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Explaining Startup Challenges to a 6 Year Old

Product Management Challenges for Homemade Lemonade

Image: Unsplash-Charity Beth Long

I was once asked to think about how I would explain some of the startup challenges faced by a product business in a way that a small child would understand. I decided to use an analogy about making and selling lemonade – something I hoped everyone could relate to as so many of us had these little entrepreneurial ideas when we were children.

So hear goes, …

  • Imagine one day that you are playing happily in your garden with your friend. You are both thirsty so you grab a refreshing glass of homemade lemonade from the house. Your friend thinks it is the best lemonade they have ever tasted. You’re eager to make some pocket money. So you decide to ask your parents to give you some money to buy ingredients so that you can make more of it and sell it from a stall in your front garden. They are a little sceptical but they like your passion and drive so decide to invest!
  • You setup a little stall and your friends who live next door come and buy your delicious lemonade. You love spending time chatting with your friends and you are delighted that they love your new lemonade and are happy to pay you some money for it!
  • You quickly spend the money you have made and are eager to make some more. You know that there must be more people who would love to buy your lemonade! You just don’t know where they live, how you are going to tell them about your stall and how you will get them to come and buy some lemonade. 
  • You ask your friends, who have already bought the lemonade, to tell their friends and this does help to bring more people to your stall. You put a sign up in your garden to attract passers by.
  • Although you have more people who want to buy your lemonade, they all have ideas about how you might change the lemonade to suit their tastes a bit better. Some think that you should add some fizz, some want it sweeter and others just want it to be cheaper. You end up spending lots of time in the kitchen trying to do everything they are asking for. You no longer have any time to spend on the stall talking to your friends and customers. You now have to ask another friend to help you sell the lemonade – they of course want a share of the money you make.
  • The more customers you have for your lemonade and the more you try to please your friends the busier you become. You have made so many changes to your recipe that it is no longer quite as delicious as it once was. You forget that the reason everyone came to your stall at the start was the delicious recipe you made for your friend in the beginning. Some of your old customers are not happy with the changes you have made and stop coming to the stall.
  • Making lemonade takes a lot of your time and it is beginning to cost you and your parents a lot of money. By the time you give money to your parents for the ingredients and to your friends helping you on the stall there is very little money left over each day.
  • What started as a way to make a little pocket money has now made you so busy that you don’t have time for anything else! You have to ask more friends to help you in the kitchen but they all want a share of your small profits.
  • You are spending more and more time making lemonade and less time talking to the people who buy your lemonade!
  • One day, one of your friends talks to some of your customers in the queue for your stall. They realize that these customers are complaining about how warm your lemonade is! It has been left sitting in the sun. Your friend, jealous of your success, decides to setup a stall of their own. They use your original recipe but with one simple change – they add ground ice to the drink before serving. Your customers are curious and they head over to their stall to try it. They love it, the weather is hot and so they decide to buy from your friend’s stall instead.
  • You realize you were too busy in the kitchen to see this happen!
  • In order make sure your friends keep coming to your stall you now decide you would need to buy an icemaker. You ask your parents for more money and they agree to help you buy the icemaker.
  • But … it is coming into winter and the kid on the other stall has been watching her customers and realizes that they are no longer as interested in the cold lemonade. She chats with her friends as they play outside and she decides that hot chocolate will sell a lot better than cold lemonade in the winter. She quickly changes her stall and whatever customers you had left all decide to visit her stand for her lovely hot chocolate.
  • Your parents are fed up, they have an ice-maker in their kitchen that is not being used and they are not prepared to give you any more money. By the time you have paid all your friends who have been helping you make lemonade in the kitchen you have no money left over to buy the ingredients for hot chocolate or any other great idea.
  • You realize too late that if you had spent more time outside with your friends and customers, instead of being stuck inside making lemonade, that you would have spotted that the weather was changing and that your customer’s needs were changing.
  • You have learned a big lesson but it is all too late – but you are just a kid so how were you to know!

Startup Challenges – so what are the lessons here?

