eBook: WTF is Product Thinking?

They have their place, but neither Agile or Cloud Native on their own are enough to build software that can continuously, ethically, sustainably change the world.

We also need clear, user-centric direction, which is where product thinking comes in. Drawing on her experience in leading EngineerBetter’s product and delivery management practices, Chisa Nwabara systematically explores how product thinking can be beneficial in common scenarios when building a product or service, and how it manifests in practice.

In this free eBook, she describes a detailed, three-pronged approach that empowers teams to become more effective at serving their users—and gives pragmatic product thinking examples on how to get strategically unstuck.

Transcript

1. WTF is Product Thinking? By Chisara Nwabara
2. WTF is Product Thinking? Contents Chapter 1: What is a Product Thinking Mindset? 4 What is product thinking? 5 A real conversation with banking IT executives 5 Features of product thinking 6 Problem validation 6 Ruthless prioritisation 7 Well-defined & measurable success 8 Customer empathy 10 Why is product thinking important? 11 Who should apply product thinking? 12 Chapter 2: Why is Product Thinking important? 14 We think this is important because… 17 What is the point of going fast in the wrong direction? 18 A cautionary tale 19 When teams are empowered to care about what they’re doing, it shows 20 Chapter 3: Product Thinking in Practice 21 Who can benefit from Product Thinking? 21 What we’ve observed 22 Need: Ruthless prioritisation 22 Need: Well-defined & measurable success 23 Need: Problem validation 23 Need: Product vision 24 Need: Customer empathy and empowered teams 25 Need: All of the above! 25 Where can this be applied? 26 Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 2
3. WTF is Product Thinking? Can you benefit from Product Thinking? 26 Chapter 4: Product Thinking for Organisations: When Product Thinking Meets Company Values 28 How it feels: a three-pronged approach 30 Product delivery 30 People 31 Practice 31 Recommended Resources 33 Books 33 Podcasts 33 Web Resources 33 About the author 34 About EngineerBetter 35 About Container Solutions 36 Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 3
4. WTF is Product Thinking? Chapter 1: What is a Product Thinking Mindset? Properly applied, agile and related approaches such as DevOps and CI/CD allow teams to build software faster. Product thinking is what allows us to deliver useful software. I have had several chats around the potential benefits of leveraging a product thinking mindset in the work we do with EngineerBetter’s former Managing Director Daniel Jones (known as Deejay). In this book we share some of those thoughts with you. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 4
5. WTF is Product Thinking? What is product thinking? We’ll use the term product thinking here to reflect that there are design and organisational elements to delivering products beyond that which might be considered purely product management. Product thinking is a set of processes used to identify, understand and prioritise problems faced by a known set of customers, and then systematically build and validate solutions that are expected to have an ongoing lifespan. Product thinking is in contrast to project execution. When discussing a project one assumes that there will one day be a ‘finished’ state. This project’s success is determined by meeting a fixed set of requirements by a given date and within a given budget (the ‘iron triangle’). Product thinking, on the other hand, is a mindset that allows one to create continuous desired and meaningful value by allowing for a product to evolve based on real and demonstrable needs that can be evidenced. It is a pointless waste to invest your resources building the wrong things on time. A real conversation with banking IT executives Deejay: How do you know when a project has been successful? Executives: If it is delivered on-time and on-budget. Deejay: How do you know if it delivered the right thing? Executives look confused, as if I’ve asked a silly question. Executives: Well, there was a requirements document, so we know it delivered the right thing because those requirements will have been met. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 5
6. WTF is Product Thinking? Deejay: How do you know the requirements were right? How do you tell, after the project was delivered, if the world changed in the way that you wanted? Executives: Oh… We’ve never thought of that. Features of product thinking There are four core themes of product thinking that we’ll explain in more detail: • Problem validation • Ruthless prioritisation • Well-defined and measurable success • Customer empathy It is important to understand that product thinking is not a phase or step that happens at a single point in a system, or level of an organisation, but instead a mindset. Mindsets do not live in one place, they are leveraged across an entire ecosystem. They speak to a way of thinking or set of approaches that can inform how we go about achieving a goal. These principles, therefore, do not apply at one level—rather, they are like a stick of rock in that they run vertically throughout an organisation, applying at scales from the individual user story to corporate strategy. Problem validation Focus on the problem before the solution When a doctor diagnoses a patient, they spend a good amount of time triaging to ensure that they very confidently understand what may be causing the patient their pain. The doctor will run diagnostic tests as well as collect anecdotal evidence from the patient themselves that provide Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 6
