Apart from being in an awesome company of amazing talents and technology, Vistaprint gives employees the opportunity to be full remote workers. This, among other reasons, was the reason why I joined this great ecommerce technology powerhouse this year.

The current pandemic situation made many companies adopt remote work, but it’s still remote / hybrid and many underestimate the power of remote practices and mindset that can make us more productive.

One of the reasons why I decided to leave a former employer in the past is due to the belief that I should show up more often in the office /in the headquarters in another country/ so that my colleagues can see me. Then you go there and your line manager has a busy agenda and hardly 1 hour to dedicate talking to you in a couple of days. Believe it or not, this mattered more than the work you do and the effort you make. It´s kind of sad in today´s digital environment and plethora of tools that we have at our disposal.

I´ve been working remotely as a consultant for years now and know that this remote work stuff just works. It does, it require discipline, motivation and healthy remote work habits.

However, it’s totally different to be a 100% remote worker from the very beginning. You have never seen your colleagues and may not see / meet them any time soon.

After helping a product redesign of a dashboard for Upshelf, crafting the strategy around the user journey, onboarding of new users and working on some new product features while working remotely for some months between two time zones, Europe and Canada, I´ve joined my current employer as 100% remote worker.

Here is the difference, working remotely is different from being a 100% remote worker. It´s a matter of a company mindset, your own attitude, expectations 

This article explains some of my remote environment learnings which can be useful for product owners and scrum masters.

To wrap it up, my full time remote work experience started in March 2020 with the pandemic and in 2 companies, one where I knew some colleagues from before / in-person and the other one I’ve met some of them during my first day. Finally, I landed on the 100% full remote bandwagon this year and I’m quite happy about it.

To start off, remote work and productivity is hard. It´s especially in the product management world as we have so many interactions with other departments, we need to meet our users, talk to them and communicate with the software development team in person. As the Agile manifesto states: the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

As a product manager, I am sure that you need to juggle between being strategic, operational as a product owner to ensure delivery and also work as a scrum master. 

We no longer rely on face-to-face conversations and it’s challenging to identify problems within teams, inspirate team members to be more vocal about their impediments and act proactively to nurture a healthy team environment. The physical clues to identify team members’ reactions, emotional state, ambitions and motivations are more important than what we think. 

What can you do is act as a determined product ninja to improve your productivity, your team’s spirit and ensure product value delivery in a remote setup.

Let´s get started with some tips from my experience.

Show up

Remote work creates challenges for all of us, so it’s more important than ever to show up and be an active participant to establish healthy and productive work and personal relationships with your co-workers.

Set up your schedule and share online availability to others

If you will not be available during certain business hours, just be open about it and put a message on your quick chat comm channel, e.g. Slack or block your agenda.

There is nothing wrong with putting a red notification on your account for some time and just focus on deep work with no distractions. Don´t feel ashamed and promote focused work by showing when you will be available. 

There are hundreds of books which talk about deep work /my favorite one is Cal Newport´s ´Deep Work´/, it can make it or break it in this ´always be online´ environment. 

Don´t miss virtual coffee breaks or start organising some

Bonding with others online is as important online as offline. Make sure that you set time to enjoy some fun time with colleagues and get to know them, what they like, dislike, what worries them etc.

We are all humans in the end and being a remote worker online shouldn´t make us digitalize our emotions and human characteristics  

Show your face, hello Zoom

Video conversations are crucial to connect with colleagues and let you analyze more deeply how team members respond to questions, how they react and communicate their impediments. While we cannot or are not comfortable to connect with a camera in every call, video is 100% recommended in most cases.

Protect your time and your team’s time by declining meetings politely

Have you just received a meeting request? Challenge  the purpose of the meeting and check whether the issue can be discussed async. Try to send out an email or any additional information. You can always tentatively accept and show up if you have time and you deem it necessary to participate. 

Start async communication

Open relevant async communication channels of your choice /don´t let it all sit in your email/, ask your colleagues which channel works the best for them, experiment, learn and adapt! 

Async standups

I´ve recently implemented Geekbot with my team as we work in three different workstreams and two time zones. Therefore, there is not always a value of daily standups which can be exhausting and prolonged if your team is too big or someone is late /if the latter, don´t miss putting on your scrum master´s hat to put things in order/.

Geekbot is an app for Slack and it has various customization options, you can set up daily standups or set your own schedule, you can add questions for self-reflection, mood state and the usual standup suspects. Remember that it´s not about monitoring your team’s work, but rather understanding how they feel, what’s the mood, whether there are impediments, where you can help /if some team members don’t reach out to you and are not vocal about their daily issues/ and foster communication in the team.

Craft your standup around mood questions, impediments, achievements

Retrospectives

As a product owner and scrum master, you need to run retrospectives. My favorite remote tools of trade are Miro, it has various templates which allow for fun and a bit of change or Funretro.

Refurbish your old retrospective practices /what went well, didn`t work well/, you need more ´live´communication and diversity when you don´t and may not /or not soon/ meet your co-workers. 

One of the most successful and enjoyable retrospective which I have tried in a remote environment is the Sailboat retro. 

I´ve experimented with it and used a template in MIRO. I highly recommend it, because it´s fun and helps you have a new perspective if you think about impediments as anchors, land / treasure as your goal, rocks as risks and wind as what helped you move forward in the sprint.

The team shared with me that they really enjoyed it and I also think that we got the most out of it due to fun format I liked the icebreaker which I have chosen and it helped us learn more about each other. The island goes hand in hand with the favorite icecream flavor during summer months, so it was a good fit

You definitely need communication and icebreakers that energize others, especially when you have not met your team in person or you are relatively new. 

Some of the icebreaker which may help you get to know each other:

• Your favourite ice cream flavor
• What would you want to take with you on a desert island if you could. Each team member shares what they would take and passes the sentence to the next one who needs to continue the story. It’s quite fun and you have a small story to tell in the end + really realize the values that you have as a team. 

Document in the cloud

Let the cloud be your friend and keep sharing documentation with your colleagues.

Dropbox, Office 365, Box, Google Drive, JIRA Confluence /my long time favorite to keep things neatly organized and visible in a specific Confluence space/ are just some of the apps you can use.

Digital whiteboard space

You remember the whiteboard in the office, right? And how you grabbed a cup of coffee and drew that user´s flow diagram or explained the new functionality to the development team to open up a technical feasibility discussion? Guess what, the whiteboard is not gone, just you´d better adjust to a digital one, don´t underestimate the impact of explaining your ideas properly.

Draw on the screen as you talk

Keep notes or show someone your idea by drawing, imagine as if you were in the samep physical office and you wanted to introduce them to a concept or an idea.

Async communication

Don´t feel bad to say ´no´ to a coworker if you see that you are spending hours on talking for days and this is blocking your work. I used to have such a colleague, it was nice talking to her, but just ´jumping on a call for a couple of minutes´ extended to long conversations which were not fruitful. Think about the company and your work health, if you multiply those hours by your hourly wage, this is how much the company is wasting for nothing.

Collect user feedback remotely

This is a tough one. It’s always better to observe your users directly and work with them to elicit requirements, test product ideas and experiment even before you develop. 

Here your own methodology and arsenal of tools can help a lot. Just be bold and keep trying new things to see what works the most. For example, you can run a user feedback session on MIRO /MIRO is quite versatile and has a bunch of templates that you can customize for your use case/. Alternatively, you can run a survey for a feature or a future functionality to make sure that users are not biased /usually some participants are biased if others have too strong opinions and they are inclined to ´follow´ instead of contributing with their own feedback/.

Time zones and meetings

It’s normal in an International environment that some team members may never share the same time zone. While we are all flexible and would love to connect, that’s not always possible. 

As a scrum master or a product leader, you are the one who schedules meetings and should make sure that nobody feels excluded from the conversation. 

My rule of thumb is to schedule the meeting either for time that works for almost everyone OR think who is your most important stakeholder. If he/she needs to participate, then adjust to their time zone. Be transparent and ask beforehand whether a meeting outside of usual business hours is acceptable.

I have done it and woke up at 6am to meet a colleague or a client for consultancy, so I’m sure that you can make it too  

If you schedule a meeting that most people should attend, just record it and send over a short recap + the recording to the stakeholder who couldn´t attend.

Be empathetic as your stakeholder may receive a bunch of recordings and meetings async to watch, so summarize the recording and be concrete in regards to what their action item(s) should be. This allows people prioritize and dont feel burn out. I feel that we are all responsible for minimizing the burnout in this remote working environment and digital lifestyle we have as the new norm.

Document, document and share

Written communication is more important than ever. Documenting everything you do in a succinct, clear way can save you or your team´s hours. 

I still remember one /or more than one )/ when a colleague leaves the company and the team needs to spend countless hours on recovering any knowledge that disappeared. Guess what? Bad documentation and software development knowledge transfer from mouth to mouth are the culprits for this.

Do you have a tip or a comment? Shoot it in the comment below or reach out to me

Have you made your product New Year’s resolutions or not yet? It´s first of March, but it´s never late to take a step back and think about them. You might have been caught in the infinite work loops, refining your product roadmap, managing stakeholders, product communication, new features which have been on the backburner for so long and much more.