As adults and business professionals we

  1. Understand the importance of recognising and protecting our competitive advantage.
  2. We know that it is really important to get out of the business and validate that we have understood our customer’s requirements.
  3. We realise that capitalising on the market segments we are best placed to serve is crucial.
  4. We understand that as a Product Manager, paying too much attention to the technicalities of making our product and too little time capturing insights from our target market is not a good idea.
  5. We know that it is really important to think clearly about the potential return on investing in any new product idea and not all ideas are the right idea.
  6. We know that our investors will require a return on their investment and won’t be willing to fund everything we do – we know we need to make money.
  7. We know this isn’t child’s play and startups are tough but rewarding when you are focused and clear about what you are doing and why.
  8. We know we need the right people around us and we need to reward loyalty and hard work.
  9. We understand that goals may need to change when circumstances change but we know why we started the business in the first place and we know that our customers are our lifeblood so we have to stay close to them.

A 6 year old can’t know all that … they just like making lemonade!

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Helping Companies to think proactively about the “Paradox of Choice”

Why Market Segmentation and Prioritisation is Crucial

Paradox of Choice Market Segmentation Market Prioritisation
Paradox of Choice

I have been working as a consultant in Strategic Marketing and Product Management for many years now. I work with clients who are not just from the technology sector but from across a broad range of industries. I am seeing a common thread across many of these clients – the paradox of choice! How can market segmentation help?

Generally, as I start each engagement, we undertake a short capability assessment so that we can explore together where there may be gaps in the the company’s approach to what I call strategic marketing or commercial product management.

Invariably, when we chat about where they have challenges, and reflect on the capability assessment that captures all team members inputs anonymously, one of the key areas that is highlighted almost every time is lack of market focus.

Whether it is a startup or a more established business, they often are adhoc or scattergun in their approach to where they will find market opportunity.

What is a Paradox of Choice?

I have rarely come across a company that has not been relatively clear in describing the product or solution they have created. What they tend to be less clear on are the market segments that might benefit most from their product or solution. Generally, in each engagement I see one of two things happening:

  • The company has a product or service but they are struggling to align this with a clear need from a broad enough market base that will help them to drive meaningful revenue – i.e they have a product or solution looking for a market
  • The company has a product or service that could address many different market challenges across lots of different areas i.e. they are suffering from what I call a paradox of choice.

A paradox of choice might make us feel good because we think we have lots of opportunities to choose from. In reality having too many opportunities actually requires more effort. A lack of focus, jumping from one opportunity to the next and not targeting sales and marketing resources in the right way will not help us to maximise market opportunities that could be strategically very lucrative.

Why Market Segmentation Helps?

Taking time as a company to outline market opportunity and to assess this market opportunity through insight gathering and then through a prioritsation exercise can be hugely beneficial.

So who should perform this market segmentation and prioritisation exercise? In my view it is part of the role of a strategic Product Manager or a Strategic Marketer. The beneficiaries of this exercise are:

  • The CEO – they will have a way of aligning their strategic objectives (OKRs or KPIs) with defined market opportunities
  • Sales – the CEO can work with the sales team to assign realistic sales targets to validated market segments
  • Marketing – the marketing team can define compelling value propositions for each prioritised market segment and drive targeted marketing campaigns

In my experience, lots of companies avoid this activity because it does require some effort and focus and it does require some experience in doing it right. It is crucial to choose the right criteria to support segmentation, to implement market research to generate insights for decision making and to get buy-in from the full leadership team in prioritising market opportunity.

What are the consequences of not doing this?

From my experience, the key consequences of a lack of market focus are:

  • A sales team that are scattergun in their approach to revenue generation. Sales is an operational cost to the business and not ensuring that the sales team are focused and targeted at the right markets is a mistake
  • Revenue is coming from markets that are not really aligned with the strategic objectives of the business – perhaps leading to bespoke engagements to meet clients needs
  • Revenue is not being generated in a repeatable way from clients with similar challenges
  • Sales forecasting is really challenging as it is difficult to predict where market demand will come from

As a senior leadership team, take some time to help the business to achieve real focus by undertaking a market segmentation and prioritisation exercise.

