High Performance Focus Areas

The first focal area is product team performance. In other words, what product teams say about their own performance. This year we continue to see improvement in the data indicating that product teams are gradually increasing their levels of performance. In fact, since we began examining product team performance in 2012 the number of respondents indicating consistency of execution reached an all time high this year. We attribute this increase to improved hiring conditions and the slow down in mass layoffs that adversely effected product teams during the great recession.

We also take a close look at product development adoption rates and perceptions about each methods impact upon profitability. We have four years of data that illustrates how Agile, Blended, Waterfall and Kanban have each fared over this time period.

In the second section we examine product management performance. There were quite a few surprises in this section. Our market research covers:

– Accountability metrics organizations are using to determine product management’s success or failure

– Time spent in the field talking to customers

– Backlog ownership

– Product management’s role in innovation

– Stand up frequency

In the third section we explore UX’s (user experiences) rise on product teams. Last year UX emerged as a factor in our regression analysis for the very first time. So this year we delve into UX reporting relationships, where UX should report to be most effective, and how user experience professionals are spending their time.

Regression Analysis

Finally, we uncovered four new factors that directly correlate with high performance on product teams.

– Making and sticking with decisions

– Stand up frequency

– Speed at overcoming unforeseen obstacles

– Active user experience engagement with product management

Over the last four years we have identified approximately twenty factors that contribute to high performance. Successful product development is complex and the more factors that product teams have effectively integrated into their activities the higher the likelihood a team will outperform its peers.

Get Your Copy Today

If you would like to download a copy of our latest market research you can do so by clicking here. Additionally, we just released new infographics covering product management and user experience as well as product teams.

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

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In our latest market research we wanted to hone in on some hard numbers and quantify satisfaction levels on today’s product teams. As a product management consulting and training organization we are currently witnessing fewer layoffs and more emphasis on hiring “the right” talent to augment existing product team members. While hiring has been slower than most organizations would desire – momentum has been picking up.

So just how satisfied are today’s product team members?

How Would You Characterize Your Satisfaction?

That was the question we asked in our most recent survey. Here’s what you told us.

Overall, those responding to the survey are satisfied with their positions. More than 63% indicate that they
are either satisfied (48.3%) or extremely satisfied (14.8%) in their work. An additional 24.6% experience
some level of satisfaction with their positions. Only 12.3% responded that they are dissatisfied with their
jobs, including 5.1% who are actively looking for employment in another organization.

Conclusion

Our findings show that the majority of product team members are pretty content with the status quo. Only 17.4% of respondents indicate that they are dissatisfied with their current positions and just 5.1% are actively looking to exit.

While these numbers are relatively low, turnover on product teams has a significant impact on performance. On-boarding newly minted product team members takes time and detracts from performance as other team members divert time from doing their specific job to bring new a team member up to speed. We know from past studies that only 4% of organizations indicate that they have a best practice bringing new product team members into the fold! The majority of organizations continue to rely upon the sink or swim approach.

Given the facts, what is your organization doing to retain the 17.4% of product team members who are at risk? Only 5.1% are actively looking but there is another 12.3% waiting for the right opportunity.

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

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Actuation Consulting has been conducting a worldwide study of product teams for three years and respondents continually tell us that only a minority of product teams are performing at a high level. There are many factors that contribute to lower levels of performance and we have statistically analyzed them for years. So this year we incorporated the following question into our global survey.

“How Effective is Your Product Team in Identifying and Incorporating Industry Best Practices?”

As it turns out the answer is a bit shocking. Only 21.83%  of respondents report that their organizations invest significant resources in keeping in tune with industry best practices and that their culture allows the product team to experiment with new ideas.

In other words, an overwhelming 78.17% of respondents are not committed to actively identifying ways to be more effective. This data illustrates that continuous improvement is not a central part of the majority of product teams’ DNA. Organizational resources, focus and culture all contribute to this startling finding.

Passive Monitoring to Completely Ignoring Best Practices

According to the responses, over half of the teams surveyed passively keep an eye on what is going on in their industry and occasionally introduce innovative new ideas into team activities. Nearly one quarter of those surveyed feel they are too busy managing their workload to devote any time to keeping up with new developments in their industry let alone incorporate new practices into their workflow.

Barely a fifth of respondents indicated their organizations actively monitor emerging best practices in their industries and encourage experimentation with new ideas. Just over 2% of respondents hold that best practices are too far afield from their day-to-day challenges and pay no attention to new ways of approaching challenges in their industry.

The Catch 22 Paradigm for Product Teams

Product team members have made it exceptionally clear that only a fifth of product teams aggressively seek continuous improvement and are allowed to do so with the support of their organization. It is no wonder then that the majority of product teams continue to operate at sub-optimal performance levels. In many ways this seems like a catch 22. Organizations that are not investing in their product teams improvement actively or passively will continue to wallow and wonder why their teams are struggling while those that empower their teams to take risks and continuously seek improvement will continue to thrive.

Where does your organization stand?

Greg Geracie is the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management©and the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge© (ProdBOK).

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Since 2012 we have been examining the factors that contribute to high performance on product teams. One thread in this years market research focuses on user experience and how to optimize the functions organizational effectiveness. This year’s preliminary findings illustrate a disconnect on where user experience should report to be most effective. While the jury is still out, our early findings suggest that most product team members believe that the user experience function’s existing reporting relationship is adversely impacting UX’s effectiveness!

Given that our research is still in process I don’t want to reach a final conclusion yet but lets examine several data points. First, when survey respondents are asked about where user experience reports today the majority of respondents indicate that UX reports primarily to “Engineering, Development, Technology or similar”. Even more interesting only a minority of Chief Product Officers (CPO) appear to have user experience reporting into them.

