# From Feature Factory to Product Lab: Turning Reviews into Strategic Outcome-Driven Conversations: transcript

Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio.

Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/from-feature-factory-to-product-lab-turning-reviews-into-strategic-outcome-driven-conversations/
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Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure
Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English

## Transcript

[00:00:00] Show me your product reviews, and I'll tell you if you're processing their feature factory or product lab.

[00:00:07] Too many reviews are just demos, teams, show what they build, stakeholders, no, then everybody gets back on the hamster wheel and it's a P4 progress.

[00:00:16] That's the feature factory drop and it's expensive.

[00:00:20] You have more people, but you feel slower and you're not sure if the end of it is actually moving the needle.

[00:00:27] If you want to break that cycle, how about changing the focus of your reviews?

[00:00:31] Stop looking inward at the blog or even the working in for land and start looking outward at the business.

[00:00:39] I've been working with the product leader who's trying to level up his tea.

[00:00:42] His product leaders were spending all their time on backlogs, outputs and deliverables.

[00:00:47] They were managing features, not steering the product.

[00:00:51] So we redesigned their product review.

[00:00:53] We explicitly decoupled it from the last two weeks sprint or even the quarterly PI.

[00:01:00] The point isn't to the demo of the latest increment, it's to answer much bigger question, are we still waiting?

[00:01:07] The product lab review doesn't ask what did we ship.

[00:01:10] It asks what are we learning from our customers, our metrics, what new evidence do we have that were on the right track or the wrong one?

[00:01:19] Based on our business KPIs, do we still believe in this strategic direction of this product?

[00:01:24] This shifts the conversation.

[00:01:26] The product manager is no longer just reporting on activity, they're forced to become a true product leader,

[00:01:32] connecting their work to real business.

[00:01:35] Now, for this to work, the leaders role has to change too.

[00:01:41] What we've seen is that the leaders role in this review is not too like for language or language or language decisions,

[00:01:47] it's to create the space and the expectation and encourage your team to step up.

[00:01:54] You're there to coach to ask hard questions, to empower them to own the outcomes, to own the bets, to come up with the insights.

[00:02:04] This is how you ship from a top-down mandate to decentralize product ownership.

[00:02:09] It's a tough shift, don't get me wrong, especially an organization that's already used to empowering their teams,

[00:02:15] organizations that are very new to this product operating model approach.

[00:02:20] But it's a concrete way to change the operating system of your product organization.

[00:02:27] It gives me as a coach surface area to coach the switch from project to product being.

[00:02:34] So take a hard look at your next review, what does it focus on?

[00:02:39] Is it a demo of outputs, a conversation of activities, just going through the motions?

[00:02:45] Or is it a strategic conversation about outcomes?

[00:02:48] And what's stopping you from shifting it a bit towards this product lab that's focusing on outcome

[00:02:56] and what may be the outcome and the impact if you try to make that.