Entries Tagged 'Strategy' ↓
November 26th, 2009 — Product Management, Strategy
I sometimes wonder what makes a person a ‘strategic thinker’. What attributes does someone need to be considered a strategic thinker? I like to fashion myself as a strategic thinker. I know that in most situations, whether personal or professional, I will start to envision what the future will look like. I am not sure this is a distinguishing feature from anyone else. I suspect everyone, in some way, does mental scenario execution to gauge what the future might look like.
This page (link) provides some interesting attributes that assist in strategic thinking. These include using facts, working with boundaries, consequence and risk analysis and decision making.
There is no doubt that product management is a strategic role (or should be), but how do you put the right person in place when everyone will claim to be a strategic thinker. I am not sure there is magic recipe here, but having someone who has successful products in the past is a possible indicator they can repeat it. Not a guarantee though.
A lot of the work that product management should be doing helps one become a strategic thinker. All of those enhancements, win/loss reports, call reports are your facts. The boundaries are framed through your persona development and then consequence, risk analysis and decision making come out during roadmapping sessions and release planning.
Having all of these things doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a winning strategy, but it will give you some evidence to put in place a plan and allow you to think strategically.
November 1st, 2009 — Leadership, Personas, Pricing, Strategy
Next thing you know it has been 23 days since your last post. Oddly my subscribers have risen. Thanks for reading! There is lots going on in my life and reading and writing has sadly slipped below my capacity to process. I am hopeful that will change in November, but my travel schedule for the month is already pretty full. We shall see. Generally when I am lost for blog ideas I have a book review to do, but the current book (How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer) is a bit heavy and proving to be a slow read. The upside, I am learning lots about brain activity.
Random Bits:
1. I want to acknowledge a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago about authority vs. influence. His premise was that authority doesn’t exist. Authority alone is not enough to lead and that even in a position of leadership influence will still rule the day. I agree.
2. Regarding personas, I continue to see them not being used. You will lose the battle without them. Also try your best to ignore this post, except for the comments.
3. Regarding vision, I continue to see either no vision or poorly defined visions. You will lose the battle without a vision, largely because it is the key component to strategy. No vision, no strategy. Here is a good blog on product visions.
4. The price of your product is determined by the value it provides, not the cost.
5. Please visit my list of product management events. It is the most comprehensive list of events targeted towards product managers anywhere.
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October 7th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
Seems to be a hot topic this week, there has been many discussions about strategy and roadmaps. Is it roadmap update season already?
Steve Johnson said: “Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.”
OnPM said: “re:Roadmap: R a hi-level *plan* based on what is known today. May include strategy (good or bad) but may not.”
OnPM also offered up a couple posts to read: What’s the deal with Product Roadmaps? and Agile/Scrum and Product Roadmaps.
It seems from the discussions and comments that the general consensus is that if you open PowerPoint, plot out a timelines and insert features into the timeline, you might have what is considered by some as roadmap, but not a strategy. It also seems that most agree that your roadmap is your strategy. So what is missing? What information do you need in your roadmap to make it a strategy?
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September 15th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
 I swear I have written half a dozen posts in my head in the past week, either while driving or walking. I really need to learn to channel my inner Winston Churchill diction skills. Alas those ideas are lost for now.
Over the past month I have been mentally wrestling with change. Death, taxes and change are about the only things guaranteed. With respect to change, you can be guaranteed change will happen and will affect something.
Change can and will come from market conditions, sales, marketing, customers, executives, support, engineering and many more sources. Change can and will affect everything including revenue, cost, project plans, feasibility, roadmaps and many more.
As product mangers, every day you have to deal with change. Every day you have to deal with the effect of that change on your product. The successful product managers, the ones who cope with change the best, are the ones with a sound strategy that reduces the risk of change and/or enables them to respond to the change.
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September 6th, 2009 — Strategy
 A lot of us live by the market-driven sword and after reading the following post: What is a “Market-Driven” Product?, I wondered, is ‘being market-driven’ a strategy or a tactic.
My initial thought was that it couldn’t be a strategy because it is not really measurable. I suspected that as you tried to find a deeper meaning to why ‘being market-driven’ was labeled as a strategy you would find that it is not a strategy, but a means to a strategy. Therefore, it has to be a tactic if we base the criteria of strategy being the ‘what for’ and tactics being the ‘how’. How do we achieve our revenue targets? By being market-driven.
Not so fast. Tactics are activities to achieve needed to achieve the objective – implement the strategy. Is ‘being market-driven’ really an activity? It feels a bit high-level and not really actionable.
I posed the question, is ‘being market-driven’ a strategy or tactic, to the #prodmgmt community on twitter and one of the first responses (of many good responses) was from Adam Bullied who said it was a philosophy. Interesting.
We know from other articles and experts that strategies are really in place to guide decisions. We also know that three of the main components of a strategy (or a set of strategies more likely) is the mission statement, vision statement and values. When Adam mentioned it was a philosophy, my immediate thought was ‘being market-driven’ is better defined as a mission statement. It seems like more of an overall goal that is accomplished (in this case, maybe never completed) over time as other (real) strategies are achieved.
In the end, I believe that ‘being market-driven’ is more of guiding philosophy used to help shape strategies versus an actual strategy or tactic. It is a useful principle for us to put a decision-making framework in place, but not for making actual decisions.
P.S. I found this – Strategy and Tactics By Eli Goldratt, Rami Goldratt, Eli Abramov – really interesting. This too – Strategic planning.
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August 30th, 2009 — Book Review, Leadership, Strategy
 I recently finished reading Winning. I was looking for something on leadership and poked Art Petty for a suggestion. Thanks Art, this was a classic read.
