Our approach starts with understanding your customer and business and creating health metrics to help gauge progress.
Whether you have a potential product or experience in mind or you have a concept in your mind, we can help shape this with you.
We'll also introduce you to our mental model around betting, and from there, we can diverge around customer problems and needs, to identify multiple options.
From there we can dispassionately narrow and identify which option, or bet, looks to satisfy the customers needs best. In summary, every engagement includes these steps:
- Defining success, value and impact
- Creating multiple bets that could create value
- Shaping the first bet and executing and learning from real customers engagement with it.
That's our approach, that's it, and it works extremely well.
How we’re different
There are many different tools and processes that teams can use to build great products and experiences, why Shape and Ship? Here are a few unique aspects that you'll experience working with us.
Strategic problem solving
Many companies relegate the role of product manager to that of someone who tends and prioritizes a backlog, and writes user stories. ( Or worse, a project manager with a different title.) We believe the role of product managers can be much more. Product management can be an organizational competency that drives growth, reduces costs and improves processes. Growth comes from satisfying the customer. Period.
Lightweight, outcome-focused planning
Instead of thinking about the features to ship each quarter, we believe planning can be more focused on driving outcomes that align to the corporate strategy and customer problems. This process doesn’t need to take weeks to get the stakeholders aligned toward product management plans. Create plans that can be shared, highlight dependencies, get critical feedback, and start building.
Manage bets across portfolio, products and teams
Are you investing for a return or just adding features to keep an engineering team busy? Product leaders have at-a-glance visibility and transparency into what bets teams are making. Product teams are able to focus on delighting the customer and maximizing returns across time.