3w3 Framework

I often follow product managers on Twitter to see what types of interesting frameworks they are using for their own teams. Sandeep Potdar posted what he calls the “3W3 Product Discovery Framework” to structure the beginnings of product discovery. The left hand column is the basic structure of discovery - the who, what, and why. (Most product managers are familiar with the 5-Whys that help dig somewhat deeper.) However, it is the additional columns that make this approach interesting; the follow-up questions are the real meat.

Beginning to ask these questions can help direct a course to success. And the “so-what” / “now-what” are excellent jumping off points for a business case or rationalization. But even more established products can benefit from revisiting these questions, ensuring the answers are in the current targets and roadmaps, and keeping the team on track.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask your team to read through as much of the Twitter thread from Sandeep Potdar as possible before the meeting. Come prepared to discuss if they’ve answered these questions for their product and audience. By reviewing these questions, are they seeing any unexplored areas or opportunity for further investigation? Further, what key questions are missing here? What other research areas are necessary to explore? What types of “where” or further “when” questions could be formulated?

Envision the Future

For weeks where the team is feeling overwhelmed or when we are all approaching tight deadlines, I like to keep the standup topics lighter and the “homework” to a minimum. One way to do that is to bring in pop culture, or to have the topic be video-based. This week’s does both!

In the late 80’s AT&T ran a campaign entitled “You Will” that was their vision of the future, and how AT&T was going to get us there. It’s hard to find high fidelity digital clips of ads that were VHS- taped decades ago, but this is one of the best compilations I’ve found. The campaign centered around connecting folks in new digital ways, but also ease of transactions in regular life, and efficiencies in the workplace. It was like science fiction when it was released - in a land of fax machines and newly-minted touchtone phones, suddenly someone was talking seriously about retinal scanners and satellite technology. But there is much to discuss in this beyond the technology. (And if you have a multi-generational team, it is great to see those who remember these ads originally playing discussing them with those who laugh at the idea of AT&T being a major technology player.)

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Watch the video and then discuss as a team. Some potential questions to get you started -
- What did AT&T get right? What of these technology concepts do we see today? What did they miss?
- How are our personalized versions of these technologies different user experiences than the more public versions or community versions that AT&T imagined?
- What does it mean to vision this bold and then fall short? AT&T itself didn’t bring us these technologies, but would we still have these functions if someone hadn’t publicized them?
- How do we gamble on vision versus practicality?

How to Measure Team Health

Product team health is a much talked about topic. Healthy teams make better products, and everyone wants better products no matter where you sit in the business. There are many tactics published by various orgs and thought leaders that address this, and many tools/apps/add-ons created to measure. Some interesting or useful ones are:

• Danny Carvajal from Contentsquare details techniques used by Spotify and how to further workshop them

• Product School has an explainer on various team metrics and how to gather them

• Andy Cleff, an Agile leader, provides links to many different apps and methodologies to use within your product team

• John Cutler of Amplitude advocates for a daily health check-in via a simple spreadsheet, and he’s also written a longer post about maturity and general health signals

There are no shortage of think-pieces and tools to use to bring the idea of a “health check” to your teams. You could discuss and debate the merits of each for months. But I decided to strip it all back a little bit when engaging on this topic with my product managers.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Prior to stand-up I mentioned we’d be discussing the topic of team health and provided some of the above resources, but not the exhaustive list. Then during stand-up, I asked them to do their own thinking, to develop their own measures.

By creating a simple line with “immature” at one end and “mature” at the other, and a second line of “unhealthy” and then “healthy”, we whiteboarded features and characteristics of teams to add to the spectrum. We generally agreed, and maybe shifted a couple sticky notes based on other entries, but the idea is to get quantity here. Each product manager might view their team or metrics differently, and that is okay - we aren’t going for homogeneity.

Then, I asked the question, “how do we get there?” meaning how do we get to a mature, healthy team. This time the spectrum definition was from “difficult to achieve” to “highly feasible”. Again, each product manager’s suggested action items for their teams were slightly different, but the purpose was to generate the idea.

Then I encouraged each of the product managers to take this back to their own teams and look for those specific team-generated definitions of maturity and health to work toward.

Top 10 / Bottom 10

Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale have a unique and insightful perspective on management - especially middle-management of distributed workforces. In their book Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year, they tackle many topics from the first year of the pandemic head-on. All of those lessons are still applicable, and impactful, today.

Out of the gate, they try to distill down who needs to know what. One great way to do that is by eliminating the 80% in the middle.

It goes like this: There are plenty of other places for your middle 80%. What we want in this room are the things that are going so well that we should celebrate and the things that are so wretched that you need help to get through them.

As a leader, this helps cut through some of the clutter, and as a contributor, this helps narrow your focus. If your team shares these, it helps everyone understand the context others are working in and where they might be able to help. It is a masterful tool to get to the areas that need the most attention.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a white-board chart where folks can fill in their top 10 / bottom 10. As you talk through the board, it can be helpful to start at the bottom. Try to find an action step for each of the items if possible, or find connections between folks or their sticking points that could help each other. Without dwelling too long on any one issue, make sure folks are heard. Then move to the top. Celebrate! Each entry should be something to acknowledge and recognize. Encourage folks to take this exercise to their product or working teams, as part of a retro or review.

Guiding Questions

John Cutler, the “Product Evangelist and Coach” at Amplitude and prolific tweeter, posted in March of 2021 about guiding questions. The instructions are simple - to as a team brainstorm guiding questions (not goals) that you refer to frequently.

The beauty of guiding questions is that they aren’t a prescription. Instead they offer a lens for you to think through some of your assumptions or actions. In contrast to guiding principles or even mission statements, they offer a bit more time for consideration or discussion.

This was John Cutler’s list:

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Have the group brainstorm a list of guiding questions that would be useful for their product team or general work. Vote or react to each other’s entries, and group similar ones together. Challenge the group to ask questions about themselves and the way they work as much as the outputs or external factors. Revisit this list regularly; use it to help onboard new team members.