25k Q&A: Advice on Strategy, Influence, and Prioritization
In this week’s issue you’ll find advice on:
Ways to implement product stratey in a sales-led company
Building a business case to sunset a product that’s not performing
Balancing commercial, customer and tech goals
Building alignment on your product vision and strategy
Best questions to ask in user interviews
and more…
But first a bit of back story.
The other week, I passed 25k followers on LinkedIn, which made me reflect on the last five years of creating content.
Kidding aside, whilst I’m proud of the milestone it was never something I set out to achieve.
In fact, I took some convincing from multiple mentors to start putting content out there.
The thing that got me across the line was the idea that if something I shared helped even one person, it would be worth it.
Five years later, I still create content under the same belief.
So I thought, what better way to celebrate the milestone than to stay true to that mission with a Q&A?
So you’ll find two things in this week’s post:
The recording of a live Q&A I did hosted the other day
and a written summary of the questions and responses below.
I hope it helps!
“Can you suggest ways to implement a product strategy (or even should you?) in a sales-led company focused on revenue? E.g why would we need a strategy if our revenue growth has been strong?”
Short answer is yes.
There’s no reason why you can’t have a product strategy in a sales-dominated company.
The first thing I would probably be looking for is the company and sales strategy.
Great Product Strategies are aligned and cohesive with other strategies around the organization. So, if I were to pull together a Product Strategy, I would need to align it with the company and sales strategy anyway.
Now let’s assume, worst case, neither exist.
Unfortunately, in that case, you’ll have a hard time creating a product strategy and aligning people with it.
One of the biggest challenges (and I’m reading between the lines) in these situations is that a Product Strategy doesn’t solve any obvious problem.
Put yourself in the CEO’s shoes or the Chief Commercial Officer’s for a second.
If the company is growing, revenue is strong, and the sales engine is humming, why would you care whether you have a product strategy or not?
Which I guess is the crux of the question here.
This doesn’t mean all hope is lost, but here’s how I would tackle it.
What I have done before in similar situations is create a narrow product strategy.
Rather than trying to create a full-blown product strategy, I would start with a specific goal or problem to solve.
For example, if your sales are strong but retention isn’t, I’d start with “reduce churn by x%.”
If you can find a clear problem, default to the company’s sales or revenue targets.
I’d take that revenue goal (or problem) and build a strategy around that.
In other words, how will the product help the organization reach its revenue goals?
I would call it a narrow strategy as you’re not creating a holistic product strategy; instead, it’s a product strategy for a specific goal - narrow.
It's not ideal, but I would start there.
Since you’re framing the strategy as something they care about - ie “here’s how I’m going to help you achieve those revenue goals.” - you will have greater success creating buy-in.
Once you’ve built some success from executing that strategy you will have greater influence to expand your circle of control and hopefully be able to expand to a more holistic product strategy in the future.
The last thing that I touched on more in the video is, you can try to influence the founders and executives that you need a product strategy.
Here are a few things you can do:
Visualize the impact of short-term revenue growth at the expense of retention and customer lifetime value.
Work out the drivers for growth—i.e. Is it a growing market, and we’re just riding the wave? If so, how might you help them see that this growth won’t last forever?
“How would you approach the business when the product is not profiting anymore and it’s logical to discontinue?”
It’s all about building the business case.
You need to do the research to show that:
The product costs us $x per month, and we’re only making $y, losing $z per month.
There are no other secondary benefits. For example, the product isn’t a ‘loss leader’ or supporting another more profitable product where losses can be offset.
You’ve examined whether the product can be pivoted or improved, and based on your research and analysis, both courses of action aren’t viable for XYZ reasons.
Why and how would you recommend we sunset the product?
Package all that up. Get support from your product leader and other stakeholders where necessary, then take it to the appropriate person to make it happen.
It might sound like a lot of work, but it’s not.
I can bet that you already have most of the data since you’ve already concluded that it’s logical to sunset the product. Something has led you to that conclusion; you might just need to fill in any of the blanks above.
