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

by Melissa Perri

One experienced product manager told me, “I keep having leaders tell me to own the vision of my product, but I’m not allowed. My manager keeps handing me solutions. Every time I try to suggest something different, I’m shut down. When

Talking to the leaders of Marquetly, I heard a different story. “Our product managers won’t step up and own the product. I have to keep prescribing things for them, but it’s because they don’t take initiative.”

When teams are not aligned with a clear direction and goals, they cannot effectively make decisions. If they dare to try, much of the time, the leader steps in and says, “No, that’s not right.”

Chris was a huge fan of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and had implemented them throughout the company, but they were very output-oriented instead of outcome-oriented.

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.

Think of the major pieces of work you do that are actually bets. Henrik Kniberg, a former consultant at Spotify, explains that this is how Spotify thinks.1 The company operates using something called DIBBs, which stands for Data, Insights, Beliefs, and Bets. The first three things, data, insight, and beliefs, inform a piece of work called a bet. The concept of thinking of initiatives as bets is powerful because it sets up a different type of expectation.

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.

At different levels of organizations, we tell stories with different scales of time (timespans), about our work and why we are doing it. In order for people to act on the stories they hear, the stories can’t have significantly different time scales than they are accustomed to. Agile teams are really good at telling two- to four-week stories. That’s what they deal with on a daily basis. As you go up in the organization, you tell stories with longer timespans. Executives are really good at telling five-year stories, but a team cannot act on a five-year story when they’re used to thinking in two to four weeks. There’s too much space to explore.

The unconstrained team is the most frightened and scared to act in the organization. They feel like they cannot make a decision because there are too many options. 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.

Teams are given instructions that are either too prescriptive or too broad. Executives will get too far into the weeds, managing by authority and not allowing autonomy. Or teams could, as Bloom mentioned, be given so much freedom they are unable to act.

There are many examples of strategy deployment across organizations. OKRs is a type of strategy deployment used by Google. Hoshin Kanri is a strategy deployment method used by Toyota. Even the military uses strategy deployment with mission command.

In most product organizations, there should be four major levels in strategy deployment (see Figure 12-1): Vision Strategic intent Product initiatives Options

Figure 12-1. Strategy deployment levels

Figure 12-3. The Product Kata, by Melissa Perri

To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker

Many companies create a vision statement that is something like, “To be the market leader in online photo storage.” Although that’s a good thing to strive for, it leaves the rest of the company asking how and why. It’s too broad.

Although the vision should remain stable over a long period of time, how you intend to reach that vision changes as your company matures and develops. Strategic intents communicate the company’s current areas of focus that help realize the vision. Strategic intents usually take a while to reach, on the magnitude of one to several years.

Figure 13-1. Framework for thinking about value, by Joshua Arnold (reprinted by permission of Joshua Arnold, © 2002)

Getting the right level and number of strategic intents is incredibly important. As Marquetly found out before, too many higher-level goals, and you are back to peanut buttering. I once saw a company with 5,000 people have 80 strategic intents. With 5,000 people, they shipped only one feature per quarter because everyone was wildly distracted and working on too many things.

One intent is usually good for a small company, and three are plenty for a large organization. Yes, three.

Strategic intents should be at a high level and business focused. They are about entering new markets, creating new revenue streams, or doubling down in certain areas. Think back to the Netflix example at the beginning of this section. Netflix had a clear strategic intent: “Lead the streaming market.”

It’s not that you don’t have time to innovate; it’s that you are not making time to innovate. To find that space, you’re going to need to say no to some things.