The case for unstructured work in a product tool
Many consider a product tool as essentially the means to organize our backlog into a prioritized plan- to share, align and collect feedback. Indeed a large part of the product managers’ responsibility is the discover opportunities that would positively impact the business, set goals and describe an iterative plan to realize those.
[Side note (perhaps a topic for another blog)- many seem to forget a significant responsibility of a product manager, which is- optimize the investment made in creating features. A solid GTM plan, pricing, communication, gradual exposure, evangelism etc. Essentially- drive multipliers for every $ invested.]
Those are, though, the “visible” aspects of product. But there is a critical phase of collecting those opportunities and building your opportunity-solution tree, for example. This phase requires lots of interviews and interception of inputs from support channels (the likes of Zendesk integration), conversations on slack, researching the market (web snippets) etc.
The point being, there is a time when a product manager needs a white space to free-form their thoughts and brainstorm with others. Tools like Miro and XMind come to mind. Recently zoom added a whiteboard feature that lingers after a zoom call ended. Of course, the question becomes, how do these get linked to an actual set of features and plan at the end of the session? In an ideal world, the less tools one needs to accomplish a job, and the more centralized and linked place all the relevant artifacts (product strategy, OKRs, roadmap, opportunity/solution tree, roadmap and release plans, user feedback etc.) are, efficiency gains are optimized.
It would seem the advanced product tooling vendors have picked up on this topic. Aha! has been one of the vendors at the forefront of serving product managers. Their “Template” library covers everything from a “lean canvas” style business strategy, feature analysis, to roadmaps. This is a rich library that provides many of the tools a product manager would need, in addition to a free-form white board where, for example, an opportunity/solution tree can be managed.
Aha! even provides process templates, starting from retro to SAFe, even career growth templates.
Modern practices in product management, such as continuous discovery and others, represent a fertile ground for white space thinking by product managers. Like any product, it is too early to try and formalize it too much into formal product tooling. However, working with this community through a set of free form tooling, that eventually ties to the broader workflow and plan, is a real opportunity.
I do anticipate the topic of free form, or semi-templated tooling (for modern product management practices) will be viewed as an area for innovation and differentiation for product tool vendors. A very exciting space- would you agree?
