In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to successfully lead the discovery process at a new company with a strong product culture, how to align product strategies across large corporations, and what questions to ask when your organization doesn’t have a clear vision statement to work from.
Show Notes
Q: Do you have any strategies or steps that can help me with feeling more empowered?
Q: What do you recommend large product organizations do so that strategies are aligned?
Q: What should I do if my company is missing a vision statement?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: Like product operations is great for teams, but it's key for leaders. It's really hard to do your job when you're managing things at this scale. And it's fantastic when you've got a big company and you're all swimming in the right direction and you can see that. But that's the flip side of having a big company is sometimes you can't see that.
So that's why in larger organizations, we need to start implementing things like product operations that help us provide full transparency into what's going on in the teams so that we can actually see what we should be doing and make actions to correct it if we're not creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers with the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions. We'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
Melissa Perri: This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry. Hello and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today on the podcast, we've got three great questions for you. One about transitioning from being a product owner where you were told what to build into a company with high product maturity and what should you do in that situation.
Two about establishing product visions for corporations. And then also to look and see how your strategies are aligned in large corporations. So great questions. And I want to remind you that you can also submit all of your questions to DearMelissa.com. I pick these out every other week between our episodes with guests and I go and I answer them straight to you.
So this is one of the highlights of my week seeing what questions you guys have finding out what's on your mind. So please go to DearMelissa.com and upload your questions there for me. All right, let's get started. Dear Melissa, I just started as a product manager at a large software company which has high product thinking maturity and structure and practice.
I've come from my previous role as a product owner in a small company, which was at the very early stages of their product thinking journey, which means I don't have a lot of experience with OKRs and autonomy.
Melissa Perri: It's only been a short while, but I'm feeling overwhelmed that I'm not up to speed with product knowledge and understanding OKRs and my new role. I've been tasked with leading discovery on the product. Do you have any strategies or steps that can help me with feeling more empowered? Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take?
It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product shops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager.
Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our Premier Course, Product Management Foundations. Alright, we're back and we are talking about transitioning into a company with high product maturity. Alright, so you've come from this other company where people were probably telling you what to build.
There was an outline roadmap.
Melissa Perri: In a smaller company, sometimes you have all the features figured out that you need because you're getting lots of customer requests. You were in build mode. Now you've got to think for yourself and try to figure out what to build. One, fantastic for you because now you're getting real product management experience, you're going to make some of those decisions, and it can be very exciting, but also very overwhelming too if you're not used to this.
So what you have to really establish first is what are the boundaries of my choices? So OKRs and strategies are laid out in product management to help provide you a box in which to experiment through. So we give those guidelines to product managers so that they can decide what's next. If you're leading discovery on the product, you're going to start from the space that has a lot of different options, and the best way to think about it is how do I narrow down those options into a few key strategy choices?
So what you want to do is understand your OKRs and your goals. Those are going to be your bounds. Every option has to help you get to those goals. You don't want to go outside them. And then for the discovery part, you're going to want to do a couple things.
Melissa Perri: One, outline all the key assumptions about this product, whether they even exist yet. So sometimes people are like, oh, we want to go build this product in this area. Here's the discovery work we want to do. What you have to do is try to figure out, OK, what do we believe is going to happen when we release this product?
So what are our assumptions about our goals, about the user behavior that will change? Why do we think this is even something worth going after? I like to turn to things like David Bland's assumption mapping for this. He has a great template out there that you can use on Mural. He outlines all these great questions around feasibility, viability, and desirability.
Start from there, look at those questions, and start to figure out, how do I answer them? What I like to recommend is get the leaders in the room or the people who actually propose this, and hear what they think to be true. Why did they set those goals? Why this piece? Why that? And start really piecing through all of those questions.
And then what you do is you start to outline the answers, the assumptions that you're making on them, from a place of certainty to uncertainty. So it's like if I'm highly certain because I have tons of data, I've done the research, I back this up, we know that assumption is probably true.
Melissa Perri: But if we have assumptions where we haven't figured it out, we're really not certain on that, that's where I would start with your discovery. So all those things usually are make or break for the product. And if you start there, look at all of your very uncertain assumptions, the ones with the highest uncertainty, you outline a research plan around that.
