Managing Complexity: The Prism Technique for Product Managers
As a product manager, how do you manage the increasing complexity of your world? When releasing features, how do you ensure that your backlog captures all of the relevant requirements for new technology, regulations, marketing channels, financial needs etc?
An approach that I have successfully used when coaching product managers is a prism technique to help them visualise and structure what they need to build and when.
As an example, when I’ve worked within regulated sectors such as banking, charity or gambling, we’ve been governed by compliance regulations which determine how you communicate with your users, what sorts of messaging you deploy, how you sell products and what safeguards you need to put in place to protect vulnerable customers.
Designing new products for a banking client in the credit sector meant that we had to consider which loan products we were able to offer to which type of customers, what digital nudges and explanations we should implement to help them better manage their credit risk and not take on unmanageable debt.
The need to design products and journeys which reflect the vulnerabilities of your users is particularly important in the gambling sector. What measures do you need to implement to prevent them from overstretching themselves and getting into debt? The prisms increase when you need to build prompts and checks within your journey which don’t feel intrusive and an invasion of their privacy.
The prisms reshape within the charity sector - you need to be hyper sensitive to the needs of your users and their current state of mind. Visitors don’t want to be bombarded with marketing messages for fundraising at a time when they’re just seeking health information. Overall, your product needs to be a responsible service provider, which builds trust from your supporters and meets the overarching requirements of the regulator.
Within a non-regulated, commercial sector, requirements are more likely to be driven by commercial activity and business success factors such as conversion rates, upsells, cross sells, sign ups and journey completion. But, your prisms may be shaped by what your competition is doing and how your product can offer a similar service at lower price, in quicker time and more intuitively.
An added dimension to your prism is when you’re working through a technology transformation. Additional considerations may include the need to replace a platform - what functionality do you lift and shift, what is obsolete, what new functionality do you need to create? Are there time constraints on your existing platform such as license renewals or service guarantees expiring which mean that certain requirements need to be prioritised over others, forcing you to ruthlessly focus on what is needed for MVP? What about personal data - have you allowed for migrations and new data pipelines into the platform? Consider if this is a good opportunity to cleanse your data, enforce more security, deduplicate and ensure that you’re not actively processing data which contravenes marketing regulations.
Five steps to help product managers navigate through complexity
Step 1: Define the environment in which your product operates eg. regulated or non-regulated.
Step 2: Identify the key prisms which govern your requirements.
Step 3: Define your key stakeholder needs and whether their input in ‘nice to have’ or essential ie. data privacy, legal and regulation.
Step 4: For every new or amended feature, check whether you have captured requirements against all of your prisms.
Step 5: Consider if you need to prioritise certain requirements over others, particularly where you’re following an Agile release programme - do the released features meet all of your mandatory requirements or do you need to hold off until more features are ready?
As a product manager, you need to be constantly alert to the evolving needs of the environment within which you operate and interface, whether that’s the business, users, regulatory bodies or competition. How do you ensure that your requirements have captured all of the faces of your prism?
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