As a product manager, you’re constantly seeking new ways to drive innovation, streamline processes, and create products that resonate with your users. While traditional methodologies like Agile and Lean have their merits, sometimes you need to think outside the box and embrace unconventional techniques to gain a competitive edge. In this post “The Progressive Product Managers Toolkit – 10 Unconventional Techniques to Try”, we’ll explore several novel techniques that Product Managers can add to their toolkit to tackle complex challenges and unlock new opportunities.
The Progressive Product Managers Toolkit
1. Design Thinking Sprints
Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that has gained traction in the product management world. However, many teams struggle to fully embrace and implement this methodology due to time constraints and organizational silos. Enter Design Thinking Sprints.
Design Thinking Sprints are intense, time-boxed workshops that condense the entire Design Thinking process into a few days or weeks. These sprints bring together cross-functional teams to collaborate, ideate, prototype, and test solutions rapidly. By compressing the process, you can quickly validate ideas, gather user feedback, and iterate on your designs before committing significant resources.
To run a successful Design Thinking Sprint, you’ll need a dedicated facilitator, a diverse team (including end-users), and a willingness to embrace ambiguity and fail fast. The sprint typically follows a structured process, such as the Google Ventures Design Sprint or the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking approach.
2. Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas is a one-page business plan template that helps you deconstruct your product idea and validate key assumptions before investing significant time and resources. Developed by Ash Maurya, the Lean Canvas is a powerful tool for capturing your product’s value proposition, customer segments, channels, revenue streams, and other critical elements.
By forcing you to articulate and prioritize these components, the Lean Canvas encourages a lean, iterative approach to product development. It serves as a living document that you can continuously update and refine as you gather customer feedback and market insights.
To leverage the Lean Canvas effectively, gather a cross-functional team, including stakeholders from marketing, sales, and customer support. Collaboratively fill out the canvas, challenge assumptions, and identify knowledge gaps that require further exploration or validation through customer interviews, data analysis, or experimentation.
3. User Journey Mapping
User Journey Mapping is a powerful technique for visualizing and understanding the end-to-end experience of your users as they interact with your product or service. By mapping out their thoughts, actions, touchpoints, and emotions at each stage, you can identify pain points, unmet needs, and opportunities for improvement.
To create an effective user journey map, start by defining personas that represent your target users. Then, outline the specific scenarios or tasks you want to map, such as onboarding, making a purchase, or resolving a support issue. Gather data from user research, analytics, and stakeholder input to populate the map with touchpoints, actions, and emotions.
User Journey Mapping encourages empathy and a holistic understanding of the user experience. It can help align cross-functional teams around a shared vision and prioritize improvements that will have the most significant impact on user satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Pretotyping
Pretotyping is a lean product development technique that allows you to validate product ideas and assumptions quickly and inexpensively, before investing significant resources in building a fully functional product. Developed by Alberto Savoia, pretotyping involves creating a simulated or pretend version of your product to gather real-world data and feedback from potential users.
There are various pretotyping techniques you can employ, such as using Landing pages to gauge interest and collect email addresses, creating interactive prototypes with tools like InVision or Marvel, or even staging physical experiences or simulations using actors or props.
By pretotyping, you can validate critical assumptions about your product’s value proposition, features, pricing, and market fit before investing heavily in development. This approach helps you mitigate risk, save time and money, and iterate based on real user feedback before committing to a full-scale product launch.
5. Lean UX
Lean UX is a methodology that combines the principles of Lean Startup with User Experience (UX) design practices. It emphasizes a collaborative, cross-functional approach to product development, where UX design is integrated into the entire product lifecycle, rather than being a separate, siloed activity.
In Lean UX, designers work closely with product managers, developers, and stakeholders to gather user insights, ideate, and validate design solutions through rapid prototyping and iterative testing. The focus is on creating Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) or Minimum Viable Experiences (MVEs) that can be quickly validated with real users, rather than investing time and resources in perfecting a product upfront.
Lean UX encourages a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and adaptation. By embracing a lean mindset, teams can reduce waste, minimize rework, and deliver value to users more efficiently.
6. Impact Mapping
Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps align product development efforts with desired business outcomes and user goals. Developed by Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping provides a visual representation of the relationships between organizational goals, user needs, and the specific deliverables or features required to achieve those goals.