7. WTF is Product Thinking? quantitative and qualitative data points. Only after the doctor fully understands and records concrete evidence of their patient’s problem will they determine the diagnosis and propose a possible treatment plan (or solution). Implementing a product mindset works similarly in that you first focus on a problem, then ensure you fully understand and can justify your reasoning before moving forward with a potential solution. Some examples in practice include: • Proper scoping and discovery activities that define the current state before starting a programme of work • Artefacts that clearly illustrate why an activity needs to be done Ruthless prioritisation Address the riskiest assumptions first Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 7
8. WTF is Product Thinking? Continuing the same metaphor, a patient may go see a doctor with several issues. The doctor will assess the patient and then do their best to determine which single issue is posing the greatest risk to their patient’s welfare. This will most likely be the first concern that they will focus on and address. Fixing the most important thing first means the doctor still has a patient to continue working with—there’s little point addressing someone’s athlete’s foot if they’re bleeding to death. One should make the biggest pains clear and prioritise what will be the most valuable and impactful to the customer, and do so ruthlessly. By doing this the overall risk is smaller and effort won’t be wasted treating the wrong things. Some examples in practice include: • Prioritisation of programmes at the strategic level • An understanding of a given solution’s cost of delay • Ordered backlogs as opposed to jumbled messes where everything is top priority Well-defined & measurable success When you know what success looks like, you know when you’re done and what to do next Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 8
9. WTF is Product Thinking? Product thinking provides a way to test and measure outcomes to ensure you return significant results, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. Significance is the ultimate goal of a test. The worst situation that a doctor can be in is one where they run a test and the results are inconclusive. If the conditions of the test are not clear, variances have not been accounted for before starting, or the doctor is not sure what they are even testing for, any results that are returned are fairly useless to their ability to diagnose and treat their patient. Additionally, it’s important to reiterate that the success of the test is determined by ensuring that, regardless of the result, there is enough information to make informed decisions about what to do next. Some examples in practice include: • Features/programmes containing a specific hypothesis about what measurable impact they will have Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 9
10. WTF is Product Thinking? • Mechanisms to measure and track metrics that will determine the success of hypotheses and determine if the outcome is valuable to the customer Customer empathy Shared ownership of empathy for users in the team means increased accountability and lighter individual loads. Before your customer is a product, or a persona, or a user, or even a customer; they are a person. We in business often forget this, focusing more on codifying and extrapolating people to fit our business needs. The real value in product thinking comes from a readdressing of the balance of peoples’ needs and business needs by listening much more closely to the person speaking to us. Their lives, their situations, their wants, needs, desires, and fears. Product thinking aids in building this empathy for users, and an emphasis should be placed on the importance of delivering value that is owned and understood by the entire team. This provides a sense of purpose and also an insight for the team into how their efforts directly impact the things they are producing; making for more commercially intelligent teams. The team should then feel more empowered to ask why they’re building what they are, and to invest in, and take ownership of, outcomes as opposed to outputs. Increased empathy in teams can also work to increase the ability to show vulnerability earlier and more often. This means teams are able to ask the questions necessary to produce solid solutions. They can call out shortcomings so they can be addressed. Teams with emotionally robust environments are truly able to fail faster and do so without fear of blame or punishment. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 10
11. WTF is Product Thinking? The most important thing is solving customer problems together and effectively adjusting their shared process, as opposed to using hero moves that can lead to weak spots in how they deliver value. Some examples in practice include: • Identifying and recording customer personas • Cross-discipline pairing, early and often, to ensure that customer needs are visible to practitioners • Increased feedback loops that run both horizontally and vertically within an organisation Why is product thinking important? Product thinking is important as the next frontier in building useful software, and in creating resilient organisations. Agile can help you go as fast as you like, but if you’re building the wrong thing, you’re screwed anyway—no one will use what you build and the chances are that a great deal of waste will be created in the process. If Agile is the vehicle you are travelling in, then product thinking is the navigation ensuring that you’re tracking in the right direction on your journey. Product thinking captures, and holds teams accountable to justifying, the intent of their actions. In a space where work is justified and actions are intentional, less waste will occur. Agile software delivery is a largely stagnant field—for years at EngineerBetter we’ve been helping people deliver software more quickly. Cloud Native practices allow us to create resilient and highly-available systems on global Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 11
