The Benefits of Having a Project and Product Mentality

The Benefits of Having a Project and Product Mentality

Defining “success” in a project implementation can vary depending on what you want to measure. Project managers need to clearly define what “success” means with all the involved stakeholders in a project because their main role is to ensure that a project’s implementation is fruitful in all aspects. Success can be defined through a project mindset, which measures a project’s deliverables, schedule, budget, and scope. Conversely, success can be defined by a product mindset, which measures things such as user adoption, downloads, ROI, etc. Commonly, a Project Manager handles the project, while a Product Owner manages the product, but depending on a company’s size, the same person can fulfill both roles. Regardless of the team's composition, keeping a project mindset is important to deliver a successful project internally, making sure the resources going into the project are managed wisely; while having a product mindset is important to create a successful product for its users.

Product Mindset

When first thinking about developing a product, it is crucial for teams to understand who the product is for and what problem it solves. A product mindset provides this strategic outlook and helps drive a product strategy. A product strategy outlines what a company wants to achieve with its product, and how it intends to do it, and also ties the company’s reason for being (mission and vision) with its customers and their needs. Having a product strategy should be the foundation before creating a new product or feature inside a product. The most important part of a product strategy is to understand the audience and their needs in order to create products that will be used by them. We can use various tools to identify customer needs and how to solve them. One of these is user journeys, a tool that helps you understand all the steps a user takes when solving a problem, beginning with the moment the user realizes the pain point exists and then the user’s actions to address it. Therefore, by understanding the user’s thought process when solving that specific need, we can create a product that alleviates one or all of the steps the user takes to solve that problem.

The following graph is a user journey for parents trying to teach their young children by rewarding good behaviors. After having studied the struggles of parents with keeping track of and handing out rewards to their children based on their behaviors, Stack Builders launched a mobile application called Amira that helped parents reinforce their children’s positive behaviors.

Another useful tool to understand if we are creating the right product is story mapping, which is a graphical way to organize stories into steps or epics and then chronologically place the stories needed to complete them (see example below). There are multiple other research methods that help identify what customers prefer, for example, A/B testing, which consists of showing two different variations of a product to customers and seeing which variation performs better, given a measurable goal. These tools and others help to understand user needs better, avoid making assumptions, and create products that meet the actual demands of the customers.

Why is it important to have a clear product strategy?

Having a well-defined product strategy helps to give context to the team about why they’re creating a product and why it’s important to the company so that everyone is aligned under a common vision and has more context when making decisions. This way, we prevent the development teams from being disconnected from the business. This is important because when this happens, teams are less engaged, there is a need for more micromanagement and hierarchies, it is harder to make Agile decisions, and there is more rework. Additionally, when we are connected to the business, we can provide better suggestions, and the technical pieces will be more aligned for maintainability and testing practices. The specifics of how you will deliver value are less significant if you have done a good job of describing the value you intend to deliver to your teammates. Settling on a single solution to an issue too quickly limits your alternatives and constrains your team's innovation. That is why it is better for everyone to be aligned on the value proposition and be flexible on how that is achieved.

However, as project managers, many times we arrive at a stage when a product has already been defined, and we just need to implement it. At that point, a huge part of our job is to have a project mindset by keeping track of deliverables, establishing clear priorities, ensuring there are no blockers, measuring team velocities, controlling the budget so we don’t overspend, and ensuring we accomplish the sprint goals. But we must always have clarity on the problems we are solving and who we are creating each product for. If we don’t understand this, we may end up developing products that users don’t like or need and, therefore, will not use. Therefore, it is important to question decisions and assumptions to ensure companies understand and are aligned with their customers' needs. If this is not clear once a project has already started, we should guide our clients to answer these questions through research with real-life users. Tools like customer journeys, story mapping, and A/B testing help gather thorough consumer insights that provide factual and reliable information and consequently help define a clear product strategy. It’s not always easy to ask these questions once a project has started, but we can make suggestions and request information to help guide clients because we don’t want to put effort towards an initiative that remains on schedule, on budget, and on scope and still does not succeed.

Project Mindset

We usually apply a project mindset once a project’s scope has been defined and it’s ready to be set in motion. When working on a project with any client, it is inevitable to have constraints on resources like time, budget, and people. Therefore, knowing how to administer those finite resources is key to meeting the client’s expectations within their possibilities. Having a project mindset allows us to plan the implementation in terms of these restraints and create a realistic project plan. As project managers, it is essential to have this mindset because it allows us to meet deliverable dates, make sure we don’t go over budget, and define and control the scope. Having a clear scope allows us to reduce scope creep, which is the uncontrolled growth of a project’s scope by adding more features that were not initially planned. In turn, by controlling scope creep, we can meet the project’s timeline and budget and also manage clients’ expectations by being clear on what is part of the scope. Finally, having a project mindset helps us to be a team’s Scrum Master by measuring the team’s velocity, helping us identify when developers are blocked, and being an overall team coach to deliver the defined goal.

Combining Both Mindsets

Some of the main responsibilities of an Agile project manager are setting and managing client expectations, developing a detailed project plan, defining the scope of the project, establishing clear priorities, delivering value after every iteration, understanding project risks, and assigning team members to specific tasks. These responsibilities form the basis of a project mindset. They help to internally measure success by focusing on achieving the mid and long-term goals in a well-established plan. In other words, a project mindset focuses more on planning, executing, and completing projects than on achieving a business goal.

On the other hand, while measuring a project with criteria such as achieving the plan and its milestones is important, these are not the only results that can be used to define a project’s success. Equally important are the metrics provided by having a product mindset. Having a product mindset means focusing more on the value you’re delivering by thinking about the actual product being implemented and what problem it solves for its users. A product mindset is about identifying a customer need we want to solve and defining a set of indicators that we can use to measure the success of the new product or feature that we’re creating. In summary, by combining these two perspectives in any project, we can ensure it succeeds both from an implementation and a business perspective. A consultant should aim to apply both mindsets to projects because there is value in both during different stages of a project.