The Product Operating Model
Today’s newsletter comes directly from the one and only Marty Cagan, the OG of Product Management, perhaps?
I am a subscriber to the SVPG newsletter (if you are not yet, I recommend it).
The Silicon Valley Product Group gathers experts in major Silicon Valley firms and help others gain knowledge about how to build not just good products, but great products. One of their principles is: “There’s a large difference between the best and the rest.”
These experts look hard to talk to hundreds of product managers and successful companies to understand how companies should organise their teams and which culture they should foster to create the environment to deliver great products.
In one of their posts, they looked in Spotify’s Product Model to get some lessons that can be duplicated.
Mind you that Spotify has more that 500 million users worldwide, and had revenue of 11 billion dollars last year. So they know a thing or two about creating a successful product.
In a long interesting articles, one of the things that caught my attention was the Operating Model:
When we discuss the product operating model, at the high level we are looking at three major dimensions:
The first is how the company decides the most important problems to solve – the product strategy. The second is how they solve those problems and discover solutions worth building – product discovery. And the third is how they build, test and deliver those solutions to their customers – product delivery.
What I love the most about this quote? The simplicity.
The product strategy is…the most important problems to solve.
The product discovery is…how we solve those problems and discover solutions worth building.
The product delivery is…how they build, test and deliver those solutions to their customers.
It’s like an express framework to organise your product team.
You must have a strategy that tells you what is important and what to focus now, next and later. Call it a roadmap, a group session, a slide on a powerpoint presentation. Vision and direction should be known by the entire company to drive progress and innovation.
You must have a process that helps teams collaborate to understand how they are going to solve the problems, and give them the tools to discover solutions worth building. This may be the topic where most Product Managers fail, because there is no time to discover good solutions - this is something I am currently working on, along with problem definition.
You must build, and test and deliver the solutions. If you get stuck on idea formulation and never develop something to gather feedback, then you don’t have a product and you won’t have a job! Sometimes tech teams and product teams discuss a lot about delivery (sprint goals, sprint velocity, dependencies, etc). However, sometimes the daily problems may come from the lack of strategy or the missing piece of a process that doesn’t let solutions be explored.
Strategy, Discovery, Delivery - the areas a product manager should work on to really understand how to build a great product, from start to finish. 🚀
I’d love to get your feedback, what do you think about this content?