Category: Blog

The scientific method is first principle thinking product managers. Applying the scientific method in an organisational context to achieve product goals is essential in what product managers do everyday.

The scientific method has been used for centuries to uncover new knowledge and answer difficult questions. What makes it special is that it produces verifiable and repeatable results. There are six steps:

1. Observation
2. Research
3. Hypothesis
4. Experiment
5. Analysis
6. Conclusion

Observation

Observing something that you would like to learn about and asking a question you would like answered. This could be:

• What can we see happening in the market?
• What problems do our target audience face?
• How do people use our product?

Research

Gathering information about what is already known about the question and creating new knowledge. It can include:

• Reviewing publicly available information
• Evaluating evidence from previous experiments
• Analysing data
• Conducting primary research with users

Hypothesis

Forming a hypothesis connects action to expected result, it says, if we do ‘this’, we expect ‘that’ to happen. They should be:

• Relevant to the research question
• Unambiguous with no assumptions
• Observable and testable

Experiment

Conducting an experiment means deliberately manipulating a situation in order to test the hypothesis. It should:

• Validate or invalidate your hypothesis
• Empirically measure the test against the control
• Be ethical

Analysis

Analysing the data generated by the experiment. This should:

• Use statistical techniques
• Establish if there is any relationship between the variables
• Apply deductive reasoning to reach logical conclusions

Conclusion

Drawing conclusions from the analysis to support making decisions. These include:

• Understanding if the hypothesis was proven or disproven
• Documenting the test results for future research
• Communicating to inform recommendations or decisions

Repeat

The method works best when it can be repeated to continually build knowledge. This means:

• Reflecting on the process, results and conclusions
• Improving any weak steps in the method
• Using what was learned to inform following observations and questions

Limitations

The scientific method isn’t applicable to every situation. It:

• Relies on existing knowledge to build upon, it doesn’t handle unknowns
• Can only answer questions that can be proven or disproven through testing
• Only describes what, doesn’t explain why

Reading

• https://medium.com/pathtoproduct/applying-the-scientific-method-to-product-management-953ca4a51758
• https://www.productplan.com/learn/product-manager-scientific-method/
• https://www.mindtheproduct.com/experiments-101/
• https://productmindset.substack.com/p/hypothesis-driven-product-management

What’s the difference between project management and product management? Both are approaches to solving problems and are often complimentary rather than opposite, but on one dimension project and product management differ greatly.

Project management approaches excel in situations of certainty. Product management approaches are more effective in environments of uncertainty.

Let’s imagine we want to get from one side of a river to the other.

If we know we want to build a bridge to get us across the river, know where on the river bank the bridge should be, how much traffic it’ll have to handle, then a project management approach will get the bridge built. That’s because lots of the situation is known and well-defined. Building a bridge to get across the river is a situation of certainty.

If we know we want to get across the river, but we don’t know how we should get across, or where to cross, or even why we want to cross the river, then a product management approach allows us to ask those questions and figure out the answers. In this uncertain situation, we might start with a small boat as a hypothesis about how to get across the river only to find that the current is too strong, and so making the situation slightly less uncertain.

This is why product management methods and techniques are often about identifying and reducing uncertainty, whether that is ‘continuous discovery’, ‘thinking in bets’ or ‘iterative development’. And underlying these techniques is the scientific method, the ultimate technique for going from unknown to known.

Maybe certainty to uncertainty is a spectrum with some overlap in the middle, but as approaches to solving problems, using project management in situations of uncertainty or product management in situations of certainty isn’t going to reach the best solution.

David Hockney – English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer.

Donna Haraway – Scholar and author on questions of science and feminism.

Donella Meadows – environmental scientist, educator, and writer.

Gilles Deleuze – French philosopher.

Malcolm Knowles – adult educator, famous for the adoption of the theory of andragogy, and influencer in the development of the Humanist Learning Theory and the use of learner constructed contracts or plans to guide learning experiences.

Mary Parker Follett – social worker, management consultant, philosopher and pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behaviour.

Nina Simone – singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist.

Rachel Carson – marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

If, after I’ve gone, what I’ve left behind others things can grow from, then my life has been a success.

This is my life goal. To live life in a way leaves behind good things that other things can grow from, and not too many bad things that might prevent other things from growing.

For me, this means two things.

Physical, real world stuff of limiting my climate impact, not using planes for travel, reducing my belongings and choosing things that can be easily disposed of. Not adding to future generations to further stretch our planet’s finite resources.

Intellectual, always indebted to the work of others, building on ideas, adding to the fertile soil for future ideas. Questioning, curious, critical and creative.

“We are all compost”

 – Donna Haraway

About the canvas

Start in the middle

“Who are you trying to help?” puts users at the centre. Without a clearly defined user or group of users it’s almost impossible to to answer any of the other problem/solution questions.

Problem side

“What problem are you trying to solve?” helps focus in on the problem that group of users has that is big enough to need a solution.

“What challenges stop people solving the problem in other ways?” makes you think more broadly, consider the context, and understand other solutions and how satisfactory they are. Without this, there is the risk of building a solution no one will use.

“How will people find the solution?” is about acquisition and marketing, because without knowing how people will find the solution, it’s unlikely they will and so it won’t be used.