So what are we going to do to go talk to customers? What are we going to do to learn about these assumptions? That's where you would start here. You have to also remember that when you're in discovery mode around a product, it's very different than delivery mode. And it sounds like in your smaller company, you are probably in a lot of delivery mode.
How do we reduce the risk around the solution being not usable or coming out weird or not having the things that people need in it? And that's a part of discovery, but usually it's a little bit more concrete. Depending on where you are in your discovery process right now, you may be investigating the problem or the solution.
I don't know exactly where you are based on what's going on over here, but try to identify that. Be like, are we certain about this problem? Are we certain about this solution?
Melissa Perri: Where is the uncertainty actually lying? And once you orient yourself around what the mission is for you around your discovery, whether it's proving it's the right solution or proving it's the right problem, that's when you can start to go into your toolkit as a product manager and figure out what do I need. So if you're in problem discovery mode, it's usually going to be customer interviews.
You're going to want to go out there and talk to a bunch of people and try to figure out, does this problem exist? Why does it exist? Probably pulling data out of your company stuff that's like customer support. Do they have anything over there to help justify why this is a problem? I go to sales. I talk to them as well and try to figure out, what are you hearing around this problem?
So go internally and externally to help understand that problem. You really want to get into data gathering mode at this point to start to synthesize it and make sense out of it. And then again, remember, you're trying to narrow it down into what are your core beliefs about this product and why it's going to solve problems and then write those down.
And that will help you shape the direction that you need to go to actually prove out this product and do that discovery work.
Melissa Perri: So if I'm going to sum all that up, first, get the lay of the land and write out what you know and what you don't know. Go into those things about what you don't know and help that lay out your plan for discovery and try to get it down to, here's some facts that we are certain about and here's the thing that we want to test from it. A few options to go forward with to really test and see if that's the right product to build.
That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to narrow the field into a few key strategies and decisions about what that product is going to be. So that should be your mission right now. You want to do everything that looks like that. You want to stay away from some of the delivery stuff right now, which means Scrum cadences are not as important.
Two-week deliveries are not as important. Those toolkits are not the things that you want right now. You want to make sure that you're in discovery mode, which is making sure that you're more certain about what the direction is. It's not going to look the same as a Scrum delivery mode. So a lot of the stuff you learn in Scrum, you're going to want to put that on hold for a minute and you're going to want to start to look up stuff about discovery.
Melissa Perri: So I can totally point you to a couple of different places. Like I said, David Bland Assumption Mapping Theresa Torres Continuous Discovery If you get into the UX work, look at Lean UX by Jeff Gothelff and Josh Seiden. All of those things are going to help you a lot. Another great book, Product Research Rules by C.
Todd Lombardo. Another fantastic book to look at. Go for that. That's your toolkit now. Scrum comes later when you become certain about what you want to build. But this is all discovery work. So that's where we want to stay right now. All right. Next question. Dear Melissa, what do you recommend large product organizations do so that strategies are aligned?
I find it difficult to know what the 40 or so PMs in my organization are strategizing. Fantastic question. I have been in your shoes. When I was consulting, the first thing I would try to do in large organizations is figure out what are we building? Like what is everybody working on? And sometimes that is not easy to answer, especially if you do not have a robust product operations framework.
And that is why I really advocate for it.
Melissa Perri: And I've said it a million times on this podcast. But let me tell you a little bit more tactically about what to do first. And then we'll talk a little bit about how product operations can help you in this situation. So the first thing you're going to want to do is what I do whenever I come into a large organization.
You go around to every team and you try to figure out what are they working on and you bubble that up. So it's like go to the 40 or so PMs and say, hey, send me a one pager or whatever format you want to use on what you're doing right now and why. Start to look at those and start to group them by themes and by what I would call initiatives at that level of product strategy.
And then that tells you what are the big pushes everybody is working towards. That's usually the thing that is the missing middle in product strategy is aligning the strategic intents back to product initiatives. The only way we can find out what people believe them to be at the moment is to figure out what they're working on now.
So you got to take all those 40 things and start to interpret it. That's going to tell you what people think the strategy is. Now, it may be wildly different than what you want the strategy to be.
Melissa Perri: Now you got your problem, right? Now you can say, okay, let's go into the organization and reassess this, figure out how to reset the strategy, make sure everybody's working in the same direction. Now, you shouldn't have to do that manually all the time but you're going to have to do it manually to start.
