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Is Your Product Strategy a ‘Word Salad’?

Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.

Useful Frameworks

A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.

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An Advocacy Strategy is Nutrition for a Healthy Culture

I travel a lot. I could always choose the cheapest airline, or the most convenient, or I could look for the airline with the most comfortable seats. I don’t. I always start with Delta airlines. Why? Because I believe that they run a responsible business that cares about the people it serves. My family recently traveled and had a bag come open somewhere in transit. I’ll spare you the details of what was lost, but I will tell you that it was something very important to our trip. Delta made us feel as though they mobilized, what felt like, a small army of people searching across the baggage claim systems of three airports until our problem was solved. More importantly, they kept us looped in, by text and phone, on the progress as they worked it out. Even though the device was forever lost, we actually felt good about our relationship with the airline in the end.

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The Calculus of Trust

Many of my friends distrust their internet providers. The cable company I subscribe to for internet services, for example, has clearly demonstrated that they don’t care about my family. To fix a recent bandwidth issue, we had to call several times, explain our problem to several people and ask to speak to a manager to finally get a technician to visit our home to troubleshoot the recurring latency issues. Their gross demonstration of incompetence and lack of concern for me led me to have deep feelings of distrust for the firm. Even though the technician who ultimately resolved the issue was competent and clearly wanted to do a good job, the corporate bureaucracy, incompetence, and clear placement of profits over people broke any trust I had down. While my family is still paying for the service, the moment a better alternative comes along, what do you think we will be doing? I assure you, based on many conversations that I have had since the incident, that I am not alone.

If we take the time to break trust down and describe it mathematically, it will help us to be more purposeful with our language when we speak about it and when we use it to lead others. It will also help us to brainstorm and craft our tactical approach to earning more trust in more powerful ways with our teams.

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Prioritizing Stakeholders Drives Targeted, Impactful Outcomes

Why Treating Every Client As #1 Gets Us In Trouble

Clarifying Our Vision Through Strategic Stakeholder Prioritization

In any thriving business, possessing a clear, mutually understood vision of whom your organization serves stands as the hallmark of robust strategy and compelling leadership. This understanding becomes particularly critical as organizations expand, necessitating that leadership teams grasp and effectively communicate the complexities of stakeholder hierarchies. These hierarchies guide more informed, effective decision-making that aligns with the organization’s long-term objectives.

However, misconceptions or misalignments within these hierarchies can lead to significant strategic missteps, often manifesting as widespread confusion about the primary focus of service. This blog proposes a structured approach to dissecting and prioritizing stakeholders to ensure targeted, impactful engagements.

Several years ago, I collaborated with a major corporation grappling with a technology crisis. To make a long story short, market criticisms about security vulnerabilities within their key software precipitated a hasty decision to overhaul and re-platform the application. Driven by a reactive concern for market perceptions – primarily focused on stock price impact – the corporation’s leadership mandated a rapid redevelopment cycle. This rush sidelined potential incremental improvements, aiming instead for feature parity with the legacy system.

Upon release, the new version (while technically superior) failed to meet user expectations. This led to market backlash and a tarnished brand reputation. While totally understandable, this scenario exemplifies a breakdown in understanding service hierarchies, where the focus skewed too heavily toward investor concerns at the expense of user satisfaction.

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Business as High Art (A Bird’s Eye View of Culture)

A well-run organization, with highly motivated and aligned people, is a powerful form of high art. It includes the performance art of your people delivering services and coordinating activities at scale and it has artifacts, symbols, and physical art that have the potential to leave a profound impression on the people it touches. The art manifests in and through all of the layers of the organization’s culture.

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Freedom and Structure: The Creativity Curve

The motivation of the people you surround yourself with is the wellspring of creativity in your life.

There is a complex relationship between motivation, psychological safety, the structure you impose, and the innovation that results. It is not as simple as you might think. The guru on the subject, author Amy Edmonson, Ph.D., coined the term ‘psychological safety’ and has spent the bulk of her career as a professor and researcher at Harvard University studying teams, teaming, and the dynamics of this phenomenon.

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Great Business Leaders

The greatest of leaders shift the thinking and behaviors of those they lead in ways that cause more caring and more influence through competence. They transform the thinking of those they serve by shifting the language of the group from “I” to “We” thinking at scale. Their work transforms their followers into leaders, through language, by empowering them to each scale both caring and influence in their work. The most successful leaders craft language, create tools, and follow through with actions that allow their leadership to resonate for generations. Natural leaders have an uncanny ability to inspire others into action to create sustainable, long-lasting positive results. They do it by purposefully scaling both the capacity for influence and the capacity for caring in those they lead.

Great leaders profoundly scale the capacity for caring and the capacity for influence of the people they lead.

 

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Commitment is Rare In Business

Commitment is rare. Building a culture of commitment in your organization accelerates trust.

People often avoid making small interpersonal commitments because they are risky. According to Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning and prolific academic, we value loss about twice as much as we value gains, thus it follows that we are more likely to avoid a negative experience resulting from a missed promise than to take the unnecessary risk of making a commitment. However, when you make commitments and keep them, even small promises, it builds trust faster. Being purposeful about the promises and commitments you make to your customers, your colleagues, and your friends can transform your business and even your life. Building commitment into your culture and empowering your people to make measured and valuable commitments can have a big impact on how you earn trust. Companies often make contractual guarantees and issue warranties because they know how important commitments are, but the small promises that are made every day, through normal interactions can be just as important in helping your people and your firm earn trust from your customers. Lots of small, valuable interpersonal commitments add up, over time, and can be even more valuable to the people you serve than those big corporate commitments that we tout in our marketing materials. This small tactic also has the ability to transform your internal culture by boosting internal trust between colleagues. As long as the intent to keep them is certain.

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Product Leadership and Sticky Notes

Our industry owes sticky notes a tribute.

Sticky notes have become a prized item in the product leader toolbox. We use them to brainstorm, sort, prioritize, vote, organize, group and rearrange everything from thoughts, domains, and problems to ideas, concepts and user stories. It is fair to say we would be lost without them in the product development world today.

We have learned a lot about how to use them and how not to use them along the way. Stick-note sorceresses, whiteboard wizards & flip-chart fortune tellers might improve their craft by learning from our misfortunes and innovations over the last couple of decades, so I am sharing them here.

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The Nature of Competition

Experience is what creates sustainable competitive advantage. This is the nature of competition.

The Experience Puzzle

Economists have argued for centuries about the nature of competition.

According to Adam Smith in the 18th century, every individual “intends only his own gain.” Therefore, he exchanges what he produces with others who sufficiently value what he has to offer. One thing many economists agree on is the elusive nature of individual utility. What one man values, others often ignore. This simple fact is what drives human innovation and ingenuity.

I was taught many things about competition and positioning in the course of earning my MBA, We read about Michael Porter’s five-forces model, Jerome McCarthy’s 4 P’s of Marketing, and a few other generic frameworks, which invariably describe the relationship between cost and target positioning. One model that stuck with me, as I have seen it used countless times in business, is a more traditional contextual model for determining the positioning of your product, your services and ultimately for your firm called “The Tradeoff Triangle.”

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