Product Stability Risk

Vision is by nature a long-term perspective - peering off into the future at an undefined point. A product vision, therefore, drives strategy, priorities, and execution through agreement on long term outcomes. But as product teams, we cannot solely focus on the long term. We must align on the short-term risks that threaten the long-term outcomes and stability, so we all understand how to navigate the product's survival.

In Radical Product Thinking, Dutt defines five categories of risk to a product. They are outlined below with some examples I’ve pulled from my experience.

Technology / Operational Risk
- Needed tech solutions are not available / feasible
- Operational issues (such as, scalability)
- Cybersecurity issues

Legal / Regulatory Risk
- Not meeting necessary compliance standards
- Risk of being sued / receiving demand letters

Financial Risk
- Running out of budget before launch/completion
- Not generating enough revenue
- On-going budget not enough to maintain product

Personnel Risk
- Product cannot survive departure of key personnel
- Resources being pulled into other projects / products

Stakeholder Risk
- Powerful stakeholders are skeptical of product / outcomes
- Potential to lose executive sponsorship

Identifying the immediate risks to your product is necessary for any team. This allows not only for mitigation of the risk, but an additional framework for prioritizing product activities. Then each activity can be placed on the below quadrant, which measures alignment to vision and stability.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask your team to think through what they think might be the biggest stability risk to the product at this moment? What category does it fall in? Are you all aligned? You might also think about risks in terms of time scale - what do you project the biggest risk to be in the next 3 months? Next year?
Once the stability risks are identified, ask what the consequences might be if the risk was realized. Then you can begin brainstorming a mitigation plan.

Time Travel to Better Results

Time travel, of the mental variety, can help you envision future success, as well as the multiple possibilities to get there. In Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, she says, “Futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Futures thinking, or mental time travel, involves mentally stepping into a future time period and imagining - realistically - what could be happening. Depending how far into the future you imagine, your brain might be inventing new possibilities for the unknowns that inevitably arise. Your brain draws on past experiences, current hopes or fears, and intuitions about what might possibly change going forward. This exercise helps uncover and define risks or possibilities you might not have previously considered. It can be part of connecting who you are today with what you might actually feel and do in the future. This can be especially powerful if done as a team.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

This exercise can take place over two weeks.

In session one, ask the team to imagine it is the end of the calendar year - what are you most proud to have accomplished in the last 3 or so months? What would you describe to your manager as your greatest achievements over the last couple months? What did you just squeak in at the last minute? What were the expected wins? The unexpected wins?

In session two, ask the team about what happened on the journey to those accomplishments? What were the biggest challenges? What were the expected roadblocks? The unexpected ones?

Next then is more individual engagement - having folks work with their managers, teams, and stakeholders to keep an eye out for those roadblocks or ways to mitigate them before they even arise.

Gaining Insights

So much of UX is about gaining insights from our users, so that we can better solve their problems. In the widely followed design thinking process from d.school, we can get to insights by following the non-linear phases of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Assess. This is a tried and true process that allows designers to solve human-centric problems.

However, there is a way to breakdown the “Ideate” section further, to create even more expansive ideas.

In Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, Gary Klein details two parts to our “thinking” about a problem. First is an incubation phase, where we stop consciously thinking about the problem and let our unconscious mind take over. We put it on the shelf, relegate it to the back burners, not forgotten but not actively engaged with. He advises to “seek out mental relaxation and stop thinking about the problem.” Next, comes the illumination stage, “when insight bursts forth with conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty.” The aha moment.

If we lean into the two loops of incubation and illumination on any given design-thinking process, how can we optimize these loops to yield more and better insights? During illumination, while the conscious mind wanders, the unconscious engages in what Einstein called “combinatory play” - taking diverse ideas and inputs and finding new ways to bring them together.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

“But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.” ― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

How do you define insights - both as an individual and as a team?

How can you further exploit the incubation and illumination loops to reach more insights? What do you do to help incubate an idea? Are you spending enough time on this portion of ideation?

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.)

---

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?

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:

---

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.