1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
How to Connect User Problems to Business GoalsDear Reader, Most people mistake Impact Mapping as a framework. As something they “have to” fill out. I encourage teams to treat it as a visual aid. Here’s what it can do for you but what it relies on to be useful:
Here are five proven practices that improve your way of connecting business goals to user problems through Impact Mapping immediately: Use Specific ImpactsIt's easy to default to generic KPIs to set your Impact. But this will rarely help a product team with guiding their decisions. Instead, use specific Strategy Choices to define clear Impacts: Accelerate inventory through private sellers → X% Inventory share from Private Sellers (instead of "Inventory Growth") Connect it to other PracticesImpact Mapping should guide the decision-making of existing practices, not start a parallel universe. The various levels of the map connect to various Discovery practices like Strategy/Alignment to frame the Impact and Actors, Research to arrive at proven Outcomes, and Ideation + Testing for the Output and Experiment levels. Another loose mapping is that the Impact should link to Company KRs or Annual Team KRs, whereas the Outcomes should inform your Quarterly team-level KRs Adapt and Bend itAlmost no way of working adds value to your work "out of the box." Modify it in whatever way possible. Like trying to reverse-engineer the gaps in your understanding by starting at the bottom (Outputs) and "mapping up." Or by adding more layers to the individual levels: One client added another overarching grouping of actors to group similar Actors by Geography. Treat it as a Range of Options, Not PromisesNeither the Outcomes nor the Outputs items on an Impact Map should be seen as promises. Instead, they outline the options you have. For the 𝘈𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴, that describes the possible groups of people for whom you 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 solve a problem. For the 𝘖𝘶𝘵𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴, that describes the options you have to improve the life of the various Actors. For the 𝘖𝘶𝘵p𝘶𝘵𝘴, that describes the 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 solutions you could pursue to drive the identified Outcomes. Prioritize Actor Outcomes over Business OutcomesThere's nothing wrong with aiming to improve a revenue target. But that doesn't mean a valid Outcome is to "put more items in my shopping basket." That's what the business wants. Instead, you have to understand what is in the user’s way of completing the actions that will contribute and lead to business success. "Continue shopping without having to leave the basket view first." Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim PS.: My thinking on Impact Mapping stands on the shoulders of giants like Goijko Adzic, through whom I uncovered this approach about 10 years ago and have iterated on it ever since. How to Dive Deeper into Product DiscoveryLearn how I helped companies like Deutsche Telekom and Forto hone their Product Discovery practices. I closely work with product organizations through workshops and coaching to introduce and adapt Product Discovery.
What did you think of this week's newsletter? As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I identify and share the patterns among better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Turn Product Theory into Pragmatic Application by Tim Herbig
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
Product Practice #319 A Product Coach Walks into a Bar Full of UX Researchers... READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 26, 2024 READING TIME 5 min & 01 sec … and says, "I'm looking for actionable insights." The bartender replies, "Well, you're in luck! We serve them straight up, no bias added." (thanks for helping me complete this pun, ChatGPT). Dear Reader, Lately, there has been a lot of (necessary and unnecessary) talk about the collaboration between Product and UX practitioners. Independent but...
Product Practice #318 How does your Traffic Light Strategy look? READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 19, 2024 READING TIME 4 min & 37 sec Dear Reader, Here’s the good news: Your Product Strategy doesn’t have to be 100% proven and watertight based on evidence before you can start sharing and working on it. Instead of trying to hide the assumptions present in your strategy, embrace them by using what I like to call the “Traffic Light Strategy.” This ties in with the idea that your Strategy consists...
Product Practice #317 From Product Strategy to OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 12, 2024 READING TIME <1 min Dear Reader, This week, I conducted a webinar that turned into a mini-workshop with airfocus (Disclaimer: I'm an Angel Investor in them). In it, I used a made-up mock case to work with the audience through making Product Strategy choices within the constraints of a Company Strategy and how to turn these into possible quarterly KRs. Without further ado, here's the full recording,...