Staying Focused and Making Bets
I had a really great conversation today with a super smart individual. Whenever I can step away from a conversation / meeting knowing that I’ve learned something, it’s awesome. Today was one of those meetings.
One of the topics that came up was, with relation to a start-up, how imperative it is to do four things to give your organization the best chance at succeeding:
- Develop a vision and focus on it
- Place your bets
- Be heavily critical about the business
- Obsess about results
I know the term “vision” doesn’t always have the best connotations. I could easily see someone hearing the word and picturing those cheesy motivational posters hanging in SVP/EVP and C-level offices all over corporate North America. Take a look at the picture to see what I mean.
What I’m talking about is a very centered description of your business and what you are trying to accomplish. This isn’t a PHd or Masters paper here, folks. It’s a very clear and concise paragraph at most. You want something that everything else is aligned to - if you don’t have it, you are going to start spinning your wheels and going in circles; trust me on that one.
Once you have the vision (and yes, it can change - this is a start-up after all) you need focus. At the exclusion of all else, everyone in the organization must be 100% committed to executing that pre-defined vision. Your product roadmap must be committed to it. Your finance people must be committed to it. Your support reps, sales reps, etc…
If “really awesome / cool” product ideas start to seep into the culture, you’re sunk. Kill everything that exists that doesn’t support the vision and focusing on it.
Of course, let’s be realistic. You’re certainly going to want to assess whether your vision is attacking an appropriate market opportunity. If it’s not, that’s also a major cause for concern unless you know how to create new markets. That’s not entirely out of the question, but it is quite difficult.
Once these pieces are put together, you need to place your bets. You could be wrong. Trust me, it wouldn’t be the first time a start-up executed 100% correctly but failed due to external consequences (i.e., wrong market, wrong product, wrong timing, etc…). But if you can get something out the door that solves a problem for a set of people, are you light years ahead.
Again, and I can’t stress this enough, you very well may be wrong. Your board / investors have to be comfortable with the fact that not everyone hits a home run every time. Sure, take input - but don’t let things veer off course. Remember, you have to maintain focus in order to place a bet on the vision you’ve constructed.
OK, so say you get all of these things in place - what’s next? Well, you must be critical of the business. Let me repeat - “the business” does not mean “other people.” For example, you have an amazing quarter and are really rocking along (blowing away estimates, shipping stuff ahead of schedule, improving productivity, landing some key talent, etc…) how are you going to do better next quarter?
On the flip side, what if you have a horrible quarter? Don’t blame Jimmy in the mail room. Take ownership. Are you maintaining morale? Are you still maintaining your focus on the bets you’ve already placed? If not, you have some re-evaluating to do. Namely, identifying how things slipped off the rails during this time period. But always be heavily critical of the business. This dovetails into the next point…
Obsess about results. If you aren’t concerned with the results you are delivering, something is out of whack. If you can’t deliver the results you need to, change something. If you are delivering, see the previous point - heavily criticize the business.
Of course, this all may seem like common sense. I guess that’s kind of the point. It’s all the little things that really make the difference - and ultimately, being able to execute.
Don’t Get Paralyzed
One of the most important things about getting products out the door is being able to call it and…actually get it out the door. The tough part about doing that is not letting yourself become paralyzed by whether or not features are perfect, or competitors have already released them, or they have all the bells and whistles.
The key thing to answer is: does the feature solve a problem? Keep the requirements true to that problem and don’t waver. A feature will never be perfect. There is no such thing as a “silver bullet.” Or, if you believe there is, you can’t rely on them. Make sure you do the work to align features being implemented with your roadmap and go heads-down on them.
One of my best friends Cory taught me about analysis paralysis when I was just starting out in my career. It may sound like something totally cliche, but it happens all the time. PMs must not be afraid to push through this and draw the line. If you don’t have a ton of user data coming in, don’t get discouraged. Someone has to make the call or else things will never really be done. You’re expected to keep the product glued together as you go - not everyone can see this like the PM, and it’s not their job to do so.
Sure, large features can be implemented in stages. Of course. No one should expected anything less. You never get it all in or totally right the first time. But what you can absolutely nail is the fundamentals and actually executing. Does it add value? Is it aligned? Does it have the fundamental capabilities it needs to? Is it usable and clear? If all answers point to “yes” then you have nothing to worry about - just get it done and release it.
Maintain Your Focus
Here’s a great little bit from Manage It, by Johanna Rothman…this book is highly enlightening and it’s great to know I’m not the only person thinking some of these things.
I once worked for a company that decided aftear a several-day offsite strategy meeting that we were going to “focus on five.”
That isn’t focus.
Focus means to center all of the attention toward something. Five strategic areas are four too many.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common for companies to spread themselves too thin in order to be all things to all possible customers. If that’s the problem where you work, move to short iterations as quickly as possible so you can say to your management, “OK, we can start that next week, because we’ll be finishing this in two days.” Even better, make sure your iterations start and end in the middle of the week, such as a Wednesday. That way if your managers have “a-ha” ideas over the weekend, they’ll probably give you a couple of days to finish what you were doing.
