Be a champion for a culture of experimentation

Presented to members of The Product Mentor program

Transcript

1. @nisfrome Be a champion for a culture of experimentation
2. Hello, my name is: Nis Frome @nisfrome Cofounder & Head of Experimentation, Alpha Alpha’s on-demand insights platform is the fastest way to learn about your future customers. This is Product Management is the industry’s top podcast with 2M+ downloads. Product Management Insider is the industry’s top publication with 13K+ subscribers.
3. So, you want to be a champion for a culture of experimentation? 3
4. So, you want to be a champion for a culture of experimentation? 4
5. What is culture? • At a high level, culture is everything that’s valued, whether or not explicitly imposed. • It’s how everyday decisions are made, whether or not there’s a documented right answer. • Examples: Which candidate should we hire? What snacks should we have in the office? Should we use any ‘dark patterns’ to increase conversion rates on our homepage? 5
6. Why is culture important? • Command-and-control micromanagement doesn’t scale, so the only way to scale a particular way of working is with culture. • Culture provides incentives and thereby a framework for behavior and decision-making. • An understood product management culture accelerates decision-making, mitigates risk, and aligns expectations. 6
7. How is culture impacted? • Top-down behavior change: redefine values or incentives. • Outside-in: re-organize the company. • Bottom-up: Champion a new path to success. 7
8. Who is a champion? • At a high level, a champion is an agent of change, operating in a perceivably forward-thinking way, regardless of culture. • Champions are an increasingly common source of impact for company cultures. • Examples: remote working, diversity and sensitivity, agile development. 8
9. Why is a champion important? • Decentralized decision-making leads to a culture that is continually open to change and improvement. • Champions compete with each other and the status quo over narratives for the future. • A product management champion refocuses objectives, workflows, and mindsets in order to better validate customer problems and solutions, mitigate risk, and capitalize on growth opportunities. 9
10. How does a champion make an impact? • Champions are always selling, whether it’s an aspiration or desperation. • Champions eat their own dogfood, no matter the cost (or taste). • Champions showcase outcomes together with the underlying mechanics. 10
11. What is experimentation? • At a high level, experimentation is the underlying mechanic for data-driven decision-making at scale. • Experimentation is a set of techniques that closes the confidence gap between perceived problems and solutions and genuine problems and solutions. • Examples: you are all familiar with countless, but check out this interview with an innovation leader from Humana → thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/ scaling-experimentation/ 11
12. Why is experimentation important? • Experimentation shifts value from consensus-building and high-quality decision-making to speed-to-insight and high-velocity decision-making. • Experimentation at scale is a sustainable competitive advantage and the key to continuous innovation. • Product managers can be more customer-centric and achieve better outcomes (and avoid worse outcomes) more reliably with experimentation. 12
13. How do champions experiment? • Champions for experimentation spend a lot of time MacGyvering rather than following step-by-step instructions from a book. • Champions for experimentation become a unique (or exclusive) source of customer and market insights. • Champions for experimentation connect techniques to outcomes, and outcomes to culture change. 13
14. Break it down to build it up. • Culture • Champion • Experimentation 14
15. Avoid some key mistakes: 1. Not all experiments will lead to learnings your organization wants. Set expectations for ‘invalidation.’ 2. Every industry, organization, team, and person is different, so don’t just mimic what another company (or author) is doing. 3. At first, it doesn’t have to scale or look pretty or be diplomatic or have a line item in the budget. 4. It does have to be repeated and evangelized and have some jargon. 15
16. Recommended Reading @nisfrome Experimentation principles Company culture Behavior change
17. @nisfrome Thanks!