Product Focus Funnel

Lack of focus is the number one reason attributed to startup failures by venture capitalists. Focus is a pretty ambiguous term, what does it mean? How is it created?

The Product Focus Funnel

Focus begins with strategy. Good strategy provides clarity on what goals are important and why, along with a plan to reach those goals. Clarity allows teams to understand their purpose, and align on common goals.

It takes tremendous rigor and discipline to create enough focus to turn an idea into reality.

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Steve Jobs

The Focus Funnel is a framework I pulled together to help set goals, build a strategy, layer on a plan, and drive alignment. All while remaining externally focused on the needs of the user. Each step of the focus funnel should be filled with customer conversations. These conversations act as our value indicators ensuring we remain focused and deliver value.

The ultimate goal of the Focus Funnel is scope reduction. Scope and focus have an inverse relationship. The larger the scope of features within a product, the less focus we can spend refining each feature. Our job is to relentlessly push to uncover the features that provide value, and say no to everything else. The earlier in the Focus Funnel we can reject ideas, the more time we save to focus on what’s important.

Within the Focus Funnel, there are two streams. The first is the strategic stream, designed to create alignment with goal setting and decision-making. The second is the tactical stream, which takes our strategy, and provides a framework for uncovering and prioritizing valuable features, and creates a plan of action for building them.

The Strategic Stream

The Strategic Stream of the Focus Funnel consists of three stages:

1. Strategic Overview
2. Roadmap
3. Aligned Goals

The Strategic Stream is designed to provide clarity to individual teams on how they fit into the bigger picture, driving alignment throughout the organization.

1. Strategic Overview

The strategic overview consists of the vision, mission, and high-level goals. They have been extensively covered in business literature, but here’s a quick refresher:

When it comes to the creation of a vision, mission, and high-level goals, it is important to note that they are too broad to act as a complete strategy. A thorough strategy consists of three stages:

• Goals: The mission, vision, and high-level company goals. These are broad objectives or outcomes.
• Strategy: Strategy takes the goals and outlines the logical steps needed to reach them.
• Plan: The plan breaks down the strategy into measurable objectives and actions, along with providing the tools we need to achieve those objectives.

The Strategic Stream of the Focus Funnel aims to breakdown the high-level goals set within the Strategic Overview into a complete strategy, and then drive alignment on this strategy throughout the organization.

2. Roadmap

Solving user problems is how value is created. A good roadmap creates focus for the product by outlining the specific problems the product is designed to solve, prioritized based on customer value. The best way to understand which problems are the most important is by meeting directly with users.

The roadmap provides clarity on what problems to focus on, allowing teams to dive in deep, and design great solutions. Without clarity, teams become stretched too thin and are forced to create shallow solutions that only partially solve user problems. Or, even worse, guess which problems to solve. Either way, quality suffers.

Once key problems are uncovered, the next step is prioritization. Priority is determined by balancing the overall risk of building the solution versus the amount of value the solution will provide the user.

The roadmap should remain high-level, and focused on feature sets rather than individual features. This is because it often takes a group of features to solve a user problem. Don’t confuse the roadmap with the development backlog. The roadmap is the visualization of the strategy, the backlog is the visualization of the plan.

I’ve written extensively about creating a strategic roadmap in The Art of the Strategic Product Roadmap.

3. Aligned Goals

Goal alignment is the process of making sure the goals of the individual teams tie back to the overall strategy. Overall organization goals are set first, teams then use the organizational goals as guidelines for setting their own goals. The result is that all business units are positively contributing to the big picture.

The most popular form of aligned goals is Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s). OKR’s were originally made popular by Intel, and more recently, Google.

In short, OKR’s are:

• Collaborative: Balance of top-down and bottom-up input when setting both organizational and team OKR’s.
• Transparent: All OKR’s and grades should be visible to everyone. This helps create engaged teams, as they understand how their individual effort ties back into the big picture, and how well the company is doing as a whole.
• Measurable: Objectives are broad goals, key results are measurable metrics. Each objective should have 3 to 5 key results graded on a 0–1 scale.
• Ambitious: A good score is 60–70%. Scores outside this range should be evaluated, scrutinized, and learned from. A lower score could mean that the goal may be unrealistic, or not as strategic as initially thought. A higher score could mean that the goal was not ambitious enough, which means the team isn’t pushing themselves to their full potential.

Ultimately OKR’s create data that help us learn and make better decisions. They show us what is working and what isn’t, what we should stop doing, and where we need to find better ways to do things.

For more detail on OKR’s check out how Google implemented OKR’s.

The Tactical Stream

The Tactical Stream consists of three additional stages:

4. Jobs to be Done + Mind Mapping

5. User Story Mapping

6. Product Backlog

Amazing ideas will have zero value if we can’t bring them to life. The Tactical Stream consists of utilizing tools that help us gain a deep understanding of our users, while breaking down the strategy into a focused work plan.

4. Jobs to be Done + Mind Mapping

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is the highest level of the Tactical Stream. JBTD is focused on understanding what jobs that a user hopes to complete throughout the day, along with identifying the pain-points they face. It’s important to keep the JTBD framed through the eyes of the user, as it keeps our research customer-centric.

Once we understand the jobs a user is looking to do, we can build features aimed at making those jobs easier. We may find we have multiple types of users, and sometimes completing a job requires a workflow.

Mind Maps are a great tool for visually outlining the jobs to be done, along with mapping workflows. In essence, this exercise is the first step towards a logical feature architecture.

There is some overlap between Jobs to be Done and the Roadmap. If we’ve properly validated our Roadmap, we will already have an idea of the problems that we believe we can solve. However, by laying out the JTBD on a Mind Map, we are able to add another level of detail about our assumptions, and validate these assumptions with our users.

5. User Story Mapping

User Story Mapping goes one step beyond Mind Mapping, and should act as an extension to the Mind Map. It takes the individual jobs to be done and pain points uncovered, and dives in to learn more detail. The goal with User Story Mapping is to translate customer feedback into context that our team can understand.

The most difficult part of developing software is translating what a customer asks for into a great solution. Traditional requirements outline the solution, and exactly how to build it. This removes the developer from the creative process, eliminating the chance for the developer to improve the feature with their own ideas.

The best solutions are collaborative efforts. User Story Mapping is a great design tool because anyone can do it. Including the entire team in the process allows for more diverse points of view, along with protecting ourselves from individual biases.

Once the User Story Map is created, it will provide the team with a number of key benefits:

• Highlight our Knowledge Gaps: Determine where we need further research and customer validation
• Big-Picture Outline: Show how a specific feature fits into the whole, in turn helping the design and development teams create powerful user experiences.
• Guidance on Decisions: Provides context when creating the backlog, as we can see what can be done right away, and what big decisions from a business standpoint need to be made.

If you are new to User Stories, pick up the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, as it is the gold standard on this process.

6. Product Backlog

When it comes to prioritizing the User Stories and creating the product backlog make sure to prioritize by return on investment. The risk/value matrix that was used during the creation of the roadmap is an excellent tool to re-use here.

Wrapping it Up

The entire Focus Funnel is aimed at learning more about the user. As we progress through each stage, we may learn something about our users or our market that impacts a previous stage. This is great, as it allows us to further refine our strategy.

As such, it is important to view any document created through this process as a living document. It is important to revisit our strategy on a regular basis to make sure it is as current as possible. The creation of a strategy, like the creation of a product, is an iterative process.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this article check out a few of my others, and feel free to connect with me on Twitter.