Your team will thank you for maintaining focus.
Stay the course, folks.
If that course includes too much stuff, either strip some of the dead weight, or move on.
Starting Out with Objectives
I’ve started implementing a set of key objectives and associated metrics with the product team. This is a fun process - especially since I have had the opportunity to take part in corporate-level planning with the management team for 2008.
This gives me the ability to do something very important - ensure everything is aligned.
Since this is happening within the company for the first time, it’s crucial that what’s setup is flexible but still effective. And the team is involved. It’s so important to remember that while you are a manager of a team, you aren’t a dictator - everyone needs to truly believe in what’s happening.
Plus, you’ll never slam dunk something like this on your own. It’s always better to gather feedback; especially if you’ve built a team the right way. Everyone will be smarter than you, so they’re going to be able to point out where you’ve mis-stepped and how something can be made better. But, I digress.
So, the question still stands: where to start with objectives?
It’s a pretty easy process really. To me, the thing that makes the most sense for a product team is to want to build market-driven products. That’s a pretty solid objective - ensure you are building market-driven products.
If it seems like this is too hard to measure, it’s not. While there are several checks and balances you could put in place, keep it simple. Remember, even if you aren’t in a start-up, you don’t want your team (or yourself, for that matter) to waste a bunch of time entering metric values for your ongoing management or Board of Director reports.
So, how can you tell if you are building market-driven products? While, first, you want to make sure the product can get customers and keep them - customer retention. If you can’t land customers it’s either a problem with Sales, product or both. Since we are talking about product management, let’s assume it’s a product-level issue.
However, it’s key to remember this isn’t all about killer features. If you are losing customers at a nasty rate, you can make sure of a couple of things:
- Has the product grown stagnant between releases?
- Is the market responding to product pricing?
- Is client support and/or implementation a concern?
- Are market needs being identified and met?
Now, market needs also include defects. If you have a slew of bugs, you may want to think about holding off on the new features for a while and do a bug release. It seems tricky, and maybe complex, but it’s not. Make sure if you find defects, especially those that are high severity, you’re fixing them. Make sure you’re gathering and paying attention to market data and implementing the right features.
The other metric you may want to consider is the cash flow of the product. You can ascertain this by looking at a basic product P & L. Is your product costing more money to develop than it’s bringing in? If it’s an intentional loss leader, than that may be OK, but if you are dumping tens of thousands (or more) of company dollars into each release and nothing is being yielded by customers in return, you can question the following:
- Is the product priced appropriately?
- Is the product positioned to take advantage of the right market opportunities?
- Are product release cycles taking too long?
- Is there a large number of high severity defects hampering product operation?
If people are buying your product, and you are bringing in positive revenue per release cycle, it’s addressing the right market needs. If this isn’t happening, and it’s not identified as a loss leader, it’s time to look at whether its positioned correctly, targeted appropriately, and being sold the right way and for the right price.
These are pretty simplistic, and I’m sure there’s a lot more than could be used. However, I’m a fan of the basics. If you want to be market-driven, make sure you can get and keep customers, and people are willing to pay for your product.
Making a Huge Company Agile
Want to know what it takes to make a company - like, say, the size of General Electric, or Wal-Mart agile? Look no further than how Jack Welch ran things when he was the CEO of GE for over 2 decades.
I just reading through one of the great books he’s put out, and here are some interesting highlights:
- Embrace Change, Don’t Fear It
- Face Reality, Then Act Decisively
- Don’t Focus on the Numbers
- Be Lean and Agile Like a Small Company
- Tear Down Boundaries
This is really interesting to me, because as a company grows, folks tend to want to start putting in more process and layers of management. While I’m not against having effective process points, I like to think of things more like a framework so people can make their own decisions. Also, creating leaders that are driving home key parts of the business is imperative.
I try to keep my philosophies grounded around similar fundamentals. Not just in product management, but in constantly trying to improve my skill set and contributing as much as possible to the company being successful.
Bring in people that are just really damn good. Provide the tools and skills to help others become really damn good. It’s not beyond a successful leader to do so.
Ensuring that people don’t feel tethered to do whatever “senior management” wants is crucial. Great ideas really can come from anywhere in the business; making sure they are being heard is necessary in order for a company to become truly great.
Being so closely tied to product, it’s easy for me (and others) to become really wrapped up in “roadmaps” and “features” and “action items” and “metrics.” However, while these things can be sexy to talk about, they aren’t the fundamentals of a successful organization.
What’s the most critical part of defining a new product? Identifying the problem that product is going to solve. The same goes for a business.
Identifying the vision for that organization and the objectives that need to be met is 100% critical. Everything else will come after that, including some amazing / lightning bolt ideas. But, everyone has to be dialed-in to that vision. It can sound like rhetoric, but it’s really not.
