3 Habits that Stifle Product Execution According to a Product Expert

If you dive into the meeting rooms of most good corporate innovation and start-up product teams, you will likely find some similar rituals and conversations. Some type of build-measure-learn loop with a sprinkle of gut-feel and product intuition. This begs the question: if everyone is innovating in a similar way, how does one get the edge over their competitors? As with most winning teams, the devil (and success) is in the details.

But when you’re in the weeds, relentlessly executing, it’s often hard to zoom out and figure out how to fine tune performance. This is a critical exercise and also a big challenge. Thankfully, business leaders and Product Managers (including myself!) rely on experts like Mirav Vyas who has successfully advised a multitude of product and innovation teams across the UK, US and Africa over the last 8 years.

With expertise on building products across industries including HealthTech, AgTech, and FinTech, Mirav is adamant that what separates good teams from the truly great teams are the little, often overlooked details:

“It’s the degree to which teams are truly empowered by leadership to solve customer problems and how legitimately they operate in a cross-functional and collaborative way... not just say that they do.”

When I first met Mirav to discuss approaches to product execution for my start-up, it was clear that he has an acute awareness of what drives performance. Mirav developed this nuanced perspective after building a very well-rounded professional experience. He has led and provided expert insight on the delivery of large scale B2B and B2C software products that have served millions of users. Mirav spent the first 5 years of his career at Deloitte UK in the Digital Strategy Consulting practice, where he specialised in Corporate Innovation. While at Deloitte, Mirav was in the founding team developing Deloitte Venture Path – a revolutionary proprietary innovation framework used today by corporate venture teams globally to launch new products and services.

“We spent countless hours refining the methodology to develop a framework that approaches innovation as a structured, scientific process.”

With a passion to build innovative products and expertise with execution, Mirav went on to win corporate venture funding to join Deloitte’s internal incubator. Notably, as the only solo pitch winner.

After Deloitte, Mirav was selected to participate in Antler, a highly selective (2% acceptance) and reputable global VC and Start-Up generator. During this time, Mirav worked on developing market-changing ideas in EdTech and CareerTech — going on to launch and lead Rize, a consumer app spear heading a new innovative “micro-mentorship” category. Rize was voted as a “Top 100 Start-up to Watch ” by TechRound, a leading Tech publication in the UK, for a remarkable use of voice technology to facilitate micro-mentorship at scale.

With such broad experience and expertise in innovation across the corporate and start-up worlds, Mirav shares his 3 overlooked bad habits for product teams to watch out for…

Bad Habit #1: Only Product Managers / User Researchers participate in Customer Discovery

Scenario:

There’s a big customer discovery push to validate some critical hypotheses. Management is eager to hear customer feedback to determine whether to proceed, pivot or kill an idea. The Product Manager (“PM”) has been busy syncing diaries and has scheduled 7 customer calls. She is leading them all, and is alone for all but one where a UX designer is free to join. Engineering is stretched and despite the invites, are unable to participate. The PM conducts the calls and translates pages of notes into a succinct set of key findings. A week after the call, the PM shares the findings with Management including Engineering and Design.

So What?

Working this way is ineffective. The PM becomes the sole conduit of customer feedback to the business. Managers in wider functions are tasked with turning second-hand information into actions. Regardless of how good the PM is, there are likely always going to be further clarification loops. For example, if Engineering questions the viability of a feature - which they often do. The result of this is lost time due to further clarification and customer feedback loops to get to an outcome.

The Fix:

Make sure Product Discovery calls have 3 key attendees: A PM, a Designer, and critically, an Engineer. Why? Because each one of those attendees ingests and solves problems differently. As leading product thought leader Marty Cagan says: “In the best teams products were conceived by true collaborations between engineers, designers and product managers.”

“In my experience it is often the engineers who provide the best initial ideas. They know what the limits of the technology are and think within these parameters.” - Mirav.

Bad Habit #2: Experiments are not strictly time boxed and there is no agreed burden of proof

Scenario:

The cross-functional product team is designing experiments to test key hypotheses about optimizing a core feature. There are a range of experiments being brainstormed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. After some discussion the team decides on 3 experiments to launch in the following week, and to reconvene at some later date to discuss the results.

So What?

On the face of it, this seems like a sensible set of actions. However, the discussions are missing a few key elements. Firstly, the experiments are somewhat open ended in their duration. People have a rough idea based on previous experience, but nothing has been noted down. Will an experiment take one day? Two days? A week? A month? Tied to this is the fact that there has been no agreed burden of proof. Again, participants in the discussion may have vocalized “if x number of people opt in” or “if we see 2% increase in conversion” but nothing has been formally agreed.

Moreover, in any cross-functional team, there are always a mix of optimists and pessimists each requiring a different burden of proof to be confident. In some cases, where there is enough data for quantitative experiments, there is a clear marker of statistical significance which can determine success. However, for many early-stage product teams or new ventures, this is not possible.

The Fix:

Get a healthy debate flowing about “What needs to be true for this experiment to be determined successful?” and strictly timebox how long you have to gather data. This can seem tedious, but it’s worth the upfront effort to ensure everyone is clear on the goal and time available to hit it. Some simple yet effective tools I have seen teams use are experiment trackers, for example using Trello, where each experiment has a dedicated card with agreed details for all to see.

“I have seen these trackers used at both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. Keep things simple and encourage debate around each experiment.” - Mirav.

Bad Habit #3: Product metrics are only known by product teams

Scenario:

The PM works with leadership to agree on KPIs. The product team begins to execute and the team meets every week to track progress. They discuss the metrics and agree some actions / experiments to run in order to improve performance. The rest of the business has their own KPIs and have a vague awareness and understanding of how their work impacts the product metrics.

So What?

If people in a software company outside the core product team have limited awareness of how the product is performing, they can focus on the wrong things. Imagine someone in Marketing designing a campaign for a particular demographic without the knowledge that this demographic has a low 90-day retention rate. Or a Business Development representative prospecting a future customer without understanding which product features are most used and valuable to similar customers. Most teams would say “we do this anyway” but a true acid test is to see if people outside of the product team can reel off core product metrics without assistance.

The Fix:

This is perhaps most relevant for product-led growth businesses but, regardless of growth strategy, if your core product is software, then having everyone know how that software is performing can ensure all teams are focused on the right things. As renowned Venture Capitalist and Network Effects thought leader James Currier remarks: “When I go into companies I want to see everybody looking at triangle charts… how great is your daily stats email? Do you even have one? When I go into an office I love to see screens up on the wall with stats for everyone to see.” Check-out James’ talk here on what makes great teams.

The above habits as Mirav states are:

“As much about team culture and mindset vs. tactics. The tactics may fail but the mindset must remain intact.”

Today, Mirav continues to share his expertise in innovation and product development by supporting multi-national companies and high growth start-ups via his own independent consulting practice. He continues to contribute to the European tech community as a mentor, advisor and speaker with the aim to empower innovators with the tools they need to be successful.