A couple of years ago our company adopted a framework for leading a product called the “4-in-the-box”. The idea behind the 4-in-the-box (4ITB) is easy. It is a leadership team made up of representatives from the business, product management, technology, and UX design. The role of this team is to guide the direction of the product, making high-level decisions around what to build, priorities, and the like. It is definitely an improvement of the “good ol’ days” when it was just the business telling tech what to build (which were anything but good).
For all the good the 4ITB was intended to solve, it has one fatal flaw that will prevent product management from realizing its full potential. That fatal flaw is that the 4ITB puts the business in the box, giving them the same decision-making power as the other three. On the surface, this may not sound like a bad thing, but it does have a negative impact when managing a product. Let’s explore some reasons this is suboptimal.
The main reason the business should not be “in the box” is that it handcuffs the product managers who are supposed to be the primary driver of product vision and strategy. If the business representative has equal decision-making power, it clouds the roles and responsibilities of the product managers and can compromise the product vision itself. How? The business tends to be driven by short-term goals and the whims of upper leadership. Product management tends to be driven by longer-term goals and a vision for what the product should be. Another issue is that it can also change the behavior of the product managers (who should be strategic and visionary) into more of a project manager (who manages a set of tasks against a timeline). If the business is driving too much of the direction and priorities, the product manager starts to just manage tasks set forth by the business. This is not a recipe for a successful product, as we learned in the 90s and early 2000s.
If the business doesn’t belong “in the box”, then what is the role of the business in relation to the other three? The business has one primary function within an organization with product management is to provide business problems that need to be solved and the business value of solving each of them. That’s it. The business is really a stakeholder, not a product decision-maker. The business should hold the other three roles, product, technology, and UX design, accountable for solving the business problems. In other words, the 4-in-the-box is a fallacy that should be replaced by the cleverly-named 3-in-the-box (3ITB). Let me explain.
In the 3ITB model, the business provides the business problems that must be solved along with what they will measure to determine if the problem is truly solved. The 3ITB will be held accountable for solving those problems and own the definition and delivery of the solutions to the given business problems. The product, tech, and design representatives in the box work together to come up with solutions that they believe will produce the desired business outcomes.
Product looks at the solution through the lens of value and viability. Will our solution hypothesis provide the value expected by the business? Will our intended users use the product? Is the solution viable within our company? (i.e., Does the solution work within the company’s processes and culture?) Tech looks at the solution through the lens of feasibility. Can we solve this problem with technology? What technical design and architecture will we follow to build the solution? Finally, Design looks at the problem from the perspective of usability. Can the user figure out how to use it to perform the job at hand? Is it easy, even lovable, to use?
When you put product, tech, and design together to come up with solutions, it fosters an environment conducive to innovation. These three roles are not tied to how things work today or “how we’ve always done it”. They can explore options to achieve the desired outcomes that could change the way the company does business — and that’s a great thing. It also fosters speed and agility. The 3ITB can break a solution into iterations that add incremental value and collect feedback from users without doing long, “big bang” deployments. The 3ITB prioritizes the work based on relative business value and level of effort to ensure the team is always working on the things that will provide the most value in the shortest amount of time. Finally, there is shared accountability with the 3ITB. If a given solution does not produce the desired business outcome, the business holds the team accountable. After all, the most important thing in product management is that a meaningful business problem gets solved. Who cares if something gets delivered if it doesn’t solve the problem?
In the 4ITB model, it could be easy for one to ask, “Why even have a product manager?” because the value of product management gets diminished when the business has too much power. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the business, even if not in the box, is still a critical player. In fact, the business owns the most important part of the entire process: identifying the business problems that need to be solved. Without the business problem, nothing else matters. Let the business own the problems, and let the 3-in-the-box own the solutions.
References:
Empowered, by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
