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

by Melissa Perri

Part III. Strategy

Capítulo Chave

A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions.

connects the vision and economic outcomes of the company back to product portfolio, individual product initiatives, and solution options for the teams.

Strategies are created at each level and then deployed across the organization.

This has made Netflix one of the most successful software companies to date. How did Netflix do it? First, it focused the entire company around a solid vision. This vision has evolved over time as the market has evolved. Now the vision for Netflix is, “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.” This vision states not only why the company exists but also the plan for getting there. It aligns the team in the right direction. Netflix then self-organized around key outcomes and strategies to help reach its goals.

aligning his team around a common guideline for evaluating its product strategy. That guideline was to “delight customers, in margin-enhancing, hard-to-copy ways.” He set goals that would accomplish this and would help Netflix execute on the company vision around key initiatives (Table III-1), including personalization, instant access to entertainment, and ease of use.

This combination of vision, goals, and key initiatives helps create a system in which Netflix can make decisions about its products — sometimes difficult decisions,

Netflix can change tactics or kill ideas because it commits itself not to the solutions they are building but rather to the outcomes these solutions produce. The company then enforces this mentality with a product strategy that is coherently aligned and decision enabling.

The powerful thing about a strategic framework like the one Netflix uses is that it forces you to think about the whole...

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.

The Art of Action, he writes: 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. A good strategy should sustain an organization for years. If you are changing strategy yearly or monthly, without good reason from data or the market, you are treating your strategy as a plan rather than as a framework.

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.

Lack of leadership alignment is by far the biggest issue I see standing in the way of successful product management.

Giving individuals and teams the freedom to adjust their actions so that they are in line with their goals is what will truly allow them to achieve results.

strategic framework promotes. If you’re aligned coherently and you have a good strategic framework, you can then allow people to make decisions without a lot of management oversight.

It prioritized big projects based on customer requests or contracts. It wasn’t thinking strategically about how to grow the product.

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.

getting the strategic framework right is essential for developing great products and services.

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. 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. Spotify maintains innovation by not establishing mandates about what to build from a higher-up perspective. Managers give employees the leeway to participate in hackathons and to implement their ideas. They set up an environment in which it’s safe to try new things and fail. Upper management is willing to embrace uncertainty about what customers want, and, by doing so, they create a work environment that embraces experimentation and innovation and that can course-correct quickly, when necessary.

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.

Not having the right level of direction lands us in the build trap.

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. All of these are based on the same premise — setting the direction for each level of an organization so they can act. Choosing the right framework is important for the organization, but understanding what makes a good strategy framework is even more important.

Figure 12-1. Strategy deployment levels

Strategy is about how you take the organization from where you currently are and reach the vision. For strategy to be created, you must first understand the vision, or where you want to go. Then we can identify problems or obstacles standing in our way of getting there and experiment around tackling them. We repeatedly do this until we reach the vision.

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

To understand the direction, you are looking at either the vision, strategic intent, or product initiative, depending on which level you are starting on.

Vision is not set solely top-down by management. The entire organization should be sharing information as they learn about what will reach goals, and help inform the strategy.

This process of communicating data and direction up and down — and across — the organization is how we maintain alignment. But it needs to first start at the company level.

By keeping an eye on the overall vision, the product people who test, develop, and grow these different products are able to make effective decisions about what they should and shouldn’t pursue.

The strategy needs to start at the corporate level, moving through the business lines, and ultimately arriving at the products. In

Here the company vision is the wrapper that gives meaning to all of the products and services you offer.

“What is the difference between a company mission and vision?” A good mission explains why the company exists. A vision, on the other hand, explains where the company is going based on that purpose.

Here