The term best practice is frequently used to describe a process, technique, or practice that was successful for one team, organization or industry that others copy, hoping if it worked for them, it will work for us.

Unfortunately, a practice that works great in one context may not work as well in a different context or may be entirely inappropriate.

There are no best practices, only appropriate practices.

You can avoid the lure of best practices when you understand the conditions under which a practice is effective and determine if your situation has similar characteristics.

In other words, understand your context to understand the appropriate practices.

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Type of product drives the practices you use

When you work at a tech-enabled enterprise in an industry such as financial services, insurance, retail, or healthcare, you often work on software that enables some business process, aka an internal product. You need to have a general understanding of how this product will help your organization serve its customers, but you’ll also need to understand your organization’s processes, rules, and data. Business analysis techniques are helpful here.

You may work on your organization’s website or mobile app. It’s something your customers are going to use to buy your product, and it’s also something that helps people inside your organization with their activities. You’ll need to understand your customers and your organization’s processes in this case.

The structure of your organization drives the practices you use

Regardless of what type of product you’re working on, you’re going to have to figure out how to work with the makers (developers and designers) on the product team. Product ownership techniques come in handy for these interactions.

The trick is, there’s more than one way to organize the product function. There are at least four different ways to organize your product people, primarily based on where the responsibilities for product ownership lie. There are of course multiple factors that determine what model you use.

Uncertainty and complexity drives the practices you use

Then there are some characteristics of both your product and organization that combine to add context - complexity and uncertainty.

The Context Leadership Model, created by Todd Little, was introduced in Stand Back and Deliver as a tool for determining the appropriate leadership style given your product’s uncertainty and complexity. You can also use the Context Leadership Model to understand the risks inherent in a product. That will help you determine how to approach analysis and documentation to address those risks. Todd represented each quadrant with an animal whose characteristics mirror those of the products that fit into that quadrant.

The stage in the product life cycle drives the practices you use

The product lifecycle is the journey each product takes from the inception of an idea through to a product’s retirement.

The lifecycle comprises five stages, each of which drives differences in how you manage your product.

During the development stage, you and your product team simultaneously perform discovery and delivery to identify the problems you’re trying to solve and create solutions for those that are worth solving. ****

Once you hit the introduction stage, you release the initial version of your product to the market for testing and iteration, so that you can find product-market fit.

When you’ve found product-market fit, you move to the growth stage. Here, your product has proven adoption and traction, and you can focus on increasing market share.

You enter the maturity stage when growth and rapid customer acquisition level off, your product enters the maturity stage. The focus of this stage shifts from growth to retention.

The decline stage is where demand for your product has reached its peak and is declining. You need to decide whether to pivot, revitalize, or sunset the product.

How to Run Product in Large Organizations

For an idea of how those factors all work together, Janna Bastow explains how enterprise product management differs from product management in other types of organizations.

The large scale of enterprises means integrating with multiple existing systems and fitting into existing processes. That leads to longer timeframes and more complex product cycles. You have to tread lightly so you don’t mess up other efforts already in progress.

Large enterprises mean a whole cast of characters - er stakeholders - that you need to keep happy and a wide range of customers you need to understand. Working through all of those relationships can easily become a huge part of your day.

Then, of course, there’s the red tape. One feature (or is it a bug?) in those industries I mentioned before you have to deal with a maze of compliance and security, so every move requires a great deal of forethought.

And all of that makes software product development in enterprises so…fun.

Thanks for reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know.

Talk to you next time,

Kent J. McDonald Founder | KBP.Media