12. WTF is Product Thinking? scales. Both are generally well-understood even if adoption is poor and lip-service is prevalent. We’ve observed that many in our industry spend so much time focusing on the tech and the solution, that they haven’t done enough to determine if the solution solves the problem for their users in the first place. It’s often forgotten that at the heart of technological advances we’re ultimately trying to solve problems for people and add more value to their lives! When thinking about what success looks like, it’s important that we’re measuring the right things (or even taking measurements in the first place). Neither Agile nor Cloud Native alone are enough to build software that is useful and that changes the world in the intended fashion. In short, they don’t help us build the right thing. Who should apply product thinking? Anyone that is building a product or offers a service can benefit from product thinking and associated tools and practices. The greater the uncertainty in the problem, solution, or delivery method, the greater the benefits of applying product thinking. Product thinking applies to anything that offers self-service with an ongoing lifespan. Digital experiences, apps, platforms, as well as abstract systems such as communication loops, services and information flows could all leverage these techniques. It is only by: • explicitly identifying those suffering a problem • understanding that issue • hypothesising what might help Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 12
13. WTF is Product Thinking? • building that proposed solution • checking the solution had the intended effect …that we deliver useful software. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 13
14. WTF is Product Thinking? Chapter 2: Why is Product Thinking important? EngineerBetter is known as a source of knowledge for helping back-end engineering teams deliver platform-based technology solutions to their consumers, i.e. product and delivery teams. What we’ve learned over the years is that because these internal teams are often treated as support or supplemental functions, the same level of thought and care does not go into how they are positioned We’ve spent some time discussing what a Product Thinking mindset is, as well as a bit on why in the first chapter of this book. Now, let’s discuss why it matters in greater detail. To answer this question, there are three key points worth highlighting. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 14
15. WTF is Product Thinking? “Speed at the cost of productivity and efficiency is not progress.” — Chisa Nwabara, EngineerBetter Technology is constantly changing and evolving. Oftentimes we’ve observed that in order to maintain a perceived speed of pace, companies and teams end up sacrificing more than they realise in the form of quality and team performance. When this happens, productivity can be so affected and changed that one does not realise just how much efficiency is sacrificed. Typically, a desire to go quickly surpasses efficiency to the point that it ends up costing organisations an exponentially larger amount to sustain inefficient and unsustainable practices. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 15
16. WTF is Product Thinking? “If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.” — Head of Industrial Engineering, Yale University Nell Derick Debevoise, writing for Forbes, cites a similar quote attributed to Einstein. “The point he makes,” she goes on to say, “is important: preparation has great value to problem solving. And what is any task worth doing but a problem to be solved?” When thinking about what success looks like, it’s important that we’re measuring the right things (or even taking measurements in the first place)… Ultimately, these teams are providing a service to their end-users who oftentimes are likely to be other developers or internal peers. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 16
17. WTF is Product Thinking? “Just because you’re not selling to a customer, doesn’t mean you don’t have users.” — Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter The deliverables that teams produce are services, experiences, products… These are teams that are tasked to deliver value to end users, but they may not have strong perspectives on how best to go about doing so, i.e. developers are not thought of as customers. There is little to no expertise on how best to prioritise internal backlogs. Most importantly, there is little guidance on how to validate that the platform-based decisions being made are solving the right problems By solving these pain points, the odds are increased that organisations will create sustainable internal systems that lead to less waste, better feedback loops and more effective teams who are capable of producing value for customers. We think this is important because… Agile Methodologies and Product thinking are two peas in a pod! Agile added a feedback loop between customer and developer, but despite this we still seem to spend so much time focusing on the tech and the solution, that we haven’t done enough to determine if the solution matches or solves the problem for our users in the first place. We forget that at the heart of tech advances, we’re ultimately trying to solve problems for people and add more value to their lives, Product thinking used in conjunction with agile practices produces more effective teams who are able to deliver valuable outcomes as opposed to unverified outputs. We also tend to see an increase in transparency and Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 17
