Global Nomad

enhancing the amazon working backwards process

3/29/2020

In a previous post I discussed the famous amazon “press release backwards” technique for product teams - designed for customer-facing “product” teams — teams that create a product or service to be consumed by either B2C or B2B customers, the technique is in my opinion a valuable exercise that forces teams to consider the value of the thing they’re making for their intended audience BEFORE they start working on it.

Indeed, the idea behind this process is that if the teams can’t tell a super compelling story about the product, then the concepts they’re considering are too complicated or probably not worth the effort developing. It also forces the team to start with empathy for the customer rather than a set of features. It forces the team to understand the purpose of the work they’re doing rather than just the building and delivery aspects.

A few suggestions to enhance the technique

Obviously there isn’t a “one size fits all” for product development teams, and while working on a hard digital transformation effort for a global non-tech company, I found that the following had to be addressed:

Suggestion 1: More focus on key outcomes, which are the measurable changes in customer behavior that tell us we’ve delivered something of value, designed and implemented it well and that it solves a real need for a real customer.

Suggestion 2: Add in the FAQs a discussion of the collaboration challenges the team needs to overcome – for example projects usually don’t see the light of day without direct contact from legal, marketing, brand, risk, compliance and multiple other teams.

As a result, here are a few additions to the “Amazon press release backwards” famous template for product teams to consider when working on new initiatives and products – let me know what you think!

What did you ship? What is the name of the product and what does it do? Can you explain it in layman’s terms? What is the scope of the project and how does it work?

What customer problems does it solve? What does this new product help users or customers do better? More quickly or efficiently? How does it make THEM more successful? This is key to building a customer-centric solution that actually delivers value.

How do you know the problem solved those problems? What measurable changes in customer behavior have been observed to indicate that you have indeed solved the problem for your customers and that they love this product? It is worth to get the team thinking about this question now, rather than after your launch - “If we build and launch this product or initiative, what will our users be doing differently than they are today?”

What business benefit has been achieved? Now that our customers are successful, how has that translated into business benefits? Are we making more money? Have we reduced our costs? Is it easier to acquire new customers? In other words, why do we as businesses care about this product?

Internal quote from someone involved or invested in this project and its success. Provide a quote that focuses on how this project improved the customer experience and why the business took it on. This should come from someone involved in the process and invested in its success.

Provide a customer quote sharing how this new product made them more successful or helped them achieve something. Make sure to note who the customer is and what role the product plays in their life and how their life has been improved with this new service.

How did the team work together to achieve these results? What challenges did the team overcome to make the product successful? Trying to predict the challenges the teams face today to achieving the kind of success you’ve imagined for this product. What would get in the way? How will you collaborate across different groups? Locations? Meet legal requirements?

Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic.

Head of Digital Product
thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader

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leveraging data as a strategic asset part 2

3/25/2020

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Data literacy: It’s also super important to ensure basic data literacy at every level in the organization – best achieved via data science training - data is not there to bolster (or undermine) existing decisions, but to help inform future ones.
A good first step is to enhance basic skills in descriptive statistics like knowing mean, percentiles, range, standard deviation, etc. and highlighting when they are or are not appropriate give the shape of the underlying data. For example, when data are highly skewed, as in-house prices or income, the median is the appropriate metric with which to summarize the data, not the mean. Just training people to make fewer assumptions, to plot and examine the data and to use appropriate summary metrics would be a big win. And then a quick introduction to computational data mining and machine learning approaches to extract insights from data, as well as create data products using recommendation engines and other predictive models will go a long way.

Another win can come from data visualization skills. It doesn’t make any sense to spend a huge amount of effort on data collection and analysis, only to fail, and lessen the data’s impact, at the finish line. Just a small amount of data visualization training goes a long way and can greatly enhance people’s presentation skills and make insights clearer, more digestible and ultimately likely to be used. Too often, charts are full of visual junk and unnecessary clutter and annotations that detract from the key point. Or, inappropriate chart types are used — such as multiple pie charts each with a large number of segments — or, a color scheme is chosen that makes it near impossible to interpret.

Decision making: Data can only make an impact if it is actually incorporated in the decision-making process. An organization can have quality, timely and relevant data and skilled analysts who generate masterful reports with carefully crafted and presented insights and recommendations. However, if that report sits unopened on a desk, or unread in an inbox, or the decision maker has already made up his mind what action he or she is going to take, regardless of what the data shows, then all the efforts are worthless, and more often than not, too often organizations have a prevailing culture where intuition is valued or there is a lack of accountability. One way to avoid this is to cultivate a culture of objective experimentation, such as A/B testing. In those scenarios, whether it be a change to website design or marketing messaging, you control for as much as possible, determine the success metrics and required sample sizes, change that one thing and let the experiment run. The key here is to have a clear analysis plan and set out the success metric and any predictions before the experiments run. That is also true of any pilot program.

