Melissa answers 3 questions all about your experience with product strategy. We'll get into whether or not its possible to "bubble up" a product strategy from the product manager level, how to look at business goals versus customer outcomes, and the pitfalls of confusing product strategy with a pre-defined plan.
Show Notes
Creating great products is about the systems, processes, and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader.
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about strategy.
Q: How do you convince the CTO of the value of working towards understanding problems rather than defining pre-made solutions? [1:54]
A: Sometimes you just have to demonstrate to them what the customer discovery process is, how it works and why it's valuable, which means you'll have to go out and do it. Figure out how you can define that value, package that up into something that will work for your CTO, and then present it. Start small and demonstrate success.
Q: Do you have any tips for a product leader to make sure that their team gets the big picture and has visibility and ownership end-to-end, including the business success? [9:00]
A: There is often a misalignment of business goals across multiple levels of organizations, which indicates that something is wrong with the product strategy. [I suggest] you over-communicate and ensure that the product strategy is well deployed. Everyone needs to understand what problems they are facing and what goals they are trying to achieve.
Q: What’s your recommendation on building a product strategy at small scale within the product team and leveraging that strategy up to get broader visibility, and buying from leadership and other stakeholders? Does that work? [13:55]
A: Yes, it does work. I would start by finding out if there’s a product strategy that’s been poorly deployed. Figure out the goals that the executives want to achieve, use that opportunity to define said goals, and build your product strategy.
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right. Let's dive in. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of Dear Melissa. I'm so excited to bring this podcast to you. We had opened up Dear Melissa as a way for people to submit questions that I was going to answer on my newsletter through our website, and it just kind of took off.
We got hundreds and hundreds of questions, and I thought, hey, maybe we'll turn this into a podcast instead. It was something that I had wanted to do for a while, and I'm excited that you are on board with it as well. In this episode, we're going to break down your burning product questions. I'm excited to start with a little bit about product strategy.
Product strategy has been top of mind lately. We've got some great guests on the podcast talking about product strategy, how they set product strategy as chief product officers. We're going to break down some of your burning questions about that as well. There's a lot of nuances to this topic, and it's hard to navigate.
Sometimes in organizations, we're not given what we were needed to be given. Product strategy is a complicated topic because it cuts across every level of an organization. We need to get our CEO and our leadership on board to set the direction for the company and that vision and those strategic intents, and then we got to align it all the way across and down and up around our organization so that we're all moving in the same way.
Of course, we've got a million questions on it, and that's what we're going to dive into today. Let's start off with our first question. Our listener says, dear Melissa, in your seller book, you describe a situation that I have faced a few times, confusing the product strategy with a laid out plan, with every step clearly defined.
How do you convince the CTO of the value to work towards understanding problems rather than defining pre-made solutions? I find that when startups are scaling to a point where product management is needed, what the tech founders want is to get back to the good old days of very quick delivery, but at scale. I think that I haven't been able to properly explain or prove the value of a well understood customer need and discovery process prior to the delivery.
Thanks a lot for any tip on how to persuade such individuals. Ooh, the good old days. The good old days of delivery, man, I've heard that so many times from founders and especially tech founders, some non-tech founders too. You get a lot of CEOs who are more business minded and they're like, why can't they just ship those things faster and make those fingers go faster?
That's a common thing I see. But what really is happening here is it sounds like you're scaling really fast and we have to start to pull back and figure out what stage of the company you're at to really understand why you don't have a product strategy. And what happens when organizations start up in that startup phase that you're talking about is that they go out, they figure out what it's going to take to get to product market fit.
They're rapidly experimenting. They're trying to find that problem. They're doing tons of customer research. And at the point where you're scaling, you have some kind of product market fit. So there's usually this backlog on what to execute that's super long because we did all the upfront work to figure out what was going to make it stick or a lot of the upfront work.
I'm not saying we solved all the problems, but we did a lot of work. We figured out what people wanted and now we've got to catch up and build it. So then we start scaling and we added more and more customers who've got more and more opinions, more things that they want, and we have different directions to go.
And we keep adding and we keep adding. And typically when organizations run into trouble is they start to outrun or outpace the strategy that they currently had. So everything that they had on that backlog, all those different things, they're still building them. But the next phase of growth, what are we going to do?
How are we going to address customer problems are things that we're not really thinking about. And that's where product management becomes really important because a lot of the organizations I've worked with hit that stage and they're like, crap, what do we do next? Where do we go? What problems can we solve?