18. WTF is Product Thinking? accountability because we validate and provide reasoning for decisions that are made. Like Agile, product thinking is rooted in healthy experimentation and hypothesis-driven approaches. This continuous learning means once you’ve identified and solved a problem, you can feed it back into your method with strong agile practices and continuous improvement, i.e. create more accuracy in your feedback loops which in turn produces better-vetted results. What is the point of going fast in the wrong direction? You can go as fast as you like, but if you’re building the wrong thing, you’re screwed anyway because no one will use it and chances are, a great deal of waste will be created in the process. As previously mentioned, if agile is the vehicle you are travelling in, Product Thinking is the GPS navigation ensuring that you’re tracking in the right Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 18
19. WTF is Product Thinking? direction on your journey. Product Thinking captures and holds teams accountable to justifying the intent of their actions. In a space where work is justified and actions are intentional, less will happen without good reason. A cautionary tale EngineerBetter worked with a CTO who asked for help creating an effective software delivery practice and technology culture. Whilst performing this consultancy work, it became clear that the business was a ‘feature factory’—the visionary CEO, who had willed this first-of-its-kind product into existence, was still dictating which features needed to be built. There were no success criteria associated with these features, nor any attempt to check that they were having a positive effect. If he woke up one morning with a new idea, it was suddenly the company’s top priority. We identified this as a risk and implored the CTO to allow us to engage with the CEO to perform some executive coaching. The CEO needed to know that he had ‘levelled up’ and was no longer building a product, but instead building the company that built the product. He needed to delegate product decisions to professionals, and most importantly validate that features had the desired outcomes. Without this, all the agility in the world would only help them deliver the wrong thing. Our requests were repeatedly declined. “He’s not ready for that yet”, “we need to make improvements first before having that conversation.” We should have done a better job of convincing the customer that we could help. Some months later, the CEO made a unilateral and fundamental change to the product without checking that it was what customers actually wanted. Customers felt cheated, left in their droves, and started a downward spiral that (combined with the COVID-19 pandemic) resulted in the company becoming insolvent. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 19
20. WTF is Product Thinking? Product thinking makes each feature a bet—if we spend X building Y, then we think we’ll see effect Z. An organisation without product thinking turns itself into the bet—we’ll build whatever we think is the right thing, and if we’re wrong, we’ll go bust. When teams are empowered to care about what they’re doing, it shows So many morale and people issues have crept into the many of the delivery teams that we are later asked to help. Oftentimes, we find that the “people” aspect of our field is lost the moment we get to the teams doing the building. This directly affects how well those teams function and the things that they produce, as dysfunctional teams are unable to be as effective or productive as they could be. Product thinking done well can lead to a reduction in blame culture because everyone owns the outcome and it no longer becomes about the individuals, but instead about the deliverables and their value to users. This also creates a sense of purpose because product delivery teams are informed and empowered around what they’re building as opposed to effectively building blind… There’s nothing wrong with telling engineers why they’re doing what they’re doing and how their efforts produce value and directly affect the outcomes i.e. constructive channels of accountability via informed decisioning. There also should be nothing wrong with allowing them to ask questions so that they truly have access to the information they need to deliver the best outcomes possible. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 20
21. WTF is Product Thinking? Chapter 3: Product Thinking in Practice We’ve discussed the what and the why of a product thinking mindset. In this chapter, let’s explore the how, specifically how product thinking can be beneficial in some commonly experienced scenarios. Who can benefit from Product Thinking? Product thinking can improve your ability to organise your strategy to goals, vet pain points, prioritise work to be done, and then also create less waste across your solutions. If you have a problem to be solved or desired business outcomes that you’re not certain how to organise thoughts & actions around, then chances are you could leverage product thinking frameworks. Anyone that is building a product or offering a service can benefit from product thinking and the associated toolkit and practices. Product thinking applies to anything that offers self-service with an ongoing lifespan, which Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 21
