Decoding the Product Manager (Part 4)

The Compass to Product Success Without Burnout

Last year, my product team and I were consumed by "keep the lights on" activities: developing custom features, fixing bugs, and addressing technical debt. Despite long hours, constant updates, and meetings, the client rollout, usage, quality, experience, and performance didn't improve. The product and tech felt like black boxes, and the roadmap just a feature wish list. The executive pushed for more execution, but people were exhausted and burnt out.

Looking back, we mistook product strategy and business alignment issues for execution problems. We churned out features with minimal value, making the product too complex to maintain and too difficult to deploy. Sales and Customer Service were burdened, and clients were hesitant to adopt it.

Product Vision and Strategy

So how would product vision and strategy help us steer clear from the problems we mentioned above? Before answering this, let us start with some fundamentals. What is product vision and strategy?

Product Vision - The purpose of the product and the positive change it brings to the world. It's an inspiring, lofty statement shared among everyone in the team to create alignment and facilitate collaboration. It represents the destiny in the next five to ten years. A good example:

• Uber: We ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion.

Product Strategy - The plan of how you are going to realize the vision, to win in the marketplace. It's a rigorous logical plan based on external and internal data analysis, researches and insights. It's your path to the destiny. Building on the product vision, the product strategy has four parts:

1. Target segment: Who are you serving?

2. Unmet needs: What problems are you solving?

3. Differentiators: What makes you unique?

4. Business goals: How does your product benefit the business?

Uber's original pitch to VC was a good example to articulate these 4 parts. In 2008, Uber was positioned as a limo on-demand service competing against cabs. The product was called UberCab.

• The target market: Professionals in American cities, San Francisco, New York

• The unmet needs: inconvenient and suboptimal experience to the riders and underpaid drivers

• The differentiators: Faster, cheaper, nicer, safer rides without the need to call, and with real-time driver tracking

• Business benefits: profitable by design, scalable technology platform, pre-paid cashless billing

There are two main benefits of putting shared product vision and strategy in place before getting into the product roadmap and backlog.

A) Guide us in decision-making

The product strategy keeps us focused on the big strategic pillars for the next two to three years. It guides us when deciding what we are going to do or not going to do. It helps us say NO to good ideas so we can focus on truly great ones that can forge the product foundation and drive growth. Cases in point:

• Apple is renowned for its minimalist design and focused product line. It famously rejected features like physical keyboards on iPhones, prioritizing user experience to ensure iPhones remained sleek and user-friendly.

• Southwest Airlines remained committed to its low-cost, no-frills model despite other airlines adding fees and complexities, maintaining a loyal customer base.

B) Create alignment and clarity

It takes time to complete a product vision and strategy as it is not a Product team only exercise. The process of crafting product vision and strategy in itself is a great practice to get inputs and buy-in from different teams and stakeholders to create a shared vision and strategy. A good product strategy gets everyone on the same page, fostering more collaboration, innovation, and reducing friction.

In the right order

Product vision, product strategy, product roadmap, and backlog form a top-down stack. One should always start from the top and cascade down. Once we establish a solid product strategy, the team is empowered to create a product roadmap, an OKRs-driven roadmap where feature sets and timelines are associated with product key results measured by business metrics. Then roadmap leads to backlogs for each sprint. The planning, prioritization of each feature, UX/UI design, and non-functional requirements are driven by OKRs. Since each feature states the specific value it's likely to bring, making trade-offs and alignment is easier. Finally, the teams can connect daily work they do all the way back up to the business metrics, people are more motivated in their daily endeavor. The execution gets smoother, and the business starts to grow.

Conclusion

In summary, many seemingly execution problems are actually strategic and business alignment problems. We should address them with the right product vision and strategy:

1. Do thorough customer, market, and business due diligence. Take time and effort to craft your product vision and strategy.

2. Focus on highly value strategic pillars while working out the product roadmap and backlog. Learn to say 'No' to yourself and stakeholders.

3. Continuously align your vision/strategy/roadmap with executives and stakeholders by articulating the OKRs and metrics.

4. Keep reevaluating the strategy to ensure it’s on big business levers. If not, be prepared to pivot.

Though good strategy can't bear fruit without good execution, good execution without a good product vision and strategy is like starting a journey without direction and signposts. It won't get you anywhere. Remember, a strong product vision and strategy can save you from burnout and help you achieve sustainable growth.

Reference

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri 

https://dan-olsen.com/book/

Author

Sherman Jiang, a product leader with a proven track record of success at Fortune 500 companies like Visa, HSBC, and Synchrony and honed expertise in Silicon Valley’s fast-paced tech scene. My passion lies in empowering payment and fintech companies through the power of Agile and AI augment. I specialize in engagement of team transformations, product strategy, product discovery, and product delivery. I’m also enthusiastic about how generative AI can make product managers better.

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