Here is my challenge for you: just take a step back (if you have been a PM for this product for some time) and do a realistic assessment to find out where your opportunity lies. Taking a step back may mean something making 2 ahead!

If you´ve just joined a new team and growing a new baby (I’m sure you´re excited about the bright future of your new product), don´t rush all in, say ´no´ to some obsolete initial meetings and get your time back to get to know your product and the situation in the company.  

FOCUS matters a lot. Don’t underestimate and defend it! Before you do anything else, do a reality check and propose what your product focus for GROWTH should be in 2021. If you make it only for Q1, it still fits the bill.  

I´m just going to throw some ideas your way and feel free to pick any you find relevant or ping me to expand the list. I hope these ideas provide some food for thought to change your way of work a bit, challenge other people who think that the product development team is a ´features factory´ and focus on what makes your product delightful, useful for your target audience and results in a product growth.  

Acquisition 

• It’s time check-in whether you are getting enough leads for a free trial and what the funnel looks like.
• What’s the first thing they see in your application? 
• Is it time to review the user flow to help them get to the product value faster (AHA moment)?

In-app triggers for conversions

Do you have any UX elements and a clear mechanism which is triggered once the user hits their allowed credits OR they have reached a functionality which is only for Premium users?

Believe it or not, this is big and can help you upsell existing clients to a better $ subscription. I remember when we released a functionality only for Premium users in one of my products and once the user hit the screen, they could get a feeling of the benefit they will get (view their position vs competition, better benchmarking through data visualization and historic data comparison). We just decided to show one part of the screen, blurred the functionality behind the scenes and put a welcoming message for the user to contact their Account Manager for a quote. This experiment went really well as the user could contact their AM after experiencing a flavor of the functionality, realize the benefit and ignite some curiosity instead of being ´sold´a new functionality in the traditional sales approach. 

Don’t underestimate the power of good UX, creativity and good UX writing for a better conversion. 

Short and simple make a huge difference.

Short message is better, explain the benefit (what am I getting out of this) instead of the functionality, clear call-to-action, short and sweet message. 

Identify new growth opportunities

When was the last time when you look at any customer interviews, reviewed quantitative and qualitative data about your users?

If you´ve not talked to customers yet and have no evidence of their problems to build your product hypotheses, you gotta leave your room right now and immerse yourself in customers´ problems. You can start with some exploratory interviews or consider a short product survey to get some insights.

 Level up the game with clean UX

If you´ve identified any UX deficiencies and enhancements that you want to do, I´d recommend you to finally sit down and order them by priority. A product which is usable and clear for customers is sometimes worth  much more than a new feature (no matter how your internal stakeholders insist on it on behalf of the users).

Segmentation and funnel

• How does your funnel look like? 
• Do you have Freemium users?
• Do you need to convert Free trials to new subscriptions?
• What type of clients do you have (small, medium, big)?
• What types of subscriptions? 

This information will serve as a refresher to base off your product decisions of solid segmentation. Are you building the wrong features, because you don’t target your most important groups? Are you sure you help the product conversions?

It’s a no brainer, but if you are struggling with obtaining new clients, make sure your product supports the conversion of free to paid customers through banners, in-app engagement triggers and a proper user onboarding. 

Product Experimentation

• Have you worked on any product experimentation?
• Is it worth it to roll out one change at a time or plan a project for a bigger release?
• Do you have the setup to perform any A/B testing? 

Consider your case and jot down some key existing product features you can optimize through experimentation vs rushing into building something from scratch.

Spring cleaning

I´m a big fan of minimalism : ) and every day improvement, if we improve 1% every day, it´s still a step towards becoming our better self.

Related to that I can tell you that I also fell into the trap of building, creating and running after the next release. However, less is more and the more you clean up your website or application, the better results you will reap.

Visitors don’t visit all the pages you’ve expected in their customer journey, your CX is suffering or the feature in your SaaS application gets only a small traction. Don’t suffer too much, but rather focus on resolving these problems.

If you have not been involved in the CX of the website or this feature development in your SaaS application, just get to the origin, understand the context, review, assess, collect any data, product stats, build your hypothesis before judging  and decide whether to merge, purge or improve!

User research

Are you stuck with your ecommerce product roadmap? Evaluate the current state of the customer experience, the shopping cart, CMS, any ecommerce tools to work on the technology part of your roadmap. Don´t forget that conducting user research to develop and refine the product roadmap would be a gold mine!  

Redesign

• Is it the right time to redesign a feature?
• Does your dashboard application have consistent charts across reports with a similar purpose?

Put consistency high on your list!

• Does your analytical dashboard provide data which speaks for itself or is it crammed with data that creates too much noise?
• Is there any report which doesn´t bring extra value due to the lack of aggregated data which shows the current performance (e.g. average ad spend for the month, total hotel bookings)?

• Does your application miss some important charts which help business decisions? Users like comparing data to draw their conclusions or viewing trends over time. If you have no charts or poor data visualization, now it´s the right time to turn your user feedback and detective observations into actions!
• Do a heuristic website analysis and find out which pages on your ecommerce website need a heavy update! Do you show consistent shipping information across the website? Is it clear what your unique value proposition as a brand is? Do you tell a story and connect with the audience? If your product needs application, do you properly explain the application step by step to avoid any user´s doubts?
• What about testimonials and user´s reviews on product pages? 

You see there are certain elements which you can completely redesign, tweak or add! 

Time to craft and send some product surveys

Surveys are a quick way to collect feedback from many users. Don´t miss sending surveys to your churning customers. 

As a golden rule, focus on 3-5 questions and collect some basic profile data (user´s role, company, for how long they used the application).

Keep it short, sweet and simple, don’t annoy your users, try to understand their problems, which alternatives they´d consider and why (pricing, features gap, quality etc.) 

Behavioral analysis

If your website or application has any tracking which allows you to perform analysis of how your users scroll down the page, the features they visit, the depth of clicks on your website, then no excuse not to use it. Now it’s the time to refine the CX, propose UX enhancements and interpret the data to simplify the user´s flow in your website or application. 

• Is your key product subscription page clicks away from the homepage?
• Do users bounce quickly due to inconsistent messaging?
• Are some features too buried and not accessible from your application?

This usually happens when you have too many features which were released too quickly.

• What type of data and insights can you use to change the mindset of retention and engagement? 
• Are customers active to understand user behavior and collect feedback? If not, what can you do to activate them?

As the HOTJAR guys state it, the biggest enemy is inertia. I recommend you to review this article.

It’s not easy to change the product´s look and feel or inform your customers about what has changed without interrupting their work.

Imagine that your users have used their old reports for the last 5 years or so. They definitely need something new which will help their productivity and you´re excited about implementing that new technology. Your product designers gave their best to come up with redesigns and you did your job to run exploratory interviews to see what you can get to enhance the reports. 

In a B2B software world, though, switching to a new view or sunsetting a functionality is not so straightforward. As a product manager in a B2B world, I’m sure that you know about your ´indirect clients´, your stakeholders such as account managers, technical support, sales and customer success. How do you go about changing something for the good of all users, but making the transition as smooth as possible for your users and not entering into a conflict with your stakeholders?

Carry on reading and find out some quick tips which can prevent you from having further headaches  

Why do we redesign software products?

There are many reasons why we need to consider product redesign:

• Product compliance 

Your products should comply with the others in a product suite.

• Change of the product portfolio

The product portfolio and guidelines for designs have changed to visually unify past products or products that the company has recently acquired. 

• Your current product design doesn´t have room for scalability
• New functionalities clutter the design and your new redesigns simplify things 
• Expansion in new markets
• Customer feedback showed that it’s best to change your product 
• Merge two platforms and unify features 

This was my most recent case. We had to get rid of an old data visualization software for hotel reports (which still had paying users!) and build up the features of a competing one (with a different user base of paying customers) which was meant to replace it. 

Quite a complex and sensitive case as one platform lacked the features of the other one. Different usability and experience, a roadmap to build the missing features and a plan to execute the transition.  

Internal communication first

The internal communication is key for the success of your product change. Some ideas about what you can do:

• Send an email to the key stakeholders and announce the key changes in regards to what will change and when

Pro tip: If you don’t get any replies or a reaction, put your storyteller´s hat on and inspire others. Tell the story behind what will change and when, why, how the customers will benefit from it.

If you don´t know what you´ll do or you´re still unsure, be transparent about it and ask for the honest feedback of stakeholders.

•  Organize a quick webinar to present the planned product changes

A quick walkthrough can be helpful. Don´t forget that your colleagues can bring you the best feedback from clients and can raise a red flag on time. Listen to them carefully, read between the lines and react accordingly. You´ve one common goal: happy customers and more revenue.

• Announce the change and evangelize the need for it in a company or a product demo meeting 

Redesigning a big portion of the product or a full module

You have some options here.

1. Keep both old and the new version for some time

In my case, I´ve decided to redesign the hotel cancellations report in the data visualization platform which was meant to stay and bring new features to it. The latter were based on the needs of the current business users and added extra value when compared to the old data visualization software. However, the product design is subjective, because it was a way better, BUT some users are never ready to make a switch as they are used to what they have.

The solution was to keep both the old and the new report in the data visualization platform that we wanted to stay. Thus, I could prepare the users for the transition and gather feedback along the way. At the same time, we´ve shown the design of the new report  to the users of the old data visualization software and highlighted the added value with the extra features.

