Lack of attention is a venture capitalistStartup failedThe primary reason. The focus is a very vague term, what does it mean? How was it created?

Product focus funnel

The focus begins with the strategy. A good strategy can clarify the importance and causes of the goals and the plans to achieve them. Clarity allows teams to understand their purpose and coordinate common goals.

Creating enough focus to turn ideas into reality requires extreme rigor and discipline.

"This is one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple may be harder than complexity: you have to work hard to make your ideas concise. But it is ultimately worth it, because once you get there, you can move mountain." Steve Jobs

Focus Funnel is the framework I put together to help set goals, develop strategies, stratify plans, and drive alignment. At the same time keep the external attention to the needs of users. Every step of the focus funnel should be full of customer conversations. These conversations act as our value indicators, ensuring that we stay focused and deliver value.

The ultimate goal of Focus Funnel is to reduce the scope. The range and focus have an inverse relationship. The greater the range of features in the product, the less we can focus on the improvement of each feature. Our job is to relentlessly promote the discovery of value-providing features and not to say anything else. In the early days of Focus Funnel we can reject creativity, the more time we save, the more important things we focus on.

In the Focus Funnel, there are two streams. the first isStrategic flow, designed to be consistent with goal setting and decision making. The second one isTactical flowIt takes our strategy and provides a framework for revealing and prioritizing valuable features and creating an action plan to build them.

Strategic flow

The strategic process of the focus funnel consists of three phases:

  1. Strategic overview
  2. route map
  3. Align target

The strategic flow is designed to provide clarity to each team so they understand how they fit into the overall situation and drive alignment across the organization.

  1. Strategic overview

The strategic overview includes vision, mission and high-level goals. They have been widely covered in the commercial literature, but there is a quick review here:

When creating visions, missions, and high-level goals, it's important to note that they are too broad to be a complete strategy. A thorough strategy consists of three phases:

  • aims:Mission, vision and high-level corporate goals. These are broad goals or outcomes.
  • strategy:The strategy achieves the goals and outlines the logical steps required to achieve them.
  • plan:The plan breaks down the strategy into measurable goals and actions while providing the tools needed to achieve them.

Focus Funnel's strategic stream is designed to break down the high-level goals set out in the strategy overview into a complete strategy and then drive the consistency of the strategy across the organization.

2. Roadmap

Solve how user problems create value. A good roadmap creates a focus on the product by outlining the specific issues that the product is designed to address and prioritizing based on customer value. The best way to understand which issues are most important is to meet directly with the user.

The roadmap identifies the issues to focus on, allowing the team to dig deeper and design an excellent solution. If you don't know, the team will become too thin and have to create a shallow solution that can only partially solve user problems. Or, even worse, guess what problems to solve. Either way, quality will be affected.

Once the key issues are discovered, the next step is to prioritize. The priority is determined by balancing the overall risk of the build solution and the amount of value the solution provides to the user.

The roadmap should remain high and focus on feature sets rather than individual features. This is because it usually requires a set of features to solve user problems. Don't confuse the roadmap with the development backlog. The road map is a visualization of strategy, and the backlog is the visualization of the plan.

I'm here"The Art of Strategic Product Roadmap"Wrote a lot about developing strategic routesFigure article.

3. Align target

Goal consistency is the process of ensuring that the goals of each team are linked to the overall strategy. The overall organizational goals are set first, and then the team uses organizational goals as a guide to setting goals. The result is that all business units have made a positive contribution to the overall situation.

The most common form of consistent goal isGoals and key results(OKR). OKR was initially welcomed by Intel and recently Google.

In short, OKR is:

  • cooperation:The balance of top-down and bottom-up input when setting up organization and team OKR.
  • Transparent:Everyone can see all OKRs and grades. This helps create participating teams because they understand how their personal efforts relate to the big picture and how the company is performing overall.
  • Measurable:The goal is a broad goal, and the key outcome is a measurable indicator. Each target should have 0 to 5 levels of 3 to 5 key results.
  • Ambitious:Scores up to 60-70%. Scores outside this range should be evaluated, reviewed and learned. A lower score may mean that the goal may be impractical or not as strategic as originally thought. A higher score may mean that the goal is not ambitious, which means that the team does not fully realize its potential.

Ultimately, the data created by OKR can help us learn and make better decisions. They show us what is effective, what is not, what we should stop doing, and how we need to find better ways to do things.

For more details on OKR, please checkHow Google implements OKR.

Tactical flow

The tactical flow consists of three additional phases:

4. Work to complete + mind map

5. User Story Mapping

6. Product Backlog

If we can't turn them into reality, then amazing ideas will have no value. The tactical flow includes the use of tools to help us understand the user and break down the strategy into a focused work plan.

4. Work to complete + mind map

Work to be done(JTBD) is the highest level of tactical flow. JBTD is focused on understanding what users want to do in a day and determining the pain points they face. Keeping the JTBD framework through the user's eyes is important because it makes our research customer-centric.

Once we understand what the user wants to do, we can build features that are designed to simplify these tasks. We may find that we have multiple types of users, and sometimes a workflow is required to complete a job.

Mind maps are a great tool for visually summarizing the work to be done, as well as the drawing workflow. Essentially, this exercise is the first step toward a logical feature architecture.

There is some overlap between the work to be done and the roadmap. If we have correctly verified our roadmap, we already know what we think can be solved. However, by arranging JTBD on the mind map, we can add another level of detail about our hypothesis and validate these assumptions with our users.

5. User Story Mapping

User story mapIt goes further than the mind map and should be used as an extension of the mind map. It takes personal work and finds pain points and sneaked in to learn more. The goal of user story mapping is to translate customer feedback into contexts that our team can understand.

The hardest part of developing software is to transform what the customer wants into an excellent solution. Traditional requirements outline the solution and how to build a solution. This removes developers from the authoring process, eliminating the opportunity for developers to use their ideas to improve functionality.

The best solution is to work collaboratively. User story mapping is a great design tool because anyone can do it. Throughout the process, the entire team can provide more diverse perspectives while protecting themselves from personal bias.

After creating a user story map, it will provide the team with many key advantages:

  • Highlight our knowledge gap:Identify where we need further research and customer verification
  • Large picture overview:Show how a particular feature fits into the whole, helping design and development teams create a powerful user experience.
  • Decision guidance:Provide background information when creating a to-do list because we can see what steps can be taken immediately and what major decisions need to be made from a business perspective.

If you are not familiar with user stories, please choose Jeff Patton’sUser story mapA book because it is the gold standard for this process.

6. Product Backlog

When determining the priority of a user story and creating a product backlog, be sure to prioritize your return on investment. The risk/value matrix used during the creation of the roadmap is an excellent tool for reuse here.

Wrap it up

The entire Focus Funnel is designed to learn more about users. As we progress at each stage, we may understand the users or our markets that affect the previous stage. This is great because it allows us to further refine our strategy.

Therefore, it is important to consider any document created through this process as a living document. It is important to review our strategy on a regular basis to ensure it is as up-to-date as possible. The creation of a strategy, such as the creation of a product, is an iterative process.

This article is transferred from productcoalition,Original address