Root Cause Analysis – in product management

Assumptions, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

Most engineers and technical folks would understand Root Cause Analysis, RCA in short. People use various tools like the fish bone diagram that the Japanese developed or the 5 Whys to figure out the root cause

The root cause analysis as the name suggests, helps you get to the key constraint, the main reason , instead of just monitoring the effects.

How that helps, is that once you rectify that specific cause, the problems which are related to that cause would not surface again. It does not mean that no other problems will show up. It just means that you will then need to work on the next root cause and so on. In effect over a period of time your whole system will become better and better.

In operations, manufacturing, production, there’s a lot of numeric data which keeps coming in, which can be useful in running analytics and analyzing the causes.

In product management the analysis of root cause becomes a little more difficult. First, you generally end up doing RCA only when something has failed. Which means there are already emotions running high with everyone from finance to sales to production looking to find the scape goat.

Second, marketing has a lot to do with markets, which means people – the buyers – are involved. When you have people involved the psychological aspects are also important.

So when doing the root cause analysis of why a product did not make it in the market, you need to ensure that even trivial things related to inputs of people are not missed.

These small subjective things can change your analysis to help you identify the key reasons why your product didn’t do as well as expected. Sometimes you will come across multiple causes which all seem to be equally important. Generally this means somewhere in the analysis there are assumptions which have not been substantiated clearly.

Once you have called out the assumptions then generally you will end up with only one or two causes.

Once you handle those, chances are you will recover your sales again.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting blindsided in product management

Assumptions, differentiation, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management

When an idea for a product or service is our baby, even though we ask ourselves and all our team members of the possible issues that the product (or service) may have, we miss out on some of the most elementary things. This generally happens because all our team members get involved in group think.

For a product management guy getting blindsided by this kind of mistake ends up being most expensive , as you don’t realise “what hit you”. What you think as an essential differentiation could be a worthless factor which increases costs.

On the other hand two simple mechanisms that I use to try to exploit all the possible lacunae or weak spots in my thinking are:

Red team, blue team: In thisI make it into a game where I have one team specifically work on figuring out all the items about my offering that the other team can utilise to beat my product. This is the same concept that armies of friendly countries use during their war games. Once the fatal flaws are identified, you then go about correcting them before you get into the market. Sometimes in these exercises, I have also heard comments like – “there is nothing about your product that we even need to bother about, we can beat it very easily”. If you hear this kind of a comment, it means you are in deep trouble. If your internal team doesn’t think your product has any strengths, then you better figure out something new.
The second method I have found useful is to get a finance guy to figure out the plan and numbers. Typically finance guys are very good at doing a post-mortem and want artefacts for every assumption for all their bills. They will ask you for all your background checks and will help you surface the assumptions.

Getting internal people telling you all the possible negative feedback helps you build a much better product offering.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Theory of Constraints – and product management

Assumptions, constraints, Marketing, Product Management

Eli Goldiratt in the 1960s formulated this the Theory of Constraints and over the next 30-40 years he went about figuring out the solutions in various manufacturing companies. They had a lot of consultants world wide, some of whom directly still utilise the framework given by this theory or have modified it with changing times.

Goldiratt during his lifetime had written a few books out of which Goal and Goal II are so well written, with the story so tightly woven, that you don’t realise that you are reading a book which is about serious business.

Like with any theory there are proponents and then there are some who don’t realise the value and identify flaws – like in the real world there could be more than one constraint acting in parallel. These could be true.

However , I have found the theory very logical, in that it goes step by step in a well defined manner. If you go through the If… AND If…. AND If ….. Then. If you have done logic circuits using gates(AND, OR etc. ) then it is even more easy to understand.

Aa lot of times we are faced with the dilemma, that we have introduced a product, after identifying a niche in the market, with breakthrough technology, which has a novelty factor also, but the market is not accepting it. So you start figuring out the reasons.

One way to do the analysis and figure out the course correction is using the theory of constraints, by using the If …AND , If …. Then construct. As you start speaking the logic of the conditions you automatically start realising the flaws in your assumptions and start figuring out the possible challenges because of which there’s no pull in the market. I have found it’s a good way to surface the assumptions that you have taken during the launch of the product. Sometimes it actually makes you go down to where you started the buyer’s journey for your product. It can get you down to first principle thinking because it is so logical.

So while you do a lot of careful planning while launching, you should also be ready to work on a course correction if things are not going as per plan. Its your product, so a product management person you have to do whatever it takes to make it successful.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just ask….why finding what’s wrong is critical

Assumptions, Marketing, problem solving, Product Management, Questions

I have a pretty large ego. This comes into play a lot of times. And most of the times when I let it takeover I end up with a mess on my hands.

Especially when we have been in a role for some time we create a tool box for solving problems…and we end up molding the problem into what can be solved by the tools in the tool box.

So when things are not going the way they should be, in the market , we end up taking action using our tools which have proven worthy earlier. We assume we know the problem and like earlier can be solved the same way.

However markets are different…..they are dynamic in nature…the customers, your competitors and the environment are all changing, all the time. As a marketing or product management person you cannot let time pass while you keep grappling with the tools in your tool box.

This does not mean that having a tool box of proven techniques is bad. It is just that we should be quick to figure out if things are not working.

Sometimes its better to find out what’s wrong then to be proven wrong by the market. That happens when you start asking.

Till next time then…just ask.

Carpe Diem!!!