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Do you have a solution looking for a problem to solve?

Aligning your Product Strategy with Market Demand

How would Product Management answer if asked to explain how your product strategy reflects the needs of the market?

Does your Product Strategy start by introducing the features of your product or solution before you speak about the market you are targeting? Do you present architecture diagrams showing how your product can integrate into the customer’s network without first explaining who the customer is? Do you talk about the great things that your company or product can do and include a lot of technical spiel with a sprinkling of ‘ilities’ … reliability, flexibility, usability? Can you talk at length about how performant your product is, how well you support the customer when they find a bug and what a fantastic user interface you have?

At what point in your Product Strategy do you start to talk about the customer?

Many companies struggle to talk about the market that they are targeting and the key problems or needs that they are solving for that market segment. Often they have little understanding of the buyer personas in the target market – what jobs they do, what motivates them, the difficulties they have in doing their job.

So why are technology companies generally so poor at representing the customer in their Product Strategy?

In my opinion, it is because they feel more comfortable jumping straight to the “how” without trying to articulate the “what” and the “why”. Technology people just want to make things – they love to create new things and to apply cool technology in interesting new ways.

Technology companies are often not good at understanding or articulating the problem they are trying to solve for their target customers.

Even when companies do take a stab at describing the customer, they struggle to provide evidence that they have ever validated their hypothesis with existing or prospective customers. They rarely talk to customers about their needs or wants. They often operate in broadcast mode – selling the latest feature or attempting to upgrade the customer. If they listen to their customers at all it is often in a support role where the customer logs bugs or issues with the existing product.

“If you base your product strategy around incrementally adding new features to your product, without a clear understanding of how these features benefit your target customer segment, then you run the risk of having a complex product searching for a problem to solve!“

IntegratedThinking

Could your business benefit from clarifying the core market problem you are trying to solve, through a structured approach to insight gathering? Contact: email siobhan@integratedthinking.ie for more details

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When is the Right Time to Get Strategic with Product Management?

The Importance of Product Management

As a Product Manager, or senior leader responsible for Product Strategy, it makes sense to take a step back and assess your approach to Product Management once in a while.

Every battle is won before it is fought

Sun Tsu

What might Product Management look like in an Early Stage Business

Early stage companies are typically led by strong founders with a clear vision of where they want to be – they are not afraid to take risks, they see the bigger picture and they have the ability to lead others to deliver their vision of the world.

These successful founders aim to foster an environment of innovation and creativity that will ensure that their vision is executed and that projects with the highest potential are prioritised.

To get initial investment the founder creates a clear business plan articulating the market opportunity, the competitors in their space, the problem or need the company is going to address, the technology they will use to solve this problem and how they will make money.

The founder will generally start by hiring a few engineers to deliver their vision. They might have one or two sales and marketing people but predominantly the company is focused on executing a defined product strategy.

What happens when the business starts to scale?

As the company grows the founder can sometimes move into a different role in favour of a “professional” CEO (often appointed by the board) or they may become more focused on general business development, with perhaps less time for defining the product vision.

In this hiatus, where there is potentially a lack of market strategic direction, one of Sales, Engineering or Marketing may step up to fill the void.

However, allowing any of these groups to dictate the product strategy brings risk:

  • A company that adopts an engineering-led strategy runs the risk of focusing too much on the “next cool technology” with little understanding of the needs of the market.
  • A sales-led strategy may simply focus on the needs of each individual customer leading to “bespoke” and “one-off” solutions and driving the company down a services route.
  • A marketing led strategy may focus too much on external messaging with little understanding of technology innovations or the needs of the customer.

When is the right time to adopt a more strategic approach to Product Management?

CEOs like Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple managed to scale their companies and remain involved in core product strategy. As their companies grew they ensured they played a key part in defining the “vision” for the product, whilst ensuring that they built a strong team that were equipped to address their core strategic vision. These CEOs knew that, without innovation and the right product vision, the company would die.

