The Why, What, and How of the Modern Product Team

In meeting its goal of solving problems by building new products and features¹, the modern product team has to answer three important questions.

Why, as in “Why is this a problem and for whom?”

What, as in “What do I need to build to solve that problem for my target customer while satisfying any business constraints?”

And finally

How, as in “How do I build this product such that it accomplishes as much of the what as is reasonably possible?”

Each of these questions has an owner on the product team, who takes on specific responsibilities in holding that torch.

I will note that this applies mostly to product-led orgs, where a product team is tasked with an area of the product and/or key metrics, and is responsible for elucidating the problem to attack and developing a solution. In the classical waterfall approach where management tells you what to build, the product team is mostly focused on the how. But even if your org does use waterfall, there are still benefits to applying some of this thinking.

Start with Why

When I transitioned from engineering to product management, our VP of product talked a lot about the “why,” and really didn’t understand what the heck this was until I read Simon Sinek’s now-classic book. In talking about why, we need to understand why this is an issue for the customer. There are a lot of potential problems that we can try to solve, but successful teams make sure they are addressing problems that will lead to impact. In order to do that, they talk to customers or potential customers, and understand the magnitude of the problem as well as the potential benefits of solving it. Ideally this is an emotional thing, in that the problem causes noticeable stress or unhappiness for the customer on a regular basis.

The responsibility of the why owner is to deeply understand the customer and his or her pains, and to communicate which problems need to be solved. This can involve quantitative actions (such as analyzing metrics) as well as qualitative actions (such as talking to customers). But the why owner’s job is only partially finished when they personally understand the pain; now they need to communicate this…