Why?

• Prepare both user groups for an upcoming change
• Gather user feedback
• Don´t interrupt user´s daily work and unobtrusively introduce the ´new´ design and functionalities
• ´Sell´ the imminent change by providing the extra value

How?

• Inform users with a product newsletter
• Prepare a video to walk them through the new report and help them unlock the value
• Inform that the new report will eventually replace the older one and why
• Inspire users of the old platform to offer an ´exclusive free trial´ for the new data visualization software 
• Remember to update your product content and rewrite your product user guides if necessary
• Communicate internally why and until when you´ll keep both reports
• Once the user from the same user account clicks on the ´New´ report for the first time, show them a short and informative video directly in the application to increase the interaction and engagement  
• Prepare user surveys to collect feedback 
• Make sure you have all your product tracking in place in order to analyze the product usage results and turn them into insights

2. Small changes 

Any smaller platform changes and product redesign can be communicated effectively with in-product notifications. Focus on a short messaging to help you manage the change and users can adapt to the redesigned interface. 

You can communicate the redesign in a small modal window in the tool. From a product UX perspective, modal dialogs interrupt users and prompt an action, so they are relevant when the user’s attention needs to focus on important information (such as a redesign). I´m pretty happy about the results of modal dialogs if used appropriately as my experience shows that a notification in the application does not receive so much attention and can be left unseen. Read more about implementing (or not) modal windows here.

Some examples and inspiration I like from a product UX perspective, depending on the use case:

SOURCE HERE

Alternatively, you can craft a full walkthrough for the new platform and have a self-guided user tour.

As a Scrum Product Owner, I am responsible for keeping a neatly ordered and cleaned product backlog. I am sure that you’ve read the Scrum guide and you know what this entails. I´m not going to get into specifics as I assume that you have the fundamental knowledge of Scrum and the product backlog as an artefact. 

Let me tell you a story. Forget about the theory for a moment, you´ll learn how to deal with a bloated product backlog if you land on a new role and you inherit an enormous backlog which you should manage, order and defend  Good luck if you leave it all to the chance

This happened to me, I landed in an awesome team, but inherited a product backlog was a big chaos of technical tasks with no priority, old product ideas by a product owner, quick notes, anything you can imagine. Some tasks were even in a different language and not in English. Some items had just a title which I couldn´t understand anything about and were created by former employees (some who I´ve never met).

Now let’s face it, you cannot advance and do quality product work with a messy backlog which continues accumulating fancy ideas and good user stories for implementation.

You cannot advance and do quality product work with a messy backlog which continues growing in all directions over time.

What Santa´s long wishlist and your product backlog have in common? Some stakeholders think that the product backlog is where every single idea should go in order not to be forgotten!

WRONG! I´m heartbroken every time I hear this. That’s OK, remember that your role is to be a product ambassador, defend your product and its goals, so this implies product education and coaching where necessary. 

I’d love to clear the air, so allow me to summarize some misconceptions which you can learn from, reuse and explain them in a way which even your granny will understand. 

What is a Product Backlog?

The Product backlog is one of the essential elements in Scrum. It includes all the business critical elements which you’ve identified to develop a software product. 

The backlog includes things which specifically pertain to the product development and evolution and the list is based on priorities. The elements which the backlog is composed of are called PBI, product backlog items.

What is a Product Roadmap?

The product roadmap is a structured approach to organize your main implementation buckets / themes over time. It is closely related to the product vision and your product strategy. If you don’t have a product vision, do me a favor, make sure you understand the product which you will be managing and work on crafting your product vision. 

The lack of a common and inspiring product vision which shows the big picture of where you want to be is the culprit for the messy Product Backlog. A lack of a common vision between the Product Owner, the stakeholders and the Development team is the biggest mistake which will continue dragging you down. Evaluate the ideas based on the vision and create the backlog items only for valuable things that help the product reach the vision. 

The product roadmap provides a strategic product direction for the next Q or 1 year. It is a tool which enables you to partner with stakeholders and the development team to define, deliver and advance the product evolution.  

Why do I need a product backlog then?

The product backlog translates your product roadmap into manageable implementation chunks. Note that I´m saying implementation, because it covers both the UX/UI work and the development itself. 

Each item in your product backlog must have its definition of done. It reflects delivering a small increment of value for your product.

Misconceptions

Everything we want to do and pops up from a workshop, a discussion, a client´s request or your manager´s whim goes to the product backlog. WRONG! Defend this or you will constantly clean the backlog and will not be able to defend and evangelize it in front of your implementation team.

All ´green´ ideas which should be reviewed and call for some product love in your product discovery must go in a completely different backlog or ´product discovery´ list.

The product backlog includes technical debt tasks and any other tasks, stories which pertain to something that has been confirmed to be built. Why not try X, Y, Z is just an idea! Don´t mess up things, please!

The marathon product backlog cleaning

The product backlog was so big that I couldn’t get to its end, nearly 600 tasks! A bunch of tasks, stories, ideas and anything you can think of!

How do you tame a beast like this? There is more than one way to skin a cat. Just, keep calm, don´t give up and push yourself to get started!

Attack the Epics first

Group it all by epics and re-evaluate the opportunity behind an epic. If you cannot understand the value of the epic or the team member who created it is no longer a part of the company, just purge it.

If the epic doesn’t align with the strategy anymore and is far from close to your product roadmap, then just move it back to your secret pocket of ideas aka your ideas backlog. Did I say that you can organize yourself and your stakeholders by using a platform like User Voice, a simple Trello or an Excel? 

Organize ideas in a centralized repository

You´ll be surprised how many ideas you can get in a B2B world as well. That’s true B2C is characterized by the voice of the customer who directly says what they are looking for. However, your B2B stakeholders would also love to contribute and share their thoughts, ideas and wishes. 

Don´t panic, they will come in any shape and type of communication, be it a call, chat, a conversation or a meeting with a client. It’s your job to cope with the overflowing ideas and look for patterns in them to grow the business and build a robust product.

You can educate your stakeholders to submit ideas in a portal like internal User Voice where you can label and categorize items, create a nice and simple Excel spreadsheet, a Trello board where you can collect a repository of ideas and show to your stakeholders how you handle those. Don´t forget that they should know the internal status and what you will do next. This helps you find out who creates the idea and follow up with them for extra questions or an exploratory interview with a key customer.

Ease your life and start evangelizing a product culture, it will pay off in the long term, I guarantee  

Messy backlog comes into shape  

Are there any tasks which don’t belong to an epic? If the task is created by an ex colleague and the context is not clear or it´s obsolete, just archive it. 

Any items which were created a long time ago (5 years!) deserve their place in the JIRA bin!

Use a handy syntax query in Atlassian JIRA to extract and access all the tasks which are old and belong to someone who you can no longer contact.

Any other older tasks which make sense, you can group them by epics or label them so that you will know and can pull them at a later stage.

If you need to remember one golden rule, let it be ´Categorize´to ´productize´. I want to go to the moon, this is probably an epic Any single item in your product backlog must belong to an overarching theme / functionality or be labeled in a way to denote its importance. If you cannot categorize your items, their place is not in the product backlog, it’s as simple as this. 

The bulk delete is your friend

Any obsolete, old and meaningless tasks are just easily captured with the bulk delete in JIRA and you can quickly clean them up.

Technical Debt buddies

If your team members were creating technical debt tasks here and there without a clear label or an epic, just group them in one epic and sit down to see which ones can be merged or purged. Make sure that you understand the context well enough to group and categorize them. The technical debt can put the house on fire, don’t risk your product, understand and address these on time. The first step is to understand and group them.

Product backlog is NOT your working playground

I confess, I also create tasks for myself and like having them in an organized place. I´ve used Trello for my product management work and also an epic for my tasks where I can organize them throughout the sprints. Of course, I´m referring to bigger items, smaller, daily business tasks don’t need to be written.  

However, please, don´t use JIRA for your product discovery work and rough ideas. I personally find it useful to document my rough items in Atlassian Confluence in a specific product folder. Once I’m done and I start writing the product requirements, then I can create the functional requirements and break them down into JIRA tasks which belong to the product backlog. My personal tip is to create only JIRA stories for those bits which are relevant for the next product releases. If a specific portion of a functionality is rather ´nice to have´ or ´should have´and you don’t have even an idea about whether and when you want to ship it, mark with a nice label in Confluence and don´t fall into the temptation of creating placeholder task for it yet. Otherwise, you know that the product backlog will always keep bloating.

Label product backlog items

It’s true that we need a well ordered product backlog. I don’t argue about this, but want to highlight that ordering is not the only way to get an idea of the work. I personally use labelling in certain cases to add an extra layer of prioritization: mid, long term or as I call it ´house on fire´(these tasks must be handled first as they jeopardize the product, customers´satisfaction and recurring revenue). As a big fan of JIRA, I recommend labelling items as you see them fit (e.g. ´upcoming release´, ´key client´, ´product content´etc). This is crucial especially if the product backlog is used across teams or includes more than 1 product (I know that it doesn´t make much sense…However, such cases exist and the keyword here is ´adaptation´).

Don’t mess up things and create your own structure, the important thing is to choose what works best for you. 

Don’t be afraid of experimenting, pivot if it doesn’t work until you find your optimal structure.

