Three Touchpoints for Successful Product Managers
Introduction
Every project you work on as a Product Manager has a key risk. How do you translate your UX Designs and Product Requirements into development tasks that create what you’ve worked so hard to define? How do you do that work with any kind of predictability? The secret lies in how you move work from design to development. In this article, I’ll outline a technique that I call the three touchpoints. It is easy to implement and quick to deliver value, and I’ll show you how.
I’m making a few assumptions — that you’re working in software (as my experience is mainly in SaaS products), and that you’re working with a User Experience or Product Designer. I’m also hoping that your team is working in some flavor of agile development process. I’ll refer to a Tech Lead, who could be any senior engineer on the team. With those disclaimers, let’s get to the good stuff!
Touchpoint 1: Pre-Discovery
When you are starting work on a project, spend some time with both your UX Designer and your Tech Lead. Give them the background and context for the problem you’re trying to solve, why it matters to the business, and what the outcome is you’re trying to achieve. Once you answer any questions, dig into a few important topics:
Have we done something like this before?
Is there existing technology we could use to solve this problem?
Is there technical debt or other challenges in the area of our product that we’re going to be working?
Are there other technical considerations or limitations?
Are there performance or security risks we should consider?
What type of design assets would help aid in the discovery?
It is essential that you spend some time understanding what you have to work with, what barriers you may encounter, and most importantly, that both your UX Designer and Tech Lead start to think about the potential solutions.
Touchpoint 2: Finalizing Requirements
As you start to wrap up discovery and have a draft of both requirements and a UX design, get together with both the UX Designer, Tech Lead, and the development team who’ll be working on the project. Start by reviewing the context of the project — the problem you’re solving, the scope of the solution, the business value, and the outcomes you want. Review your requirements and designs with them and elicit feedback. There are two benefits to bringing your development team into the process:
Engineers have lots of thoughts and ideas about how something should be built. You need to gather feedback from them as stakeholders. Some of the best ideas have come from these feedback sessions. They know how software typically works and can point out things you haven’t considered. It is also an opportunity to identify things in the design that may be extremely difficult or expensive to build, which you will want to avoid. They may have suggestions on how to achieve the same outcome more quickly. There may be performance implications that you haven’t considered, or other technical considerations. Incorporating their feedback also creates a shared sense of ownership of the project.
If a developer is asked to work on something they have not seen before, their focus will be on what is wrong with the design. This is an unneeded distraction. I remember those meetings myself, where as a developer I was expected to break down and estimate designs that had obvious problems to me. If I had an opportunity to share feedback and gain context around the project, I would have been more focused on doing the work at hand.
Touchpoint 3: Work Breakdown
Before diving into the grooming process and breaking down the work, take a moment to re-establish the context. Review the problem, solution, business value, and expected outcomes. It might feel redundant for Product Managers, but it's beneficial since the team has been focused on different tasks between touchpoints. Context setting is invaluable. After revisiting the context and addressing any questions, proceed with the standard grooming process. Techniques for work breakdown will be discussed in future articles.
Conclusion
This process is simple, yet effective. The repeated context and collaborative approach will help you and your team deliver better value, faster. It will also empower the developers writing the code to understand the complete narrative, leading to superior decision-making.