How to manage expectations and deliver on time while building products
This post examines the importance & dangers of managing expectations, how to set & manage expectations and the importance of follow-up in managing expectations.
When I started managing products after spending years building software applications as a developer, I struggled with having developers not deliver on expectations when due. It is funny but that is the truth.
I believe one of the causes was that I built an MVP that was released to beta users in under 2 weeks so I believed that if you understood the technology stack then you should be able to deliver in time that I have set. Note the word I.
I will talk about some of the results of this mentality in the later part of this article.
However, the main reason for this article is to open your mind to the fact that shipping a product is not linear and you have to consider several factors that can affect your product delivery. This is why I have broken this topic into the following:
Importance of managing expectations
Dangers of Not Setting & Managing Expectations
How to set & manage expectations
The importance of follow-up in managing expectations
The business owner’s Hat vs the PM Hat
Importance of managing expectations
You need to understand that if you don’t set expectations, someone else is setting them in their minds.
You wonder how possible this is but let’s take this situation as an example. You give someone money to buy a skincare product, and you probably have been delivering that product within 1 week but currently, you have envisaged something might make it take longer but you did not communicate with the customer. When do you think the customer already expects the product? That is it.
Again, you need to understand that when building your product, you are working with humans and they could be internal teams across engineering, sales/business, operations, marketing & design. In some cases, there are external parties that could influence your product delivery. Do not also forget customers because you could realize that what you are aiming to release from your roadmap is not what is important to the customer at that particular time.
What I am saying in essence is that expectations are set with the collective consideration and participation of stakeholders. You enjoy the following benefits when you set expectations well.
Roles and responsibility clarity: Every stakeholder gets to understand the part they have to play to ensure they hit that goal. The clearer the picture, the easier it is to identify the humans or objects in the image. That is how it works for product delivery. This is why agile teams try to set product visions and roadmaps ahead of releases just to serve as a guide and ensure the team understands that the roadmap is a guide and might not be followed exactly the way it was created.
Value To Customer & Avoid Compromising Quality: Agile is big on building quality products and most importantly building a product that is of value to the customer. A poorly built product could hurt the team or business along the road.
Dangers of not managing expectations
The question is what could go wrong when expectations are not set and managed properly? The simple answer is chaos. I will break it down into points.
Compromising Quality: In business, the first to do something does not always matter. What matters is who stays, innovates, and wins eventually. Not setting expectations might mean you would have to rush your team to deliver on something that is not realistic. I have fallen into this trap several times and many times we can’t seem to control it but it is a messy road. You end up releasing product features that are not valuable enough. This often happens when teams skip important processes the feature should have undergone.
Product Rescoping: Not getting a clear picture of what is to be expected from the team on a particular goal is dangerous. It is the easiest way to waste your time and the team’s.
Product scoping involves considering as many factors (controllable or uncontrollable) that could influence the release. For example, you have scope a feature that was meant to be worked on with a date set for the release and the team is working on it, and in the middle of the product release, something else comes up that involves moving the current sprint to the next release and prioritizing the new one.
There is a good chance that when you come back to that sprint you have to consider what has been recently released into the product and how the previous sprint fits into it. The whole team would also go through this exercise.
Miss the deadline: No expectations mean no timeline set. Take for example, you have a major demo with a huge potential partner that would deepen the distribution of your product and there is a release important for the demo to be successful. Your team mentioned it briefly in a meeting and did not consider the resources to ensure the demo is successful or consider what is a priority. By default, the expectations of the external stakeholder will be dashed.
Pressure/team churn plus blame-shifting: I believe a neutral person should handle the product at times so they can manage expectations but of course, many teams are not as big so the founders take up the responsibility of managing the product. In my opinion, this is the easiest way to put pressure on the team if there is no extra care. This is me speaking from experience.
Unhappy client or customer: This is one danger that is the birthright of a product team or product manager that does not set expectations and manage the expectations of stakeholders. You need to consider your cost of acquisition (CAC) here so you don’t keep spending to get new customers when you can retain, get new ones, and keep growing. If you are the only product in the market though or have a unique IP, you are good to go.
How to set & manage expectations
We have answered why setting and managing expectations matters and also the dangers of not doing so but we cannot skip the part of getting to understand how to set and manage expectations.
To understand how to set and manage expectations, you need to take the following into consideration:
Understand what is important & focus: You need to understand what is important or everything will seem important. Ask the question “What is important to us now?”. Then probe further to the point where your team and you make up your mind on what to focus on. Focus is a very hard thing for many product teams but always works when it is taken seriously.
Understand Controllable vs Uncontrollable Factors: When setting expectations, your team needs to know what the controllable and uncontrollable factors are. For example, an integration of a 3rd party payment processor in your product can be an uncontrollable factor or legal agreement.
Under promise & over delivering: This is a unique skill that is important in setting expectations and managing stakeholders. You want to stand your ground on what you believe would be executed at the due time but work towards delivering those deliverables and beyond.
For example, for a product to be fully ready for a demo with a client, there are highlighted things but there is time constraint to get it done. What you do is highlight the most important things that would ensure a good demo but work towards completing some other parts that could enhance the success of the demo. The MoSCoW method of Prioritisation can also be useful here.
Product Roadmap as a guide: Product roadmaps are guides and not the rule. The roadmap is one of the first steps to managing the expectations of your internal team. Some product teams make their roadmap public just to manage the expectations of their customers. Whether that works or not, is a topic for another day.
Understand the resources available: I fell for this several times in my career. You need to understand the resources available across engineering, sales/business, operations, marketing & design teams. Most importantly, the strength of the resources on the team. If you want to do a quick hack, you should be able to determine the resources that will help you hit your milestone faster.
KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid): Keep your stories and tasks stupidly simple. You want to avoid as much ambiguity as possible. You can learn more about writing a good user story here.
The importance of follow-up in managing expectations
Many times, follow-up can be the reason you are able to hit a particular goal. Daily scrums and of course project management tools like Jira allow the team to know and measure the progress that has been made so far.
However, follow-up is important while managing your product. Many times, product managers are both givers and receivers of follow-up.
In the same light, following up is a skill that can be improved so you don’t become a burden to your team members.
The business owner’s Hat vs the Product Manager’s Hat
When the product manager is the business owner there is bound to be confusion in setting or managing expectations. This is because it is easier to be pulled from Sales, Investor relationship management, operational responsibilities, and other external or internal factors.
This can easily cloud how the founder works with the team to set and manage expectations. It is a hard thing to separate being the business owner and also the product manager at times but it is important to mention it.
Many times, founders find a way of hiring a product manager that handles managing the product and they are more involved in setting the product vision.
Notes
Your product is like a child, you don’t have full control of their life but you can make decisions that would ensure their journey is more blissful. You want to ensure that you continuously create an environment where everyone enjoys working on the product.
Again, setting expectations does not mean being Slow. You can set expectations and execute very fast. If you are executing extremely slowly you might need to dig a little deeper into different things like your processes but first, try to define what slow is.
Finally, I have dived a little deep into some of the mistakes I have made so far in my career in building products and recently in this article. I have also talked about how to set and manage expectations.
I would love to learn some of the mistakes you have made in setting expectations or managing expectations.