I’ll not be the first or last one to cover this topic. 

These are some ramblings about my recent experience with my product work for a new product concept and some reflections on the story mapping and the sequence of my product approach for it.

Product Discovery and Story Mapping

I personally find the story mapping an integral part of the full Product Discovery.

Story Mapping belongs to your Product Discovery.

Don’t feel caught up in discussing features, writing a long list of user stories for your product designer before you understood the problem. They say: fall in love with the problem and not the process. OK, in this case we’d need both . This is my point, there is no solution (not the right one at least) before we have the problem. Is the problem clear for you? Or do you think that it’s clear?  Be honest with yourself.

Even if your boss tells you to ‘go and find out what those features are and create the scope of your MVP’, don’t get fooled to start writing like crazy, take a step back and start exploring the problem space by understanding the potential customers, their problems, emotions and present those findings to your agile team to brainstorm solutions.

What is a user story mapping?

User story mapping is a visualization of the journey a customer takes with a product, from beginning to end. It includes all the tasks they’d typically complete as part of that journey.

sOURCE

Why do I bother with Story Mapping in the Product Discovery phase?

Right now I’m working on a new product concept with quite a lot of unknowns  Very exciting

I’ve done my product research, included some benchmarking, prepared my product hypothesis and conducted a series of exploratory customer research. I’ve synthesized my findings and next steps. Happy to talk about it next time. Now comes this BUT..

I’ve a very solid foundation, BUT one crucial missing point. My team knows that this is a key company initiative and we’ve a tentative release date as demanded by the business. 

However, I’ve reached the point where I want to leave aside my ‘solo’ product work (getting into that customer’s problem area) and involve my agile team with whom we will ultimately build the solution (the real experts on the solution area). I want to keep them informed about the progress so far and share where we are at.

So far so good, but I’m missing one (albeit most important) part of the customer journey (automation, which system we’d automate and why).

Without this piece of the puzzle, a new hypothesis and another round of interviews, I cannot ‘finalize’ my work for this new product concept and validate its business viability. Yet, I want to share the work with my team and tell them why we’re not ready to build it yet.

I might have simply prepared the first round of feature sets and shaped up the Minimum Lovable product (lovable > viable especially for a new product which will undergo users/pilot testers, feedback collection and refining to then reach the MVP aka minimum viable product) with a long list of prioritized features. Yes, but I am missing the part which will potentially bring the most value to the customer.

Embrace uncertainty, but still open the discussion for timeliness (now or later)

We need to embrace uncertainty if we work with agile and iterations, but still we want to set the expectations of the business and visualize what we’re working on.

Story maps can make our life easier. Our planning efforts can focus on the following buckets of time-based work:

Now ->  Next ->  Later -> On Hold (v2)

Each time period (e.g. now) has its set of user story maps. 

From User story mapping to time-based blocks and progress!

Avoid the waste

The long list of user stories forms my product backlog and could have been the starting point for the product development and design work. However, I call this ‘WASTE’ for something that may remain at a product concept level OR would find the fit for.

Additionally, I think that this user story approach is ‘broken’ in that case. I shouldn’t be the ‘giver’ and the team to be ‘receiver’. My team should be aligned with the common goal and the findings along the way. I ‘own’ the problems of potential customers and we (team + myself) must work on solution ideas together, brainstorm and prioritize based on the experiences which our product would deliver. 

First, they are a way smarter than me and they have this engineering vision which I don’t necessarily have. Second, they should have their say about HOW we will deliver solutions for experiences.

Here is the trap, if I provide a list of features which I ‘think’ that can solve the problem I’ve been researching, we fall into the trap of building something that neither my client nor the team loves enough. My point is: my team should fall in love with the customer’s problem AND understand the piece which we’re missing so far. The customer should love the product and not the literal implementation of WHAT they described as ‘I think that this solves my issue’. 

OK, we still want to choose the minimum set of features to solve the problem of our customers. I don’t argue about that, I just argue about setting that set of features as user stories in a flat product backlog which doesn’t tell the full story about the experiences which the product will bring towards solving the customer’s problem.

We rarely solve something with a single action, right? E.g. the customer will login, they will check their created alerts, the results of their recommendations engine and only then apply the action to solve the problem. 

This is a sequence of events / experiences which tells the story of the solution journey. The story may fall short for a new product concept. As every single thing in life, that product will be conceived and then born. 

My revelation was that: the flat product backlog wouldn’t show the customer journey + the impact we want at each step

 I’d need to share the problem areas with the team & highlight that missing part.

The flat backlog actually misses the crucial part about the experience which each touchpoint in the customer journey brings and the impact behind it.

 The backlog has a linear structure and has the tendency to grow or bloat over time.  OK, I agree that it’s ordered, but doesn’t present the customer experiences that the agile team should know about to feel empathetic with the user. 

Story mapping allows us to bring the customer story to life and show each impact element in the customer journey.  

My personal take is that the story mapping helps me bring the findings about my user’s problem back to my team and help my team understand the experiences, put themselves in the shoes of the customer.

Thus, they will not work with a lifeless list of user stories. And, hey, I won’t write down a series of user stories which may change as I get the most valuable missing part  

Each bigger theme has its experience point behind it, e.g.  ‘Notification of an Automatic Change’. Then this consists of various actions: receive the alert, add other people who should know about the change, group alerts in the dashboard, mute alerts etc.

The user story mapping ‘notification of an automatic change’ can then break down to its individual stories (receive an alert, add people, eliminate alerts over a certain threshold etc). However, the experience gives us some emotional state to work with and would help us find a solution that delights at every step. Ultimately, the product should stand out from the rest. 

The flat product backlog will always miss something and this is why we keep adding, purging or merging stories.  

Users have activities which lead to experiences that have impact. The outcome of the latter is the solution of the user’s problem. 

Story Mapping = the sequence of activities → Solution

We can call them Epics or Themes, no problem with that in my humble opinion. It’s just that the ‘story mapping’ implies ‘story’ (activity + experience for each activity) AND ‘mapping’ (a logical sequence of activities within the ‘big picture’). 

This raises the question about ‘dependencies’ as well. Would an element depend on another one in the mapping process? If so, show this properly on the map.

Far better than interlinking user stories in a flat backlog and smaller tasks here and there. It’s chaotic and difficult to follow when we think about the big picture.

First Block to Think BIG

Based on the discovery from the first exploratory phase, we meet up with the team to think BIG without any bias, think of solutions, ideas, better ways to solve the customer’s problem without getting obsessed with the problem. I’d call this the ideation phase. 

From Ideation to Story Mapping and High Level ‘Birth Plan’

The story mapping is a good starting point for an exercise with the agile team (engineering, product design and product) to start mapping out together the customer’s journey, the impact of the user’s activity at each part of the journey and thinking big about solution ideas without any bias (again this is prior to the next round of customer validation interviews). 

Once the user story mapping is done and the prioritization is completed, it gives me the basis of the draft user story writing. We’re ready to split the stories with the team based on the user perspective, the impact and any considerations in terms of technical implementation. 

Visualization of progress

How often do your stakeholders enter JIRA? How much time do you spend on counting story points and drafting project status reports?

I’d challenge you to use a better way in the case of a new product concept. The user story mapping is a powerful stakeholder management tool as it helps easily visualize the delivery progress and the status later on.

Again, the flat product backlog is not ideal. Either use Excel with color coding or Google Slides with nice shapes that show the sequence or a tool like Monday.com, but stick to your mapping, it goes a long way.

At the end of the day, a user story map can have a status ‘done’ or ‘in progress’ and this will do the job for someone who wants a high level overview. You may spend 4 sprints (or even more!) on a complex user story map, the flat product backlog cannot visualize your team’s progress.

Resources which I recommend on the topic of user story mapping:

New User Story Backlog as a Map

A nice presentation you can learn a lot from

Ultimate Guide on User Story Mapping

I’m always happy and curious to learn, give me a shout about your experience and thoughts!

You might think that you’re a magician and you can do it all. However, if you do product development for quite some time or you want to learn the first steps without failing too many times, then remember the following.

Educate, inspire and guide everyone involved in product development.

There are many people who are involved in product development in a direct or indirect way. You should give them the confidence that we’re building the right product for customers and help them share the excitement to ship value! 

Create a regular conversation with your stakeholders, try different formats, approaches and techniques to make them care about your product.

If they don’t care about WHY you’re building it and HOW, understanding WHEN (when it’s built and why not right now), how do you want to you succeed with customers (WHO).

Product Management Update / Review / Demo

We have stakeholders, all the people who support us in the product development (before, after and during the development). They can be project sponsors or colleague who convey the product value to the customers who benefit from it and pay for it. We can have internal stakeholders or clients. 

As product managers it’s our job to make them feel engaged with the product and get them to believe in it. So next time you talk to a consulting client, don’t miss to do a demo or a short presentation to them. 

Continuous collaboration is key in the digital services world. It’s also vital when you are in-house. 

Please, don’t leave your internal stakeholders (account management, sales, research, customer support and customer success, market managers) in the darkness.

