What do you call a product / experience that does not deliver impact? 

A bad investment.

As a product leader, your job is to invest in products and experiences that drive meaningful business impact.

But when you are early in the budgeting process, how can you tell which product / experience has the best chance of success? How do you choose where to invest?

Ideally, a crystal ball would be nice. But those don’t exists.

So the next best thing you can do is to only invest in teams that have the right foundation. This gives both you and them the best chance of success.

At Google, we first verify that the product can deliver impact then write code.  

At Google, when we invest in products and experiences, we look for – what I call the 5 Rs,

• Right Success Metrics: The team has identified, defined, and quantifies the right business metrics that matter.
• Right User Problem: Team is working on a user problem that is worth solving and that by solving it, it will impact the above metrics
• Right Team & Organization Structure: Leaders have put into place a cross functional team that can not only discover the best solution to the user problem. But also represent the best interests of the key internal stakeholders.
• Right Approach: Team is leveraging modern product development practices so that you can build the “right” product, and
• Right Skills: Each individual team member has the right skill and capability to execute

Get all the 5 Rs right. And you exponentially increase your chances of delivering a very successful product.

So the next time you approve a budget, ask your team the following questions.

The more “yeses” the better your chances of success.

Right Success Metrics

1. Have you defined success criteria (i.e business results)? What business KPIs (leading & lagging) will the product impact?
2. Can you quantify the impact? By how much will the KPI improve?
3. Do you have the ability to measure and collect this data? At what frequency? Level of accuracy? Ability to compare with historical data?
4. Are all your stakeholders aligned on the success metric, the results, and frequency?

Right Customer Problem

1. Have you identified the user / persona for this product?
2. What % of our users are suffering from this problem?
3. Do you have access to talk to these users directly?
4. Have you validated with your users that this problem is worth solving? Is the validation first hand vs. second hand?
5. Have you validated with your users that solving this problem will led to the desired business outcome?

Right Team Structure & Organization Alignment

1. Have you identified all the key internal stakeholders required to build this product?
2. Does your product team (core, support, and extended) include representatives from each of the key stakeholders? Do they have set defined responsibilities / expectations? (Check out the Risk Assessment Framework in this article)
3. Is the engineering manager and UX designer identified, available, and ready to start?
4. Have you validated with your key stakeholders that solving this problem will lead to the desired business outcome?

Right Approach

1. Have you identified the top 3 risk that would severely impact your ability to deliver outcomes? Do you have a mitigation plan to overcome these risks?
2. Do you have an agile / sprint approach set up to guide your discovery and development process?
3. Have you identified parameters for your MVP (i.e no more than X development weeks)?
4. Do you plan to validate the solution before you build? How?

Right Skills

1. Are your product managers trained, skilled, and experienced in modern product development approaches?
2. Do your product leaders know how to manage modern product development teams?
3. Does the product team have the right product / technical / industry skills to build the product?

What have I left out? What questions do you ask your team to ensure that they too can deliver meaningful impact?

Happy Building!!