Product, Society, and Ethics by Kathy Pham

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Kathy Pham reflects on the importance of asking societal and ethical questions in product organizations and asks how teams and companies can be more accountable in the future.

Kathy, who is a Fellow at Mozilla, Harvard, and MIT with over 15 years’ tech experience in product, engineering, data and leadership, asserts that product and ethics are increasingly important in a progressive society – the stakes are rising.

She ascribes a lack of accountability for unethical or poor product decisions and says harmful products are still being released, at the cost of losing consumer trust (and unfortunately sometimes human lives).

Kathy asks several questions:

  • Do we truly understand the community we’re building for?
  • Where and how do we store data?
  • If we deliver a “cool” product, how does the tool mine user information and who is actually responsible for it?
  • How can the issue of failed or poorly designed services that can lead to issues of human rights, justice and ethical concerns be addressed?

Be Accountable

To see your blindspots, as product team members, leaders and organizations, everyone needs to be accountable and empowered. Kathy highlights a previous #mtpcon speaker, Mariah Hay who said: “I will be 200% accountable, know my blind spots, and I will not allow my product to be weaponized.”

Kathy shares three insights for product teams: tech ethics is not new, power exists with the builders, and honor expertise.

1. Tech Ethics is not new

As tech products become more complex, deep-seated ethical questions and learnings are coming to the fore. While no one can control and plan everything that will happen, what can product teams do today to mitigate risk? Kathy says we need to start from the bottom-up: firstly with the builders.

2. Power Lies With the Builders

While company hierarchies always exist, the real power when developing a product lies with a product team’s ability to ask about the implications of societal impact. For metrics, the team can dig deeper in daily standups by asking the questions not being asked. In A/B testing, if one method is less secure, what are the real implications of the test? Is one group being disadvantaged over another? When deep-dive metric findings become more concerning, it is best to call on the experts.

3. Honor Expertise

As product teams grow and attract talent from different backgrounds and industries, companies should build dedicated all-star teams for social good. Kathy references – in AirBNB’s attempt to combat racism in 2016 by dedicating a permanent product team to fight bias and promote diversity.

We can all agree, says Kathy, it is unfortunate that these types of expert teams have to be built in order to fix product blindspots. It is, however, a step in the right direction. Our uncertain world needs product teams and companies to take accountability for their actions and prioritize societal risk mitigation.

The post Product, Society, and Ethics by Kathy Pham appeared first on Mind the Product.

Great User Research (for Non-Researchers) by Steve Portigal

Researchers often have concerns about what will happen when “other people” go out and do work with users. But the demand for research far outweighs the supply of researchers, and everyone wins when more people are enabled to do research themselves. At #mtpcon San Francisco, Steve Portigal, Principal at Portigal Consulting, tells us how to quickly level up our research skills as product managers across the lifecycle of a research effort.

Steve tells us how to be more effective in the three main elements of research: planning research, conducting research, and acting on research.

Planning Research

Ultimately, our goal is to learn from interactions with our customers. However, we typically focus on researching only if our product is usable or if people like the thing we’re making. In research we should be looking at broader questions, and proper planning will help ensure we are getting the answers that we need.

What are we Trying to Accomplish?

Research planning should include three areas:

  • Business question: What challenge does the business face?
  • Research objective: What do we hope to learn to help us answer that business question?
  • Participant questions: What questions can we ask customers to help us achieve that research objective?

We often skip straight to writing participant questions without addressing the other two areas, and end up with unfocused interviews that don’t fully get us the answers we’re looking for.

How are we Going to Accomplish it?

Steve highlights a few considerations when planning how to go about research.

  • What method of research should I use? It is easy to conflate “research” with “testing” and only focus on validating what we already have. But there are many research methods we can use.
  • Who should I learn from? You don’t have to focus only on the people who are already using your product. Think about who else in the customer journey might have insights that could have an impact on your understanding of the customer’s needs.
  • How should I interact with them? Remote work is easier than ever, so it is tempting to think using collaboration tools like Zoom or Skype are enough. But you learn so much by pushing yourself outside your comfort zone and interacting with people in their environment. Make sure you spend at least some portion of your research in the field.

Doing Research

Steve provides some tips for talking to your customers once you’ve planned your research.

  • Specific questions are better than general questions. The more specific you can be, the better a user will be able to answer.
  • Don’t ask users what they do. Ask them for an example of a time they have done something, and then ask if it was typical.
  • Ask follow up questions to get to specifics. If a user gives you general answers, asking for stories or examples will help you move beyond surface level and into deeper insights.

He also highlights some common mistakes we make in understanding our role as an interviewer.

  • Don’t provide the answer in the question. You may want to try to provide some examples to help guide the user, but this ends up tainting their response.
  • Don’t try to build rapport by telling the participant ways you are just like them. This removes the focus from the user and pulls it back to you. Hold off on sharing your experiences and just continue asking them questions.
  • Don’t become the expert. Users will often ask questions like: “Is this feature going to be in the next version?” Answering this, even if you know the answer, will change your role from researcher to expert and it is very difficult to get back into research mode. Ask: “Why is that important to you?” instead.
  • Don’t correct the user. You’ll have users mispronounce your product name, or ask for features you already have, or any number of things that you will want to correct them. Don’t do it. This, again, makes you the expert and harms the research.
  • Use the language they use. Don’t add acronyms they haven’t mentioned, or try to sound smart by using terminology they’re not using. Let them be the expert.

