- kostazhivkov
Boost Your SAP Analytics Cloud Implementation with Product Discovery: The Ultimate Game-Changer!
Project to Product – Enjoy the ride!
In today's business landscape, many organizations are looking to shift their project approach to digital products. For the vast number of teams, this transition feels like a mere change in titles and the introduction of new jargon that does not provide any practical guidance. In this series, we aim to bridge some of these gaps by focusing on the concept of product discovery and how it can supercharge your SAP Analytics Cloud implementations. Whether you're already riding the product-led wave or just starting your transformation journey, this series is here to inspire, energize, and equip you with ideas to create remarkably powerful digital solutions. So, let's buckle up and embark on this exciting journey together!
Is a powerful platform enough?
At our core, we embrace SAP technology and we’ve been fortunate enough to ride the wave of SAP Analytics Cloud right from its inception. As one of the first companies to contribute third-party content to the SAP store, we have witnessed the platform's potential for implementing modern, integrated reporting and planning solutions. However, let’s be realistic – maximizing the value and adoption of any digital solution is no walk in the park. A buy-in on a robust tech platform is not a solution on its own, but rather an enabler for the creation of digital products. The difference between great BI products and the rest comes from the approach of idea assessment and iteration on impactful ones, exactly where these are most needed.
Switch to the game-changing approach.
I guess almost everyone is familiar with the traditional project approach, which often falls short when it comes to aligning objectives with growing lists of business requirements and packing it altogether in a seamless user journey. This situation is a challenge for every team in today’s environment. The classical project approach emphasizes delivery and output or otherwise said - building the things right. But the fact is that no one knows in the beginning of a project what is right and what not. That's where the game-changing approach of product-led with product discovery at its core comes into play. To refer to Marty Cagan - product discovery is all about iteratively prototyping potential solutions and constantly validating their value, usability, feasibility and viability. By addressing these risks early on in a cost-effective manner, you can rapidly learn and establish the right solution to meet your objectives, rather than simply implementing a long list of features. Discovery serves as a compass guiding you toward the creation of an impactful product that solves your customers’ problems, saving them time and money by discarding bad ideas quickly and iterating on good ones until they mature.
Let’s play a sample with data integration.
Let me give a tangible example with a data topic. Usually in each business process, people are consuming from various datasets to execute their job. When we build a digital solution to facilitate the same process, the traditional approach leads us to investigating these data sources and exploring how to integrate them. We try to picture on diagrams on how we will consume, harmonize and transform the data, so that it becomes reliable, reusable and of course real-time. In contrast, when putting in motion discovery techniques, we first assess the value of the datasets in conjunction to the objectives of the new digital product. This is achieved not via discussions, but through rapidly prototyping to establish the most value-adding scenarios in a usable way. In this collaboration with customers, the team usually encounters that the number of datasets and KPIs that drive real impact shrink tremendously, saving lots of time in delivery and focusing our energy on ideas to evolve the solution even more powerful.
Exercise extreme ownership in your product team.
However, finding good ideas to solve a problem isn't enough on its own. As Marty Cagan says – You need to find solutions that are substantially better than the existing ones for your customers. Interestingly, such innovations often come from the technical members of your team. The trick is to believe in the discovery process that involves the technical team throughout. We embrace that the technology people are not only supporting delivery, but can contribute with amazing ideas combined with the latest technological possibilities. Great products are a result of the collaborative efforts within a team. In that sense a true product success is bound to authentic and healthy human relationships in the group. As a product team, you will be given a challenging objective, a true hard problem to crack. And the goal is to come up with great ideas and ensure that the best ones win. Building this foundation depends on fostering strong relationship-based collaboration among all team members, rather than relying solely on top-down, seniority-based assessments. Discovery processes are designed to run at a super-fast pace, but what matters most is embracing the principles of extreme ownership throughout the entire process. This means, that every team member takes full responsibility for the solution and accepts measurement based on the outcomes of the final solution, rather than individual output in story points.
Use prototyping to discover winning solutions.
Now, let's dive deeper into the magic of product discovery and explore one of its most powerful techniques. You have already pictured that instead of getting lost in months of business case development, high-level requirements gathering and prioritization on delivery roadmaps, through discovery you engage with your customers right from the get-go. Creating prototypes is one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to achieve this. They serve to emulate ideas into tangible possible solutions, allowing your real customers to provide feedback and shape the solution as it evolves. As Fred Brooks has famously said in 1975, "Plan to throw one away; you will anyhow." This emphasizes the importance of learning through iterations, and prototyping enables you to learn quickly and inexpensively during the discovery phase, rather than investing heavily in the delivery of "final" solutions.
What do you imagine when you hear prototype?
When it comes to prototyping, people imagine various approaches, and this is quite all right. All of these are potentially valid, but it is important to choose the right type for each specific moment. In very short, prototypes are designed to test solution ideas against specific risks. For example, feasibility prototypes or as we often call them technical POCs, user prototypes that depict the user journey and test usability, and so on. Prototypes can greatly vary in level of detail and graphical representation. A low fidelity prototype, such as a wireframe on a piece of paper, can be used to validate an idea for KPI measurement a matter of minutes. And this is a wonderful discovery technique that can save tons of time. On the other hand, a high fidelity proto with a fully digitized solution idea can be used to test usability, value or both simultaneously. Through prototypes, within a short period of time you are able to test your solution idea from all important perspectives. Namely, this iterative and user-centric approach ensures the product to be build will solve the given business problem in a usable, valuable, feasible and viable way. And you want to validate this before implementing anything, because a discovery iteration is much cheaper and faster than a delivery iteration.
Success story from the real world.
Let's take a moment to celebrate success. We recently collaborated with a company determined to enhance overall efficiency. They sought a transparent way to steer the business and communicate aligned action plans across all functions. One of their passionate product managers stepped up to the challenge and embarked on building a digital steering wheel using SAP Analytics Cloud. By embracing product discovery, we shifted our focus from mere features to the true objective of managing efficiency. Through multiple prototype iterations, we arrived at the important set of steering KPIs, executive summary, and dedicated management stories for different lines of business. All these elements seamlessly converged to generate an aligned course of action that trickled down the organization. And yes, it was full adopted by all 60 users, because it solved the challenge much better than their existing solutions.
Let’s drag a line together.
Product discovery is an absolute game-changer. When combined with a robust framework, it elevates your digital products to a whole new level. Your team becomes a dream-team that feels accomplished, your end-users will eagerly adopt the solution, because it solves their biggest problems in substantially better ways than the one, they are used to. And last, but not least, you can address more of the outstanding business demand simply because you gain in efficiency. Without doubt any organization embracing product discovery evolves stronger.
So, buckle up and run your next discovery sprint with openness and passion.