The success of early stage technology companies is often a result of a founder CEO who has managed to get the balance “just right” with product and market strategy. To ensure the product strategy meets their vision they maintain an active involvement in:

  • Articulating the problem they are trying to solve
  • Understanding the competitive landscape
  • Defining the market opportunity

They also have a deep knowledge of the technology that will help them to successfully address the market need.

Continuing to get that balance right as the company grows is crucial for continued success.

Although Steve Jobs was actively involved in defining the vision for Apple’s products, he recognised the importance of adopting a supporting framework to deliver on his vision so that he could also focus on other aspects of business development. He is quoted as saying:

“You need a very market-oriented culture… Lots of companies have great engineers and smart people. …..there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together.”

Steve Jobs

As the company grows and the CEO has less opportunity for acting as the  “gravitational force”, adopting a product management discipline is an important next step –  it is never too early to ensure it is part of the DNA of the company.

Successful CEOs naturally adopt aspects of the product management discipline from the moment they write their first business plan but ensuring it is engrained in the organisation takes focus and alignment across the leadership team.

As the CEO becomes increasingly involved in other aspects of business development, it is so important that they have adopted and resourced a framework for product management that will ensure their vision continues to be executed.

Rather than usurping the CEO, Product Management supports them by understanding their vision and ensuring that a product strategy captures and articulates that vision. They help the CEO to understand the market opportunity, they maintain oversight of the creation and delivery of the product through engineering and they support the positioning of the product to market through targeted messaging and sales execution. Product Management listen to many stakeholders and help the organisation to make decisions based on the “right data” – they are the “gravitational force” that pulls everyone together to drive the organisation’s strategic objectives.

Whether the CEO is the ultimate product visionary or whether this is driven from within the organisation it is essential that there is an established discipline for managing product strategy.

Finding and nurturing the right product management team will enable the CEO  to “get it just right” and to allow them to maintain the right level of engagement on product strategy.

To be really effective the relationship between the Product Manager and the CEO must be strong and bi-directional

  • The product manager must be able to understand and reflect the CEOs vision and objectives through a clear product strategy. They are a critical resource in supporting the CEO to deliver on their vision.

For product management to become part of the DNA of an organisation it needs the support and “buy-in” of the CEO from the start. 

 

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Product Management – how to be the best Product Manager!

Product Management Product Manager
Failing Fast @ Product Management

Product Management is a discipline that is gaining more traction in organisations over the last few years – more and more companies are saying that they have a product manager or at the very least are applying aspects of the discipline. In my experience there is still a huge amount of misunderstanding in the industry as to what product management actually is and its implementation in companies varies widely.

But hey, everyone says it is important to “fail fast” – to recognise when something is not working and move on – so here are some things that you may already be doing that ensure you have a better chance of failing fast at product management:

You let vested interests drive the product management agenda 

There will be many stakeholders in your organisation with an interest in “guiding” product management’s agenda. Sales might like them to attend every sales meeting or create snazzy powerpoint presentations to support their sales engagements … at the end of the day this can only help them to meet their sales targets and it will certainly keep the product manager very busy. Engineering might like them to “project manage” their activities or generally act as gofer in the product development process. After all, product management do “own” the product, so when there is someone needed to do some random task related to the product and nobody else wants to do it then who better to ask … right?! When product management become too busy delivering an agenda for one dominant stakeholder they will not be looking at the bigger picture and delivering on the organisation’s overall core objectives.

You continue to use hunches or “gut feel” to guide decision making in the organisation 

Allowing those who “shout loudest” or who wield the most power to influence decision making and ignoring market data, ROI calculations and other business metrics presented by product management will likely mean you are simply “taking a punt” and risking your hard earned money.  Continuing to manage your organisation as a bottomless pit of resources that you can just throw ad-hoc projects into will ensure you continue to have product releases that miss deadlines, products that miss the mark with regards to customer expectations and revenues that continue to flatline.

