Main takeaways: - Understand how the features that you ship deliver business results - Recognize the two different starting points for projects - If you can't measure impact, bridge the gap with proxy metrics

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How to Link Your Product to Business
Outcomes by Intercom Sr PM

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5. Corporate
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6. T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
Robbie Allan

7. How to link your product
to business outcomes
Product School SF 01.14.2020
or: How I learned to stop worrying
and love the proxy metric

8. 👋 Hi, I’m @robbiedigi

9. What we’ll cover
Why outcomes matter
How product links to impact
The two types of project
How to drive outcomes

10. Why outcomes matter

11. In the beginning, there is nothing…

12. In the beginning, there is nothing…
…so you gotta just ship

13. VC twitter, 2019

14. Microsoft Word, mid 1980s

15. Microsoft Word, 1991

16. At some point, not all additional
features are an improvement

17. Microsoft Word, 2015

18. Intercom blog, 2013

19. Intercom founder, 2018

20. At that point, the PM job changed
from ship things
to ship the most impactful things

21. Because we didn’t want this

22. I know how to ship product.
How, exactly, do I ship outcomes?

23. The Product Impact
framework

24. The Product Impact framework
describes how shipping product
drives business outcomes

25. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature

26. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem

27. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior

28. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results

31. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Add ‘stories’
feature

32. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Add ‘stories’
feature
Share short
term content

33. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Add ‘stories’
feature
Share short
term content
More sharing,
more views

34. The Product
Impact
framework
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Add ‘stories’
feature
Share short
term content
More sharing,
more views
Sell more ads

35. You can start from anywhere in
this framework
But there are fundamentally
two different approaches

36. The two kinds of
project

37. Feature-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
START
HERE

38. Outcome-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
START
HERE

39. Delivering outcomes with a
feature-first project

40. Delivering outcomes with a
feature-first project
1. Deeply understand the problem

41. Feature-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results

42. Product School hates him
Learn Product Management
with this one weird trick

44. Delivering outcomes with a
feature-first project
1. Deeply understand the problem
2. Proxy impact if you can’t measure it

45. Feature-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Mission
Accomplished!

48. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results

49. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Customizable sidebar that lets you
integrate with tools such as Stripe
and Salesforce

50. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Switching between tools is inefficient
and painful for support agents
Customizable sidebar that lets you
integrate with tools such as Stripe
and Salesforce

51. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Switching between tools is inefficient
and painful for support agents
Customizable sidebar that lets you
integrate with tools such as Stripe
and Salesforce
Reduce average reply time

52. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Switching between tools is inefficient
and painful for support agents
Customizable sidebar that lets you
integrate with tools such as Stripe
and Salesforce
Reduce average reply time
Improve retention for our
Support customers

53. Ship the
feature
Users
will
love it
Retention
will
improve
Retention
will
improve

54. Using retention as a metric for all projects
isn’t feasible… It’s a hard metric to move,
and proving a retention improvement
requires large-scale A/B tests
Gibston Biddle
Former CPO, Netflix

55. 158,000,000 subscribers
60,000,000,000 hours of content annually

58. There are lies, damned lies,
and statisticsExcel models
Mark Twain

59. Proxy metrics are customer
behavior metrics that are
associated with and stand in for the
business metrics you care about

60. ...but they’re faster and easier
to measure

61. Choose a behavior that
empirically and logically
correlates with a business
metric

63. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results

64. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve retention for our
Support customers

65. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Agents want to use their time
as efficiently as possible
Improve retention for our
Support customers

66. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Agents want to use their time
as efficiently as possible
Improve retention for our
Support customers
Reduce average time
to first close
PROXY
METRIC

68. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve retention for new
SurveyMonkey users

69. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve retention for new
SurveyMonkey users
I want an easy-to-analyze way to
know what people think about X

70. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve retention for new
SurveyMonkey users
Get 5 survey responses
PROXY
METRIC
I want an easy-to-analyze way to
know what people think about X

71. A new proxy metric is a guess,
so trust but verify

72. This is hard work.
Finding the right proxy metric
can take 6+ months of analysis
and validation

74. Delivering outcomes with an
outcome-first project

76. Project:
Improve Seat expansion

78. Feature-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
START
HERE

79. Outcome-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
START
HERE

80. Delivering outcomes with an
outcome-first project

81. Delivering outcomes with an
outcome-first project
1. Work back through each step

82. Outcome-first
project
Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results

83. Project:
Improve Seat expansion

84. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion

85. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion
Redesign the ‘add seat’ flow

86. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Redesign the ‘add seat’ flow
Improve seat expansion

88. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion

89. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion
Grow number of Support
customers

90. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion
Grow number of Support
customers
Intercom doesn’t handle
voice support

91. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Improve seat expansion
Grow number of Support
customers
Intercom doesn’t handle
voice support
Build a voice support
product

92. Delivering outcomes with an
outcome-first project
1. Work back through each step
2. Use the right tools to work back

93. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Grow number of Support
customers
Intercom doesn’t handle
voice support
Build a voice support
product
Data analysis
Improve seat expansion

94. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Grow number of Support
customers
Intercom doesn’t handle
voice support
Build a voice support
product
Data analysis
User research
Improve seat expansion

95. Ship product
feature
Solve customer
problem
Drive customer
behavior
Impact business
results
Grow number of Support
customers
Intercom doesn’t handle
voice support
Build a voice support
product
Data analysis
User research
Product design
Improve seat expansion

96. ● Identify the style of project you’re working on
● Really understand the problem you’re
solving and the behavior you want to drive
● Proxy impact with metrics over assumptions
If you want to ship outcomes...

97. Any questions?
Robbie
Allan
@robbiedigi

99. www.productschool.com
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