.

They lacked shared KPIs. They had no consistent post-launch iteration rhythm.

They had very weak cross functional collaboration. A lot of handoff friction.

They started to move toward becoming a feature factory.

So Raj, you’re involved with this.

Raj | 01:09:20–01:13:05
Yeah.

Insurance is a highly regulated industry.

There was also a sense of malaise where we don’t have to do too much stuff.

And then suddenly the insurance industry saw a bunch of changes happening.

So we did a whole bunch.

We started to help them clarify some of the KPIs, some of the outcome alignments.

Team adopted outcome-driven product roadmaps and defined those three to five KPIs for each initiative.

They started to work in faster validation cycles.

Teams were trained to use experiment-driven decision criteria, lightweight validation loops.

We started to bring the teams together to build some cross-functional launch rhythm.

They established a shared launch, measure, iterate cadence.

We built a simple end of life and or pause rubric so teams could deprioritize low value work and free capacity for validated opportunities.

They went from 10 weeks to four weeks for each release.

There was business impact. They got rid of that six weeks of wasted development cycles on an annual basis.

We calculated there was over 550,000 per team in regained efficiency.

And there was more innovation.

They became more innovative in being able to offer through software more innovative add-on services.

Those KPIs now were something they could actually monitor in real time and then with those interactions be able to evolve the products to deliver more and more value.

Key Lessons & What To Do Next

Kenny Kranseler | 01:13:05–01:09:20
Deliver is both the most important capability and one of the weakest for product management teams.

Teams fail delivery not from a lack of talent but a lack of systems and coordination and collaboration.

Good delivery is the result of strong work across all the capability areas.

Do the five things we talked about today, but also clarify your practices on everything leading up to deliver so you’re set up for success.

Upcoming Webinars, Training, and Resources

Kenny Kranseler | 01:09:20–01:13:10
There’s a team assessment available on the Productside.

Take it honestly.

Second, go to our Productside, take a look at a replay of our recent webinar on AI’s potential for enhanced go to market and it was led by Roger.

Third, take a look at some of the playbooks we have available.

Finally, invest in boosting maturity.

I also recommend downloading the ebook that’s on our website. I co-authored it. It shows you how to put some of the practices that we’ve talked about in action at your company.

Roger Snyder | 01:13:10–01:15:30
Download our state of product management maturity report and use that QR code or use the link that we have just popped into the chat.

The next webinar is ship happens. Adoption however is earned.

This one will be led by our very own Dean Peters.

We also have courses coming up.

Kenny is going to be training our live online OPM next week.

The week after that I am training our live online AI product management course.

And if you want in-person training, Tom Evans will be in London in March.

Q&A: Focus Groups, Failing Metrics, KPI Conflicts

Roger Snyder | 01:15:30–01:19:10
Suzanne asked our focus group discussions are part of that right and they can be part of your discovery.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:19:10–01:21:10
Talk to your customers even after you launch.

It could be onetoone, it could be in focus groups, it could even be surveys.

Both quantitative and qualitative is an important way you should go through it.

Roger Snyder | 01:21:10–01:22:10
What do you do if you find that your product is failing in its post-launch metrics?

Kenny Kranseler | 01:22:10–01:23:40
Do some root cause analysis.

What’s going on? What’s driving some of those metrics to be going down?

And this is where surveys or additional instrumentation or focus groups might be some of the tools that you use to dig deeper.

Roger Snyder | 01:23:40–01:24:20
How do you recommend teams choose which KPIs to anchor on when different stakeholders push for different success metrics post launch.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:24:20–01:27:05
There may be other metrics that other stakeholders track.

Go back to outcomes.

I varied KPIs over time.

There were some parts of the year where sales was very important.

The rest of the time adoption was really important.

And I like what you said. What actions will I take as a result of adding this metric?

Avoid vanity metrics.

Closing Remarks

Roger Snyder | 01:27:05–01:28:10
Thank you so much, Kenny.

I really hope you all take those five steps to heart.

Follow up with a recording and write those things down so that you have an actionable plan to become more effective at monitoring your products after they launch.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:28:10–01:28:40
Thank you, Roger, for supporting me and thank everybody for attending and the level of engagement questions you had and being honest when we asked those poll questions as well.

Roger Snyder | 01:28:40–01:28:55
Absolutely. Great. Thank you and have a great day. Take care everyone. Bye.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:28:55–01:29:00
Bye.