How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri

i've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people and 99 of the time i see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy because once you train those people they have no context on what to work towards so it's such an a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations or try to set up a product organization so you either need somebody in there to do it or you got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you through her speaking consulting interim cpo roles and teaching at both harvard business school and online melissa perry has seen more product orgs up close than possibly any human alive in our chat we cover the most common problems that product teams face and how to overcome them when to hire your first pm how to hone your craft as a pm signs you're doing a bad job as a pm also how to structure your product teams and product development process signs your team doesn't have a strategy and how to come up with one also how to come up with a product vision and so much more i love chatting with melissa and i learned a ton and i can't wait for you to hear this episode if you're setting up your analytics stack but you're not using amplitude what are you doing amplitude is the number one most popular analytics solution in the world used by both big companies like shopify instacart and atlassian and also most tech startups amplitude has everything you need including a powerful and fully self-service analytics product an experimentation platform and even an integrated customer data platform to help you understand your users like never before give your teams self-service product data to understand your users drive conversions and increase engagement growth and revenue get your vanity metrics trust your data work smarter and grow your business try amplitude for free just visit amplitude.com to get started this episode is brought to you by revenuecat revenuecad makes it easy to build analyze and grow in-app subscriptions on ios android and the web their platform lets you focus on growth rather than getting bogged down in subscription infrastructure revenue cap provides a back-end and a wrapper around apple store kit and google play billing to handle the implementation and upkeep of in-app purchases revenuecad is your source of truth for customer status across platforms and provides out-of-the-box analytics for key subscription metrics like monthly recurring revenue lifetime value retention and more with revenue cap you also get pre-built integrations with best-in-class tools like amplitude apps flyer and firebase that means reliable consistent data sync to your entire product and growth stack in minutes see why companies like notion bisco and life360 use revenue cap to power in-app subscriptions learn more at revenuecat.com [Music] melissa welcome thank you so much for joining me thanks for having me it's absolutely my pleasure i wanted to set a little context for folks that may not be familiar with you um how many pms have you worked with and helped would you say over the course of your career so between teaching consulting and all of those different things it's probably north of 4000 at this point i think we're approaching 5 000 now oh my god okay and then how many companies would you say you've worked with so if we're talking like deep consulting since i started products labs we've done over 30 companies where we've been in there did something with them either transformation wise or setting up their pm work or setting their strategy helping with road maps if we're talking training we're into the multiple hundreds okay uh insane would you say that you're maybe in the top three maybe top five people in the world that have worked with the most product managers or you've even met the most product managers i know a lot of people who do what i do so um i think probably among them probably among them but i haven't counted everybody else's okay so for all these reasons i'm really excited to dig into a lot of the stuff that you've learned along this journey and things that people can take away from your experience what do you spend your time doing these days i know there's a lot a lot in your portfolio well right now i'll say my primary focus is on training and education in product management so i'm teaching at harvard i teach the second year mbas and their elective program product management so they can choose whether or not they want to take that but that's been really great and then i have had an online school since 2016 called product institute so it's all a self-serve online education place where we have multiple courses in product management we have trained almost all of the fortune 100 companies at this point through that with product management which is great but a lot of different growth stage companies coming in there too and smaller companies as well so been doing that for quite some time and then i more recently started cpo accelerator which is a program to help vps and heads of product really make the leap into the c-suite so that's been really great because i i believe that the more we train people to be better product executives the better the products they'll make and the better product managers they'll make by training them as well so that's been my primary focus i am writing another book called product operations after writing escaping the bill trap i thought i would never write again but it's time you know you know that feeling so i'm excited about that i'm running it with my former vp of product at productslabs denise and yeah before i was doing this what i'm doing right now i was doing all that plus i was also consulting pretty deeply with companies through products labs but at the end of 2020 i took a step back from that to take a little break from it kind of focus more on the teaching aspects of things and try to figure out what else i'm gonna do from here i love that you mentioned your book you almost didn't and i was gonna make sure to mention it and we're gonna talk about it more in a little bit and i have it right here and hopefully i can get it signed someday in real life um before we get into that