🚨 4 Flaws in Product Teams
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Enjoy the 156th Podup, with special thanks to ChatGPT Consulting - a proven 4-week program to transform your team’s productivity and creativity.
Today, you’ll learn the 4 flaws of product teams thanks to Lenny’s Podcast.
Think your product team has what it takes? Jag Duggal, Chief Product Officer at Nubank, reveals four lessons that even the best teams often overlook. Discover these critical mistakes and how to avoid them to boost your product’s chances of success.
What not to do
Some of the greatest inconsistencies I see in product development include:
Teams forget that the anecdote usually trumps the data. Never lose sight of your customer's words.
Teams often skip the step of clearly articulating their hypothesis. Without a hypothesis, you're not going to know what to make of your research.
Teams fall in love with their hypothesis. Avoid being a lawyer advocating for your hypothesis. Instead, be a judge of whether your hypothesis is right or not.
Teams ask too many direct questions. Observe more than you ask questions. You should be searching for the problem more than the solution.
Jag Duggal
Why it matters
Product teams can over-rely on data and miss the context that customer anecdotes provide. These stories reveal emotional and practical user needs that numbers alone can't capture, leading to a disconnect between what your team thinks users need and what they actually value.
Next steps
Integrate customer stories. Regularly gather and discuss customer anecdotes alongside data to ensure a full understanding of user experiences.
Define clear hypotheses. Start every project with a well-articulated hypothesis to focus your team’s efforts and set clear success metrics.
Cultivate an objective mindset. Encourage your team to critically evaluate their ideas and seek to be wrong to avoid confirmation bias.
Prioritize observational research. Free up time to observe users in real-world settings to uncover deeper insights beyond direct questioning.
Your thoughts?
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I voted for customer anecdotes because of my experience in product management. I’m now retired but as a product manager my greatest successes came when I remembered who the customer was and when we focused on solving problems that cost them time and money. An anecdote: I worked on a product that helped migrate user customizations over when the company upgraded the PC hardware. When I came into the company, the main message was to preserve all the hundreds of settings in apps such the Microsoft Office suite. Not a bad idea but the buyer in corporations was the IT department and with few exceptions such as high level executives, IT can limit how much time they have to spend getting people up and running again. In fact, a common trend then was to treat IT as a profit center who could charge calls back to the originating department if it was anything but critical functioning, and restoring all the custom settings in Microsoft Word didn’t fit that bill.
But after talking to some prospective customers, their big issue was getting Microsoft Outlook email hooked up and working again, something that wasn’t trivial then when done manually. It was taking IT workers about 1.5 hours per PC. Our software did that automatically and that became the main selling point and the reason for some very large corporate and government contracts. It was a minor feature in the grand scheme of what the product did, but it was the one we could pitch in cost savings. I worked with the team to change the messaging and we had a good run in that version blamed on that message alone. All this came from listening to a few tech support calls and asking specific questions of where their pain points were.