You don’t communicate business objectives to the product manager or provide any input on their role objectives

A product manager with little insight of corporate objectives will have to try and guess what it is the company is trying to achieve (this is always fun) so they will probably flip-flop between projects that delve into project management, innovation, programme management, product marketing, sales engagement, possibly a little bit of product development and really anything else that someone believes the “owner” of the product should be doing on any given day. Failing to communicate any corporate objectives to product management will often mean that the organisation as a whole will lack clarity and focus and there will be mis-alignment as to what the company is trying to achieve. If the product manager does not understand how they should apply the discipline of product management in their organisation and what the leadership team expect from the role then they are much more likely to fail to meet expectations.

You allow product development teams to pay “lip service” to product management requirements 

Hiring a product manager and assigning them to an engineering team as a glorified “backlog manager” runs the risk that they are just responsible for moving things up and down the backlog on the direction of the engineering team. This will undermine their responsibility for the overall strategic direction of the product and you will be allowing engineering to call the shots and decide what goes into each release. Engineers rarely talk to customers and will typically not understand the needs of a broader market base. Allowing a product manager to become consumed by the engineering process (the “how”) and not enabling them to focus on the strategic (the “what” and “why”) is more likely to drive your product further and further away from what potential customers and the broader market really wants!

You don’t provide mentorship or support for your new product manager 

Hiring a product manager and just letting them loose in the organisation, even though they have never performed the role before, is likely to set them on a path to failure. Not providing any guidance or training on managing up and across the organisation, on handling a portfolio of requirements and choosing the ones with the best ROI, on communicating with a leadership team and board members, on managing product strategic direction and on ensuring that the company remains innovative, can have serious consequences. We all know you need to get training and support for sales, engineering and leadership team members. Equally, product managers are not born knowing how to deliver product strategy, so failing to train, mentor and support them will result in a key resource who does not have the confidence to execute strategy.

I don’t think any of us want to fail at what we do. We definitely need to be able to recognise when things are not working well and do something that makes a positive difference. We just don’t have the time to sit around and hope things get better by themselves!

If you are interested in taking a diagnostic to help you to understand the gaps in your company’s adoption of the discipline of Product Management then contact me by email siobhan@integratedthinking.ie for more details.


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Product Management: How can you make sure investors love your strategy?

What Investors Care About?

Investors hate missing out on a great opportunity but equally they fear making a bad investment. For Product Management it is essential that they consider the needs of this crucial stakeholder.

So what are some of the things that investors think about when investing in product companies…

  • The challenge the product is trying to address and the evidence you have captured that this is a challenge the market wants solved
  • The size of the market opportunity
  • Any early traction you have obtained for your product
  • Your articulation of the value you bring to the market and how you will monetise this value
  • Why your business is uniquely different and how you compete with others?
  • Why you think people will be compelled to buy from you? Who your buyers are and what do they care about?
  • What team is in place to execute on the product strategy and how effective are this team?
  • Your strategy for marketing communications and sales
  • Your strategy for partnering with others to gain market traction or to execute on your product strategy

If this is what investors want to understand about your business, then how much attention do the leaders in your business, including Product Management give these areas?

As someone who has helped startups with their business plans and product strategy I understand that to capture the interest of the investor community it is hugely important to articulate the growth opportunity for your business through a business plan and associated Product Strategy.

Articulating the market opportunity and your value proposition for each target market is crucial. Clearly representing the challenge you address for your target market, capturing insights from this market and understanding how you will capture market interest to drive revenue growth is essential to ensure you get the kick-start of investment you need to scale your business.

Strategy is based on a differentiated customer value proposition. Satisfying customers is the source of sustainable value creation.” 

Robert Kaplan and David Norton (Strategy Maps)

Of course your Product Strategy needs to consider areas such as your mission and vision (with associated metrics of success), segmented market opportunity, your pricing strategy, your positioning of value for each target market, your competitive differentiation, any partnership strategy and a link to any sales and marketing strategies. You also need to highlight the key metrics that you will monitor to ensure product success – recurring revenue goals, customer acquisition rates, etc.

Everyone in the organisation needs to have sight of the key objectives (OKRs or SMART metrics of success) that the business is aiming to achieve at a high level so that they can define and align their own metrics of success to drive these corporate objectives.