so you've worked with dozens of companies directly hundreds maybe indirectly through the course and then like you said thousands of pms when you come into a company they basically bring you in to help them level up their product team their product management function what are like one or two of the most common problems that you run into or even unexpected problems you run into especially at modern tech companies not like you know ford and things like that no offense um what do you what do you run into usually in 2014 i started consulting with companies through products labs and it's funny because some people will be like oh well you've never worked with i get i get two sides of it i'll get the well you don't really work with the sas companies but i had a whole partnership with insight venture partners where we go in and play the interim cpo role in their high growth sas companies we'd help them scale we'd set their strategy and their road maps and all that stuff so we did that for a long time and then i have also come in and helped organizations that aren't really sas like banks and um a lot of banks oh bob a lot of banks uh but your pharmaceutical companies and all these other ones to kind of set up product management for the first time so i've seen the whole gamut from like super you know software focused teams to companies that are still just just figuring out software and it's been great because some of the the companies i've worked with now since 2014 i've been able to see you know eight years of their progressions and what they go through with that and i'd say like it's very different if you're sas versus non-sas but if we're talking about like the sas companies that get software like software is what they sell software is a critical part of the strategy they're bought in they know that it's really important one of the biggest issues i kind of see with them and product management is at this pivotal scale-up phase where they go from hey i found product market fit too i'm ready to scale one it's hiring a great cheap product officer that can help them figure out what the next phase is so it's basically there's this junction point where they go from single product to multi-product but then they have to manage a complex portfolio and then they have to scale rapidly at that point they have to re rethink their entire strategy right and then they have to focus because they have all of these choices to keep building for their existing customers and you know just take everything off the you know the backlog because everybody's requesting things they really have to focus and prioritize and that becomes absolutely critical but it's usually the first time that companies actually had to form a comprehensive strategy in a prioritized strategy and deploy it to hundreds of employees which will scale to thousands of employees and that is hard like it's not easy to do and if you've never done it before which a lot of people haven't in that position that becomes really complicated and then there's some companies too that bypass that initial growth phase because they already could clearly see what their you know second third product should be and they were scaling really fast and that's awesome and they're really really successful but then they start to plateau and they have the same problem where they have to rethink reprioritize and it just always comes back to how do i set strategy how do i deploy strategy and how do i like make sure it's well communicated and that everything that we're doing on the tech teams on the product teams is laddered up into a company strategy that's well prioritized but that has to be the biggest issue that i see with companies at all that are just like they get the software piece they know it's a critical part of their business it's just like how do we prioritize it and double down and build the org and find the right people to build it all out i'd love to double click on that what is a sign that it's time for a cpo and and then what do you look for when you're hiring a cpu i know these are big questions but i'd love to hear your thoughts usually whoever was a product leader whether it was a founder or maybe somebody was a little bit more junior in those phases at the beginning finding product market fit trying to get into the growth stage early growth stage it's really about execution at that point it's like rapidly experimentation trying to figure that out and all hands on deck you're usually a little bit in the weeds as well doing the work yourself too and then when you get into needing a cpo it's like hey we actually have to pull together a product strategy that's all-encompassing we have to have great communication between product and the executive team a big sign for me when i've come in and worked with like boards or executive teams as well is they're telling me like i don't really know what's going on in tech or product i have no idea if we're like achieving our goals if your executives and your board are telling you that the person who's communicating those things to them are usually not chief product officer level right like if you are if you your executives don't know what you're doing that's that's a big problem so uh that's usually the sign to me that we need that i go in when i was going in and consulting like pretty deeply the first thing i would do is go to all the teams if there was like 5 000 teams of smattering of teams but i'd always ask them like what are you working on what's the most important thing you could be doing and why and i would try to ladder that up myself into a strategy and see if it was connected right and if it wasn't connected that's telling me somebody is not formulating the strategy and deploying it down and then that's telling me there's a lack of strategy at the top and that that would be like hey is there a cpo here and if there is maybe this person isn't right for the job or there's no cpo and we do need somebody around this to actually formulate that strategy on an org design perspective with the team i'd look at the product managers if the product managers aren't sometimes you have great product managers and they're frustrated because they're not