Your goal in interviewing is to make the user comfortable. Your aim should be to move from “Question-Answer” to “Question-Story”. Continuing to ask questions and follow ups will help you build that rapport.

Steve also recommends recording your interviews. We can’t take notes fast enough to capture everything, so our notes become filtered versions of what we heard. Having a recording to return to gives you the full context and allows you to revisit the interview with fresh eyes.

When interviewing, it is important to avoid bias and try to look to new situations as learning. We also need to have empathy for the people we’re interviewing. But we are all human, and our own feelings can creep into our interactions. When you feel yourself moving into a judgmental mode:

  • Hear your own judgement
  • Refute the assertion
  • Use new data to flesh out your new thinking

Stress also hinders empathy. So make sure you plan your research in a reasonable manner so you’re not trying to do too much in too short a timeframe.

Acting on Research

Once you talk to people and write up your key takeaways, you are not done. Truly getting to new insights is a combination of analysis and synthesis.

  • Analysis is breaking out larger pieces into smaller pieces, such as breaking out the insights you heard in interviews.
  • Synthesis is combining those smaller pieces into larger ones to gain new understanding, such as taking the insights from multiple interviews and bringing together common themes.

When doing synthesis, you should go back to your business problem and what your stakeholders were looking for in the beginning. This will make sure you’re pulling the insights that will help answer the questions you were trying to understand. You should also make sure you’re presenting the information in a way that your stakeholders can consume to avoid research being dismissed.

Research is very important, but also very difficult. Being intentional in how you plan, do, and act on research will help to ensure you are get value out of the time you spend on it, and help you truly to understand your customers, and build products that solve their problems.

The post Great User Research (for Non-Researchers) by Steve Portigal appeared first on Mind the Product.

Be a Director, not a Manager by Fareed Mosavat

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Fareed Mosavat, Director of Product, Lifecycle, at Slack, shares his early career lessons on creativity from Pixar. He says being a great product leader is about being a director instead of a manager.

Products have become much more complex over the last 20 years and an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace has led to the creation of new roles, different teams, design sprints and methodologies. Now, it’s not enough just to solve problems for today’s customers, products must also be delivered beautifully and intelligently. As Fareed says: “It’s incredible we are able to build anything at all.”

We’re in a Revolutionary Shift

Fareed talks about railroad manager Daniel McCallum, the founder of management principles and inventor of the first modern organization chart. Fareed believes we are going through another revolutionary shift akin to the industrial revolution – it’s a shift that means a significant change for digital products and the role of the product manager is evolving. Metrics, dashboards, OKRs, and agile frameworks are forcing product managers to increase predictability in order to control the process and predict the future. This increase in prediction creates a big challenge: how do we keep highly compensated creative talent, with various skills and expertise, focused and aligned on one common goal?

Product Leaders are like Film Directors

Three Key Principles

Fareed shares three fundamental principles from his early career at Pixar: tell a great story, unlock creative freedom, and connect the dots with feedback.

1. Tell a Great Story

How do you pitch your product story to inspire teams and get everyone behind your idea? User stories do not count. He recommends watching film director Andrew Stanton’s pitch for the film Finding Nemo. Character, emotion, logic, and reason can rally a team, however “logic is necessary but not sufficient enough to move creative people to act”.

2. Unlock Creative Freedom

Do you give your teams enough creative independence to act on ideas as they come, or do you limit creativity to quarterly brainstorming sessions? As the bar for quality and the requirement for business results rises so does the requirement for more specificity. More specificity stifles creativity. Fareed quotes Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar: “Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

To negate increasing specificity requirements, Fareed offers three tactics to inspire creative solutions: spec it loose, get to the next hill, and “plus” at every touch.
1. Spec it Loose – If a designer receives detailed specs, there is no room for creative input. This limits the real value of your product.
2. Get to the Next Hill – As leaders, it is your role to help your team get to the next product challenge “together”.
3. “Plus” at Every Touch – If you touch a product, it should leave your hand better than you found it.

The third fundamental principle is the primary role of a product leader: connect the dots with frequent feedback.

3. Connect the Dots with Feedback

1. Review Before it’s Ready – Do not wait for feedback. Get it in front of people early and often.
2. Frequency, Easy, Safe – Say your current company organizational structure makes it difficult and raises unnecessary friction for feedback. The solution? In a safe environment, product leaders should build a culture of frequent and consistent feedback.
3. Give Feedback Holistically and Find the Right Zoom Level – Tools like Google Docs have room for improvement by providing holistic and themed feedback. Comments only given at the micro level will dilute the actual product story you want to tell.
4. Review in Public – This is the hardest to put into practice. It may humiliate a team member in the short term, however for the long term it will help everyone on the team to find solutions faster and better.

To solve more complex product problems and to keep highly talented teams engaged, creativity is key. Great product leaders are no longer managers, great product leaders are directors.

The post Be a Director, not a Manager by Fareed Mosavat appeared first on Mind the Product.