It can take many forms and you can call it as you want depending on the methodology you follow or don’t fall, we have the ‘Sprint Review’ or ‘ Product Management Update’ or ‘Product Demo’ or ‘Product Review’, just make sure that you do this regular update for your product. I’d recommend you to arrange as the cadence you’re following with a specific development methodology (e.g. sprints, every 2 weeks) or if you have a big release. It’s up to you, no strict rules here

In any case, you can always keep two product updates, once after each sprint AND one for big releases. 

Separately, you may definitely want to schedule an update on your product roadmap twice a year to mark the adjustments which need to be made and other important updates. 

How to structure your product update

Audience first

Who will be attending your product review / update? What are their goals, what’s their daily work and how your updates can relate to it? 

Adapt your product content to your audience. How does the released feature help them solve issues better (CS side) or sell better by conveying the value to clients? 

Last sprint

Provide an overview of the work done (bugs vs features).

You can avoid difficult questions by simply getting a breakdown by bugs and features. Your stakeholders want to know why the team worked on some many bugs and less feature-related tasks. Make sure you provide the % breakdown just to give an idea about the distribution and provide some context. 

Don’t overwhelm the audience with the small details, give them the big picture and good understanding of the breakdown. 

KISS U = keep it short, simple, sweet + understandable

Structure (feature / benefit / demo + key points)

Include a slide for features only. I don’t recommend going into detail about bugs, you can all group them on one slide with a nice table. Like:

What you need is to highlight the status (in progress, done, being tested, generally available or in a test environment). 

Additionally, you’d want to show the % distribution of the work done on features and bugs (e.g. 50% on features and 50% on bugs). If the bugs predominate, make sure that you explain why and what happened. Your audience should understand concepts as scalability, reliability of the software, we cannot ship, ship all the time without making the system stronger. The only way to coach them is to subtly mention it in your chats with them  

As it comes to features, include one slide per feature and include the feature description and its benefit for customers. Why did we build this? What is it? How would it solve the customer’s pain point? 

• Feature
• Benefit
• Demo – snapshot, video or show it live to achieve more interactions

Human brains prefer visuals over text, so demo that or prepare a screenshot of the feature. We are naturally inclined to follow steps, so mark with 1, 2, 3 etc. all the steps to make a feature work as expected. If a specific configuration or enabling is needed for something to work, don’t save this info for yourself   

• Include links to other resources or mention where more information can be found if someone wants to understand the feature in detail.

Please, leave the details for another time, keep it straight to the point and use less words. 

Visuals are your good friends. Use them. Visuals can be images, nice emojis just next to the title of what you present.

I’m a big fan of emojis and animated gifs when it makes sense to use them. Don’t overuse, though Hey, if you want to draw, then draw and improve your visual storytelling. 

Next sprint

If you already know what you’ll be working on next sprint, don’t hesitate to provide some info about it. If you’re unsure, though, refrain from overpromising or setting wrong expectations. You can just briefly explain a couple of things which are still in the works. 

You can skip this part altogether and use your time to provide a teaser for a future item  

Build globally, conquer locally

Don’t be afraid of saying that your release or a single feature is focused just on something for one of your core markets. No regrets, we should get market share in certain markets. Share this with your stakeholders and try to tie this back to the company’s strategy (to avoid any disappointment and be transparent). 

Go to market tips

If you’ve the time and you can afford to include some more info or speak a couple of minutes more, then highlight WHY this was built, WHO it was built for and HOW it will solve the customer’s problem.

How would you do the roll-out to engage your target segment(s)? What do our stakeholders need to know when we roll it out? Is there any battle card that they can use when we release, something that will help them introduce the feature to the market and beat the competition? Don’t assume that they will know, this is your job to help your product reach its full potential and enable your colleagues to shine with it! 

Bonus tips 

Use brand colors 

This can sound straightforward, but keep the brand colors, use your product identity, logo, name, everything that makes a connection to your product. 

Wording and language

Try to use their language, avoid any fluff and fancy way to describe things. If there is a specific terminology in your industry, make sure that you refer to it and keep it simple. Shorter sentences can be better I’m still working on this one  

Before and after

Even if you don’t write it down or you simply mark it in your presentation, please, mention whether the feature depends on switching it, what is the configuration, how to do it, what’s the default behavior of the system without the feature. What does it change if we enable it?  

Color coding 

Color coding is your friend. Be it for the status of a task or assignee or anything else you want to highlight.

Compare this:

In progress 

Done 

Blocked 

AND

In progress 

Done 

Blocked 

This also helps you give some more context around what’s in progress or blocked. If you feel like it, you can briefly  mention the impediment for a blocked task. Again, less is more, don’t overwhelm your audience with obsolete info. 

Kudos

Give credit where credit is due. We don’t operate in silos (well, if you work in squads, it’s even better :)), give the credit to your coworkers even if they indirectly helped for a new feature or increased efficiency. 

A line or two and a nice, positive message can make a big difference.

Interactive presentation and being vivid

Do you remember the last time you messaged your mom while listening to a presentation? Were you sleepy or simply not interested in the subject?

Your presentation needs its life, it should be vivid and keep the audience engaged. In the spirit of using images, visuals, I’d remind you about the power of storytelling (this we’ll cover in a new article) and including small details. 

Read what you’ve written in your presentation and give it a try to rewrite it with less words, replace words with schemes, flows (you can just draw the flow of how the system is supposed to function and avoid the wordy stuff), emojis (I’m a big fan of them ), replace checkmarks with emoji checkmark to make it more interactive. 

Hope that some of my experience has helped and don’t hesitate to drop me a line and share how your product updates improved I’m curious and always happy to chat over fresh ideas Stay strong

Having a clear direction for your business at a high level, your marketing strategy or product roadmap during the current pandemic is hard. 

Resources are limited, product demos are cancelled, events are rescheduled and many businesses are cutting spends on software and services.

Getting ready for the rebound and securing more business are critical for the future of any organization, but quite hard. 

What can you do? The other day I thought about this as I helped a client, SaaS event management software some months and I’ve realized that some of the things that we’ve done are actually quite relevant right now! OK, it’s true that major events went offline and event managers are not looking for software, but there are some quick ‘wins’ for businesses that are ‘on hold’. Don’t you want to secure future business?

At my current employer, D-EDGE, we’ve worked hard with my team to prioritize the delivery and speed up the development of new Cancellations reports in our business intelligence product to be here for our customers and provide immediate value. It’s not about invoicing and doing business as usual, it’s about providing VALUE fast. It’s about ‘giving back’ and helping your customers in hard times. We’ve also released a Recovery Tracker which shows hoteliers in different countries the ‘pulse’ of future bookings and the trend for recovering. 

Based on my recent experience in various projects, I’ve identified a few things that many businesses regardless of their industry may apply right now.

Product:

Competitive Benchmarking

It’s important to know the strengths of the product that we are building or promoting, its positioning, market share and perform a competitive review in terms of of both features and marketing.  

I’ll not go into detail as it’s the idea of this article, but, hey, if you haven’t had the time to do a competitive benchmarking for a while, no excuse not to dedicate time right now  

What I can share that conducting a competitive benchmarking at a high level in terms of product features + marketing (copy, flow, content campaigns) gave me a big advantage to be able to show value shortly for the B2B event management software. It turned out that the major competitor with the biggest share on the market is offering paid features that the client had for free. Also, the product technologies of the giant were too obsolete and the UI wasn’t modern at all. Not to think about the patched features which they put together after several product acquisitions and, hence, minimum investment in a seamless product experience. 

However, their product marketing was at quite a high level which explained all the business that they’ve been recently getting. 

Action items out of this:

• Better showcase features
• Explain the different subscriptions in a better way
• Highlight UX and ease of use

Fix our top product marketing items (free trial experience, explanation of features, better descriptions for the different subscriptions, piggyback on competitors).

Give back – show data and trends from aggregated data sources

Businesses exist to generate money. We get that. However, tough times should (I hope!) remind us that it’s crucial to give back!

As I’ve said, you can provide value by giving data for free to your customers and the community. This will establish you as a leader and may help you get more eyeballs on your product  

For example, if you are a portal for real estates online, you definitely have data about all the properties by a country, region, their price increase or decrease,  number of newly published ads etc. Is your data showing that the real estate business is recovering? 

If you are platform of online events, do you know how many events got cancelled vs. rescheduled due to the Covid-19 outbreak. 

OK, I think that you got the point, if you have all this aggregated data from various sources, just use it, build some nice data visualizations to tell a story or visualize trends. This can mean a lot for your product, future business, leads acquisition or simply give back.  

‘Steal’ business

Don’t like the word ‘steal’ in this case, but it’s the best that comes to mind to convey my idea. Some competitors may go out of business and this can represent an opportunity for you, watch out and seize the opportunity to get new future clients.

Also, many competitors can freeze their aggressive product roadmaps. Now it’s the time to capitalize on that and ship a new feature faster  

Adapt – A/B testing to redefine existing roadmap

If there is something that we’ve learnt during these tough times, it’s that we should be better than ever to pivot and adapt. 

This client and that big client, those important enhancements, a new API…Your list is endless and you may not dedicate the time that you always want to do A/B testing.

We all know that experimentation and A/B testing are important to iterate and refine your product roadmap continuously regardless of whether we are talking about a website or software. 

Guess what, take a step back now, have a look at your experimentation framework, previous insights and adapt what you have or start from scratch to execute on some A/B testing to redefine your Q3 and Q4 roadmap. 

