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Product Management has a confusing array of different guides, frameworks, jargon and buzzwords, techniques, and tools. OKRs, North Star metrics, JTBD, and dozens of other concepts compete for attention, leaving both aspiring product managers and companies who need them floundering or seeking clarity. There is really only one principle you need to know:

Shorten the path to value.

That's it. It all boils down to that, and it all comes from that. Hold on to that one principle. Apply it whenever you're thinking about your products. It'll be very hard to go wrong, and it'll be a lot easier to make sense of the bewildering array of product management resources and related disciplines that compete for your attention.

You might be wondering whether it could really be so simple. Let's drill into the concept a little.

• First, we'll look at four kinds of people who are seeking value.
• Then we'll look at how product management helps shorten the path to their value.

The Four Value-Seekers

• Business stakeholders: people in your own organization who want to increase revenue or installed base or grow the book of business or improve customer satisfaction or gain market share or or or ...
• Customers: people at other organizations you sell to who want to spend less but as much as necessary to reduce other costs or achieve their own business goals for revenue, customer satisfaction etc. Whether it's reducing order fulfillment or cash application cycle time, removing variation from a production process, ensuring access to the latest case law or compliant legal forms, or other goal, they want their business to get more done faster and more accurately.
• Users: the people whose hands will be on your product are also creating value – producing more objects, more deals, more hired candidates and so on, having more conversations, connecting with more people, reaching the person they're calling the first time, everytime, and so on.
• Beneficiaries: these folks get the benefit of what users do with your product. A home health care client might not directly use your home care management product. But they benefit from providers arriving when scheduled and providing expected services during their visit. And they benefit when their insurance company pays claims without any problem because the provider was able to record all the information the payer needs, thanks to your product.

A note about consumers: sometimes the customer, user, and beneficiary is the same person (and there might not be a business stakeholder). As consumers we are still seeking value.

How to Shorten The Path to Value

As product managers, what ideas, frameworks, tools, and techniques should be understand and bring to bear in order to shorten the path to value for each of these value-seekers? What practitioners of specific disciplines should we engage to extend our reach or provide expertise deeper than our own?

Business stakeholders

Shortening the path to value here is about how quickly your company can increase revenue, gain customers or market share, realize cost savings, and so on, as a result of the product introductions or changes you make. You might also contribute to or align with process improvements in your own or other parts of the business.

This is the arena of business and technology alignment, navigating organizational politics, product vision and roadmapping, business value articulation, stakeholder management, and related activities. If you apply the principle of shortening the path to value for your business stakeholders a number of activities will follow. For example, you might

• work with delivery partners to reduce development cycle time (idea to deployment) as you together seek ways to bring new or improved capabilities to market faster so that the business can realize revenue as early as possible.
• work with Operations to package your product differently, adjust pricing, work on sales enablement, or accept new forms of payment.

This path might include concepts like OKRs or NorthStar metrics or tools like Aha! to achieve, maintain, and communicate business alignment. Product positioning and messaging, while directed primarily at Customers, will also help Sales understand who the ideal customer is and how to tailor their sales approach to those customers needs. You might be involved in providing training, documentation, or guides to your customer success or end-user support teams, so they can be more effective.

Customers

How do the people you sell to realize value? Your product does something their organization needs to have done, something that currently they can't do, or do well enough. To shorten this path to value:

• Your product's value to be easy to understand, easy to demonstrate, and easy to sell/buy so that the purchase cycle is as short as possible.
• Your product should be easy to implement/onboard, easy to rollout in their organization, and easy for their staff to learn to use the product quickly and reliably.
• You product should require little maintenance or attention.
• Your customer's staff and application administrators can get support as and when they need it.
• Your customer should be able to pay no more than necessary and remit payments by whatever means works for them.

Product Management activities here include customer needs surveys, field observation, competitive analysis, identifying un- or under-served segments, and the like, so that you can devise new products or product changes. You'll also position and define effective messaging so that your customers can immediately understand how your product satisfies their needs. Your search for the shortest path to value for your Customer might lead you into (for example) service design, collaboration with Operations, or prioritizing administrative features in support of implementation and onboarding in your roadmap.