How do we actually grow? And all the VCs and all the people that you took money from are like, grow, grow, grow, grow. And you've ran out of options besides your current option to grow because you didn't figure out what your product strategy is. And that's the value I think that your CTO isn't understanding.
They don't understand that a strategy is only going to last a certain amount of time and then it's going to be done and then you're going to have to have a new strategy to figure out what's next. And I wonder if you can talk to them about that, right? How do we know that we're successful? What's next?
What's our next engine of growth? What value are we actually providing? Are we hitting all of that value? There's another side of this too, which is sometimes you just have to demonstrate to them what that discovery process is, how it works and why it's valuable, which means you're just going to have to go out and do it.
You don't have to do 10,000 interviews and then come back and be like, oh, look at what I just spent the last six months on. You can start small and do something that's a little sprint to figure out how you can define that value, package that up into something that will work for your CTO and then go and present it and show how it affects the roadmap, show how it will get more money. And there's an art in that too, to connecting the problems that you're discovering and the things that you think you need to build after testing back to the financials of the business and how it's going to help grow.
And that is what every founder, every VC, every executive really wants to hear. They don't want you to come to them and say, we need to do customer discovery. They want you to come to them and say, I discovered this feature that's going to make us $20 million maybe next year because I put all these things together and we found that it could grow.
That's on a big scale, but on a smaller scale, it could be, I found that people are churning at this rate. Here's the customer segment that's churning. And one of the big reasons that they're churning is X, Y, and Z feature. I think we can build that next quarter and that should prevent this churn and help us win back X amount of money.
It's really putting those things into perspective that makes them go, aha. But the hard part about this is just telling them that they need customer discovery is usually not enough to convince them. They're going to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that seems like a distraction and that seems like a distraction because they don't understand, they'd never seen it.
In many of these places, you have to show them what good looks like. You have to go out, do the discovery, fit it in on the side, just figure out how to go talk to people. It was a lot of what I used to do when I was starting out as a product manager. I just didn't listen to people telling me no. And I would go out and try to find a way to get in touch with people, get the things I needed and then put it back together and be like, hey, look, this is what we learned.
And it makes people go, oh, aha. You took initiative, you went out there, you found stuff that we needed, you answered questions. I think that's really important. So my tip for this is first start by understanding what they believe the product strategy is. So I would go ask questions because sometimes there is a product strategy.
They have done some good research. There is a lot of facts that these are based on, but it's stuck in people's heads. So my first thing for you is to go to your CTO, go to your leadership team and be like, can you explain the product strategy? I just want to write down these things. Or you can even start with some assumptions, be like, this is what I think our product strategy is.
Am I right? And they're like, oh, no, no, no. And you're like, okay, explain it to me because I want to make sure that I'm building the best possible thing for you. So have them explain it, see if it aligns with what you understand, and then talk about what goals they're supposed to hit with that. And then ask them if they feel like they're hitting those goals.
And they're probably going to say no, because you need to code faster or we just need to ship faster. That's a valid question. Are you shipping fast enough to actually make all of this worth it? Is that a problem? As organizations scale, the delivery cycle is going to be longer. And that's just the nature of an organization getting bigger and having more complexity.
It's definitely a thing that we all have to deal with and no founder likes that, but it's a reality. But there is a question of, are we actually delivering well? So you have to nip that in the bud first and say, are we delivering well? And is that an actual issue? And if that's not the issue, the next question is, what can we do to further our product strategy, make sure that we are really finding the right things to build?
And are we all aligned on what we should be building and is our product strategy going to be long enough or have the next engine of growth for us so that we can succeed and we can grow? And if not, I think that's where you start. You go out, you try to target the people you want to test your assumptions with.
You learn from them, you do that customer discovery, but then go back to them and show them how valuable it was. A lot of these things, I would say, start small, demonstrate success, and that's how you're going to get buy-in. So our next question is really talking about business goals and outcomes. They say, dear Melissa, I'm a product leader working in a small fintech company.
We are using an outcomes focused approach based on business goals, but sometimes I'm having difficulty to keep a correlation between business goals and outcomes, including the team's accountability. Do you have any advice or tips to make sure that the team gets the big picture and has visibility and ownership end-to-end, including the business success? Thanks.
Ooh, you're welcome in advance. So let's talk about business goals and outcomes. I think one of the issues is that we start to think of business goals and outcomes only in the way of the business. So as I'm reading this question, I'm going, we are using an outcomes focused approach based on business goals.