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leveraging data as a strategic asset part 1

3/5/2020

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Data is the new oil! But truly data-driven cultures require an overarching data culture that encompasses a few fundamental elements, such as high-quality data, broad access and data literacy as well as appropriate data-driven decision-making processes.

A single source of truth
A single source of truth is a central, controlled and blessed source of data from which the whole company can draw. It is the master data. When you don’t have such data and staff can pull down seemingly the same metrics from different systems, inevitably those systems will produce different numbers. Then the arguments ensue. Or (and more dangerous for the business), some teams may unknowingly use stale, low-quality or otherwise incorrect data or metrics and make bad decisions, when they could have used a better source.

A single source of truth, that is hopefully refreshed in real-time (if possible) will provide superior service to the end users as well as decision makers.

In large organizations, there are often historical reasons why data are siloed. For example, large organizations are more likely to acquire data systems through company acquisitions, thereby resulting in additional independent systems. Thus, a single source of truth can represent a large and complex investment. But in the interim, a central data team or office can still make a big difference by providing official guideposts: listing what’s available, where it is and where there are multiple sources, the best place to get it.

Data dictionaries: Once a single source of truth has been established, the team will need to know what the data fields and metrics mean and to have broad consensus on a glossary with clear, unambiguous and agreed-upon definitions. In other words the team will need a data dictionary.

Broad data access: Data-driven organizations tend to be very inclusive and provide access wherever the data can help – they need to foster a culture whereby individuals know what data is available. It is those front-line staff — the customer service agent dealing with an angry customer, or a warehouse worker facing a pallet of damaged product — who can leverage data immediately to determine best next steps. If suitably empowered, they are often also in the best position to resolve a situation, determine changes to workflow or handle a customer complaint. For example, at Warby Parker sales associates on the retail shop floor have access to a dashboard that provides details on their performance, as well as that of the store as a whole. At Sprig, a food-delivery company from San Francisco, even the chef has access to an analytics platform that they use to analyze the meals that have been ordered and understand which menu items are popular or have not fared well, and so tailor the menu.

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the case for eliminating powerpoints (part one)

3/2/2020

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Here are the 5 top elements of the most boring presentations (rings a bell?):

No clear point – what it was all about? What was the point?
No audience benefit – the audience doesn’t see how they can benefit. “So what?”
No clear flow – the sequence of ideas is so confusing that it leaves the audience behind. “How did he get there?”
Too detailed – so many facts are presented that the main point is hidden. “What is that all about?”
Too long – the audience loses focus and gets bored

But wait! There’s something so painful that we should all work to put an end to this cruelty, so agonizing for audiences that some decide to give up on the corporate life rather than have to face another day of meetings with this type of presentation - so unfailingly bad that medieval torture techniques are too light to punish the inflictors…

It is the Data Dump presentation.

The data dump is an excessive, meaningless, shapeless outpouring of data without purpose or plan, with not one single moment’s thought from the presenter about the existence of a listener, a human being with a life, needs, goals, dreams…

How to clarify a communication objective
First of all, define your objective prior to starting to prepare any communication. This might sound too basic to be important, but it’s fairly guaranteed that more failure in communication occurs because the requester really has not clarified what they want and thought about whether it is realistic to expect.

Finish this sentence: “When I have finished speaking the listener will _________________”

The sentence must be completed with a call to action. “meet on thursday”, “phone me immediately”, “vote for me”, “visit my web site” are all CTAs. “understand more about the situation” is not a CTA. Honestly, most communication fails at this step – a lack of clarity of the realistic, do-able, specific next action that will move you closer to your overall objective.

When you write this sentence, it will force you to think about the audience. What do they need to know, feel and believe in order to take this action? This immediately puts you in their point of view and clarifies what is important.

And Please. No more Data Dump Presentations.

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The Global Nomad
(Doer edition)

enhancing the amazon working backwards process

leveraging data as a strategic asset part 2

leveraging data as a strategic asset part 1

the case for eliminating powerpoints (part one)

i blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech, Experiences and anything holistic.

Phil Mora

Categories

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Search the site...

The Global Nomad(Doer edition)

enhancing the amazon working backwards process

leveraging data as a strategic asset part 2

leveraging data as a strategic asset part 1

the case for eliminating powerpoints (part one)

i blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech, Experiences and anything holistic.

Phil Mora

Categories

Archives

The Global Nomad
(Doer edition)