Users

The shortest path to value here means enabling people to do what they want with as little wrangling with your product as possible. Every bit of attention a user spends on trying to make your product do what they want lengthens the path to value.

This is the domain of user experience design and the disciplines that comprise it such as

• user research (field studies, user shadowing, ethnographic studies, other forms of observation of the user, their tools, and their context of work)
• functional and content requirements discovery and analysis (what do they need to do, what information do they need to do it, and what do they need to do with it)
• information architecture
• interface design (what elements the interface has, where the elements are) interaction design (how do interface elements behave when you interact with them)
• navigation design (how do they get where the need to go, how do they know how to get there, how do they know where they are)
• information design
• visual design (how do all the elements look).

This is also the domain of application or product usability and accessibility (a11y). Usability is the measurable characteristic of task performance speed and accuracy. This dovetails conveniently well with Jobs To Be Done's emphasis on enabling people to get their jobs done faster and more accurately.

Beneficiaries

When the beneficiaries of your product don't use it directly they will benefit indirectly from the quality your product provides to Users. If Users can perform their jobs faster and more accurately, that creates value for the beneficiaries and can remove obstacles to their satisfaction. Think about how frustrating it is when you're the victim of a billing error, and it seems harder than necessary to correct it! In addition, creating the shortest path to value for beneficiaries will often require leveraging the customer experience (CX)design and service design disciplines.

In Sum...

Simply by holding fast to the single principle “find the shortest path to value” you'll

• find yourself on a solid path to choose and carry out product management activities and be able to better understand and apply the ideas, tools, and techniques from the many disciplines that comprise or significantly co-operate with product management.

Resources

Here are some of the foundational references about shortening the User's path to value. What resources do you like for the other areas? I'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

For User Experience Design a tried-and-true reference is Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web.

There's also a vast literature in usability. For those new to it reliable places to start are classics like

• Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Revisited
• Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things
• Susan Weinschenk's 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
• The Usability Body of Knowledge

And for accessibility (shorthanded as a11y), a starting point in the United States is An Introduction to Accessibility at digital.gov or Section508.gov.

Credits

• John Mansour recently observed that within the product management community we often talk about the tools and techniques of our craft, but only seldom talk about what the “why” of product management is. His question catalyzed some ideas I'd been incubating.
• Jerry Seufert recently asked a question in the Product Coffee community about how we can make products, especially software, more transparent, easier to use, and put less burden on the user. The resulting engagement with his Customer Experience perspective also influenced this article.
• Jeffrey Siver and Nermin Dibek offered feedback and encouragement during the writing and provided a perspective from outside product management.

What's Missing from this Article

Prioritization

I haven't mentioned prioritization frameworks or roadmap construction in any of those sections. Some would include this in the Business Stakeholder path to value discussion. Having an organized, transparent, flexible priortization process might be part of shortening that path. But I see the act of prioritization as transcening or spanning each of those four path-shortening objectives. Prioritization is the process of deciding how much to invest (time, cost) in shortening each of the paths, which resources to allocate, and how much urgency to apply in order to achieve each increment of shortening. There are many frameworks and approaches to prioritization. I won't jump into this here, but might in a future post! In the meanwhile, Jobs To Be Done has something to say about this, as do the various vendors who provide tools for this.

User Stories, Story Cards, Work Tracking, Agile, or Scrum

Product Manager should be involved in these activities. They can be elemenets of a service design initiative but are most frequently associated (in my awareness) with software development and delivery. The only thing I'll say about this here is that once you know how to shorten a path to value, these techniques enable a team to create and deliver the service or product that achieves the shortening. They're not independent of product management, not completely, because they are the way product management vision is realized. This general area, though, is a big tent under which live many viewpoints, not always harmoniously, so I'll leave this for another day.

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This article original appeared on LinkedIn on July 21, 2022.