Food and shelter. Love and belonging. Delivering customer value through a robust portfolio of product offerings.
Self-actualization may be the final frontier of behavioral motivation, but there’s more than one way to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Specifically in the realm of product management, establishing a pyramid of ranked priorities like the model proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943 can make all the difference when optimizing the roadmap along a user’s journey. Even if it means starting small and simple, Pareto Intelligence Product Manager Grace Anderson said, a hierarchical framework allows organizations like the Chicago-area healthtech company she works for to remain focused on what matters most while staying adaptable as challenges present themselves.
“My favorite element is the middle tiers of the hierarchy, where you’re trying to put it all together,” Anderson said. “Finding a way to serve your clients’ needs and then connect them to greater business objectives is challenging, but it’s incredibly powerful and worthwhile when done successfully. When it all clicks, you can feel it.”
Built In Chicago met with Anderson to gain insights into Pareto Intelligence’s approach to product management, and how a hierarchy helps her team prioritize objectives to deliver optimal results to her clients.
How does your product management team prioritize its hierarchy of needs?
Our priority at Pareto Intelligence is solving problems for our clients. In product development, this means focusing first on building a solution that will provide value — even if it means starting small and simple. Then, once we’ve aligned on the problem and its solution, we shift our attention to tactics that translate that solution into technical and business disciplines: mapping it to key performance indicators, breaking it down into features on the roadmap, and establishing feedback points and other ways to measure success. As our company grows, the needs of our clients change. A hierarchy framework helps us remain focused on that priority while staying adaptable at the higher levels.
As our company grows, the needs of our clients change.”
How does this hierarchy of needs differ from other product organizations you’ve worked on?
One of the main variables I’ve observed is we carefully consider what type of products are built and how they are used. The role a product plays in an end user’s life helps us determine if it’s best to use operational, financial, qualitative or other types of KPIs. Different KPIs will move up the hierarchy differently as their measurement frequency, approach to stakeholder feedback and application to business decisions are all unique. Factor in different industries and company sizes, and hierarchies will naturally vary at each organization.
Pareto Intelligence is a data and analytics company providing insights that help healthcare organizations manage risk, revenue and cost.