To create an Impact Map, start by defining the desired goal or impact you want to achieve (e.g., increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction). Then, identify the specific behaviors or actions that users must take to contribute to that goal. Finally, map out the deliverables or features that will enable or encourage those user behaviors.
Impact Mapping encourages a goal-oriented and outcome-driven approach to product development. It helps teams prioritize features based on their potential impact, ensuring that efforts are focused on delivering value that aligns with organizational and user needs.
7. Wardley Mapping
Wardley Mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps organizations understand the evolution of their products, services, and capabilities over time. Developed by Simon Wardley, this mapping technique provides a visual representation of the components that make up a product or service, their maturity levels, and their dependencies.
By creating a Wardley Map, you can identify which components are commodity (widely available and well-understood), which are differentiating (unique and valuable), and which are emerging or novel. This understanding allows you to make informed decisions about where to invest resources, what to outsource or buy, and what capabilities to build or maintain in-house.
Wardley Mapping encourages a strategic and future-oriented mindset, helping organizations anticipate and adapt to changing market conditions, technological advancements, and competitive landscapes. It can be particularly useful for product managers working in rapidly evolving industries or exploring new business models
8. Opportunity Solution Tree
The Opportunity Solution Tree is a structured problem-solving technique that helps teams systematically explore and evaluate potential solutions to a given opportunity or challenge. Developed by Lean and Six Sigma experts, this technique encourages divergent thinking and a thorough exploration of alternatives before converging on a final solution.
To create an Opportunity Solution Tree, start by clearly defining the opportunity or challenge you want to address. Then, generate a list of possible solutions or approaches, without judgment or evaluation. For each potential solution, identify its underlying assumptions, implications, and potential consequences or risks.
By visualizing and exploring the solution space in this structured way, teams can uncover hidden assumptions, identify potential blindspots, and make more informed decisions about which solutions to pursue or combine.
9. Innovation Games
Innovation Games are a collection of structured activities and exercises designed to foster creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in a fun and engaging way. Developed by Luke Hohmann, these games leverage principles from game design, improv, and facilitation to unlock new perspectives and generate innovative ideas.
Some popular Innovation Games include:
- Product Box: Teams design a physical product box to represent a new product or service idea, forcing them to articulate key features and value propositions concisely.
- Buy a Feature: Participants are given a limited budget and must prioritize and “purchase” features or capabilities, revealing true priorities and trade-offs.
- Remember the Future: Teams imagine a future scenario where their product or service is wildly successful, and work backward to identify the critical decisions and actions that led to that success.
Innovation Games can be powerful tools for breaking out of traditional thinking patterns, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and generating fresh ideas in a low-risk, playful environment.
10. Lean Coffee
Lean Coffee is a structured, agenda-less meeting format that promotes open discussion, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem-solving. Inspired by the principles of Lean and Agile, Lean Coffee encourages participants to collectively identify and prioritize the topics they want to discuss, fostering a sense of ownership and engagement.
During a Lean Coffee session, participants write down potential discussion topics on sticky notes or a shared board. The group then votes on the topics they find most interesting or relevant, effectively creating an ad-hoc agenda. The discussions are time-boxed, and participants can seamlessly transition between topics as interest or energy shifts.
Lean Coffee can be a valuable tool for product managers to gather insights, share knowledge, and collaboratively explore solutions to complex challenges. It encourages a culture of continuous learning, open communication, and collective problem-solving.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, product managers must continually expand their toolkits and embrace unconventional techniques to stay ahead of the curve. The ten techniques we’ve explored in this article – Design Thinking Sprints, Lean Canvas, User Journey Mapping, Pretotyping, Lean UX, Impact Mapping, Wardley Mapping, Opportunity Solution Tree, Innovation Games, and Lean Coffee – offer fresh perspectives and approaches to tackle complex challenges, foster innovation, and deliver exceptional user experiences.
By incorporating these techniques into your product management practice, you can cultivate a culture of experimentation, collaboration, and continuous learning within your team. Embrace ambiguity, challenge assumptions, and stay open to new ways of thinking and working. Remember, product management is an ever-evolving discipline, and those who are willing to adapt and embrace unconventional methods will be better equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern product landscape.
Leave a Reply