The outcomes are not just business outcomes that you're trying to achieve. They're also people outcomes, right? Your customer outcomes, your user outcomes. So when we talk about building a great product strategy or any approach like this, I don't care what you use, OKRs, whatever, they all need a ladder up where you start with the business goals of what do we need to achieve to thrive as a business?
So if we want to, almost every business is like, we want to make more money, but there are usually specific goals like, Hey, we want to IPO in the next three years. We want to be acquired, you know, you've got business goals. Now, the second thing you ask is, what is it going to take to get to those business goals?
That's where your product strategy comes in. So it's usually like enter new markets, expand geographically, do something to gain more revenue. Sometimes it's stemming the churn, making sure that your people are not leaving you, but these are all kind of high level business goals. Then what you have to say is what outcomes do I need to produce for my customers to achieve those business goals?
So if everybody's leaving and your business goal is to reduce retention, now the question is why is everybody leaving? What's the outcome they can't achieve with your product? So that's where I would really focus my product teams around. I would say, OK, how do we stem churn? And again, that's a business problem.
That's not a customer problem. Nobody's like, Oh my God, I just, you know, I have to leave you. That's not a customer problem. They're going to a competitor. They're finding issues elsewhere. If they're not, I guarantee you they're still with you and they're still complaining. But that's a problem. So now we have to say, what can't the customer do that's causing them to leave?
That's the outcome that you should be aligning your team towards. That's what we really need to figure out what our product strategy goes towards. So when I read this, I'm thinking maybe there's a disconnect between the way that you really talk about outcomes and the way that you talk about business success.
But the biggest issue I've seen in the past with organizations is that there is no alignment. Like I was talking about where you go from business goal, what are the outcomes to achieve that for the customer? And then you say, okay, what's the product or the thing we're going to build to do that? There's no connection of that.
And I see that in a lot of organizations. One of the things that I do in many organizations when I start is to go in and start to ask people what's the most important thing we could be doing? Or what is your team doing right now? And then I try to line that up. I like go to the CEO. I ask the same question.
I'm like, what are your goals? What are you trying to achieve? And then I draw this whole little like tree all the way down to the product teams. And I start to align those goals. And I look for gaps. I'm like, is it all aligned? Are we telling a consistent story that goes, I am building this so that X, so that X, so that Y, all the way up to the business goal line.
And you can usually trace that from the team all the way up. And if that line breaks, you have a misalignment. And that means that there's something wrong with your product strategy. There's something wrong with the way you created it or deployed it. So maybe some of the teams are working on problems that you shouldn't be solving right now.
Do you have a stakeholder come over and bombard your team and take everybody away to work on their problems? Or are you just kind of setting things in silos? That's a big issue that I see all the time. A lot of teams are just figuring out what they should be building by themselves, but they're not talking about it across the organization.
There are a ton of reasons or a ton of underlying problems that could cause you to have lack of accountability on your team. But it's usually because something's broken along the way. So if you want your team to have the big picture and have visibility and ownership end to end, the idea is over-communicate and make sure that product strategy is well deployed.
So again, you start at the top, you make sure everybody understands the goals, make sure everybody understands the, what I call strategic intents, but the biggest things that you need to do as a business. And then the product team should be communicating back up, what are the problems that we're going to solve that are going to help us reach those business goals? And then you go into a conversation about, are we building the right things to reach those business goals?
So that's what I would do. I would run a session and try to map out what is our product strategy end to end? Is it aligned? Does everybody understand it? Do we understand what our goals are from a business perspective? Do we understand what our customer is going to achieve? And it might open up some gaps there for you to go explore and fix the alignment problems.
All right, now we've got our last question. It says, dear Melissa, I work in a command and control organization. What's your recommendation on building a product strategy at small scale within the product team and leveraging that strategy up to get broader visibility and buy-in from leadership and other stakeholders?
Does that work? Can you even do that? The answer is yes, I think that does actually work. And it kind of gets back to what we were talking about in our first and second questions, right? The first question is, does the product strategy really not exist? As I mentioned before, sometimes those product strategies are just living in somebody's brain and they decided not to write it down.
So step one, go find out if there is a product strategy that's been really, really poorly deployed. That's where I would start and figure out like, what are you trying to achieve? What are the goals there? And now in the absence of that, because this does happen, I've seen it a million times, there is no product strategy.
Okay, now we've got to come up with something. There's usually goals. There's usually something somebody wants to achieve, even if they're very not explicit. So like I said, there are things that companies want to achieve to get to IPOs or acquisitions or there's goals that they really want to hit. And those things are usually clear cut in executives' minds.
