Mapping Outcomes and Opportunities to Reach Stakeholder Goals Together
Continually map out each solution idea and opportunity to shared outcomes.
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When I was 16, I got my first job in customer service as a restaurant waiter. I loved it — cash-in-hand, free food at the end of my shift, and the ability to meet all kinds of new people.
It was certainly hard work, dealing with both happy and unhappy customers. Two key lesson I experienced that has stuck with me forever was to: ‘listen, listen, listen’ and ‘the customer is always right’:
If an order was too cold — make it again, ASAP and ensure it is more than warm.
If a food item was missing — give them twice as much what was missing
Essentially: if a complaint came through — do a good deed, double in quantity.
Yet, years later, as a management consultant and as a Product Manager, the same service and listening skills don’t quite fit the bill.
Stakeholder requests and demands are much more complicated:
No longer are you simply executing against a pre-set menu of goods. Your menu (i.e., backlog, roadmap) keeps changing. Problems can be solved by all kinds of solutions, each with differing levels of impact.
Your kitchen (aka Product / Engineering team) isn’t that forgiving when you have a demanding stakeholder in front of you, instructing your every step. In a restaurant, customers may never return. In a company, the same stakeholders are in front of you each and every day.
Contrary to popular believe, your stakeholders (internal customer) aren’t always right: their issues may just be individual to them, their performance goals, and their agendas.
That said, the majority of the time, our stakeholders are a great source of inspiration: they often are on the front line that experiences the pain often on behalf of the customer, and they all have objectives that should (in theory) be aligned with yours, assuming you all work towards some shared company goal (aka North Star Metric).
So how does one distinguish bad ideas from good ideas?
Simple Answer: Empathise with your stakeholders, and take them through the journey of outcome and opportunity mapping.
The Outcome / Opportunity Map
Assume we have already got a strong understanding of what our stakeholder’s power and influence is, and what level of involvement we need to have with them. I wrote about this extensively in previous posts.
Our challenge now, is how to distinguish between their ideas: the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
To do this effectively, I always vouch for opportunity mapping: working with stakeholders top-down, starting from Company Goals, moving down the stack, asking many questions along the way to arrive at a shared set of opportunities to pursue together.
Let’s walk through each in detail:
Goals: What goals are your stakeholders aiming towards <this period>? How does the company goal break down into a stakeholder’s departmental and team goals?
Hypothesis: What hypothesis needs to hold true for us to deliver (solution) to reach (goal)?
Outcome: What outcome are you aiming to achieve with your (solution idea)
Opportunity: What actor (user segment, persona) are we targetting, and which metric are we aiming to impact? Why?
Solution: What is a summary of the solution idea from teams and stakeholders?
Evidence: What evidence or data points do we already have to suggest this hypothesis holds true, and that this opportunity makes sense?
Experiments: What experiments can we run to reinforce the evidence or provide as proof points that a bigger solution should be delivered?
Success Metrics: What is the definition of success, and the leading (input) metrics that drive it?
Health Metrics: What counter (health) metrics should we track, to ensure we don’t have negative consequences of our experiments or future solutions?
A simple mapping exercise with post-its, either physical (ideally face to face) or remotely (e.g., via Miro Board) will allow you to lay all the ideas out on the table, and see whether there are gaps in understanding by your teams or stakeholders.
A few scenarios could happen:
Scenario 1: Many Ideas, Low Evidence: This is a common scenario when solution ideas are aplenty, but they are inconsistently mapped to problems, hypotheses, or evidence needed to justify these ideas. In these cases, your job as a PM is to guide the stakeholders through each topic above, identify which data points are needed to validate hypotheses, and the measurements you need to measure to decide on future solutions to be delivered.
Scenario 2: Few Ideas, Low Evidence: In this scenario, stakeholders struggle to come up with ideas that may drive shared outcomes. Here, a PM can facilitate collaborative ideation exercises (e.g., design thinking, collaborative feature kick-offs for existing opportunities) to gain more perspectives and ideas that may spur future experiments and opportunities. Feel free to look at my previous posts about some ways to do this.
Scenario 3: Few Ideas, High Evidence: Prioritise the opportunities and hypotheses first (e.g., through ICE), before deep-diving into solution mode so as to not waste time on relatively less important opportunities. For the prioritised opportunities, map them to the hypotheses that need validation, and the experiments and data points needed to establish whether that idea is successful.
Scenario 4: Many Ideas, High Evidence: A nice scenario where your stakeholders have matched ideas to the required evidence and hypotheses that may already be validated through existing data. In this scenario, a PM can simply negotiate through prevailing prioritisation processes, prioritising at the hypothesis, outcome or opportunity level.
Whatever the scenario may be, you can see that a PMs role is rather crucial: you either coach or guide your stakeholders through the opportunity map, or you are helping generate and validate ideas based the diverse knowledge of your team and stakeholders, and you are helping structure the prioritisation of the opportunities first before your teams get too deep on experiments and solution ideation.
Let’s take a look at some illustrative examples of the full Outcome / Problem / Opportunity Stack mapped out 👇.
Opportunity Mapping: E-commerce Start-up Case Study
See below an illustrative example of a e-commerce start-up looking to become break even by Q4. Clearly, there are many ways to do this, but the chosen quarterly goal by the stakeholder in alignment with your team and leaders is to drive Sales Revenue in the second half (H2) of the year.
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