For PMs working on internal products (e.g. data/analytics, integrations, etc) - what does product discovery and delivery look like for you?
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Senior Vice President of Product Management in Software10 months ago
We focus heavily on internal stakeholder interviews and workshops. This involves deep-diving into the specific needs, pain points, and workflows of various internal teams. We use these insights to tailor our products closely to their requirements. Delivery, then, becomes an ongoing process of iteration and feedback, often involving rapid prototyping and frequent, incremental releases. This approach ensures that the product evolves in lockstep with the changing needs of the organization, maintaining relevance and effectiveness.Director of Product Management in Services (non-Government)10 months ago
In an Enterprise context, I wouldn't consider integrations as a solely internal product in terms of product discovery/delivery. In a SaaS product, Integrations are actually an alternative UI to the main product functionality. Standard product discovery methods based on getting feedback from the end user of the product are still functional, but those are actually received by your integration partners and come to you as feature requests through your partners. Most of the time these requests come out of context, so your discovery process involves treating partners as client user proxies and interviewing them to find out what the actual user needs are. Sometimes partner's own needs are also posed as client requirements, so diligent discovery work (mostly partner interviews as getting access to clients directly might not always be possible) is required to identify the actual client needs and partner needs and address them at different levels. There is definitely a community management aspect to it, especially when the integrations ecosystem is large and you have to maintain alignment across the ecosystem. There is also the inbound part of integrations, which is the internal aspect, where new product development is constantly producing new artifacts that needs to be exposed to partners through integrations. Delivery becomes the important part, and the best way to manage complexity is to have those rapid changes delivered to an internal abstraction layer (an Integrations Platform) first before deploying to the partner ecosystem. The speed of absorption of changes by different partners will not always be the same and you might need to control the release of new capabilities independently.
In summary, discovery/delivery methods are different depending on which role (producer or consumer) we're considering, or which side of the integration we're looking at (there are always two sides, and their needs will not always match perfectly).
Product Associate9 months ago
Great question. Both of the examples, integrations and analytics, have impacts on external and internal users/stakeholders. It's important to gather input from all sides.That is, customer discovery interviews whereby you're seeking to understand the user's workflow and pain points. As well, internal input through conversations and group discovery/input sessions to ensure your chosen solution/partnerships solve the direct need as well as work well within the indirect cross-impacts.
Product Manager in Banking8 months ago
Treating it as an opportunity. Our customers are a slack/team call away. Product Discovery is around engaging with Partner Teams
Being Active on channels (Where our customers are) < Engage with a customer that has a potential new requirement
Driving leadership strategic pivots
Brining external industry best practices to the org
Through periodic meetups and roadshows the opportunity to interact with customer and partners is huge, and this brings a lot of quick feedback.
Product Delivery revolves around aligning with our Customers/Program needs, and having release cycles and release notes as we would have around any external facing product. Our scrum team follows a PI method.
I think the key aspect is to treat the product as it is, and focus on the principles of the product management .
This is where community comes into play, where we're talking about releasing very early products and building them together with the user through the feedback they provide. In the gaming industry, this has been the most successful way of doing games. By releasing something very early that you know the players/users want, and then building it together with them. The earlier in the process you involve them, the more engaged they will be.