PB 28/6 Before you 'get strategic': Stop! Look! Listen! Think! .
Don't just grab a framework and dive in. Take a beat, and ask yourself a few basic questions.
So you’ve been asked to come up with a Strategy for your product. Or show your roadmap. Or talk about your vision. Or perhaps you feel there’s a need for one or more of the above.
There’s no shortage of guides on how to create a product strategy/ roadmap/ vision; but most a) treat them as discrete activities; b) recommend a uniform process that you can allegedly apply in any organisation; and c) they ignore the context of whatever might be going on elsewhere in your organisation at that particular time.
Strategy, vision, roadmaps (and the accompanying financials) are all key outputs - but they’re not an end in themselves. Rather they’re optional tools for the outcome you want which will normally be some combination of defining, deciding and getting support for the future direction of your product.
And how you do that depends so much on your situation, the nature of the organisation (eg: an early stage start up is very different to a big corporate going through digital transformation); and the context of whatever is happening.
So, before you take some framework off the shelf and start getting all ‘strategic’, I’d urge you to take a beat: and maybe follow the old road safety advice: Stop, Look, Listen, Think. And ask yourself some fundamental questions.
What are you actually being asked for? Is it a strategy? a roadmap? a vision? some financials? Or - more likely - some combination of all the above?
What are you trying to get out of it? Funding? Support?
Who is your audience? And what’s going to be on their mind?
Who do you need to work with/ get on side?
When do you need to get things ready for?
How are you going to communicate?
Take 5: very different scenarios
If you’ve operated as a product leader at any level of seniority - here’s a few scenarios that will be very familiar to you.
There’s a board strategy offsite and they want to know the 3 - 5 year product vision.
You’re presenting your plan for the next year to the sales/ marketing team.
You’re new in a job; you’ve been here a month and you need to present your plan for the next few quarters to some group of senior leaders.
It’s budget time and you need to present your plan for the next 1 - 3 years to the CEO and CFO.
You’re presenting your plan for the next year to the product, design and engineering teams.
Each of these occasions has a different desired outcome; and even though you might be telling a very similar story in each situation, exactly how you tell it will have to change in each instance.
In each case what you’re actually going to have to provide is some blend of Vision, Strategy, Roadmap and Financials. Although exactly how you blend them and dial up and down the details in each case is going to be very different.
In each case you’ve got an audience that’s sitting there thinking ‘what does this mean for me and/or the things I’m trying to achieve?’. But in each case what they’re looking for is different.
And the unspoken bit: you know that they other question that’s being asked: ‘Do we have the right person leading this?’
The ideal world: Directional DNA vs reality
In the ideal world, you will have some discrete strategy process - where you capture and get support for your overall approach. You have a clear sense of long term direction; you know what you’re planning to focus on; you can talk broadly about a sequence of delivery; and you have a sense of the financials / resource.
This then creates a core Directional DNA that you can then call on - and each of the instances above is simply a different framing of the same core narrative.
You know this is how it should be. I know this is how it should be. Yet somehow it hardly ever happens like this
In reality, you never quite get time to break away from the day job to step back and really; and you will instead be focussed on simply getting your stuff together for one or more of the above activities (and they often all tend to land at the same time).
These events/ requests above which are meant to reflect your strategy/ planning process, in fact they often drive it.
So what is often presented as a neat linear process - like taking a penalty…becomes more like some kind of rolling maul, while also playing chess, on a roller coaster.
Principles > Process
The point of all of this - and the real skill of product leadership - is not to robotically follow a process, but to adapt to your circumstances and the particular needs of a situation, while having a very clear set of principles for how you operate.
You might have your own principles - but painful experience has led me to these..
Assume nothing: always get clarity on what’s expected from you. Especially if you’re new to a company and the idea of ‘a product strategy’ might be very different to what you’re used to.
Build and tell the whole story: Vision. Strategy. Roadmap. Financials: all are rarely effective when either conceived or presented in isolation.
Think bigger. Make it simpler. Only watchmakers succeed by making things smaller and more complicated.
Do the hard work outside the room: You’re 90 days into a new role and about to present to the exec, and you’ve decided to kill off the CEO’s pet project. Probably best to discuss that with her in advance.. !
Context is everything: be aware of whatever is going on outside your world that will be on your audience’s mind. If you have 10 mins in front of the board - make sure you know what will have happened in the hour before you go in.
Answer the question you’ve been asked not the one you hope you were asked: True on every level.
And finally..
Setting direction for a product, a team or an organisation is hard. If you or your team need help. Just reply to this, or track me down on LinkedIn.
Great breakdown Simon!