Marketing:

Improve Free Trial Conversions

Get those FREE visitors convert to download your software for FREE! In the world of SaaS where many companies offer a free trial prior to purchasing software, you really want to turn your acquisition into real converting trial users. 

A few months ago this is the first thing that I worked with my client. The visitor’s journey on the website was fine, BUT loads of visitors didn’t sign up for a trial! Why? A very good software which offers a slew of features that the major competitor  is charging for.

I’ve conducted a full analysis of the main pages, traffic and the visitor’s journey to identify the bottlenecks, opportunities and form hypotheses. 

I’ll not get into details, but it could look straightforward, but there are so many things that can go wrong or just not polished if you don’t have product marketing!

• Get your free trial CTA right!
• Mention FREE and make sure to highlight it + no credit card
• Free account forever 
• Easy sign up process, no headaches
• A free trial dedicated page with minimum info required, clear positioning and elements to ensure the conversion (quite a lot of CRO was needed along the way) 

Low hanging Fruit

Remember the preliminary product analysis and competitor research. The insights serve as the foundation for a good list of action items for ‘quick’ wins. 

Action items in my case: 

• Change messaging above the fold on the homepage, better copywriting to explain the benefits of the product

• Change the hero image, make it more human and related to the business (I cannot share more details about this project due to NDA, I wish I could show you before and after.) Being customer-centric and human-oriented to show that human connection and use of technology (hey, B2B event management is all about networking and people communication, right?)

• Free trial, no credit card required
• Unlimited free trial
• Improve CTA buttons on the homepage
• Improvement of the features page

When you know that a feature is important for a segment of clients and your main competitor is charging for it, hey, you should make sure that you inform that you give it in a less expensive subscription package.

Revamp the Pricing page

Is your pricing clear? It’s not all about the $, but do you explain what, which features and clear product benefits relate to the subscription that you’re asking for. I like the Mailchimp pricing page quite a lot, look at the clean columns, CTAs which stand out and the comprehensive list of features which link to a separate detail feature page. Very well done!

OK, many of the items here look quite no-brainer, but….This is what you found out once you implement the improvements and you reap the rewards of new paying and trial users SaaS businesses sometimes need an outside view to drive key improvements in user activation, onboarding, retention and monetization. 

Competitor Comparison Pages – Gold for Conversions

Let me share a secret with you. One of the biggest wins (along with the improved free trial tactics described above) was my strategy + implementation of a competitor comparison page. 

SaaS marketing is quite different from any other marketing (e.g. ecommerce is quite a different world There are plenty of software vendors who do a great job to piggyback on competitors by building...competitor comparison pages. Sometimes the market leader is not developing the best product, it’s the one with the most creative marketing and nimble enough to get traction with organic content techniques. Don’t be left behind!

My client had many competitors in the market, but one stood out (the one with the best marketing indeed). That product has many organic searches for their product name on Google and software marketplaces online. 

Competitors comparison pages are something that I love! One of my top organic marketing tactics for SaaS and software companies is to get such a page asap if the demand for the competitor brand exists! As soon as I’ve learnt that my client has a far easier product with better UX and stronger features, I was thinking, wow, why don’t we talk openly about this. How do we compare to top competitors, especially the big X one. 

To build such a page, it’s instrumental to know the strength of your software + investigate why users churn, why they are leaving the big X.

Before you decide to go after such a page and build out that meaty content and apply the best of your SaaS copywriting, do your homework first, please Remember that the idea of the competitor page is to rank for branded queries with less competition of your competitor, e.g. your brand vs. brand Y

Process to estimate your opportunity:

Volume and demand for the main keywords:

• Check volume of the competitor’s brand product
• Check volume for alternative to product X
• Check what’s showing up in Google for X vs Y (your product vs competitor)
• Free + competitor name

• Apart from the pure search volumes above to estimate the opportunity, make sure that you do a thorough research in terms of the complaints that users had about the competitor’s product. Why are they looking for an alternative? Old UI, a bunch of incompatible features, wrapped in a cranky ‘product’ box? 
• Are there any missing features? 
• What are the limits of each subscription offered?
• Is the customer support bad?
• A good competitor comparison page will let you shine, explain why and how you are offering a solution for those pain paints, how do you serve user’s need in a better way? 
• Hey, it’s all about $, is there something that you share in regards to your pricing?

This was my case, many, many wins in terms of product subscriptions, flexiblity, good features and FREE, serious investment in the product and easy-to-use UI which is exactly what event professionals need in a software!

• Clear product benefit

Would the user save on using your software as an alternative? How much? What’s the benefit for them? Is there an easy migration process of all the data from the competitor’s tool to yours? 

As simple as it may sound, just do your initial comparison to understand how your software compares to the competitor and jot down your findings side-by-side, it’s just about highlighting the missing elements in the competitor’s product and reiterating how you solve this!

• Testimonials

A good competitor comparison page is incomplete if you don’t have that social proof. Reviews or/and testimonials are your secret ‘weapon’, they are powerful as users trust businesses with positive testimonials more. In the end of the day, you also want to establish yourself as an industry leader, so don’t forget to include logo of the companies that worked with you and featured testimonials! 

I don’t want to be repetitive, but if you have a free trial, don’t hesitate and put a good CTA to invite visitors to try your software for you. No credit card required, easy to use and frictionless user experience?

Please make sure that your copy, design and layout properly incorporate these important elements  

Some examples which I’ve liked when I looked at what others did before I prepared the design requirements, main marketing messages and copywriting. Look at the clear headings, buttons, animated gifs, clear list of features

Uxpin vs Invision

Invision Alternative

Sorry for my English if I have mistakes, I am not native and don’t shine with the best blogging skills, but I am glad that I’ve shared some ideas from my experience!

I hope that you’ve learnt a thing or two. Remember that action is what makes a difference, get started with your effective tactics right now!

The thing is that the Product Manager position is quite trendy now in its many forms (product owner in a scrum, digital product manager, SaaS PM, digital business partner, product engineer. A ton of new roles!). 

As a product person, you definitely need to juggle between communication with different stakeholders, master your soft skills and build upon your hard skills for real action work! T-shaped would be too limited to describe the long list of skills and deep expertise that you should have. 

You may have a laundry list of experiences and skills, this is great, but if you are excited about building, creating stuff, then I see a clear rationale for the career transition that you want to make. So, yes, if you’ve worked in the ecommerce or marketing space, I bet that you can be a better ecommerce product manager. You may need some basics and I hope this article could help you.

Also, if you are a great product manager, you know what it takes to bring something of Value to the Market is relentless prioritization. It’s one of the most important characteristics of your job. You can be a product manager for a digital property or ecommerce if you acquire the hard skills in those domains. 

I’ve been often asked why I’ve made a move from one position to another. I don’t regret any decision that I’ve made until now, because it made the person who I want to be and made me grow. Don’t limit yourself if you want to make a change, transferable skills are important. 

I’ve got experience with ecommerce, SaaS,  hundreds of web projects and industries. 

I shall admit that I love websites and my contribution has expanded from the content audit, SEO structure to recommendations in regards to information architecture, content strategy, technical requirements for engineers and designing a good funnel optimization.

From outside it may look like that you’re quite specialized in one area, but the truth is that in order to be a good ecommerce consultant, you should be a real ecommerce product manager.

Don’t be afraid to make a leap from a non-product role and carry on reading.

If you’re considering a new partner for your ecommerce, then, yes, you’re also welcome to continue exploring this article.

Ecommerce Product Management – Why and What

Today I’m going to share with you my stance on ecommerce product management, what it is, why it’s important and give you some concrete examples.

I’ve decided to do that, because I’ve recently worked on an exciting ecommerce project and want to share my experience with you.

Some Truths + Myths :

• You need a developer and a designer.
• You need an ecommerce consultant.
• Your Analytics ninja will do a great job.
• Your content team will put all the pieces together.
• You need to put your architecture in place.
• Analyze your past performance
• And the list goes on..

All these hold TRUE when you have a new ecommerce website or embark on a new digital project. You need technology, design, business and administration in place along with a solid marketing strategy.

Do you need a product expert? NO, it’s a website, it’s just an ecommerce.

You’re WRONG, your ecommerce website is a digital product on its own and as long as it exists to solve a problem (someone needs to buy from you because of X reason) and has a business model behind it, yes, you need a product manager for key projects or ongoing activities in order to build something that delights users and serves your business purposes (drive $).

Note that there are great ecommerce specialists who are proficient in analytics, BUT they may not know how to translate their requests into technical requirements and that’s a problem, because you don’t know to spend money on engineering without a clear direction and be careful, don’t annoy your developers, they are too smart to waste time on building something just for the sake of it! 

Why do I need an Ecommerce Product Manager OR an Ecommerce Partner with Technical Expertise

This person is the glue between business, product development, engineering, design, marketing + content and the users. 

If you can afford it, it’s important to invest in growth of the product (you want to continue growing your business, don’t you?). If not, then it’s crucial to involve an expert especially in the case of a complex digital project which has an impact on the business and users. 

Do you ask yourself:

• What images do we need to tell our brand story? 
• What’s the mobile layout and mobile experience?
• What do we showcase from our product catalog?
• How do we do it?
• Where do I put the newsletter form to get leads:
• Where do I place my clients’ testimonials?
• Which provider do I use for reviews? 
• Which CMS do I use (Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce)?
• Which content tools will facilitate the work of my ecommerce team?