So that's why I'm saying, go ask them what they're doing right now. Easiest way to do it. Start bubbling it up. Start putting the goals on it. If you're using an OKR framework, which to me is just a way to pick strategy deployment. It's just a format for it, which is totally fine. Try to figure out what those OKRs are at the strategic intent level and the product initiative level for what they're doing today.
Not what you want them to do. What they're doing today. And then look and say, is this what I want them to do? Reassess from there. And you shouldn't have to do this manually all the time. That's where product operations comes in. You need some kind of tool, some kind of framework that allows you to keep updating this in real time so that you can see how it ladders up.
That's why I like things like Dragon Boat, which shows you how all of the things that are working around the teams, like the JIRA tickets and stuff, come up to the product portfolio. So you're going to need something to fill in that gap. You should be able to open this tool, like you can with Dragon Boat, and look at it and say, how are we working towards our goals and are we actually achieving them or not?
That's the thing that's going to help you try to monitor that strategy, reassess it faster, and make sure everybody's working in the same direction.
Melissa Perri: So, one, get yourself a tool like that. Two, now you've got to implement the cadences to actually review these things and check it and make sure that you can move direction if you need to. So that's where we get together and start discussing things like roadmapping meetings. But instead of like, hey, everybody come in here and tell me what your roadmap is, it's, hey, are all of these roadmaps actually aligning to the strategy that we want them to?
And if not, let's start to make decisions in this meeting about how we're actually going to fix it. So, you're going to want to get your 40 PMs together in a room, maybe once a quarter, and they have to come up and pitch what they're doing and why and how it ladders up to the strategy. They should know what strategic intents and what product initiatives they're working towards.
If they don't, that's a clear sign that you're not all aligned. But through that meeting, they should be showing how they ladder up to that. That's what you want to do in those meetings. I find that a lot of the roadmap meetings and things that we do on these types of cadences just become status updates, and that's not the point.
Melissa Perri: They should be a working meeting so that you can ask questions, clarify, and then make sure that people are moving in the right direction. So, if you don't have some kind of strategy meeting like that where you're meeting with everybody every quarter or whatnot, that's a really good thing to start to put in. But once you have the tools in place to start monitoring your strategy as well, that's going to help you see if they're off even before those quarterly meetings so that you can act.
And that's your whole point as a product leader, right? It's like, I want to be able to act on the information about what my teams are doing now so that they don't go like three months building the wrong thing. So, that's why we need to have that transparency and that's why I keep promoting things like product operations because it provides that transparency to leaders.
Like, product operations is great for teams but it's key for leaders. It's really hard to do your job when you're managing things at this scale. And it's fantastic when you've got a big company and you're all swimming in the right direction and you can see that, but that's the flip side of having a big company is sometimes you can't see that.
So, that's why in larger organizations we need to start implementing things like product operations that help us provide full transparency into what's going on in the teams so that we can actually see what we should be doing and make actions to correct it if we're not.
Melissa Perri: That would be my suggestion for you is to really look out into the literature that we talk about with product operations and see if some of that can help you. We do have another workshop coming up in April that you can sign up for. If you go to productslabs.com, click into training, you'll see there's a workshop on product ops 101 that might be able to help you too.
Alright, last question. Dear Melissa, I'm working to establish a product vision and strategy for one of the products my team manages. To start, I want to look back at our corporate vision and make sure we were in alignment. We have a corporate mission statement, corporate values, corporate strategy pillars, and corporate goals, but no vision statement.
What should I do? Forge ahead with the vision for the product. Any help is greatly appreciated. First of all, kudos to you for going back and making sure that you were in alignment. Now, this one's tricky. And it also depends on how big your corporation is. If you are at a place that's like a bank with 10,000 divisions and kind of all these businesses that run independently, your corporate vision may not be super transparent.
It's probably going to be a little fluffy. And what you want to align towards is like your business pillar, the business line that you're under. So let's say you're in credit cards. Hopefully, it matches the mission of the company, everything you're doing in credit cards. Like that's the job of the leadership of that division.
But your product vision should probably follow the vision of what the credit cards division wants to be and what credit cards want to be in the future, something like that.