There were so many good lessons in here with respect to leadership and strategy it was almost overwhelming. One of my favourite topics was the chapter about candor; a truly powerful skill for the old mental toolset. Although I understand the power of this, I am aware of how this could be truly damaging to your career if not used properly.
can•dor (kndr) n. Frankness or sincerity of expression; openness.
Despite the book having leadership undertones throughout, there was a great chapter on leadership where Jack discussed eight things leaders do. This list includes team evaluation, coaching, articulating the vision, making decisions, probing and pushing with curiosity and inspiring risk taking.
lead•er•ship (lē-dər-ˌship n. The act or an instance of leading.
Lastly, he wrote a chapter on strategy. Given my interest in what strategy is and how people perceive, it was refreshing to see him try to simplify it. I loved this quote:
… strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.
After reading that, there is no wonder the first chapter was all about mission and values. His definition of strategy is:
Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep its pockets.
I cannot disagree with that.
He then broke down five questions to make your strategy real:
- What the playing field looks like now?
- What the competition has been up to?
- What you’ve been up to?
- What’s around the corner?
- What’s your winning move?
I could go on with lessons learned from this book, but like Made to Stick I highly recommend that you read this book.
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August 21st, 2009 — Leadership, Strategy
 Been a blank-blog week for me… some weeks I have no ideas, others more. Part of it, I am sure, was spending 5 days in the desert and blocking out just about everything I was trying to block.
I am getting to the end of the latest book on my desk, Winning by Jack Welch and it is helping cement in the fact that strategy without leadership is not strategy. You can strategize all day, but without leadership you have the equivalent of someone who is pounding salt.
Leadership, like strategy, is a really big topic. Most of what you will read will tell you that leadership is not about you, but about the people around you. Very true! Leadership includes building self-confidence in your team, making people see the vision and then living it, establishing trust with candor, making decisions, and celebrating the wins. The other point worth mentioning, you can lead without direct reports as effectively as you can with direct reports.
There are many ways to tie leadership back to strategy, but I wanted to focus on the vision aspect of it. I have written about vision in the past, Roadmap: Product Vision Statement. As you start to flush out your vision, you will need to consider your resources, not only who, but how the vision can be articulated in such a way that people are able to live it. The primary message from Made to Stick was getting people excited enough about your idea (read: strategy and vision) that they will execute on it.
Product management is 90% leadership, but unless you have a well-defined vision it will be impossible to make decisions and lead people in such a way that the vision enables them to comfortably make their own decisions. Time to dust off the vision and pass it through the -Made to Stick- principles again. Remember… no vision, no leadership, no strategy.
See a previous post of leadership quotes, Leadership Lessons from McKinsey.
And here are my two favourite leadership blogs from people with ties to product management:
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August 5th, 2009 — Book Review, Product Management, Strategy
 I just finished reading Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, as part of our Smarter Product Managers book club. You’ll probably see a bunch of reviews pop-up as it seems everyone really enjoyed it. Here is one from Product Management Zen.
Without trying to oversell, this is a MUST READ for product management.
An ‘idea‘ is a funny concept. It can be concrete or it can be abstract and for a lot people the vagueness of an idea may be translated into many different things including ideas as new products or ideas as new features for existing products. The relevancy of this book for product managers is that they live in a world of ideas and they need some to stick and some to slip away. (Note: The principles will help make sure the right ones stick and the wrong ones slip away.) They also need to communicate a variety of messages including problem statements, vision statements and strategies all of which can be parsed through the principles of this book. This book provided an excellent framework to help you successfully disseminate those ideas.
The authors explain the six qualities of an idea that will stick:
- Simplicity: This is perhaps my favourite quality because too often I see too much content and part way through the description people’s eyes start to glaze over. Every idea has a core message and it important for your idea to draw attention to that core message. Focus on the core and keep it simple.
- Unexpectedness: The concept here is that people remember what they weren’t expecting to hear, something out of the ordinary. I think the key for product management is being able to articulate your idea in such a way that makes the impact stand out. You will want people to walk away remembering the impact and feeling compassion for people who are dealing with the impact of the idea every day.
- Concreteness: How do you make it real? The book gave a classic product management example (read: customer visits) of an employee of General Mills who poured through reams of data only to try a novel approach of going into the homes of actual customers and observing them. Imagine that?!?! Needless to say the observations were not only concrete but some were even unexpected.
- Credibility: To be honest, I think this is one that most product managers will suffer from the most (easily correctable, read concreteness again). A lot of your credibility will come from the supporting data you have collected, but also your leadership skills will play here. Be mindful of how you play the credibility card in this situation as just throwing out names or titles can instantly kill credibility.
- Emotional: The interesting line from this section was: “For people to take action, they have to care.” As you start to champion your idea, think about the factors that will encourage people to take action.
- Stories: Great section on how to complement your idea with stories. Again, I direct you to refer to the concreteness section for inspiration in developing stories. The right story will also draw on the emotional and credible aspect of your idea.
The overarching concept through the book that plagues the stickiness of ideas is what the authors call the “Curse of Knowledge.” They define this as a common tendency people have that reduces their ability to create ideas that stick. People tend to communicate ideas in a way that is constrained by the fact that they already know what they are talking about and find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know. The authors offer that the best way to beat the curse is to apply the six principles and transform your ideas. The other tip for beating the Curse of Knowledge is to ask why as many times as necessary for a truer understanding of the problem (and therefore idea).
This is book is officially going my “must-read” list for product managers. It’ll shape the way you write and communicate your ideas in way that will hopefully make them stick.
P.S. I found this, the The Stickiness Aptitude Test, for you to validate whether your idea is sticky. Enjoy!
Image Source: MadetoStick.com |
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