A company that has captured initial investment through a clearly defined business plan and product strategy will move quickly to focus on the execution of this plan – hiring engineers, marketers and sales personnel. Keeping these resources aligned to deliver on the promises made to investors is now crucial!

It is really important that you can demonstrate to an investor that everyone in the business is aligned around the product strategy and that you can show how cross functional goals and initiatives are aligned. So it is important to define clear corporate goals and objectives that can be cascaded throughout the business. This ensures that you:

  • Create an aligned and collaborative organization that shares a common understanding of how the business will create value
  • Ensure the organization remains focused on corporate strategic objectives
  • Maximize ROI for corporate resources and ensure all resources are delivering effectively
  • Support decision making for all employees
  • Enable Sales and Marketing to clearly position the products and solutions to the target market and thereby drive revenue growth

How can you make sure you are investor ready?

Whether you are a startup or SME you should take the time to ensure that you have captured the right insights from the market to create a clear and compelling Business Plan and Product Strategy.

There are so many things that Investors care about but you need to focus on what is key in the context of your industry.

I have recently spent time running strategic insight gathering and value proposition workshops with companies across multiple industry sectors. The exercise has been enlightening for everyone – particularly those companies that have spent a lot of time focusing on the “execution” rather than the “strategic” side of product management and for those companies that have a requirement for near term investment. These workshops support the company with the insights that are needed to create a compelling product strategy.

Contact me siobhan@integratedthinking.ie for more details on how your business can capture market insights to drive future opportunity.


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5 ways for a Product Manager to make a positive impact when working with other leaders

Product Mentor Product Manager Product Management
Work with a Product Mentor

One of the more difficult challenges for any Product Manager is “managing up” or “managing across” the organization. The ability to demonstrate the soft skills required to effectively communicate and work with multiple people in the organization is often an underestimted part of the product manager’s role. This is not about becoming the bosses best friend, it is about stepping through the sometimes subtle political minefield that exists in most organizations.

Few of us receive specific training or work with a product mentor on what is a very important part of what we do. We don’t often discuss the negative impact of this aspect of our role  with others for fear of showing weakness. The training to deal with political interactions is often “on the job”, with many of us bearing the battle scars.

So what are my top 5 approaches for getting results when working with other leaders (although like all of you I’m still learning!)

As a Product Manager, build a relationship of trust with your key stakeholders

Difficulties in establishing a strong relationship with other stakeholders can stem from a lack of trust and a lack of understanding of the other person’s role. People can sometimes have a tendency to retreat to their trenches and adopt a stance based primarily on mistrust.

Making an effort to understand the value that each group in the organization brings is crucial. We may think we know it all and that we are clearly adding the most value but in reality we are all part of a bigger team. All stakeholders have the potential to add value – no person is an island, you need other people as much as they need you. In your communication with others show how you can support them in their role and how they can support you. Great companies are built with great people who develop strong relationships.

Understand your counterpart’s objectives and their management style

Conflict can often occur when as a Product Manager you don’t understand or care about your peer’s objectives. Although we may be working to different team KPIs at the end of the day there must be some common ground – do we not all aspire to create successful companies?

Rather than going head-to-head with someone over a position they have taken, try and understand their motives and objectives. If you are new to the role, try and speak to others in the organization to understand the different “management styles” that exist in the organization. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes first – it can help to avoid conflict if you know what motivates the other person and what they are trying to achieve.

Take advice from others – work with a product mentor

Product management is a multi-faceted role – it requires good communication, a strong focus on commercial aspects of business development, an ability to multi-task, the capacity to lead and above all the capability to deliver order from chaos. Often the product manager is a solitary figure with no direct reports but they communicate with and require support from many people in the organization.

I found huge benefits in working with a product mentor in my early days of product management and today I find it hugely satisfying to mentor product managers in their role.  Product Management can be a lonely place but it is an immensely rewarding role if approached in the right way. Take advice from as many other people as you can, especially those who have faced similar challenges to you. If you have a product manager in your team, ensure they are receiving the right supports from inside and outside the organization.

