“How Can We Get Better At Building Products & Experiences?”

A few weeks ago, the Chief Digital Officer of a regional bank asked us the above question.

Over the last year, the bank had successfully launched several products. Unfortunately, none of the new products were having much of an impact.

The users did not seem to particularly care for it. And the executives were not impressed since it barely moved the needle.

So instead of trying to do the same thing and hoping for a better outcome in 2022.

The team decided to beef up their internal capabilities. So that they can deliver better products, that drive a bigger impact, faster.

To Help Them Answer This Question, We Shared With Them A Capability Map.

A capability map is a visual representation of all the key skills needed to build great products.

I like using these maps because it’s a great way to consider all options and potential tradeoffs.

And Asked Each Of The Product Leaders To Highlight Areas That Needed To Improve.

Here is what they came back with.

Clearly that is a lot of areas to focus on.

Trying to do too much is a recipe for disaster.

So we asked them to pick just 5 key priority areas. Here is what they decided,

The numbers next to the circles indicate the number of votes.

Based On Their Responses A Few Things Stood Out.

1. All 5 leaders agreed to invest in up-skilling their product leaders and managers.
2. Most of the leaders (4 out of 5) wanted to improve the way they did product discovery (validating solutions before you build and defining MVP),
3. Majority of the leaders (3 out of 5) wanted to get better at setting success metrics (OKRs, KPIs) and creating high performing product teams.
4. The rest of the votes were distributed between building product strategy, creating hypothesis, writing requirements, and measuring success
5. No one prioritized tooling. A complete reversal from our initial conversation.

Armed With This Data, The Team Was Quickly Able To Decide Where To Invest And (Just As Important) Where Not To Invest.

As a result the team decided to,

1. Up-skill Their People First: Which, frankly, is music to my ears. In my experience, enabling the product team is the fastest and most effective way to start building great products.

2. Upgrade The Discovery Processes: So that they can better understand their user’s needs, test hypothesis, and ultimately build the “right” product.

3. Temporarily Pause On Buying Tools: Which actually worked out. Now instead of buying tools. They could use that same budget to invest in areas that would make a material difference.

So, the next time you you find yourself debating how to improve your product development competency. Consider starting with a capability map first.

You can download a clean copy here.