Define Your Product - "Just what is it that you want to do?"

Can you and your colleagues give a concise answer to this question describing your product or service?

This quote, which Primal Scream used in 1990 to open the song "Loaded", was taken from the 1966 movie "The Wild Angels" (Frank Maxwell as a Preacher). Peter Fonda as "Heavenly Blues" pauses before answering with a summary of the services and a description of the product offered by Hell's Angels - being free, having fun, riding a motorcycle without trouble, getting high and having a party. What's striking is how often this question is answered with verbosity when posed to clients. Asking this question to different members of many organisations may provide a huge variety of responses.

What's the reason for this? From experience, leaders, managers and designers create brilliant innovative products and services and expect these ideas to be realised through casual talks with team members, one or two experts and colleagues. The work will be prioritised and scheduled without input from knowledgable workers. This eventually leads to the final product failing to meet the expected outcome, good ideas being dropped/stopped, delays to the delivery date, increased costs, and inefficient use of available talent.

This way of working is not bad, in many organisations it is normal and people generating the ideas expect the people building the solution to be skilled and knowledgeable enough to produce the expected outcome. Having worked under this model our team usually delivered what was expected but sometimes we missed the mark. After a few misses we wondered why? The result - let's sit together and work together so we can show the solution as we build it, involve the ideatior(s) and ask questions face to face to reduce delays and avoid any confusion or re-work. If you asked all the people working together in this way what they do, they will mostly give the same answer. They are all aligned and fully invested in the final product as everyone shares ownership of the solution.

Sitting together and working together is great if the solution can be generated by a small team but how can we build a global, complex, enterprise solution with people in multiple locations? Spend weeks/months writing requirements and design documents? It is one option but what happens when the target technology changes during the specification or competitors release a similar product during this time requiring additional functionality to be added, or the business strategy changes as we write documentation, etc?

Find the balance between defining just enough of the product to start and ensure the ideatior(s) are continually engaged to expand and refine the desired outcome based on regular reviews and feedback of what has been produced. From experience, one of the best techniques is to organise a time-boxed brain-storming workshop with the ideator(s) and all the people assumed to produce the solution to define and prioritise the work. Ensure a follow-up workshop is organised a few days later to include people who may have been missed/absent/overlooked during the first session and allow participants to "sleep on it" and refine the work defined during the initial workshop. At this point the group will have enough knowledge to begin even though unknowns exist and some work is yet to be identified. This avoids unnecessary delay to the start of work whilst solutions are meticulously defined and enables prototyping options where a solution is unknown/complex.

If these brainstorming sessions include ALL the people required to define and build the product/solution and the group constantly engages at regular intervals, this time when you ask the question "what do you do?" across the organisation, the responses will be very similar. The benefit will be observed by significantly reduced errors, delivery time and cost, as well as improved efficiency, productivity and morale.

Contact Sugarfunk to help you realise the benefits of good product definition.