Product Bugle 29/7: Being Strategic
Back after a break. What makes a Strategic PM? and other things I'm going to focus on in the coming weeks. Three books worth a read.
So after two glorious weeks off in Greece, I’m back - and thanks to the wonders of Substack’s recommendation system, I have hardly written a thing and still picked up a whole new load of subscribers. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that. Like Aaron Burr says in Hamilton ‘Talk less, smile more’. Anyway, welcome, or welcome back!
One of the things I thought about (a bit) while away was where to go next with this newsletter. I’m not going to get too deliberate and focussed, but there’s a few broad themes I’m going to focus on.
1. Being a Strategic PM vs Doing a Product Strategy
So - this is going to be a theme I plan to come back to repeatedly in the coming weeks. Mostly because I think it’s a critical part of a PM’s career development.
Product Strategy is something that happens maybe a handful of times in a year. But being a Strategic PM is something you need to do on a daily basis if you want to get ahead.
Product Strategy is a specific process with a specific deliverable. But Being Strategic applies to pretty much everything you do: how you allocate your time; how you communicate and collaborate; how you think about the sequencing and prioritisation of work; how and when you measure success - and what you do with that insight.
The point is that in order to get promoted, to get ahead, PMs often think they need to ‘do a product strategy’; but what’s really needed is for them to be strategic in everything they do. That is the bit of stepping up that’s needed.
And what does ‘Being Strategic’ mean? Well - like I said, I’m going to dive into what being a Strategic PM is in the coming weeks. But a few of the guidelines.
You look down both ends of the telescope: You’re on top of the day to day detail; but you can also see the bigger picture - the longer term trend, the things that will actually matter in a few years time vs the crisis that’s looming. The important, not just the urgent. The insight, not just the data.
You think a few moves ahead: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. and Strategic PMs think beyond the immediate consequence of their actions and anticipate the reaction. They don’t just hope that that the best case scenario will magically come about - they take the right steps now to give it the highest possible probability of it happening in the future.
You deal with the difficult stuff in a calm and structured way: Strategic PMs keep their head when all around are losing theirs. There are lots of books and bits of guidance on the different processes you need to run as a PM. But too often they mask factors like urgency, exec or stakeholder pressure, or competing personal priorities, or the stuff that shouldn’t happen but always does. Junior PMs see this as getting in the way of their job. Strategic PMs realise that dealing with this is their job.
The reason this matters is that it’s these more strategic qualities that people look at when assessing PMs for a more senior role. The difference between those who step up and those who don’t isn’t just what you work: the mechanics of product management- but how you work on it: the art of product management.
Often PMs want to be given the big bit of work to demonstrate their seniority. The point is they first need to work in the right, strategic way on the smaller stuff. And, just as important, their manager also needs to give them the right feedback - in the right way - if they’re not.
Like I said - a theme I’ll be coming back to.
2. A select amount of good stuff stuff about Product Management
There’s so many books, podcasts, newsletters, you tube videos, medium posts, and people posting stuff on LinkedIn - all about product management. Within the last 5 - 6 years we’ve gone from famine to feast. And about 90% of it is actually pretty good, written by smart, articulate people who know their shit. But it’s too much.
I saw a list of ‘11 PM podcasts you have to listen to’ the other week. 11! That’s 11 hours in a week. Or 30 books every PM should read? 30 books! That’s a lot of time commuting (remember that?). If you try and work your way through even half of those and you’ll be behind before you’ve even started. Unless you’re basically going to lock yourself away for two hours every night.
So. I’m going to focus on finding 3 - 5 useful things each week. No more.
3. The (haphazard) route into product management
For every product manager trying to get ahead, I reckon there’s at least 5 people trying to get into product management. Hence the booming business is PM courses; and guides on how to crack that interview.
As the role has grown and become increasingly attractive over the last five years, so it’s become a bit of a magnet for people in a whole load of different job families who want product management to be the next stage on their career. I think Will Lawrence’s Associate Product Manager Playbook is a great bit of work (his Product Life Product Life newsletter is great) but those top tier programs are very much at the apex of a pretty broad job family.
Anyway, I’m going to keep coming back to this theme - and picking up the best tips and bits of advice I can find. Please get in touch if you see anything worth passing on.
4. Business models are getting interesting
There’s something about a looming recession and a couple of quarters of shaky results to make everything interesting.
We’ve come off the back of a wave of bear market growth where consumer businesses have tended to land either on the side of advertising or subscription. And now as money tightens on both sides - people are moving into both areas. Netflix starts to take advertising. The price of Prime goes up just as everyone is already thinking about their recurring subscriptions; and meanwhile Amazon muscles in on the Ad market.
Tracking cookies are going (or are they?). The Guardian shows the long term benefits of its voluntary subscription offering. Medium and Substack - both of which I think are pretty incredible products are going through their respective processes of realignment. There’s change for the very big and the relatively small. This piece by Peter Yang is a great run down for those in the ‘creator/ writer economy’.
All of this covers the consumer market - but the B2B SaaS market is going to be just as open to scrutiny. Customers who have been happily signing up for new services will be asking: ‘How many collaboration tools (of swap out some other category) do we need? Are we really using product X or Y? Do we need that many licences? Meanwhile companies why have taken VC backing and are now driving for massive growth will be busy building out their offerings hoping to make themselves irreplacable at scale.
The point is - even though some of the names are well established, the models are all in flux, and dealing with this is going to become a big part of every product roadmap. It’s obviously a massive topic - but I think it’s interesting to glean lessons learned from different sectors/ sizes of business.
My holiday reading.
An unusually work related list for me this summer - nothing that involves my usual holiday prescription of spies and/or gruesome murders.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Building a Second Brain, by Tiago Forte
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is the book I wish I’d read 20 years ago - even though that’s actually 10 years before it was written. I’d skimmed it before, but got to read it cover-to-cover by the pool (oh yes, I know how to holiday!). It’s the best book I’ve read about strategy. Clear, bullshit-free, and intellectually robust.
TL;DR: Good strategy is really about defining the challenges you face, and how you’re going over come them. [You can find a good summary/ set of notes here.]
Another book I’d half read but not really done justice too was Escaping the build Trap, This is really up there with Inspired in terms of defining what a product function should be within an organisation and how it should work - and covers many of the same bases, but perhaps in a slightly more empathetic way.
TL; DR: Product management adds value by deciding the right thing to build. There’s minimal real value in having a team that just defines the things they’ve been told to build and focuses on delivery and deadlines (the build trap). [here’s a summary]
I am that worst of creatures - a totally unproductive Productivity obsessive. And I’m not quite sure how I stumbled on Building a Second Brain but it builds on the famous Getting things done - and slightly super charges it for the age of the note taking app (which ties in with my now unusually long-lasting obsession with Notion).
If you’re into that sort of thing there’s a whole load of ‘productivity porn’ on YouTube where people go through their second brain systems. I should shut up right now!
TL; DR: Capture everything in a note-taking app (Evernote; Notion; Apple Notes). Then sort it out into Projects; Areas; Research; Archives. [some notes from the course it stemmed from].
That’s it for now - feedback welcome as always. And back with something a bit more structured next week.