Product Management – Scout & Swan

WD40, a lesson in determination

It’s a blue tin with a red lid and a clumsily taped or strapped funny red straw. You might think its packaging is old-fashioned and ugly but, if you’ve ever enjoyed the benefit of WD40 you’ll most likely know it as “a life saver” it’s a brilliant “magic” product that customers truly love. It’s also essentially unique within a market it identified over 60 years-ago.

The WD stands for Water Displacement, the need to forcibly remove the destructive and corrosive forces of H2O. The 40 is ’40th Formula’ – that’s the fortieth not the third, fifth, eighth, twentieth or any other number less than the apocryphal number of nights it takes to flood the world with that destructive life-defining liquid.

For that team in 1953 that’s a lot of determination, a stack of problem-solving, a heap of learning and a mountain of failures, but they resulted in a phenomenal product. Determination is not only persistence and doggedness, the notion of sheer bloody-mindedness in pursuit of success. It also means the process of establishing something exactly, through research and calculation. It sits at the heart of discovery.

In software product teams we talk about failing-fast and discovery, alongside rapid prototyping, before we commit to commercial production. But how do we know we’ve discovered the right product? The pressure to build and sell the product is huge – a team chomping at you to exercise their skills and code ‘it’. It’s tempting to build something – anything. If you do, then be clear that you’re essentially creating a bigger prototype, keep your focus on discovery. Before you approach Product discovery you have to nail Customer discovery. Not just who your target persona is, and which reference customers you can identify, but know the problem. Make the customer’s problem your own. Love your problem. Consider how you could prove your problem’s been solved. What evidence will there be? Are there conditions or situations where the problem is no longer worth solving?

Consider the WD40 team of three – their product goal; prevent rust in the aerospace industry – success being specifically; protect the outer skin of the Atlas Missile from rust and corrosion, with a solvent.

Is the problem locking in value?
Photo by Silver Ringvee on Unsplash — Is the customer’s problem really valuable?

If you’ve got a clearly identified real problem for your reference customers which if solved will provide value to the business, then you’ve cleared your first hurdle. If you haven’t then you’re still in customer discovery. Go back and make sure this problem is going to be worth solving. Do not venture into product discovery till you know the business problem from beginning to end. Who’s it for? What’s it worth if it’s solved? Is it of value to your company and how will you know (otherwise what’s the point)?

Why is that first stage of discovery so important? Because when you’re deep in the weeds, demoralised from your 6th, 27th or 39th failure, you may have learnt a lot and solved lots of problems but your team needs to maintain focus and that’s from knowing that it’s still worth striving towards that goal.

#customerfirst #discovery #baprofessionalpm

Speak your Truth – the principles for ‘Do Nothing’

My partner is in Snowdonia, training for advanced orienteering leadership with the Scouts. This triggers my son’s memory of our journey to the top on ‘Great-grandad’s railway’ and that in-turn reminds me of the moment I discovered a personal history of what it can really mean to ‘Speak your Truth’. Not a literal definition, but the consequences of standing for and living by professional principles.

My father’s father was the consultant Engineer for Snowdon Mountain Railway during the 1960s and 70s. When we had visited recently I’d looked him up in the history book at the gift shop at the top. He would walk the narrow-gauge track and check each of the joints, supports, and foundations for the unique Abt rack-and-pinion solution that annually takes 130,000 souls one kilometre up into the clouds of Britain. However one year the board of the company were forced to “accept the recommendation of their senior engineering consultant (yeah, that was my light-bulb moment) to close the railway for up to 6months in order to undertake ‘essential engineering’.” They would have missed peak season with massive losses – not just to the company, but also the local tourist industry. When I asked my father what had happened, he recalled it being a tricky time but that Grandad had “just got on with it.”

50-years later and I find myself acting as consultant in the gig economy. I’ve been asked to come in and ‘do something’ to alleviate a client’s perceived misery but after rapid investigation of the problem, the business objectives and potential solutions, the truth was that ‘Do Nothing’ was going to be the best option for the business. Five-days in and I’ve put myself out of a job, speaking my truth, just getting on with it.

Getting on with ‘it’ would ideally mean finding something to build, a visible solution for a problem, purposeful forward-moving activities. Doing something. The thing is that when the best solution is ‘Do Nothing’ that doesn’t mean you did nothing to make that decision. It just might look that way.

Stark choices presented by professional practice generally won’t have personal consequences but speaking your truth can feel just as risky. Checking that the business justification for a product or project is still valid may not be a corporate norm in your organisation and staying in Discovery when your team just want to build something can be really tough but if you know your truth, speak it.