Leaders' Guide to Evaluating and Enhancing Organizational Product Practices
How to create a comprehensive assessment of how product-led your culture is
In a world were the speed of innovation is constantly getting faster, the pursuit of product-led excellence has become more pressing than ever. We have all heard how the best companies work, and seen how established companies are being disrupted by new ones with more modern approaches to product development.
We all yearn to deliver remarkable products that delight users and bolster our business's bottom line. But the question lingers: where should we start the improvement journey?
We must pinpoint the key areas that hold more potential benefits. This naturally requires running an assessment. The problem is: what exactly do you need to assess, and how do you assess it? There is no standardized or agreed-upon way to do it.
Today I want to provide some help to frame the assessment, and give you an initial one that you can use and adapt quickly to your needs.
Identifying assessment areas with the D3 model
The first challenge we must address is having an end-to-end view of our product practices.
We don’t want to evaluate how good we are in a particular activity, we want to understand how good we are in the expected outcomes of each phase of the product process.
We have activities that are easier to map to a “product development step”, like creating a roadmap, or validating a prototype with users. But other activities are not so clearly attached to a point of our product development process, such as conducting a JTBD research, or our periodic metric review.
While there is no fill-in-the-blanks exercise that can get you out of this issue, I like to map our practices through the lenses of the D3 model: Direction, Discovery, Delivery.
Simply put, we have 3 phases that help us do 3 different “jobs” of the product development cycle:
Product Direction: select the problems and goals on which we want to focus, to assure an aligned discovery and delivery processes
Product Discovery: decide the best product to solve the selected customer and business needs. It involves activities directed to understanding the problem and validating the solution, framing and reducing the value, usability, feasibility, and business viability risks.
Product Delivery: iteratively build and optimize a robust, reliable, and valuable product, based on the discovery’s findings to capture the desired outcomes.
With this framing in mind, we can think of assessment questions that help us see how good we are, not at certain practice, but at achieving the expected phase outcomes.
Beyond practices: Structure and mindset
Practices is not everything. On top of them you have structural and cultural aspects that you also need to evaluate.
Some of them are more tangible:
Good team topologies: autonomous teams, low level of dependencies, interdisciplinary units.
HR related: having a product career path, having an onboarding guide, having people development plans.
Others are harder to define in an assessment:
A trust and safe environment that foster open discussions
A “product mindset”, with people being accountable, proactive, collaborative.
This part of the assessment can be harder to define, and would be even more context dependant.
Initial Assessment
Moving beyond this framing, I would like to provide you an initial assessment, based on my experience helping companies mature their practices.
It contains close to 30 questions, and would cover most areas from a holistic perspective. You will also have some resources to help understand why this points are relevant.
Open the full spreadsheet here.
If you find it useful and want to explore more detailed options, contact me!
Next Steps
Seeing a holistic picture can still be overwhelming, and does not answer the question “where should I start”.
In our next article, we will cover how to select priorities, with a model to think about your organizations maturity (sneak peek below!)