They're thinking about them all the time, they're presenting to boards on them. These are things that they need to hit. These are their own personal goals. Find out what those goals are. Do whatever you can to find out what those goals are, because now you have somewhere to start. And once you understand those goals, you can start to build your own product strategy or start asking the right questions on if what you're building is going to achieve those goals.
So once you figure out what those goals are, now is your opportunity to really define what could we do to get to those goals? What is our product strategy with my little scope of the world that I can do to help achieve the goals? And if you can paint that picture, I've seen really good change. I've seen this at a lot of organizations that actually successfully did this.
I was working in a really, really large organization that had like seven business lines and there was no cohesive product strategy at the top. Everybody was working in silos. Every single one of those business lines had their own little thing going on. It wasn't really a strategy. It was just like pull things off a backlog and build. 5,000 person organization was huge.
But we had one business line that really started to pull together and said, we don't have a product strategy, but we do have goals and I'm going to build our own product strategy for my little neck of the woods and figure out what it is for success here and how do we achieve those goals. And then each one of my teams are going to come back to me and tell me how can their part of the world get to those goals. So they did it, you know, inside this little part of this organization and really built a nice robust product strategy for them and it made everybody else in the organization go, oh, we should probably do that too.
And it started a conversation at the leadership level, which I was part of and I really loved about why we don't have a product strategy across the board and how that was probably causing things to be delayed in our releases. It was causing us to be slow releasing things. It was causing us to not release the things that we actually should be releasing.
And just seeing them build a product strategy made the leaders who were not product managers and had never seen this before go, oh, that's what good looks like. I want that everywhere because it spoke to them. It told them what they need to know, what these teams were building, why they were building it and how it was going to actually help them achieve the things that they needed to achieve.
So by demonstrating that they could build a product strategy and that's what could look like, they helped actually shape the entire culture of the organization and they got everybody building product strategies. And that's what I think is so powerful about just seeing what good looks like. So many people are just hunting around for what does good look like?
And if you can demonstrate that and show it, a lot of times people go, oh yeah, I want that because it's answering the questions that they have. So many leaders have questions about what are people building or what is the right thing to build. I was in the same organization. I had the CEO pouring through JIRA tickets, which I was like, please get out of JIRA.
Don't do that. Get out of my JIRA tickets. I was like, you're never going to learn what you need to learn in there. What are you trying to learn? And he was like, I have no idea what anybody's building. I was like, yeah, that's a roadmap problem. That's a communication problem. Our product leaders are not doing their jobs to bubble up why we're building the things we're building and connected to your goals.
But reading a user story in JIRA is not going to give you the information you need. So when we started to put those roadmaps in place, he was like, oh, I get it. And he backed off. He stopped asking so many questions. He was like, okay, I get it. This is where we're going. And he was able to have intelligent conversations on the level that he should be having them on, which wasn't the nitty gritty, why are you building that feature?
But the, what is this going to achieve for us? So I think demonstrating those things, if you're ever in doubt and you know how to do these things, I see no fault in being able to demonstrate what good looks like to these leaders. I think that's always a great way to go because they're also going to look at that and it's going to help your career.
So lots of good questions on product strategy today, all these different questions about should we bubble up the product strategy from the team? How do we know if everybody's aligned? What happens if we don't have a product strategy? It really all comes down to this. And I'll say it again, a lot of times product strategy just lives in people's heads and it's your job to figure out how to get it out so that you can be successful.
And when you take the steps and do that and approach it from an empathetic way, instead of like, oh, all my product leaders suck and like my executives are not great and just try to piece it together, you'll get pretty far. I've seen really good change happen at these companies. And if you are a leader listening to this podcast and you do not have a product strategy that is robust or you feel like everybody's moving in 20 different ways and nobody's working together and we're not achieving what we're achieving, it's not always just fingers on keyboards.
It's not always just the speed at which you can release. A lot of time it's the lack of alignment and direction of what you're going towards. So talk to your product managers, try to figure out what they're working on, figure out what you need to do as a leader to provide the product strategy to them.
Because I think that's key to enabling your team and really seeing the success that you want to see. That's how you're going to achieve your goals. So that's it for this episode of Dear Melissa. We will catch you next time. Be sure to tune into our conversation with Georgie Smallwood, which is all about product strategy and how she's implemented it at N26 and now Tier Mobility as their chief product officer.
It really gets into some of these questions that we're answering as well. So we'll catch you next time.