22. WTF is Product Thinking? can encompass digital experiences, apps and platforms, as well as abstract spaces such as communication loops, services and information systems. What we’ve observed Need: Ruthless prioritisation Feels like "We are unclear as to what to work on next. Everything is important and urgent." Looks like Poor prioritisation of work Even if everything in your backlog or on your list is important, you still need to decide what is going to be done first. From a practical perspective, there’s a good chance that it’s just not possible to do everything at once. Not only is this an ineffective way to complete tasks, it’s also probably not plausible given your delivery team. Instead, providing teams with a means to discern what the most important thing to focus on allows them to confidently determine what can be accomplished in x amount of time. Is it a question of urgency? Satisfying one stakeholder over another? Is there a need to sequence work due to dependencies? Time-constraints that shift items in the team’s queue? Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 22
23. WTF is Product Thinking? Need: Well-defined & measurable success Feels like "We are not really sure what the business needs. We've delivered a ton of output but have been unable to see an improved experience for customers." Looks like Unclear means for defining and measuring success As with most experiments, it does not make sense to define your answers before you’ve clearly defined what it is that you’d like to test. Providing clear definitions to the team as to what the business hopes to achieve ensures that there is less ambiguity around the ask. Clarity brings about more confidence and the goal should be to create environments where the business and delivery team can confidently demonstrate that efforts have been a success. Need: Problem validation Feels like "If I asked different stakeholders or team members about an aspect of the work we're doing, I'd get just as many different answers to my question(s)" Looks like A lack of understanding and vision of the strategy and product offerings they are supposed to be building Oftentimes, people make assumptions that all stakeholders involved are on the same page. When they are then asked to write down or capture their interpretation of work to be done, it’s a lot easier to see where there may be misalignments or gaps in understanding. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 23
24. WTF is Product Thinking? Finding ways to validate problems through visualisation and storytelling makes them more tangible and visceral, whilst also providing a commonly shared set of assumptions around which the entire organisation can reach alignment. Need: Product vision Feels like "Teams that are often treated like dumping grounds for all the work that doesn't fit someplace else. Overtime becomes our norm and even though we work around the clock, we always seem to be behind. We have lots of pressure for delivery. Team Morale and/or psychological safety is low and our work tends to feel very chaotic." Looks like Unsustainable behaviours in the team where all time is spent delivering something regardless of what that something is By providing a team with mechanisms to be able to have intentional conversations with stakeholders around what’s the most logical work to be done first, there’s less need to create a gauntlet of everyone fighting to get their ‘urgent’ need to the top of the pile. Pragmatic conversations can instead be had in a way where all those involved can agree to an order of priority, delivery, and or execution. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 24
25. WTF is Product Thinking? Need: Customer empathy and empowered teams Feels like "It's tough to ask clarifying questions. It's difficult to contribute to the solution and inform them on feasibility because these decisions happen before they reach our team" Looks like Siloed teams that do not have the power to make decisions within the team or access to enough information to make informed decisions Product thinking promotes an environment in which those that are doing the building have some visibility into the bigger picture. It advocates for allowing open dialogue between engineers and end users so that engineers can better understand how their efforts directly affect the people that will ultimately benefit from what they are building. Having this context and building empathy for users in a delivery team results in fewer errors because everyone knows why they are doing what they’re doing. Informed teams are empowered teams. Need: All of the above! Feels like "Feels like a feature factory where we create a lot of features, but unsure as to whether they've actually directly added profits or value to our product or service offering. We spend a lot of time on pure delivery but very little time successfully ensuring that our 'delivery factory' is running as efficiently as it could be." Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 25
26. WTF is Product Thinking? Looks like Little to zero time is allocated to ensure that the factory itself is running effectively This is always a tough conversation to have — when do we make time for, and invest in process improvements? How do we show the cost-benefit and need for these types of initiatives? When do we ‘retire’ a feature? How do we make time for improvements and maintenance? How do we show the value of investing in aspects of our work that are not ‘customer-facing’? It might run the risk of oversimplification, but: treat it like a product! Consider the entire system and your team as a living thing that must be managed, addressed and tended to, and make sure those aspects are accounted for when the cost of each incremental piece of value is calculated. Where can this be applied? One thing to be aware of is that many of the above-listed scenarios are not specific to a certain type of team, industry or domain. This helps to illustrate that applying product thinking principles should not take away or detract from the ability to deliver good work and value. In contrast, this mindset should be additive and aid in ensuring that not only can a team deliver admirably, but they can also validate that what is being delivered is of value. Can you benefit from Product Thinking? Upon reviewing the above examples, here are some questions to leave you with: • Have you noticed or experienced any of the above patterns in your team or organisation? • How has your organisation worked to address these challenges? Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 26