Very good, you definitely need someone who can orchestrate all this for you and help you bring more value!

Not only that, but the communication and translating the information between teams is extremely important, everyone needs to be on the same page. Use whatever you want, calls, user stories, notes, card or tasks to involve all stakeholders (e.g. business, marketing, designer, development), but you’d like to make sure that everyone understands what they need to do (avoid being too prescriptive), why they do it and when it’s required to deliver it.

Ecommerce PM tasks

List of Ecommerce Product tasks (which can be performed by a person who is NOT necessarily a PM, but has the skills to do the job!):

• The PM would spend their time on finding how to better present your product assortment and categories
• Would think of your UX
• Devise the proper user flow through the website
• Drive experimentation to drive business results
• Focus on Growth and focus on acquisition
• Perform content audits to beef your content strategy
• Review and recommend CMS
• Revise and recommend an ecommerce provider for reviews (Yotpo, Bazaarvoice, Trustpilot)
• Plan how to lay out that content 
• Review the wireframes of your new landing pages, write user stories for developers to make those pages live!
• Decide on plugins and ecommerce technology
• Conduct competitive research (e.g. acquisition channels, customer experience, checkout experience and CRO hooks on the competitor’s website)
• Define KPIs, track and analyze them over time to make sure that it’s all on track, the business is going in the right direction and the users have a delightful experience through all touch points with the brand as a part of their customer experience.
• Run QA testing when necessary, ensure that you know, a page is accessible and a product can be bought  
• Use A/B testing to validate the changes made to the site, and know whether a change would hurt or improve the shop’s revenue.
• Prioritize the tests to run first, focus on the areas with the biggest impact. 
• What content should we enhance with numbers to showcase better that trusworthy online shop, how to design and place trust seals on the website, how to capitalize on testimonials, where and how to place them.
• Own the roadmap to drive growth of the ecommerce product continuously by using data as your best friend and applying user-centered design with converting user flows in mind. 

What Tools Do You Need

Passion for prioritization and making trade-offs Attention to detail and desire to communicate clearly. Be humble and decisive, learn how to say ‘NO’ in a clear and friendly way  

You are the person who should drive the whole team in regards to what to do or migrate first given your limited resources and expected delivery time  

Apart from the skills above and driving everything with a positive attitude, the following tools may help you (* This is not an exhaustive list. It’s just what I’ve used for this project and some other recommendations from my experience.):

• Google Analytics
• Tableau
• Google Adwords and Search Console
• Access to current CMS
• New CMS and access to staging (well, do your homework to better understand the technicalities and implications of the new ecommerce platform! This goes without saying!
• Hotjar
• Optimizely
• Atlassian JIRA for tasks (for bigger projects, SMBs don’t usually have it) and Confluence for documentation
• Balsamiq or Figma
• Screenshots for examples
• Google drive (at least my personal favorite to outline the user stories)
• SQL to query ecommerce data
• Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Basecamp or any other project management tool of your choice.

Ecommerce Product Case Study

Let’s review my most recent contribution and show you a things or two.

Project

• Ecommerce shop online, SMB, fireplaces 
• Country: USA

Challenges

Client comes to me and wants to:

• Change CMS from Magento to Woocommerce
• Complete redesign (layout, new wireframes, new theme, new top navigation)
• Highlight top product categories
• Content audit to showcase top products and eliminate obsolete pages and taxonomy
• Change information architecture
• Boost SEO and improve the conversion funnel
• Define a new URL structure
• Increase conversion rates (who doesn’t :))
• Highly functional mobile website
• Get rid of what doesn’t work?

How does it sound to you? Is this a simple project (website is not new, has years of history).

Needless to say that all these moving pieces should nicely play together in 3 months for the core components. Fun, isn’t it

Opportunities

I’ve identified threats in terms of traffic acquisition and business decline right after the switch. From my experience, it takes 3 to 6 months (depending on the size of the website, the quality of work done and scope) to fully revive the traffic acquisition and see a lift in revenue. The truth is that there are too many moving pieces together, engineering, design, content, ecommerce flow that can help or break your website in the course of the project.

First of all, don’t freak out. Take it easy and start thinking about the challenges, the prioritization which you need to give to each, how you can help and find opportunities.

Identify Opportunities without being stressed about time (emoji)

• Analysis to identify opportunities to boost customer retention and ecommerce conversion
• Identify key metrics to test
• What advantages does the new CMS provide (Woocomerce vs Magento)? Can we change URLs? How to do that with the least risk involved?
• What is the job to be done? Use the (JTBD) framework to identify what the users want to do (they can buy a product, review it or consume content, how to, step-by-step, product specifications). Believe it or not, users are NOT only buying a product. If you are familiar with the purchase journey, you’ll know that consumers don’t buy a fireplace instantaneously, they want to check whether it’s easy to mount it, browse FAQ, look at ‘How-to’ videos, review testimonials and before & after photos. You see, many jobs to be done and be optimized from an ecommerce product perspective.

Preliminary steps

Analyze all the information you’ve been given or you’ve collected to define your high level conclusive recommendations and mark the start! 

Arrange a meeting with the business stakeholder(s) and meet with the development and design team! You should make sure that you provide your recommendations, guidance and requests in the best form possible. As I’ve always said, I think that the ability to adapt to different working styles is very important and critical for the success of every product!

First steps 

• Analyze the business requirements with the client
• Coordinate the development with engineering, BUT don’t just hand over the business requirements. I’ll talk about this in a bit. 
• Prioritization and grooming of the product backlog (we need the epic for the Homepage first, shopping cart, next product categories, then products and only then informational content) 
• Make sure that you have your well defined Epics (if you’re not familiar with the term Epic, think about themes, development buckets). Epics are bigger themes which group together key elements. You may have one epic per login page, shopping cart, homepage, product categories, product pages, info content, conversion rate optimization, testimonials, reviews
• Set yourself to support the quality assurance testing to detect and reproduce bugs on time.

Are we clear? Your work as a product management before you hand over anything involves:

• Providing in-depth analysis  
• Doing a quantitative analysis of existing ecommerce metrics
• Conducting a competitor analysis
• Getting that Market Research done
• Breaking down the high-level goal of the new website launch  to specific measures that can easily be tracked to ensure we are achieving that high level goal after we launch.
• Reviewing the wireframes to prepare recommendations (specific recommendations with examples, this is what works best from my experience)
• Writing up your technical requirements for the development team

Are you getting nervous? Calm down, stay with me and apply the tips below! 

Tips :

• Break down the required work into Epics (high level themes)
• Prioritize Epics
• Keep high level description of the Epic
• Identify the status of the Epic 

Is it dev-ready? 

Well, if your designer is not ready with the design or you’d like to change something, obviously no developer can help you flesh it out to a functional page. 

Tasks = smaller increments of work in the Epic

Think about the individual increments of work, smaller tasks in each Epic (e.g. CTA buttons on the homepage, top hero image and messaging), it’s important to work with smaller units of work.

Next

• Prep your best communication skills  
• Polish your user stories or technical requirements, make sure that all items are small, feasible at a very high level, testable and add value to the high level goal.
• Do you have any UX product recommendation (e.g. In my case, the carousel slider on the homepage was burning my eyes and actually is distracting for users!)? 

Now is the time to highlight that your ecommerce product needs UX. For example, a homepage carousel can definitely cause more harm than good, because it has serious usability pitfalls.

Then do you really want to bury your customer testimonials? Don’t you need attractive photos which represent how the customer has transformed their fireplace with the good brick paint kit? Highlight the product benefits with powerful copywriting which underscores the benefits in a transparent and clear way (easy, how much time did it take, what tools are needed etc).

I shall admit that I’ve had quite a good list, some items including a new block for customers’ testimonials, before & after photos to showcase the product and tell the story about how the product solves a problem.

Very good, create some prototypes, work together with your UX partners, get started with testing them and start some validation with real feedback from users (you can run the prototypes through internal teams, customer service or reach out to top clients. Also, make use of any tools like usabilityhub to get quick feedback on prototypes or get a survey form up and running on Hotjar).

Only once you are done from a UX perspective, you can carry on developing the UI. 

Don’t forget that you are not a solo magician, keep the conversation going, ask your developers if the prototype feels right to them and identify any impediments. Would it take more time? If so, make sure that you regroup with your UX, your developers and make a decision on what to develop first. It’s your ruthless prioritization to choose what feels right to the business and develop with resources and time in mind. 

• Engage with the engineering team or the solo developer to determine the best technical implementation methods, change the scope based on their feedback and then agree on the implementation schedule
• If you work in an agile environment, yes, your audit may imply new items! No worries, just actively maintain the backlog of items to provide clear direction to the designer and the developer, make sure that you’re clear and avoid mess at any cost!

Get the party started! 

Final

It’s trivial I know that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. Measure, measure, experiment and incorporate feedback as quickly as you can!

Learn from visitors, use all analytics at your disposal, check your ecommerce metrics vs your benchmark and find out what needs to be tweaked! 

One of the key pieces in  the ongoing work is to report your findings and business results effectively in order to get more buy-in, resources and keep your ecommerce website running and developed as a product! 