We are all on a journey of continuous learning – reach out to others who have made mistakes, learned from those mistakes and who can guide you in your approach.

Adopt processes that support better communication and interactions

Misunderstandings are more likely to occur when there is no formal process in place to guide how people work together. In the absence of a process for communication things can fall between the cracks and one side can blame the other.

Your product strategy and product roadmap are a great way to communicate your vision for the product. Ensure that each are communicated in a way that is relevant and understandable to the stakeholder you are engaging with.

Even if you don’t report to the CEO as a Product Manager and you do not have a seat on the leadership team ensure you have a forum for engaging with this team in relation to product and corporate strategy – this is essential. As a strategic Product Manager, reporting through someone else to the leadership team is never ideal.

When engaging with other stakeholders involved in executing on the product strategy, use a tool like the RACI model to outline who is responsible, accountable, consulted or informed. Product Management may be accountable for the success of the product but they cannot be responsible for everything that goes in to making products successful.

Keeping lines of communication open to all groups in your organisation and establishing forums of communication can be hugely beneficial.

As a Product Manager, understand your leadership team’s strategic objectives

It is important for product management to have a “voice” at the leadership table – they support alignment, guide decision-making and ensure everyone is moving in the same direction. As much as possible they reflect the CEO’s corporate strategy in their product strategy. I love OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) – particularly when they are outcome focused. Ensuring that your product strategy and your product roadmap are aligned with the strategic OKRs of the business is crucial. OKRs are a great way to achieve leadership alignment on strategy and to cascade strategic objectives right through the business.

Sometimes the leadership team may disagree with or do things that undermine the product manager’s strategy. Dealing with this situation can be a political minefield but use the product strategy or product roadmap as the mechanism to bring everyone back into alignment where possible.

In summary:

Managing up is such an important part of what we do and sometimes our passion for “doing the right thing” can override our ability to recognize that sometimes there are people more senior than us, who (for the best of reasons) may not agree with our vision. Product Management must tread a fine line between giving good counsel and dictating strategy. We have to ensure that we can see the bigger picture and that we recognize that there are often many contributory factors to good decision-making. As long as we enable our leadership teams to make informed decisions, with the right data, then we are doing our job. It’s important to realize though that we may not always agree with every decision that is made.

Although product managers may feel like they have no authority they do have the ability to lead and guide good decision-making and that is where they can add true value. Remember, don’t bring problems to the leadership team without some well thought out potential solutions.

 


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Top 10 signs that your company should look closely at Product Management

Whether consciously or not, most companies adopt some aspects of a Product Management discipline from their inception. The founders often perform the product management role – defining product strategy, setting revenue targets, meeting customers, capturing requirements, supporting
marketing initiatives, and managing investment priorities.
However, as the company grows it becomes more difficult to cover all bases and the essential parts of a true product management discipline need to be part of a more structured function within the company.

So what are the top 10 indicators that your company needs to reposition to adopt a product management discipline?

1) Absence of Customer or Market Focus – “Inside-Out” rather than “Outside-In”

Although your company is having conversations with customers they are typically driven by a handful of people, often senior leadership, and there is inconsistent feedback to the product development team. There is little understanding across the organization of the target or addressable market resulting in ad-hoc capture of competitor, customer or market data. This lack of customer focus means product requirements are not linked back to a customer need or problem and there are no formal links between marketing and product development. With no mechanism in place to support proactive engagement with customers your company is struggling to create products that customers truly value.

2) Lack of Alignment to Drive Strategic Objectives

As your company has grown it has become increasingly difficult to align everyone towards a common goal. Engineering, marketing, finance and sales teams have grown organically but are  operating in silos with little cross-functional alignment. This has led to  a lack of cohesion on how these functions will drive corporate strategic objectives or prioritize product strategic direction. It has become difficult to benchmark or measure the effectiveness of these teams.