27. WTF is Product Thinking? • How might a product thinking mindset constructively help your organisation navigate said challenges? If you’re not quite sure where to start, get in touch with us! We’re happy to help. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 27
28. WTF is Product Thinking? Chapter 4: Product Thinking for Organisations: When Product Thinking Meets Company Values People spend a lot of time thinking about building things. Often though they fail to spend time thinking about building companies capable of successfully building those things. More energy is spent worrying about the end product than about how effective the organisation is at building in the first place. There’s a bit of nuance that comes into play in this statement as illustrated below: Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 28
29. WTF is Product Thinking? Strong product thinking speaks at least as much to how you build as to what you build. With regards to what, the quality of what goes in directly correlates to the quality of what comes out. With regards to how, the techniques and skill applied directly correlate to the level of craftsmanship displayed in your final product. Hence we need to ensure that the quality of ingredients and other inputs is just as high as the outcomes we expect at the other end. What does this mean? In Melissa Peri’s excellent book “Escaping The Build Trap” she talks about a fictitious company called Marquetly. It’s problem wasn’t that “it did not have a great idea or a great product,” Peri says, but rather “that the company itself was not set up to keep growing that product to succeed. The organisation was missing the roles, strategy, process, and policies needed to really promote and sustain real value creation.” Peri goes on to state that: “When we lose sight of what is important, when we forget what value means, the products we produce—and sometimes our companies themselves—fail. This has happened to organisations large and small. Kodak failed to see digital photography disrupting it. Instead of responding to the change, it doubled down on how it always did things. When the company tried to innovate, it was not set up structurally to do so. It was too little, too late. Microsoft, although not in danger of failing immediately, was on the path to disruption. It had been using the same strategic recipe over and over again, counting on Windows to Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 29
30. WTF is Product Thinking? carry its business, until CEO Satya Nadella came in. He realigned the company to a future strategy that would see it continue innovating and then adjusted the people working on those activities accordingly.” In short, if your factory or machine is effective, you can confidently count on it to produce consistent results with less need for interference and manipulation, i.e. don’t forget to focus on building a better factory that will build a better product. At EngineerBetter we feel that there is a perfect opportunity to bring these values and practices to a wider audience. By applying agile and product approaches to client teams, we can in turn help them to become more effective at serving their users. How it feels: a three-pronged approach There is a balance to be struck between People, Practice, and Product (Delivery). Here’s what this looks like for us… Product delivery We focus on building momentum through lean experimentation that drives towards significant results. Designing better solutions comes from first making sure you’re addressing the correct and validated problems. This is done by utilising tried and true practices backed by values we can actually stand behind, while simultaneously keeping an open mind about the fact that there is always room for sustainable improvement. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 30
31. WTF is Product Thinking? People Every organisation is a group of people building things for other people. We believe it makes logical sense to start there when thinking about affecting change in any system. Fostering an open attitude towards learning, and empowering people to have the courage to say when something is not working, helps us to create a more effective factory that is capable of self-correction and growth. In turn we and our team need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, because that is the nature of growth and change. Practice We make time to create strong systems of support, and invest in the infrastructure and processes of an organisation FIRST, followed by conversations around tooling SECOND. Our methods are opinionated, but they are also always open for challenge. Expect that our values will be reflected at the heart of what we do: • It starts at home… we practise what we preach.. Our goal is to create sustainable ecosystems for the people that work for us and make sure those values are reflected in the way we build things. This in turn allows us to be transparent with our customers and ourselves. Because of this, our organisational ethos functions on the exact same principles and approaches that we promote to our clients. • Everyone's journey is different and everyone is starting from a different place. Habit changing doesn’t happen overnight. We also acknowledge that it can be challenging to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Introducing product thinking into spaces where it’s not well-understood, thought about or where there isn’t awareness can be difficult, but we’re here to help. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 31
