Sprint 77 :: Unlocking Value Beyond the Glamour
As a Product Manager, you know the thrill of launching new, flashy features that dazzle users and grab headlines. Yet, the less glamorous investments—those that don’t generate immediate buzz—are often the ones that sustain and grow your product over time. These include improvements in user experience, performance, developer velocity, and infrastructure. This article will explore how to justify and prioritize these "non-sexy" investments to ensure your product not only survives but thrives in the long run.
User Experience: The Silent Growth Driver
In the rush to develop new features, it’s easy to overlook user experience (UX) enhancements. However, a seamless, intuitive UX is crucial for retaining users and driving engagement. The challenge lies in quantifying the impact of UX improvements on business metrics, which can often feel intangible.
User expectations evolve continuously. If your product's user experience remains stagnant, it risks falling behind those rising expectations, ultimately affecting user satisfaction and retention. To make a compelling case for UX investments, start by gathering qualitative data from user feedback and quantitative data from usability testing. This dual approach will highlight areas for improvement and help predict the long-term benefits of a better user experience.
Performance: Speed Equals Satisfaction
A product's performance—how quickly it loads and responds—directly impacts user satisfaction and engagement. Slow load times and laggy interactions can frustrate users, leading them to abandon your product in favor of faster alternatives.
Performance issues often become apparent only as your user base grows, making early investment in performance optimization crucial. To justify these investments, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as load times, bounce rates, and user session durations. Share success stories where performance improvements have led to measurable increases in user engagement and conversion rates. This data-driven approach can help secure buy-in from stakeholders who prioritize immediate returns.
Developer Velocity: Enhancing Productivity
Developer velocity refers to the speed at which your engineering team can deliver new features, fix bugs, and improve the product. Investing in tools and processes that boost developer productivity can significantly impact your product's growth and adaptability.
Faster development cycles mean quicker iterations and more frequent releases, enabling your team to respond promptly to user needs and market changes. To advocate for investments in developer tools and infrastructure, track metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and incident resolution time. Demonstrate how improved developer velocity leads to a more agile and responsive product team, ultimately benefiting the end user.
Infrastructure: Building a Robust Foundation
Infrastructure investments, including scalable server setups, reliable databases, and robust security measures, often go unnoticed until something goes wrong. However, a solid infrastructure is vital for maintaining a seamless user experience and supporting future growth.
The reliability and scalability of your product hinge on a well-maintained infrastructure. To justify these investments, highlight the risks and potential costs associated with system failures, security breaches, and downtime. Use real-world scenarios and data to illustrate the long-term savings and enhanced user trust that come from proactive infrastructure investments.
Making the Case: Strategies for Success
To effectively advocate for "non-sexy" investments, consider the following strategies:
Align with Business Goals: Connect your proposals to the company’s overarching objectives. Show how UX improvements, performance optimizations, and infrastructure upgrades contribute to user retention, revenue growth, and competitive advantage.
Leverage Data: Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to build your case. User feedback, performance metrics, and developer productivity stats can provide compelling evidence for the benefits of these investments.
Tell a Story: Craft narratives that resonate with your audience. Share examples of how similar investments have led to significant improvements in other organizations. Highlight potential risks of inaction and the hidden costs of neglecting these areas.
Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Engage stakeholders from different departments—design, engineering, marketing, and customer support—to build a unified case for investment. A collaborative approach can help demonstrate the widespread benefits and gain broader support.
Set Clear Objectives: Define specific, measurable goals for each investment. This will help track progress and demonstrate the impact over time, making it easier to justify continued or increased funding.
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Watched a ProductCon talk recently which touches on this. The presenter broke down the approach by talking about the different types of revenue a product team can contribute to. The obvious one is growth revenue (new feature = new revenue). But an important one is also margin revenue; aka doing things more efficiently will mean higher margins for the business.
Often there lies the ‘unsexy’ work. And there lies a _lot_ of value/money, too.