“How will people access the solution?” prompts thinking about which channels the solution will be delivered over.

Solution side

“What might things look like if the problem was solved?” provides a guiding outcome that people could experience if the solution works.

“How might you be able to solve the problem?” is the space for possible solutions that

“What will you need to be able to solve the problem?” lists the resources necessary to build the solutions and acts as a reality check. If those resources aren’t available then the solution can be re-thought to be within the available resources.

Using the canvas

As with all canvases, completing it isn’t a linear process of going from one box to the next. Defining who you are trying to help is a good place to start, but as things are added to each box it should prompt ideas of things to add to other boxes and question things that have already been added.

The exercise of completing a canvas is to prompt questions, challenge assumptions, and iterate on ideas until a shared understanding is reached. Many things on the canvas might start out as best guesses but should be validated throughout the product development process so the canvas represents the reality of the problem and solution. The more not-yet validated assumptions the canvas has, the less likely the product will succeed.

If the problem-side boxes can’t be fully answered, then the problem isn’t well understood and needs research to understand it better.

If the solution-side boxes can’t be fully answered, then the solution needs prototyping and feedback to be validated.

Previous iterations:

• Charity Service/Product Model Canvas – iteration 2
• Charity service model canvas – iteration 1

I like Mckeown’s definition of strategy as ‘a coherent response to a significant challenge’. It breaks what is an often vaguely talked about thing into four distinct aspects. There has to be a challenge. That challenge has to be significant. You have to choose to respond to that significant challenge. And your response has to be cohesive.

If there isn’t a significant challenge, you don’t need to be strategic about how you respond. If you aren’t going to respond to the challenge, you don’t need a strategy. If your response isn’t cohesive, you aren’t thinking strategically about it.

If you want to respond cohesively to a significant challenge then you need a strategy. And if you want to think more strategically you can figure out what your significant challenge is and how to create a cohesive response.

Cohesion often seems to be the one that gets missed when deciding how to respond to a significant challenge.

This help us be more strategic about all kinds of challenges that are significant to us. Got lots of things to do (the challenge)? Group them together into themes of similar tasks and you’re already creating a more cohesive response to that challenge than tackling those tasks as separate individual items.

Thinking about ways of connecting, ordering, grouping things starts to add more cohesion, which invariably leads to a better response.

How might we understand what a service is, what a product is, how they are similar and how they differ?

Building on Lou Downe’s brilliant work in Good Services, we start with the definition, “A service helps someone do something”. True, but so does a spoon. Does that make it a service? The important part in that definition is the ‘doing’. Using a service is an activity, it requires the the user to actively do something, and as an activity it inherently has a limited timeframe. So time is important in defining a service too.

Starting with Jon Cutler’s work on defining a product as the value chain within an organisation that takes organisational resources and packages them up in a way that facilitates a value exchange with the user, the important part is the value exchange, the user gets something of value when they use a product.

These give us the definitions:

A service helps someone do something they want to do, at a time the organisation wants to do it.

A product helps someone get something they want to get, at the time they want to get it.

The different characteristics that we use to differentiate between a product and a service are ‘doing’ versus ‘getting’, and ‘at the time the user wants’ vs ‘at the time the organisation providing the service wants’.

A product means a user gets something of value to them, because there is a value exchange with the organisation providing the product. The value the user gets can be the physical product they own, but it’s also things like emotional value and social status.

The user should get something valuable/useful from using the service, but the service itself isn’t of value in the same way as a product is.

A product, because it is in a sense more ‘owned’ than ‘rented’, is available to the user whenever they want it to be. That’s a bit more obvious for physical products like a car, but it also applies to a digital product. For a service, the organisation providing the service is in control of the times that service is available. It may decide to provide the service 24/7, as with a digital service, but equally it could only do so at more limited times, like with an in-person service at a particular location.

The similarities are that both help the user, and what they are helping to user with remains vague so as to be as broad as possible.

Thanks to our amazing service designers, Jess and Katie, for asking the questions and inspiring the thinking.

The lesson for this month is that your focus isn’t always up to you. Sometimes things happen that demand your attention and you can’t say no to.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the non-profit sector

Working at a national non-profit organisation to embed product thinking and practice

It’s been an interesting month with lots of change but I’m making progress on my strategy in a few ways.

Participating in online communities for social good, innovation, product and digital

Slight possible progress on this goal with the idea of hosting show and tells for charities to share work in progress. Guess we’ll see if anything comes of it.

Continually developing my knowledge, skills and practice

Formal education

Didn’t do anything on my BSL course, on the Gitlab Remote Working course. I really need to go give them some time next month.

Informal learning

I didn’t do much on my side-projects as I’m still getting into the flow of being on the road but I’m really keen to work on my Ambivalent MBA on Charity in the 21st century in July.

Irregular Ideas has 43 subscribers. I’ve moved it on to Substack after an issue with Revue. Need to decide whether to keep it on Substack or move the email and website on Mailerlite.

Reflective practice

I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week.

Leading an intentional life

Lifestyle

My nomadic life along the coastline has resumed. I’m back in Wales and slowly visiting lots of beaches. I’ve seen a seal and a couple of dolphins.

Health & well-being

I’m still not doing enough to improve my physical health.

Financial independence

Runaway reduced this month due to some unexpected expenses but still pretty healthy.