32. WTF is Product Thinking? ◦ It’s ok to walk away if methods don't make sense for you. We believe the best way to move an agenda forward is to be candid and clear about what it will take to progress. We work to ensure we’re always providing value and are forthcoming if we feel we are not. This is why we structure our contracts on time and materials. A company that embodies a product thinking mindset will be organised around outcomes rather than outputs, with product management seen as an essential function of delivering value to users. As such, company strategy is regularly assessed not only against changing market conditions but also as to whether said outcomes have been successfully met—a pattern that should be repeated in every function in the organisation. Employees are rewarded for learning and achieving goals, and are encouraged to spend time really understanding their customers. For this reason, we encourage you to embed product thinking into the bones of your organisation to ensure that you’re not only building the right things but also building the things right… Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 32
33. WTF is Product Thinking? Recommended Resources Books Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Peri Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen Product Management in Practice by Matt LeMay Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres Podcasts Matt LeMay on Effective Product Management and Conducting User Research Silicon Valley Product Group’s Christian Idiodi on Product Management Skills and Product Discovery Web Resources Mind the Product (subscription)—content, events, training and more The Beautiful Mess Archive The Hyper Island Toolbox Liberating Structures FunRetrospectives Productboard Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 33
34. WTF is Product Thinking? About the author Chisara (or Chisa [CHEE-sah] for short) leads EngineerBetter’s product and delivery management practices, as well as taking responsibility for fostering cultural and organisational transformation. A veteran of Pivotal, ThoughtWorks, and Mind The Product, Chisa has provided consultancy and coaching in product management and agile practice to a number of customers, using her facilitation skills to great effect. She has also delivered inclusion consultancy professionally, as well as assisting startup founders with organisational design strategy, establishing customised ways of working and practices, and outcome-based delivery. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 34
35. WTF is Product Thinking? Chisa’s minor in psychology is often helpful in understanding the human dynamics of an organisation, as well as for training her dog Sensi. A background outside of computing technology allows valuable empathy with teams and individuals who need to interface with software developers. About EngineerBetter EngineerBetter is a boutique consultancy incorporated in 2016 and acquired by Container Solutions in 2021. The consultancy exists to improve the productivity of digital organisations, and to improve the working lives of the people working there-in. We leverage our understanding not only of cloud native technologies, but also deep insight into the organisational changes required to enable continuous delivery. Honesty, transparency and collaboration are fundamental to how we operate. We believe in working closely with our customers, continuous improvement and optimising for effectiveness. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 35
36. WTF is Product Thinking? About Container Solutions Container Solutions is a consulting firm that specialises in Cloud Native transformation, operations, and engineering. Our company prides itself on helping enterprises migrate to Cloud Native in a way that is sustainable, integrated with business needs, and ready to scale. Our proven, four-part method, known as Think Design Build Run, helps companies increase independence, take control, and reduce risk throughout a Cloud Native transformation. The process is stepwise to minimise risk, but delivers value quickly. In our Think phase, we listen carefully to people throughout a company, from the boardroom on down, to alleviate challenges and pain points, and formulate strategy. In the Design phase, we conduct small experiments to eliminate wrong choices and help organisations select the best path forward, regardless of vendor. In the Build phase, we collaborate with our clients’ engineers to create a Cloud Native system aimed at delivering software faster and easier. In the Run phase, we train our customers’ engineers to run their new system themselves—though we also offer 24/7 operations support if they prefer. Container Solutions is one of only a handful of companies in the world that are both part of the Kubernetes Training Partner (KTP) programme and a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP). Membership to both programmes is based on real-life, customer experience. When companies like Google, Atos, Shell, and Adidas need help with Cloud Native, they turn to Container Solutions. We are a remote-first company that operates globally, with offices in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. Chisara Nwabara - Container Solutions 36