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One of my favorite tools for planning a new significant feature or product is the Amazon PR FAQ. What I love about it the most is that it puts me in value storytelling mode, where I can leave aside all the mess and internal wiring and duct tape that may be needed to make the product actually stand on its feet, and focus on the would be value for the customer, what’s in it for their business, what it will be like to use the product, how customers will be happy with their choice and how proud I’ll be after. It’s the entire roller-coaster of emotions behind the product baked into a few paragraphs.
Capturing in a few lines what problem the product solves for whom and setting a (high) bar for the experience delivered are good forcing functions. I am a bit a of a rambler myself as you can tell, and tools like the PR FAQ give the perfect scaffolding to help me keep course.As a product nerd, I’ve used this model for many pet projects. Among the latest, one in stealth, one Substack newsletter coming soon, one home remodeling and one actually about the consulting services.
Cringe-aside, I’m happy to share with you how I put in practice for Product Grit with a new Advisory service packaging that I’m trialing next month. While it’s meant to be fictitious at this stage, apart from the Acme quote it’s getting very real and I’m genuinely excited to iterate on it next to curious product folks who want to make a difference for their teams.
March 1st, 2023
Product Grit enables product organizations in scale-up phase to become more effective at launching and growing digital products
Stockholm — Product Grit introduces Advisory, a transformation program enabling product teams in scale-ups to become value-driven, customer-centric, and ship value fast and consistently, in order to accelerate their business growth. The program adapts best practices of the leading tech product companies to the company setup, helping leaders review their product strategy and implement the organization structure and ways of working to enable product-led growth and increase revenues. Completing Advisory, companies should expect higher revenue, customer satisfaction, reduced costs of product development and engaged product teams. To learn more, visit productgrit.com/advisory
Companies with digital product offerings in scale-up phase that lack the practice of customer-centric development fail to grow their product, and reach profitability. The product function is seen as a cost center in the organization, with business growth reliable only on a sales-led motion. With a high cost of product development and low impact of delivery, customers churn to competitors and the product is stuck in a state of feature addition with low adoption. Leaders heading up product organizations, often from the founding team, lack prior experience in a technical product development environment and struggle to define a compelling vision that attracts top talent in their teams. They lack the tools to define a sharp strategic direction that creates focus and clarity, goal setting and makes priorities actionable by their teams. Product teams are told what features to build without relevant strategic context, and lack the tools to prioritize what product enhancements are viable, valuable, usable and feasible for the business. When product leadership is seeking help to improve their practices, it typically comes in the form of embedded agile coaches who introduce complex processes with substantial overhead and drive away focus from actual value delivery.
Advisory by Product Grit introduces the practices of modern product development in an applied manner, providing the leaders with a blueprint to set up their organization for success. In collaboration with the leadership team, Advisory conducts an in-depth review of the product vision and strategy and provides actionable priority recommendations, with the aim of transforming the product in an active growth engine in line with the company’s goals. Working with product leadership, it defines the optimal team topology, with teams scopes organized around clear customer problems to solve, as realms within which they can act autonomously so that they can deliver value faster. Advisory helps teams set up cross-functional teams, with Product, Design, Engineering crafts represented, proportional to the size, maturity and competences available in the organization and works actively with Product Managers to coach and provide them the means for continuous discovery and delivery. The program follows up on results with active coaching to Product Leadership and guidance upon completion.
Product Grit provides Advisory as a consultancy service to scale-ups building digital products in the Stockholm region. Founders, executive team or product leaders can learn more on productgrit.com and book an initial consultation at https://calendly.com/productgrit, to help tailor Advisory to their specific needs. This is followed by an exploratory discussion with the wider product team where it will help define the parameters and goals of the program. Within 1-2 weeks, the product consultant at Product Grit will start the program and work with the customer product team, data and stakeholders to deliver and follow-up on the agreed goals.
“What I’m most excited about with Advisory is that it not only provides the pre-requisites to accelerate customers’ transformation to a product-first organization, but that it also fosters a healthy product culture, so that the internal product community can take it further and drive results for the long run”, said Diana Timlund, the product professional behind Product Grit.
“Within only a few weeks of working with Product Grit, we realized some blind spots in our product direction and with the recommendations provided, we were able to set a clearer product strategy and priorities that we could easily articulate to our teams and break down into meaningful objectives. The mindset shift in how we view our product, as a growth engine, was tremendous and it energized our teams, and I’m excited to continue working with Product Grit to support our product management craft.”, said Jon Jonsson CPO at Acme AB, a Stockholm-based scale-up tech company working to provide employee performance evaluation tools.
Advisory is available in Beta from March 2023 as part of Product Grit consultancy service suite. For an initial discussion about your needs, book a 30-minute introduction call at https://calendly.com/productgrit or email at diana@productgrit.com.
About Product Grit
Product Grit is a Stockholm-based product management consultancy company that aims to create healthy product cultures where teams thrive and deliver value consistently. Product Grit partners with product leaders and their teams to support them in levelling up their craft, competencies and culture by providing advisory, interim product management and coaching. Product Grit operates in the Stockholm region and internationally remote.
How does it work?
After an initial consultation and an exploratory workshop with key roles in your product team, both obligation free, Product Grit and the customer will jointly draw the goals and deliverables behind the program. Provided that all initial inputs and access to key resources and systems are available, the program can begin within 1-2 weeks and run over a minimum of 6 months.
This is done as a combination of initial discovery workshops with your leadership, product team and stakeholders, independent research and work based on your data and insights, focused 1-to-1 sessions with your product leadership team. It will include an iterative implementation of the model in select product teams and weekly consultations with your product team
What will this require from my organization?
Primarily a willingness to improve the state of your product and ship value to your customer consistently, as well as openness to change your ways or working by experimenting with a new approach in at least one of your product teams.
To get a complete picture over the state of your product, Product Grit will need access to your product, relevant performance data, and key resources in your organization such as product leadership, product management, design, engineering.
When should I start to see results?
This would vary based on the goals and impact set at the beginning of the program. You should start to see immediately after the program an improved clarity over your goals and priorities and higher product team engagement. Results within your product will start to pick up with your first releases and improve with consistent practice.
What’s the pricing model?
Advisory is a monthly subscription-based program that runs for a minimum of six-months.
How long after the program will I get support?
Depending on the scope and complexity of the program for your organization, Product Grit will be available to support within designated office hours between one to six months at no additional costs. Companies typically follow up with external product coaching to select roles in their team.