3) Lack of Focus – Unclear Product Direction

In your early stage company  your founder worked to a clearly defined business plan and growth strategy which ensured they captured necessary investment. As the company has scaled the focus has shifted away from the customer or market and the product strategic direction has become predominantly driven from personal hunches. In the quest to win more business there is little focus on customer validation and tentative links to corporate strategic objectives. The “Highest Paid Person in the Organization (HIPPO)” is having a huge influence on how individuals prioritize their work and in this culture of the priority du jour there is a large element of confusion and an unhealthy lack of focus.
In order to cope with fluctuating markets, requirements are changing continually – business priorities are not articulated clearly and the product direction is not aligned across functions. Engineering is calling the shots and often drop or change features with little or no consultation with key stakeholders. Requirements are not understood during development so are regularly re-scoped to suit tight deadlines with little understanding of market or customer impact. Resources move frequently between projects and there is a developing culture of “fire fighting” or “organized chaos”. Engineers are creating and testing code but if asked to link back to a clear business case they are struggling.

4) Adopting a Tactical rather than Strategic Approach

In order to win business your company has  approached each customer engagement as a bespoke deployment, with solutions tailored to the customer’s exact needs. This  has resulted in a lack of cohesion or repeatability between customer releases with a large “services” component for each deployment. Code has become difficult to manage across customer sites and the development team are struggling to manage an increasing number of customer quality issues with a knock-on impact to release dates. Engineering priorities are predominantly driven from sales opportunities with little focus on the strategic direction.

5) Ad-Hoc Product Positioning

Although your company may have initially created a technically masterful product they are failing to articulate its value to the market. When asked, Engineering position the product from a technical standpoint and fail to understand or demonstrate how the product relates to a customer need or problem that can be addressed. Consequently, Marketing battle to understand the technical complexities of the product and with a lack of a defined value proposition the company is struggling to position the product to their own sales team and ultimately to the market.

6) Unclear View of Product Commercial Performance

Development resources are assigned arbitrarily to projects, with little focus on “return on investment” or any link back to corporate objectives. It has become difficult to ascertain the cost to develop a product release or to link these releases to a value proposition or product strategy. Marketing promotions are failing to associate upcoming releases with value to the customer. Win/Loss analysis does not exist or is ad-hoc at best and customer data is not fed back to the product development team. Product pricing is  arbitrary and unclear. There is no mechanism to associate product releases with clear revenue targets. Pricing varies across customers due to the bespoke nature of the deployments.

7) Too Many Projects and Too Few Resources

Due to an uncertain economic climate or investor pressure to grow revenues key decision makers in your company are feeling the need to say “yes” to any new revenue generating projects. In this tactical environment, resources are scurrying between projects with little focus on the end-game or corporate strategic objectives. The company has no gating process to prioritize project investment based on ROI.

8) No Innovation/Ideation Strategy Established

Due to the tactical nature of your business there is no clear process for capturing new ideas, prioritizing these ideas or bringing them through a gating process. You have a team that have the potential to generate lots of ideas but there is nobody to catch these and prioritize investment.

9) Unconscious Decision Making

With a lack of market or customer data product decisions are being made in a vacuum. The company is moving so fast that it cannot recognize that it is in a cul-de-sac.

10) Lack of Competitive Differentiation

Your competitive landscape is crowded and customers are finding it difficult to find compelling reasons to select your company’s products. You struggle to identify unique selling points for the products or solutions and it has become increasingly difficult to position your company competitively.

These indicators can manifest themselves to varying degrees in companies, depending on their stage of growth, but are a useful litmus test for the need to adopt a product management discipline.

Understanding what product management means to your organization – irrespective of your stage of development, product management principles will help to align key stakeholders in your organization to deliver your growth strategy, supporting you:

  • To create scalable and repeatable products or solutions that customers truly value
  • To ensure future growth through the continued progression of innovative ideas
  • To ensure the organization is focused – marching not only in the “right direction” but in the “same direction”
  • To ensure that the organization works to a clearly defined business model that meets corporate strategic objectives
  • To allocate the finite set of resources available to the company to resource the right projects and achieve maximum return on investment

I am a mentor in Product Management and have experience in supporting clients across multiple industry sectors to adopt the discipline. Get in touch to find out more.