450: The process that makes Thrive Market thrive – with Jonas Klink

Thrive Market’s VP of Product Management discusses mission-driven product process Jonas Klink is joining us. He is the Vice President of Product Management & UX Design at Thrive Market, the health-first membership for conscious living. He is responsible for the company’s entire product portfolio, shepherding a lean virtual team of 10 Project Managers & UX Designers. He has established a system allowing the team to focus on understanding customer needs more deeply, creating Outcomes through hypothesis-based testing, and measuring progress through Velocity, Win Rate and impact towards their North Star Metric. In a minute, he will tell us how to do the same thing. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:17] What is Thrive Market? Thrive Market is an online grocery platform where we are on a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to all. Inspired by that mission, our team has put together one of the first online platforms that offers a pre-curated selection of the highest quality, healthy, and sustainable products. It’s a membership-based ecommerce experience. Everything we carry is non-GMO and organic, and there are over 500 ingredients you’ll never see in our products. We support over 90 different values and diets. Working here has been a homecoming for me, where I’ve been given the opportunity to put my background in ecommerce product management to work for a mission that I deeply care about. [5:54] Take us through the customer-centered product process you have created and use at Thrive Market. It’s important to me to experiment with the craft of product management. I’m looking to perfect my craft over time and develop my brand of product management. I care just as much about how we do things as about what we do, because I believe regardless of the size of the company, there’s no excuse for not approaching product management and UX design in a way that feels best-in-class. I like when I’m able to distill things down to the core principles of how things work, and I try to strip away fluff that is not helping and might cause confusion. I put a hierarchy in place where every single person, not just on my team but within the company, is able to draw a straight line from what they are working on this minute all the way up to the company’s mission. I do that by starting off looking at the mission. That straight line starts at the top with the mission. As a purpose-driven organization, we take a measurable approach to the mission, which is the North Star goal. The mission is usually a goal you’ll never actually reach; it’s meant to inspire and set people on a path. However, the conversations I started with were very pragmatic. Our mission is to make healthy, sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to all. We talked about what we mean by healthy, what our design targets mean by healthy, and whether those definitions align. Similarly, we talked about how we would measure “easy,” “affordable,” and “accessible.” As a purpose-driven organization, you should treat your mission as a goal. Even though you may never get there, you should still be able to measure progress toward it. The second part of the process is the product vision, which outlines how you will make progress toward the mission over the next two to three years. That feeds into the product strategy, which is typically set on an annual basis or for six month. The product strategy goes hand-in-hand with your KPIs and goals. The last part of the process is priorities. They define how you will make progress toward the strategy in the next quarter. These priorities or focus areas must be focused. You need to have a small number of priorities that the OKRs line up with. Each OKR includes three to five objectives each with three to five key results,