Example of an Ecommerce User Story

Even if you don’t want to provide user stories to the development team for some reason (e.g. they prefer a list of requirements as in the case of this ecommerce case study), I’d recommend that you define your user stories for yourself and use them as the basis of requirements.

As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t need to be a super expert at the definition of requirements or be a veteran product owner to write these. What you need is your desire to improve and learn

I’ll give you a quick intro that you can use. Epics are broken down into user stories.

You can think of epics = themes and user stories = tasks.

The user story format which is quite popular in scrum actually represents the customer / user focus and the value that goes behind the requirement and the feature. 

User Story format: 

Apart from the standard user story format, I recommend you to include a title for each requirement, a short description, your user story, a list of business requirements and the acceptance criteria which the development team needs to meet in order to consider the task done. 

The title is important as it helps us glance over the requirement. The description gives us more detail, the set of business requirements speak about the value from a business and functional perspective while the acceptance criteria is important for the automated testing, it explains the expected behavior, helps technical teams better understand what is required to consider the task done and also gives guidelines to non-technical team members to perform testing.

Remember that:

• Each user story is independent from the rest. E.g. I will have a user story for the main CTA on the homepage, then another one for the add to cart, then yet another for the shopping cart checkout. 
•  Each user story can be easily tested with a short set of acceptance criteria.
• Bring value. The user story represents WHY someone needs WHAT thing that we are building. 

Acceptance criteria, yes, here we go with Gherkin. I discovered Gherkin in a past project for the re-launch of dynamic landing pages back when I was leading the Product owner domain for search and ecommerce at Vistaprint.  I really loved it due to its simplicity. 

Here is the Gherkin format:

Given XYZ condition

And condition

And condition 

When X

Let’s put all this into practice!

Example of Ecommerce User Story

Title: Fixed header 

Description: The website has a fixed header so that the visitor will see our signs of trustworthiness, our phone number and address at any time.

User story:

As a visitor 

I want to see the company’s phone number and email address throughout the site

So that I can send an inquiry.

Requirements

• The header is fixed as the user scrolls down the page.
• The header shows the company address, phone number, the free deliver, money back guarantee and quality seals. 

Non-functional requirements

• Header is small enough not to occupy too much space on the page.
• Header is not obtrusive on mobile devices.
• The page loads fast.

Acceptance criteria:

Given I scroll down the page 

When I look at the upper part of my screen

Then I can see a header with the company name, phone number and address. 

Conclusion

That’s it,  I hope that you’ve learnt something regardless of your background and you’re ready for your next challenge.

These scripts are particularly useful for website testing and regular SEO checks for which you need automation.

The following Python scripts are available:

• Top navigation links – takes the links from the website’s top navigation
• Meta data checks
• Checking HTTP status code of links
• Scraping

Please, download the scripts and play around I did them long time ago and cannot provide any help at this point. Some of them definitely need a tweak or two. If you need to learn one thing, I recommend you to have a look at the Beautiful Soup Python library, back then it was quite useful for me. Let me know how it goes and share your own scripts.

Read more why I developed scripts here in my Brighton SEO talk. If you need one book to get started, don’t hesitate to choose the one below !

The continous product discovery is a key component of the creation of new product value for existing and customers.

The discovery process is not a one-off task, but a continuous exercise and it is fueled by real customers’ problems. I’m a big fan of the resources of Teresa Torres and recommend you to read her thoughts on continuous product discovery on Product Talk.

Guess it how you can get to those problems? The short answer is customer surveys.

Customer analysis is as important as competitive research in the B2B world.

I’d rather call the feedback from real customers something like ‘opinions’, ‘active listening’ in order to avoid the critique point that comes with the word ‘feedback’.

Collect and synthesize the opinions, emails, feedback from your real customers is more complex than what it looks like.

Why do I care? I have a great product and clients! Are you the only one that says so your cash flow is in danger. According to stats, customers can purchase again after filling in a survey. Show them that you care and be ready to listen even if you receive criticism. You are here to serve them, to resolve their needs and not only get their cash. If your goal is the latest, well, you’ll fail sooner or later.

Be humble :), I swear by these use cases and there are many more:

• Improve current product (features: break, keep, tweak
• Develop future product enhancements
• Bundle products for a more robust future offering
• Identify strong product points that you didn’t focus on and use this info to bring more sales
• Improve existing features (don’t tell me that you blindly change a feature, because ‘some’ customers said so. I have learnt a lesson or two for that and would be happy to argue about this approach :))
• Find out the ‘feature bloat’ to dig deeper into the features that you should retire. Stick to the ‘less is more rule’. You are not a features factory, focus on what brings value to users over time and let it go if it stops giving value to them.

At least you’d like to have two types of surveys:

Exit surveys – we’re sorry to see you leaving 

Product Survey – existing customers > new customers, prospects, unicorns. Forever.

Your existing customers are keeping your SaaS business alive, make them happy, solve their problems and thrive with them. They are the backbone of your business. Any new customer comes with the CAC and one part of the equation is the ‘cost’ aka spend that your CFO frowns upon. Unicorns are sweet, but just that’s it :). 

The product opinion / satisfaction survey is the type that geared towards your existing customers who already pay for your product or service.

Here you can really focus on different segmentation if you’d like to. The keyword is Specificity. And segmentation. Be sure have a couple of surveys that you can share with your target users in that specific segment.

Segmentation + Specificity + Open Ended or/and Short Questions

This is the only way to get the most out of the data that you need to analyze. You will uncover common gems in your product, complains, patterns for suggestions etc.

In any case, don’t send a generic survey to everyone or a generic survey only to one segment of your customers, it will not fit the bill.

Segmentation Ideas for Better Customer Feedback

1. Customers who are active users and have been successful with a product.

 Be sure to target customers who have been successful with a product and those who have had trouble with it. This will provide a range of data to uncover common frustrations or suggestions you may otherwise miss from surveying only one segment of your customer base.

2. Customers who might have troubles with the product

3. Exit feedback for leaving customers.

4. Analyze your users by Subscription plan type if you have different ones

Be specific in your questions to get any answers that will help your work by a subscription type. For example, you can focus on feature-specific questions for that subscription.

This would require more work, because you want to get the users and examine which features they’ve activated, which ones are dormant and put your sleeves to work on activation and retention. 

5. Least active users

Hey, but why are we doing this if they pay? Well, the least active users haven’t unlocked the value of product and if they don’t use it, this should raise a red flag for potential churn. 

6. Customers who are ‘fresh’, joined in the last 1-2 months only. They have a fresh perspective about the product and you can learn what they onboarding looked like. This is ‘currency’ as you can work on tweaking your onboarding, depending on your persona and ideas on how to foster retention. 

7. Customers who are power users and are happy to share their needs (provoke, run an idea through them and let them speak).

Types of Customer Surveys

• Typeform, Google Forms best choice to create your feedback form for structured feedback.
• Personal Email – Send a personal email with an open ended questions. 
• Customer surveys via emails through account management – respect your AM and keep them in the loop. You’d be surprised how often they want to be involved in the process of collecting feedback.
• Phone – Most straightforward way. Pick up the phone and call the most valuable customers.
• In-person visit/demo meeting

It’s a great opportunity to get to know your users and be more open, interactive to provoke, challenge them on how they are using certain feature. 

My experience taught me that you’d definitely be surprised how often users don’t know about the existence of some features (regardless of how much you invest in your product launch campaign and marketing). Involve them in their conversation instead of doing a dry demo of the new features? 

Some key questions that I usually ask:

• Do you know what this feature exist?
• Oh, what’s better is that it can be used for X.
• I am wondering how you currently solve this problem.

Interesting questions:

• If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be and why?
• What features do you like the best in our product?
• What features do you like the least in our product?
• How can we improve our product?
• What do you find most frustrating about our product?

Discovery questions

• How do you use X?
• What do you think about feature X, how do use this? Do you understand what it is
• What do you use the most in X(most used features)?
• What’s the one thing we are missing in X?
• What would persuade you to use X more often?
• What’s the one thing the product is missing?
• What’s one thing we can add that would make the product indispensable for you?
• If you could no longer use this product, what’s the one thing you would miss the most?

• If you could change one thing in the product, what would it be?
• How does the product help you get your job done?
• What’s the next feature (s) you think we should build to make your work more productive? 

Background info

• Which other options did you consider before choosing X?
• Since you purchased X, what has been the biggest benefit to you?

Leaving Customers / Ex-customers exit survey

• What is the main reason you’re canceling your usage?
• Have you considered an alternative? Which one?
• If you could change one thing in X, what would it be?
• Would this make you stay with us?
• Why? What problem does it solve for you?

Ask them for their permission for a follow-up email or clarification Instead of putting too many questions in your survey, just make them speak and ask for a permission.

Remember that even the ambiguous feedback can also speak on its own and you should respect it. Maybe it’s just that customer is not familiar with the product yet, so this can uncover opportunities for in-app onboarding, product videos and tips.

Useful resources that I’d recommend you:

Open ended questions to ask in customer interviews
Customer Feedback Surveys

Mistakes to avoid in any user research

Sean Ellis Product/Market Fit Survey Template

Reference book to avoid the build trap!Definitely recommended, think about value vs building for the sake of it!