If we compare that to how survey respondents respond to the question “Where should user experience report to be most effective?” it becomes clear that survey respondents see the user experience relationship as evolving out of the “Engineering, Development, Technology or similar” category and into product management in order to increase the functions effectiveness. In fact, when you add the Chief Product Officer tally together with the responses favoring product management it currently equals about 60% of the overall responses.

As I mentioned earlier, our market research is still ongoing and these numbers could change and probably will. If you have a point of view on where user experience should report to be most effective we want to hear from you. You can weigh in by clicking this link.

Where do you think user experience should report in order to be most effective?

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This increased focus on user experience has been particularly beneficial for end users – but it has also forced organizations to re-calibrate the way they think about product management and how to best serve the needs of the end user.

The Product Management and User Experience Relationship

Product managers and user experience professionals share a common interest in creating as much value as possible for the end user and doing it in ways that are intuitive. As such, both functions make ideal partners throughout the product development process.

Only a select few possess the underlying skills required to act as a highly evolved product manager and a proficient user experience professional. It’s incredibly difficult for both to be done equally well simultaneously – although stretched product managers in less mature organizations may need to do so due to resource constraints.

Role commingling may be necessary but it’s far from ideal. Organizations that separate these functions tend to have a leg up as specialization allows product managers to focus their attention on the needs of dynamically changing markets while a user experience professional concentrates upon the end user’s interactions with the product or service.

Like product management, user experience resources are very valuable and often in short supply. Therefore, the actual use of these resources can vary widely. Options range from product management and user experience existing as independent functions collaborating together to achieve a common objective – to product managers attempting to cover the user experience ground or contracting with specialized third parties to fill in a user experience skill set void.

The types of tasks that product managers and user experience professionals can partner together on is also quite wide-ranging. For instance:

• Qualitative market research to better understand the needs of the market and end users
• Market segmentation targets and demographic data
• Interviews, surveys and observing key stakeholders to identify problems and validate possible solutions
• Development of story boards, prototypes, models and wire frames as well as use cases, personas and mental models

Clearly delineating these two roles is ideal as both functions can then focus upon what they do best, not in isolation, but in partnership.

The relationship between user experience and product management continues to evolve as user experience expands its reach across an ever-increasing number of organizations and industries. The actual practice of user experience as well as the function’s interrelationships and reporting structures tends to vary from organization to organization.

Focus of This Year’s Market Research

The evolutionary nature of the user experience role and its impact on organizations intrigues us. We’re actively conducting market research on the interplay between these two roles as part of our global Study of High Performance Product Teams.

In fact, user experience rose to the surface of our ongoing market research. This is because UX came up as a factor in our regression analysis for the first time last year. We’re particularly interested in three things: where user experience currently reports, where respondents think user experience should report and the actual activities that user experience professionals are doing in organizations.

We would love to hear your thoughts on these topics. You can share your experiences with us by clicking here.

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Our Sponsors

As we kick-off the fourth year of the study I want to take a second and acknowledge this year’s gold level sponsors without whom our efforts would not be possible.

Project Connections provides resources to help project managers, teams, functional groups and organizational leaders drive results whether it is strongly kick-starting a project, improving cross-functional collaboration, providing training and support, or implementing best practices.

Sensor Six is a leader in helping organizations prioritize product ideas based upon data, enabling roadmap creation and tracking progress in real-time.

The Authors

Part of what makes this study so unique is that it enjoys such wide support. For instance, the five contributing authors each represent a particular functional point of view.

Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting, represents the product management perspective

David Heidt, Principal of Enterprise Agility and former IIBA Chicagoland chapter president, represents the business analyst community

Matt Jackson, President of Jackson Consulting, represents the voice of the project management community

Ron Lichty, Principal of Ron Lichty Consulting and co-author of Managing the Unmanageable, represents the engineering community

Sean Van Tyne, co-author of the Customer Experience Revolution, represents the user experience community

Our Promotional Partners

We also enjoy the support of a wide array of industry associations and organizations who help to distribute the survey link and provide a platform for us to communicate the findings to executives and product team members world-wide. This year’s list includes:

The Boston Product Management Association (BPMA)

The Chicago Product Management Association (ChiPMA)

Orange County Product Managers (OCPM)

The IIBA Chicagoland

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA Chicago)

The American Society for the Advancement of Project Management (asapm/IPMA USA)

Engineering Leadership Meetup Group in the San Francisco Bay Area

Silicon Valley Code Camp

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA)

The Output of Our Research Into Product Teams

Each year we ask a standard set of questions that enables us to closely monitor industry trends including product development methodology adoption rates, how product teams perceive the effectiveness of their performance, and a wide range of other topics. Additionally, we have devised a new set of questions based upon what we have learned from previous studies and what we are witnessing in the marketplace in real-time.

If you are interested in seeing last year’s study – to get a sense of the output of our market research – you can download the 2014 study here.

For those of you who don’t enjoy reading white papers (we know you are out there!) there are four pages of infographics summarizing key data points that are very Twitter friendly. You can access them by clicking on this link.

Want to know how your product team(s) compares to others in our database? We have free online assessments you can take which benchmark your team against others in our database so you can see where you stand. There is one for product team members and another for executives.

This year’s new questions focus on user experience trends and reporting relationships, the impact an improving economy is having on product team turnover, backlog ownership and much more. We would love hear your thoughts on these subjects. You can add your voice to hundreds of others by clicking on this link. The survey takes six minutes to fill out and it’s very user friendly. All responses are anonymous. There is an option to self-identify if you decide you would like to participate in future studies or be the first to receive this year’s white paper.

If you provide us with your contact information you will be entered into our random drawing for a new IPad Mini!

We want to hear from you! Your perspective matters.

Authors Note: If you are interested in sponsoring future studies or learning more about this year’s study you can contact us here.

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