getting the direction they need and you tell their great product managers like they know what they're doing they're in there showing me there's a lack of leadership there if there's trouble hiring product managers that's a good sign that you need a cpo you need somebody they can learn from and give them those opportunities and if there's a lot of junior product managers who've never done it before it's like what's their training you know what's their training path is there something in there is there a process implemented where everybody can follow it is there a a way for them to learn if those things are lacking it's telling me like there's a gap in leadership on the product level awesome that is really helpful is there like a number of pms that it usually ends up being of how many pms you have when it's time to maybe hire a cpo it really differs i'd say the critical junction points i found deal more with company strategy so like we used to talk about this a lot at insight but it's kind of like if you're going above 10 million dollars in ar it's usually when you hit around 20 to 30 you start to bring on a cpo and a high growth company what the product starts to look like is you have multi products you have more than two or more sometimes you can have a vp of product over to you that's totally fine but as soon as you start to think about expanding into a more complex portfolio after that i'd look for probably a cpo if you're expanding geographically if you're going into new markets like drastically new markets the more complex your portfolio the bigger the sign is that you need a cpo if you're doing a major transformation or pivot if you're doing a huge merger of two companies you're probably going to need a cpo of those two things so those types of events usually lay to if you don't have a cpo it's it's time to get one the number of product managers i'd probably say it starts to hit around like maybe eight seven to eight is usually what i'd look for but it depends on what the rest of the team looks like too so a lot of times chief product officers especially in a high growth company are not going to be over just product right we'd have product reporting into them design some kind of product operations sometimes analytics depending on what company it is and then even in certain cases i put engineering underneath a cpo when there hasn't been really strong engineering leadership and you need to have product leading tech and maybe there's a disconnect there and it's just like you don't have time you need one liter you need to simplify it and go so depending on the scope that somebody is covering as well if they're only seeing product and there's no opportunity for them to be over designed or something else we'll probably stick with the vp of product but if you need a singular lead leader to bring all those things together that's where i would start looking for a chief product officer too what do you suggest companies do up until that point i know titles are not necessarily consistent i imagine usually there's like a head of product before that point is that what you'd recommend what should you do up until you get to a point where it's time for a cpo head of product or vpa product i think are very interchangeable in my head what a bp a product or a head of product is is a functional leader around product management sometimes you have design reporting into them sometimes not but they're very good at implementing processes so that product works smoothly they can pull together the roadmap across all of your product managers they can usually train lower level people where the gaps come between that and becoming an executive is like interfacing with the board understanding the financials super deeply so that you can create revenue projections off of what your roadmaps and your products strategy is going to be so like chief product officers have to deeply understand how to get from you know roadmap to revenue and how to analyze those things and put it into perspective so they're usually joined at the hip with the chief revenue officer or the head of sales the cfo they can confidently project to the board they're a fantastic executive navigator when it comes to dealing with other executives and bringing those things together and they can oversee a lot more functions than just product usually like everything can kind of you know they're they're a senior enough person where you can have a couple different functional lives report into them with a head of design head of product reporting up so vps of product are usually fantastic at growing like one or two products but then when you get into multi-product strategies or very complex platform strategies and the scope starts to to really creep that's where i would start to bring into bringing a cpo i was going to ask you about what to look for in a cpu and you answered it so amazing real quick before we move on to kind of the skill of product management and some thoughts there when would it make sense for a company to consider bringing in someone like you to do either interim cpr role or just to help out yeah um so i hope you never need me that's that's my goal with everything i do i'm always like i just wanted to be i would love to put myself out of business one day because i i just want this to work really well but where i am needed is usually when a ceo isn't sure who is the right person to hire they're usually on the fence i've come into organizations to help ceos where they're like do we need a product person to oversee this like i don't know what a product person does and i usually talk them through like hey what are the challenges you're having and they tell me everything and i'm like okay these ones are actually caused by you not having that partner to work with right like if you had that partner this is what they could take off your plate and free you up to focus on your vision and you know fundraising and all the other stuff that you have to do as a ceo so typically that's where i'd come into advise and when i came in and consulting in the past my motto was always like well first i i'll say like i spent a long time doing transformational work where i would deeply embed