Strengths Deserve Attention!

Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our innate talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected. What bigger injustice can we inflict upon ourselves, than to suppress our true potential this way?

- Marcus Buckingham, author of the bestseller Now, Discover Your Strengths

What causes us to stay unaware of our strengths? What is behind this mental paralysis? Have we given up the courage, curiosity and sense of adventure that we were born with, and lived with, as children? Do we lose the desire to continue our hero-journey into our own unexploited potential, as we start growing up and conforming to the world around us some time along the way?

Each one of us is unique. No two fingerprints match, much less thinking patterns, abilities and behaviors. Then why do we try to be “like each other”? What does it take to be different?

When you want to be different, where do you look for encouragement except to your inner calling? How to build confidence in that inner calling? How do you forge ahead with our inner voice, when outer life is erecting roadblocks everywhere? How to look at success and failure in such cases?

It takes courage to stand up and assert your strengths. When you say you will build on a strength and reach excellence, it is a bold statement you make, and you make yourself accountable. It is easier to admit weaknesses. By agreeing to repair them and stop there, you agree to reach a level of mediocrity which matches the “average” around you. Socially this may be more acceptable than aspiring to excellence, but do we really want to go there?

Focusing on your strength is not about being selfish. On the contrary, if you bring the best out of yourself, you can inspire others, help them and make a difference to the world in many ways.

Whole Product Experience Roadmap: A Simple Tool for Product Managers

Software product managers with an engineering background routinely use the product engineering roadmap, which is a document that lays out a broad time-line and engineering work items to be completed as a product evolves from one version to the next. Some of the work items are features that end-users can see and use, yet others are improvements that strengthen the product at the back-end with enhanced scalability, performance, security etc. A well maintained product roadmap goes a long way in providing a guideline for product development and maintenance efforts. It serves as a reference point for all planning discussions.

That said, products are rarely mere engineering artifacts. End-users are increasingly experiencing the consumerization of web. Consequently, the bar for total product experience keeps going up. Users need a whole array of value-adds to the core product, at various touch-points along the product experience cycle. These include online user community, social media user groups, forums for sharing best practices, webinars, on-demand videos illustrating product usage, tips, documentation, guidance on product use in specific business situations, purchase justification support, installation support, sample use cases and so forth. Geoffrey Moore, in his famous book Crossing the Chasm, refers to these value-adds collectively as the augmented product. According to him, the core product and the augmented product together make up the whole product.

Which brings us to the Whole Product Experience Roadmap, a simple tool to track the building up of a whole product experience. Prepare a tabular roadmap where rows correspond to several attributes of product experience such as Features, Documentation, Training, Community, Installation, Distribution, Pricing, Expectation Setting etc and columns correspond to successive months. For each month pick a few cells and fill them with goals that aim at enhancing product experience. It is that simple.

Now, you can record progress as you keep enhancing product experience and easily visualize the gaps which need to be filled. Every time you hear back from marketing, sales, support or directly from a customer or a partner something that could be improved in the product experience, you simply add a row to the whole product experience roadmap.

If you provide services instead of products, you can still use the same tool with minor variations. Whatever be the nature of your offering - product or service - the idea of designing a customer experience is much the same. Identify the touch-points throughout the engagement experience and plan improvements with time.