“How do you generally go about balancing commercial objectives against customer needs and, say, engineering requirements - especially when strong stakeholders are involved?”
I have a new favorite quote from Esther Perel:
This quote does a great job of encapsulating this scenario.
It’s not about finding a magic formula or process to solve this—it’s about managing the paradox.
The things that go through my head when I hear this question:
How bad is the tech debt?
Do we have an important tech upgrade?
What’s the cost of delay/not doing something (eg tech debt or shinny new feature)?
What are we trying to achieve as a business?
How is the business performing?
…etc
It’s contextual.
While we can throw percentages on things (e.g. 20% per sprint to tech debt) that needs to be intentional and based on the context.
Let me give you a real example.
I worked with a company once that was struggling financially. There was a real chance that if they couldn’t raise the next funding round or increase revenue, they would be out of business in the next 12 months.
Does investing a lot in solving tech debt make sense for them?
Probably not.
Does it make sense to double down on short-term revenue activities?
Probably.
It’s totally ok to trade the long term just to stay afloat in the short term.
After all, great foundations for the future mean nothing if you don’t have a company anymore.
Now, the question of difficult stakeholders is a different one.
I recognize that there are situations where the loudest person wins.
To help solve this, I would try a few things:
Use a 3rd reference point (I explain this in the Q&A, and there’s a video below on it, too)
Use transparency and visibility so the work can advocate for itself. By making the work and everything that you’re trying to trade-off from each other transparent, regardless of who is the loudest, everyone can see the rest of the work, and if it’s obviously not the most important, everyone can see that.
Separate data from opinions. You need to separate what’s opinions from facts. You will be able to have much more robust discussions when they’re focused on data and what we know to be true and not people’s opinions. Using a 3rd reference point can be a great way to start facilitating this.
(all these techniques are in the Stakeholder Management course on Product Pathways if you’re interested in a deep dive into them.)
Lastly, where possible, anchor everything back to strategy.
One activity I walk through in the Product Strategy Demystified course on Product Pathways is building narratives and gathering inputs on the state of the business, product, and market.
A lot of this process is about gathering the context to inform your decisions.
If you have difficult stakeholders, involve them in that process.
Product Strategy Workshop available on the MiroverseLink to the Product Strategy Workshop Template on Miro and a video walkthrough below.
“How to deal with a situation where nobody can agree on the vision and product strategy?”
Firstly, alignment takes time and effort.
The amount of time and effort was something I grossly underestimated early in my career.
With my clients, I tend to find that people hope for a ‘silver bullet’, something that will create and maintain alignment.
The reality is that it’s a constant process of creating alignment, drifting, and having to re-align.
One actionable thing you can do, however, is pre-circulation.
This means meeting with your stakeholders 1-on-1, sharing the vision and/or strategy with them and getting their feedback before getting everyone in a room or trying to present/evangelize it.
This achieves a few things:
Removes surprises. You don’t want the first time that a stakeholder sees your strategy or vision to be in a big room or people. Sometimes, people aren’t aligned because it’s the first time they’re seeing it, and it’s a surprise. Sometimes, misalignment happens not because they disagree but because they haven’t digested it yet or had the chance to ask clarifying questions.
Framing. On the note of asking clarifying questions. Sometimes, we get stuck because of how things are framed. A perfect example would be asking 10 different Product Managers what an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is. I bet you’d get 10 different answers. Clarifying what we mean by specific terms and even avoiding certain ones can be the difference between alignment vs not.
On that note, pre-circulation means that we have the chance to make (often) minor tweaks.
Makes stakeholders part of the process. Feeling like you’ve played a role in shaping the vision and strategy increases the likelihood of alignment and buy-in to that vision and strategy.
Safe space. Sharing on a one-on-one basis means that it’s much safer for stakeholders to voice their objections and feedback. No one wants to sound silly or misinformed in front of their peers.
