1. Building the Wrong Thing Faster
Two Delivery Successes That Led to Product Failure

2. Two Delivery Successes That Led to Product Failure
Product X - Building the wrong thing
Product Y - Building the right thing at the wrong time
Disclaimers
Stories from my POV
A lot I didn’t know
Not dogging on product managers

3. Product X

4. Product X – The Product An “onramp” to the flagship product
Goal: Increase market share for flagship product
A solution geared towards SMB
Goal: Capture market share in area flagship product struggled
Cloud-based, IT management solution
Goal: Enter new, yet tangential, market
Confused? So were we.
Couldn’t explain what the product did to my mother – that has uniformly proven to be a problem.

5. Product X – The Delivery Team
Money was flowing
Skilled and effective
Excited to build a SaaS product
Strong DevOps culture
Awesome QA team
Analytics baked in
Date-driven
“We will make our dates.”
Confident with respect to process (Scrum)

6. Product X – What went wrong?
Engineering and PM leadership not aligned
Constant tug of war
Variations in answers to basic questions were staggering
Progress > Product
Deliver or die; released with holes that were never filled
PM’s control over “the line” limited
Continuous delivery without continuous learning
Little learning from customers (or the market)

7. Product X - As the end was nearing…
Shifted product strategy
Built to monetize
Left a trail of undone/unused capabilities
Attempted to improve “usability”
Grew the team to build more faster

8. Product X – In the end… Product was EOL’ed
Greater SMB, business line sold off
50’ish people were let go

9. Product Y

10. Product Y – The Product Video on Demand system Demo’ed well
Streamed movies to set-top boxes via cable provider networks
Goal: Drive sales of the company’s proprietary hardware and operating system
Demo’ed well
Netflix concept of ala carte TV and movies circa 2000
Tech worked

11. Product Y – The Delivery Team
Skilled and effective engineers
Cool kids in a not so cool company
“The best team in the building.”
Everybody a tester
Mostly scope-driven
“We do what we say we are going to do when we say we will do it.”
6 to 9-month cycles; big pushes at the end
Confident with respect to process (traditional)

12. Product Y – What went wrong?
No real sales, marketing, or product management
Market conditions weren’t right
Pirating rampant during this time
Targeting the wrong buyer
Cable companies versus consumers
Hardware & tech were expensive

13. Product Y - As the end was nearing…
Practically gave it away
Added support for a new platform
Hoped to target hotels and apartment buildings
Found different work for team members

14. Product Y – In the end… Product was EOL’ed Team remained intact
Nobody was let go (but a few quit)

15. Product Over Progress

16. We can see… Process success doesn’t guarantee product success
Product matters
Map a product journey
Share the vision
Measure, Validate, Learn, Adjust
Product management is hard
We weren’t willing to learn? … to be wrong?

17. How do we get it right? The product Early discovery
Windchill Mobile App
Early discovery
Market/User research
Learning outside the code
Validated narrowing and product choices

18. Windchill Mobile App Delivery rocked! Process was tuned (Scrum)
Skilled team;
Incredible collaboration
Delivery was constant
Trust extended to team
Everyone knew where we were going
Process was tuned (Scrum)
Unburdened by existing codebase
QA solid

19. Windchill Mobile App – Why did it work?
Product management led & was responsible
Continuous delivery -> continuous validation -> continuous learning
Built “just enough” to test
Usability testing
Customer roadshow – demos & roadmap reviews
Made adjustments
Product was king (then delivery…then process)
Showed progress to execs with product demos not metrics

20. Windchill Mobile App – In the end…
Users were excited about the product
Delivered “on time”
Beta for sales-enablement
Fast-follower, public release with remaining capabilities
Happy executives
Team felt pride in product (not just finishing)

21. Keys to Success Let product people lead/own
Put product first (then progress…then process)
Embrace learning
Measure, Validate, Learn, Adjust
Build less of the wrong thing

22. Anne Steiner linkedin.com/in/annesteiner @annesteiner7