Professional Team Management 2: How to Discover Root Issues to be Solved
By: Nakamura Hiroki
Tags: Product Manager, Product Management, Problem Solving, Management

This is a continuation of the previous article. I’m going to write some more specifics about individual topics.

Once again, in a nutshell, the role of a product manager is to bring the maximum value to users through some kind of product or service. To achieve this, the mission is to define the value to be provided to the users, share it as a vision with the people involved, and execute everything necessary by any means necessary.

However, even if we say we are going to do everything, we have a limited amount of time. How do you find out what you really need to do in that limited time? In this article, I will write about the approach to discovering issues.

Discover the Bottleneck

First of all, I would like to conclude that what we need to do at that moment is, in a word, to “solve the bottleneck”. This is one of the basic ideas of TOC (Theory of Constraints), which is one of the theories used to solve problems in SCM (Supply Chain Management) in the manufacturing industry.

#If you have time, please read the book “The Goal” for more details.

In a simple diagram, when there are processes A to D from input to output, in order to increase the overall throughput (speed of output), it is necessary to strengthen B, which is the weakest process.

In this case, at least at that moment, no matter how much you strengthen A/C/D, it will not contribute to the overall throughput improvement. In fact, to improve them, you may take away the time of the person in charge of B (very common), or you may create more to-dos than necessary in front of B by improving A too much (also very common), both of which will have the opposite effect and result in a decrease in overall throughput.

In other words, the only thing that needs to be done at that moment is to improve and strengthen “B”, and this “B” is the immediate bottleneck.

Theoretically, it is very simple, but in reality, it is not easy to find bottlenecks because the process is not always this simple. Because it is not easy, it is a very important task for product managers to identify and eliminate the “bottlenecks” in creating value.

The Complexity of Reality

In reality, many people are involved in the creation of a single product or service. The product in the AI business that I am in charge of right now is very complex and consists of a combination of many elemental technologies such as voice recognition and natural language processing. If I dare to describe the complexity in two dimensions, it looks like this.

In this situation, it is difficult to discover the bottleneck by decomposing the process and measuring the speed of each output. This is because there are too many dependencies.

Also, as a matter of course, if a bottleneck will be solved, it will shift the bottleneck to another place. The fact that bottlenecks keep shifting one after another means that the cost/effort of discovering bottlenecks needs to be minimized. If the discovery cost is too high, it becomes practically difficult to keep discovering the changing bottlenecks quickly. Therefore, decomposing the process to discovering bottlenecks is too costly and not an effective method.

So, what do we do? I recommend to focus on human relationships and information flow.

Focus on Where the Communication Path is Concentrated

Find out who the communication is focused on, as shown in the diagram below.

Repeated interviews with the relevant people inside and outside the team can reveal this rather easily, as long as you ask the right questions.” Who are the people involved? What is your role with them? How do you interact with them?” etc., draw a communication path as shown in the figure above, and figure out who the path gathers.

The solution depends on the situation, but for example, in case of a person who many members are dependent on, he or she may need to:

1. separate the tasks that can only be done by that person from those that cannot be done by that person, and distribute the roles.

2. if this is not possible, automate or make it efficient as much as possible.

3. if it is difficult to do even 2, encourage the person to manage the difficulties and be prepared to do 1 and 2 when there’s more time.

I choose the best solution based on the person’s situation, role, and feelings.

Otherwise, if he or she is the kind of person who holds on to their tasks, I often redistribute work and roles, even if rather forcefully.

When the communication path is concentrated, it is rather easy to detect and often does not take long to solve. However, there is another pattern that can easily become a bottleneck. It is the loop structure.

Focus on Where the Communication Path Loops

You should also pay attention to the points where communication loops, as shown in the diagram below, i.e., where the conversation does not go forward.

In this case, it is most likely that the communication protocol between the people in the loop does not match and they are not able to communicate with each other. For example, planning and business, business and development, planning and development, etc. are supposed to be expressing the same thing, but the protocols are so different that the conversation is not taking place.

Also, in an environment with strong diversity, such as one where people from various backgrounds are gathered, differences in work style ideology may be the cause. For example, in a culture that values autonomy and consensus, and a culture where the scope of responsibility is clear and where superiors are in charge, interactions between people and teams from these two cultures can easily create a situation where trust isn’t built well. This is because they have different ways of thinking about decision-making. Such conflicts are often not verbalized (it is hard to imagine where the gaps are even between the people involved), so it is necessary to use intuition and experience to discover the issue.

In such cases, it is often difficult to expect a resolution between the members within a short period of time. If you don’t have much time, you can get help from a director who can talk about diverse protocols, or you can intervene yourself to solve the gap.

Read About Changes over Time

This is a unique point of a professional team. People with very high abilities, without exception, learn and grow very fast, and they do not stop while they are working on one business or project.

Therefore, what may be a bottleneck at a given moment may naturally become less of a bottleneck with the speed of growth. Therefore, for a professional team, it is necessary to take a clairvoyant view of the growth speed of each person in his or her role and find the bottleneck with a time frame in mind.

In the above diagram, the filled area is the current throughput, and the dotted line is the future throughput, but improving “B” is not effective, and the correct answer is “D”.

It’s really hard to predict this correctly. I often find myself wishing I hadn’t done it this way after the fact. The reason for this is simple, though: many people grow beyond their imagination.

Users, Teams, and Stakeholders

So far, I have written about the approach to solving the issues within the team. Of course, if there are issues with the users, it means that the vision is not good, which means that the realization of the vision will not bring much value. If there are issues with stakeholders, it means that the company is not making sense of the business and setting KGI/KPI.

Of course, if you are going to create a vision from scratch, you will need to start from scratch to formulate it and organize expectations with stakeholders (I’m not going to talk about how to define a vision or how to determine KGI/KPI because that is not the subject of this article).

On the other hand, there are many cases where there is some kind of team in place, such as when you join the project from the middle. In such cases, it is recommended to approach the team first. As a result, even if the bottleneck is not in the team, but between users or stakeholders, approaching the team is often the fastest way to discover the bottleneck no matter where it is.

This is because most of the time, the people on that team already understand the issue itself, they just don’t know how to identify and solve the bottleneck. So, as I mentioned earlier, when you are working on a project, if there is a team there, don’t start thinking by yourself, but talk with them first. In a nutshell, I think this is the fastest way to discover the bottleneck that needs to be solved first, and that is to talk to as many people as possible before thinking alone.

In the End

I wrote about the approach to finding issues that product managers need to solve in product management where many people and things are moving dynamically. The topic of productivity is often discussed, and I feel that people who have a high level of productivity have no hesitation in solving problems, but they are also very accurate in identifying the root issues and very fast in identifying them.

Whenever I meet someone who feels this way, I always role-play what I would do if I were them, and then I often ask them directly how they set the problem.This is because it is easy to see from the outside how the problem was “solved”, but it is sometimes difficult to see how the problem was “discovered”. Then, I match the results with my own role-playing results.

In the end, the accuracy of finding and solving problems depends on the number of experiences, but since there is a limit to the number of experiences you can have in your own time, I think the best shortcut is to increase the number of experiences by using the time and experience of other excellent people.

So, that was my approach to discover issues. I will try to write about other know-how and tips as a product manager when I feel like it.