And while we would love to work in an environment where whatever we share is met with acceptance and agreement, that’s not the case. Even in the most “empowered” organizations, you get push-back, disagreement, and feedback.
It’s important not to view feedback as personal or disempowering. Really, they want the best outcome, and they care. That’s why they’re challenging, it’s about strengthening the vision and strategy.
I also think that we do our peers and stakeholder a disservice by surprising them in forums. A townhall shouldn’t be where they see something like a product strategy for the first time.
Remember product is a team sport - we need to collaborate to drive the best outcomes.
Now there’s an important distinction here.
There’s a difference between collaborating, taking feedback and input and building a stakeholder driven vision or strategy.
Is there a comprehensive visual tool or framework that explains the entire Product Management end-to-end process more clearly?
Product Management is about driving product success. Unfortunately, that means it’s very contextual.
Therefore there’s no real process or framework that you can follow. There’s no single playbook.
But if it helps, because I know that it’s hard when you’re starting your product journey to make sense of the whole thing end-to-end.
The best visualisation I’ve seen is this one from Jeff Patton.
Credit: Jeff Patton. From Passionate Product Leadership CourseNow product is non-linear so this by no means is a sequential process and I believe Jeff tries to visualise it this way - as a circle and with ‘stances’ - to illustrate this.
The truth is there’s a lot of back and forth (see this post on the Messy Nature of Product)
I walk through the visual in the video so if you’re after a detail walk through.
What kind of questions we should ask during user interviews and what kind to avoid and how to structure them to remove bias based on order of questions?
I recently did a full post and webinar on this topic.
I gave the cliff notes in the video but to list them here too:
Make sure your questions are based on assumptions that you’re trying to test.
Seek to ask open ended rather than closed questions.
Avoid leading questions and introducing any form of bias (like anchoring).
Make sure you seek out real experiences over opinions.
Gather multiple data points. A way to do this with questions is to ask more than one question per assumption. If you tackle the assumption from multiple angles you can triangulate and see whether there are any discrepancies (note this is one of the 4 common product discovery mistakes that I see teams make).
What is the best way to balance urgent tasks with important long-term goals?
I’m not sure there’s a “best way” but here’s the mental models I use.
We can all agree that focusing only on long-term goals means there’s no capacity for support or quick wins = a problem.
Equally, no long-term work and you’re what I like to call “death by sprints” = also a problem.
So we must balance them and avoid extremes.
What’s a good balance?
Well, here’s a yard stick.
You’re probably familiar with the 3 horizon model.
A commonly quoted split between the 3 horizons is a 70-20-10 split.
Meaning:
70% invested into the near term,
20% in the mid, and
10% in the far-term.
Now I wouldn’t just blindly copy this.
Remember, it’s a mental model not a playbook.
Really they’re arbitrary numbers without understanding your context.
So this goes back to the previous question:
How important are the urgent tasks? Are they urgent but unimportant? or urgent and important?
How are we going strategically? Are we doing well as a business or not? Can we afford to not focus too much on the long-term?
What’s the cost of delay/not doing the urgent thing?
Equally, what’s the cost of delay/not doing the long-term things?
What’s our strategy?
How’s our operational excellence?
…etc
Once you’ve got a good understanding of your context the next step is basically an investment decision - How much are you willing to invest into long-term work and how much are you willing to invest in the near term?
Again this is contextual.
I’ve worked at a place where tech debt was so bad all they did was keep the lights on for 3 months and work on tech debt!
So use the 70:20:10 as a yardstick but remember that the final split is going to be based on your context and situation.
And of course this will shift overtime.
Regularly review it and adjust where appropriate.
That’s a wrap for this week!
I’ve had a crazy last couple of weeks and hence the slightly longer pause between posts than usual.
Been running training and spent the afternoon helping the teams out at the National Acoustic Laboratories in Australia.
They’re doing some really meaningful product innovations to help people with hearing difficulties!
Plus how cool is this anechoic chamber!
It’s 100% soundproof and inside is the quiest place on earth 🤯
