Hypothesis-Driven Product Management with Tanja Lau - Productized 24 TalkInTen

Productized 2024 is our third conference of the year, and we’re excited to bring you exclusive bonus episodes straight from this dynamic event!

In this special series from the Productized 2024 conference, we bring you another exciting episode of TalkInTen, where we engage in quick but insightful conversations with industry leaders who are redefining product and business agility. Broadcasting directly from Lisbon, this episode features Tanja Lau, an expert in product management and host of the upcoming Product Academy Tough Stuff podcast.

Tanja on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanjalau/

Here is the synopsis of Tanja's Workshop:

Build – Measure – Learn. It all sounds so simple in theory. Yet, so many of us are trapped in some sort of feature factory. This workshop is focused on one of the hardest skills in product: asking smart questions, framing them as hypotheses and deciding which experiments and opportunities to pursue.

Tanja shares key insights from her workshop on hypothesis-driven product management, focusing on the importance of framing decisions effectively, creating clear hypotheses, and understanding who makes the final call in the product development process. She addresses the challenges of moving beyond feature factories, offering practical advice on decision-making and testing strategies that lead to meaningful outcomes.

Tune in to hear about the concept of "decision currency" and how Tanja optimizes her life and work for joy, balancing professional choices with personal values. This episode is packed with actionable takeaways for product managers looking to enhance their decision-making processes, drive team agility, and create more impactful products.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and stay tuned for more great episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!

