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September 12 - September 30, 2020
The VP of product is responsible for connecting the company goals back to the growth of their product line.
VPs of product are also directly responsible for the financial success of their product line, not just the delivery of product features.
VPs of product are often responsible for a product team of one or just a few, and they have to dive into tactical aspects of product work to ensure that things get done.
A CPO oversees a company’s entire product portfolio.
A company should think about adding a CPO when it starts to develop its second product, expands into another geography, or merges with another company.
The CPO is responsible for driving the economic success of the business through the growth of the product portfolio. Although a VP of product needs to understand how their product roadmap affects the economics of the company, a CPO needs to do that across all products. They work with the VPs of product to ensure that every product is strategically aligned to the company’s objectives and that each product has what it needs, from a resource and people perspective, to reach the established goals.
“Board members care about the financial impacts of the technology and product decisions. A successful CPO needs to be able to translate their actions into terms the board will understand.”
Assuming they are already skilled in all aspects of product, technology, and financial management, those that make the best chief product officers also have three key traits that set them apart: they inspire confidence, empathize, and are relentless and resilient.
To inspire confidence in the product direction, CPOs work across many functions to gain buy in and alignment. It’s necessary that they bridge and unify the key departments and stakeholders.
Having a strong product leader in the C-Suite is a critical step to becoming product-led.
To organize teams effectively, you need to balance the coverage and scope of teams with the goals you are trying to achieve.
One team is focused on retention, another on implementing new currencies, and another on acquiring new users. Each of the teams has ownership of their goal and is judged for success based on their outcomes.
A value stream is all of the activities needed to deliver value to the customer. That includes the processes, from discovering the problem, setting the goals, and conceiving of the idea, to delivering the actual product or service.
As your company scales to include more products, you will need more levels of management to effectively oversee the various areas. However, you don’t want to overdo it. Having the right number of levels also has a large impact on your strategy
Product managers need room to manage toward an entire outcome-oriented goal.
When organizations lack a coherent product strategy that is ruthlessly prioritized around a few key goals, they end up spreading themselves thin. There are many teams working to optimize components but not the whole. Don’t forget that, to make a considerable impact, you need to have everyone going in the same direction, working toward the same goals,
A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions.
Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions.
it focused the entire company around a solid vision.
“Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience.”
That guideline was to “delight customers, in margin-enhancing, hard-to-copy ways.”
The powerful thing about a strategic framework like the one Netflix uses is that it forces you to think about the whole before zooming in on the details.
Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions.
Thinking of strategy as a plan is what gets us into the build trap. We keep adding new features to the list but have no way to evaluate whether they are the right features in the holistic context of our company.
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
A good strategy should transcend the iterations of features, focusing more on the higher-level goals and vision.
The Knowledge Gap (Figure 11-1) is the difference between what management would like to know and what the company actually knows.
upper management should be limiting its direction to defining and communicating the strategic intent, or the goals of the business.
The Alignment Gap, shown in Figure 11-2, is the difference between what people do and what management wants them to do, which is to achieve the business goals.
Product teams need the freedom to explore solutions and to adjust their actions according to the data they receive. As long as they are aligned with the overall strategic intents and vision for the company, management should feel comfortable granting the necessary autonomy to capable teams.
Instead of sending down mandates, organizations should, instead, turn to aligning every level of the company around the why and should give the next layer down the opportunity to figure out the how and report back.
Lack of leadership alignment is by far the biggest issue I see standing in the way of successful product management.
The Effects Gap (Figure 11-3) is the difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what actually happens.
Stephen Bungay from the Art of Action
A good company strategy should be made up of two parts: the operational framework, or how to keep the day-to-day activities of a company moving; and the strategic framework, or how the company realizes the vision through product and service development in the market.
Having a strong company vision and product visions that align to the strategic framework helps companies avoid swirl in planning and execution.
Think of the major pieces of work you do that are actually bets.
When strategy is communicated well in an organization, product development and management are synchronized.
The company strategy informs the activities of the product development teams, and the execution of work on the products and data this produces informs the company direction. This should be a cyclical process throughout the organization, in which information is being communicated up, down,
Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.
Jabe Bloom, the founder of consulting firm PraxisFlow,
Strategy deployment is about setting the right level of goals and objectives throughout the organization to narrow the playing field so that teams can act.
Appropriately constrained teams, ones who have a direction set to the right level for them, feel safe to make decisions because they can see how their stories align to the goals and structure of the organization.
Strategy creation is the process of figuring out which direction the company should act upon and of developing the framework in which people make decisions.
Strategy is about how you take the organization from where you currently are and reach the vision.
The Kata teaches people in the company how to strategically tackle problems to reach goals.
During the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycles — in step 4, teams go through and systematically identify obstacles standing in the way of reaching the target condition, their next goal, plan out how to tackle it, and then experiment in order to see whether the plan worked.
The company vision is the linchpin in the strategy architecture. It sets the direction and provides meaning for everything that follows. Having a strong company vision gives you a framework around which to think about your products.
Amazon notes that its company vision is, “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”
A good mission explains why the company exists. A vision, on the other hand, explains where the company is going based on that purpose.