Melissa Perri: Now, if you're smaller, and that's not the case, you're not all operating independently and you don't have like these crazy business pillars and stuff. I have seen this happen a lot. You are not alone. I find that most corporations make their visions really fluffy. Like they have a mission and it's like to be the best, to help people be financially solvent.
Cool. What does that mean though for us? How are we doing that? We don't spend the time making these visions about like, what does your company look like when we reach that? And that is hard, right? It's really hard to build products against that. What happens is we usually have a corporate mission, a bunch of pillars, goals, but we don't really talk about like, what does our company look like when we reach that?
How are we going to achieve this? What's going to happen in the future? What's going to change for us to make this a reality? What you want to do now is go back to your leadership and start to talk to them about those questions. If our mission is X, Y, and Z, how is our company doing that? Like, do we have these pillars?
They're not concrete enough for me to visualize like, what that means for us.
Melissa Perri: So what do you see it as, right? How do you see this changing? How do you see this moving forward? I worked with a big leadership team at a corporation once and I all asked them, what's the vision of this company? And they all gave me their mission statement, which was super fluffy. And I said, okay, cool.
What does that mean? How do you think you reach that? And nobody could give me an answer. If you can't give an answer, that's the vision, right? Like, that should be the vision is what that answer is. How are we going to reach that? What does this look like when we actually get there? That's part strategy, part vision.
But if you're just repeating mission statements that are like super fluffy and don't differentiate you from any other company, that's not a good vision. And that's the thing that you need to go and talk to your leadership about. How are we differentiated? Okay, if this is our mission, it's pretty much the same mission as these other guys over here.
What makes us different? What makes us special? How are we better than them? How do we want to be better than them? Those are the conversations that need to come up through a vision statement. So I would just start that conversation.
Melissa Perri: Should you build it without? Depends how far away you are. If you have something that fills that gap because your business line has a very concrete vision and you're building products for that business line, you might not need a super concrete corporate vision statement. It might be enough to align all of the business pillars around that and they may be operating independently.
If that's not the case for you, like it wasn't for me when I was talking about that one company I was with, that's when you start to ask leadership and say, well, how do we want to differentiate? How do we want to win? How do we want to succeed? What do we not want to do? That's a really great question.
What don't we want to do when we go after this product or vision? What don't we want to do to achieve this mission? That starts to make it a little more concrete about what you want to be as a company in the future and that can help guide what your product actually looks like too. So that's where I would start having those conversations, just asking them.
It's not your job to put together a really concrete corporate vision for them. That's the leadership's job and if they're not doing that, that's a problem. But asking these clarifying questions will help you set the product vision and the strategy around what you need to do and it will be enough to just get you going and to help clear up some of those questions.
So just have a conversation.
Melissa Perri: Don't go in there and just be like, oh my god, there's no corporate vision. Just be like, hey, I'm trying to just get some clarity around the corporate values and mission and stuff like that so that it helps me drive my decision making around product. Here's my questions and I think any leader would be happy to talk about that.
Also, starting those conversations might show your leadership that, hey, we did not answer these questions, which is good for them. Let them realize that. Let them go, oh, yeah, we should probably talk about that more. We should start to put this vision statement down. You fill in the gaps for yourself.
Maybe write something down, put it in front of them and be like, do you think this accurately represents where we want to go? And if they say yes, now you start to fill in the gaps for the corporate vision. This happens a lot, like I said. Lots of companies are in this trap right now where they are not really being concrete about where they want to go, what the vision is.
If you need that, you can start to have that conversation with people and it will probably spark something in their minds where they go, hey, we should probably do that. So that's what I would concentrate on to help fill in those gaps for yourself so that you can actually be effective with creating your products.
Melissa Perri: Alright, that's it for Dear Melissa this week. Like I said, if you have questions for me, please submit them to DearMelissa.com. Next week we'll be back with a great guest. Make sure you hit subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to the podcast because that's how you'll know if there's a new episode.
We release weekly on Wednesdays and we want to hear what you're excited about. So please keep submitting those questions. Tell me what's on your mind. Tell me what you have questions about. That also informs the type of guests that I get on here. If you have a suggestion for a guest, pop it into the Dear Melissa question box too on our website, DearMelissa.com, and then we'll know who you want us to talk to.
And we will see you next time.