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Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we can be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the Art of Product Management. Having us all find some joy in what we do, but it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and they'll be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin a huge thank you to our sponsor Sheev Limited, Sheev is the company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations. These are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. It's lunch time at Productize 2024 and another year passes and that's lunch and not something I get to experience much. I did try and steal a cake. However I was told I can't take cakes early. I was told the same yesterday I was very disappointed. I said look I'm working because I don't care. They're very strict here. He didn't say that OK so I don't speak English. I was like OK I'm just going to walk away. I tried to bribe them with Swiss chocolate but they didn't take any. Yeah chocolate and hugs. You will get chocolate and hugs for sure. I'm all about chocolate. I said a lot of money on Swiss chocolate when I was in Basel never week. Crazy. Really nice. So my family told me. So Tanya Lau, lovely to have you here. Thank you making this time for us on this lovely day in Lisbon and June lunch as well. So we'll get you out of here in the next few minutes. Your workshop date is Hypothesis driven product management. You are soon to be a host of the Product Academy Tough Stuff podcast. So great to have another podcaster on the show. Would you mind giving our listeners a bit of a say quick overview of what it is your workshops going to be about today? Yeah sure. So it's about something that is very fundamental in product management which is the art of decision making. I think that's actually the thing that interests me the most about product management and also in life in general. So I think it's about mostly about framing decisions in a useful way so that you can derive actions and move forward with confidence. That's what we're going to do there. Yeah. And what happened to you in your life to make you come up with this idea for workshop? That didn't come out how I thought it was going to. What happened to you? What happened to me? What happened to me? What about this idea? I just think that we are often not so deliberate about the actions that we take and I just figured my life got so much better and more clarity I had around my decisions. See if it's a longer episode I always like what decisions. I need to know. What decisions? We could talk about a lot of things. Yeah but let's pause it because it will be here forever. Maybe we'll do another episode another day. So one of the decisions that is very important to me is what is my decision currency in life? Decision currency. That's what I call my decision currency. So when I'm trying to decide whether to go left or right in my life I'm trying to always know and have a top of my head what I'm trying to optimize for in my life and these things might change over time but currently what I'm optimizing for is joy. And so when I'm for example I'm getting and I work part-time so I'm very strict with the working hours that I have but I might have the opportunity to teach an extra workshop for an in-house client. So then I will ask myself do I really want to take this job because I'm not optimizing for money at the moment. It's of course a factor but it's not the thing that I'm optimizing for and I'm asking myself like will this increase my joy in life or not or will I have to sacrifice joys in other areas of my life to do it and also as a family we use this to take our decisions. Excellent. Reminds me of the conversation I had last year at Proctite with Nesrine Shungal. Yes I know her. I know Nesrine. Yes of course. Right yeah yeah. We've just had offering her work to her delight workshops actually via my website. She's writing a book by the way on the top. Nice. Now Tamara spoke. I saw her on LinkedIn the other day talking about she's just teaching somewhere now but I need to drop her online. Note to self. Yeah so I mean joy is a big one. Love optimizing for joy. How does all this then translate into the practical things you're going to be giving people in the workshop. So what I notice often when I teach this workshop is that people have a hard time extracting the actual decision from the course of action that I are trying to take. Right so they will come with an assumption like we believe we should do acts and we will have the confidence to proceed if we see these signals if they even get to that part of the hypothesis. But proceed with what right and so often it is not really clear what the next steps are that they are trying to take. That's number one so is it about launching the feature is it about trying to test it with a certain amount of your customers and then rolling it out is it about to whether or not to invest more time or money into discovery like what is the decision that you're trying to take. That's the first thing if you don't know that you cannot write a good hypothesis and many people have difficulties framing this decision in the first place. The second thing is who is in charge of that decision. There is so much fuzziness around the role of a product person in many organizations that it's not so clear who is actually taking this decision. And you need to figure out who that person is if it's you great but then you need to be also aware of how am I taking this decision what do I need to have more confidence to proceed with my decision. If it's someone else you need to understand how they're taking their decisions and often people pretend to be taking decisions in a very rational way but then it's actually not really the case right and so you figure that they actually care about things they haven't told you about yet and that's why I think it's so important and that's I'm going to give you that mini tip that I'm going to give my workshop participants in a minute and then I usually fake the results before I run the actual test just to figure out like okay if we get these very extreme results will that help us take the decision. If not then we need to tweak the test in a way that it's more useful and many people if they ever get to the part where they're testing something they haven't thought about what they might get from that test what kind of results they might be getting which kind of data and if that data will be really useful to give you a concrete example maybe come back with some data about like okay 50 people clicked on that link and they signed up for whatever like the demo version but then the person who's actually taking the decision whether or not to go forward move forward with this product and might tell them like yeah but it was a I don't know a national holiday the day you were running the test or like you didn't ask the right people so I don't really believe your results it's so you this kind of stuff you need to figure out before you run the actual test right and so I think this kind of fake it tell you make it that's what I call it it's something that's so useful but very few people do it yeah it really reminds me of uh there's an excited years ago called the future backwards I think I did this in New George actually it's looking at my producer when I'm saying this uh back with a guy called David Snowden where you had to think about the end state and what it would look like and then find ways to work working backwards it's a so powerful yeah I feel it's really if it's really interesting what you say then also what you were saying about it what is a decision you're absolutely right there's a great book called a how to measure anything and it says that you can measure anything you just need to understand what decision you're trying to make if you try and measure for certainty you'll never get there yeah but how can you measure there's some things that you decrease your uncertainty enough to act yes but I wonder how many decisions are made in facets of life when we don't actually understand why we're making the decision or what decision we're trying to actually come to so if I've obviously driven product management what do you think is the uh oh no so you've run this workshop before haven't you so what is the feedback you've got what's the biggest takeaway is that people uh take away from the workshop they usually are quite surprised how hard it is to come up with a good hypothesis like how long it takes to actually write one and how much it is about the language that you use because often they sneak in fancy words like um we want to measure engagement right so we want to we believe that people will be more engaged if we do this or that but then I haven't really talked about what does engagement really mean what does it look like and why is it important how does it connect to a business metric right that's one of the things that they usually take away the second thing is that there's a lot of confusion about what outcomes really are and I get often I get asked by product teams like can you come in and just do some training on outcomes we want the organization to be more outcome driven and then I ask a couple of representatives of the company what is an outcome for you and I get a lot of different answers like there's a lot of confusion between impact and outcomes so we're that's the first thing we're going to do in the workshop we're going to clarify these terms is that using the Kellogg model I don't know which model I am so it's the one that Jeff got health and Josh Sidon kind of put me right. Maybe I know it under a different name yeah so it's kind of impact and then outcome and then going down yeah so yes so it has to do with changing user behavior right the outcome part and that's the part that many many people skip in their mental model they think like they launch something and magically their business KPIs change right but if you don't go through the lens of which kind of behavior do we want to see but also to think about what might be some unexpected unwanted behaviors to come along with it right if you start thinking and noticing these patterns then you also start tracking different things and paying attention to different signals have you heard of a book called a lizard optimization yes you do I haven't read it but it's on my list this fantastic okay so Gorky is a friend I'd say like Goyko isn't the podcast ever week sounds like a bomb villain yeah actually really sweet guy yeah but lizard optimization what you say about the unwanted behaviors it's really interesting because it was the unwanted behaviors or the unexpected behaviors for lizards that made his product such a massive success which actually when he found people misusing it and turned into a feature that's what gave opportunities I mean there's as much value in people using it how you think it should be used as well as maybe some of those unintended edge cases if you know what how are they doing that yeah and also what else do you want to keep stable right the health metrics the guardrail metrics many people don't think about that and CEO might tell you we need to increase the revenue but at which kind of cost right are you willing to to give up for example a lot of your current loyal customers to get a lot of new ones or does it matter to you or do you just don't care as long as the revenue comes in right yeah so so health metrics have um from christina's book radical focus yes certainly my dad know how to pronounce correctly vodka I think yeah okay because she's coming in the podcast actually yeah you should be excited I'm so excited so excited because I got introduced to her via via via Jeff Gotthel yeah actually yeah just very wonderful stuff um Tanya it's been so nice to get this insight into your mind you've been brilliant guys thank you so much to listen to you um if people want to find out more about you um or the product academy or the workshop how is the best way for him to do that yeah so I I can be found on LinkedIn I usually respond pretty soon to any messages I get and then also on a www.productacademy.ch for Switzerland ah brilliant fantastic well thank you so much coming on thank you too it's been a pleasure oh no an absolute joy and really good luck with the workshop software thanks to be fantastic um everyone thank you for listening to this little talk in 10 what I would request is that you share something you found in enlightening on this episode on LinkedIn tag Tanya tag the podcast or me because it would mean a world to us let you know to let us know your feedback thank you very much thank you