and try to push org design and you know deploying strategy and really taking these organizations that didn't understand product management helping them design how to do it so i did that for quite a while and then when i started working with gross stage companies my objective was like how do i get in and get out as fast as possible and bring them in the right leaders so what i learned having been like deeply embedded with these organizations doing this transformation work was you know somebody needs to be at the helm of all of this work consistently right and they also have to be able to make the decisions as well so you can hire a consultant but if you don't listen to the consultant nothing's going to change and that does happen more often than you think where everybody just hires and they're like no not that way and you're like okay well you know it's up to you at the end of the day i can't change it for you i've also had people hire me as a consultant and be like well no you you change it and i'm like i can't like like you can't just tell me to do your job like you have to go out there and and do it yourself but i will give you all the important choices and try to decide it to meet your needs and you know sometimes it's not coming out super ideal and perfect but it's all a transition right like we make road maps for transformations but being deeply embedded like this i was starting to think like how do i make sure that this lasts and i that's where i believe strong product leadership comes in whether you train somebody up in the organization to take that role over and keep driving it forward or you hire in somebody who knows what they're doing so when i started working with insight our premise was like we will never touch a company or be in a company hands-on for more than three months right and the idea was within that three months we hired a chief product officer to take the helm and we do just enough to keep it on track playing an interim cpo role to make sure that you know they can keep delivering they could keep growing we'd have just you know enough of a roadmap to keep the teams moving we trained them a little bit we helped implement some processes we'd help set like we'd help get all the information a cpo would need so that when they walked into that organization they could read the background on their customers understand what the strategy is so far look at the current roadmap watch some customer interviews you know know who to talk to get the lay of the land and have like some people working on stuff and then they could take the time they need to actually build a strategy that's going to help grow the company so really at the end of the day when you need some help you realize something is not working but you're not sure how to make it right and then you can either hire in a leader sometimes the question is what kind of leader that's when you try to hire a consultant get some outside expertise on that or if you want to hire an interim cpo type person you have to understand like that's very temporary unless you're trying to convert that person into a full time which is totally fine if you want to do that and have those expectations going in but consultants can only help as well when you're willing to take action so i tell some companies as well at the beginning like you're not ready for this unless you are ready to take action and sometimes that's drastic change sometimes that's changing up people sometimes you look at your organization and say this isn't the organization that's gonna get me to the next level so we're gonna have to make some changes we're gonna have to hire in some more senior people as well who can help train the masses of other people that need training we're gonna have to make some hard decisions and you have to reevaluate your strategy a lot of times and figure out how to set course with that too i've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people and 99 of the time i see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy because once you train those people they have no context on what to work towards so it's such an a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations or try to set up a product organization so you either need somebody in there to do it or you gotta really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you i was gonna save these questions for later but it's a good time as any to get into them around strategy which your book is about i would say is the fact that people just build feature features features and don't really have a strategy or are using a strategy and so just spending a little time there what are signs that your team or your company either doesn't have a strategy or aren't using their strategy yeah that's a great question signs that there are no strategy teams are all working like dogs like they're they're working 80 hours a week i see this all the time people are heads down crunch and crunch and crunching releasing releasing releasing or sometimes not releasing but they're working like crazy and none of the metrics are moving so the executive team is going what is happening product is a black box tex tech is a black box we've got all of these people what do they do all day like great example of when there is no strategy and what usually is happening is there's there's this missing middle it's like we all know exactly what each team we don't all know actually what each team is working on the teams all know exactly what they're working on which is usually some kind of feature enhancement new features whatever you got right bug fixes all that wonderful stuff very the people they report to usually know what the teams are doing but the executives are like cool how does that matter right to our business how does that actually ladder up into our vision where we want to go our objectives for the year our goals great sign that there is actually no strategy deployed correctly now when i say too like there's no strategy there's usually some kind of strategy but it lives in people's heads and they're really bad at writing it down and getting it out so i always tell people too if you think that there's no strategy like go just like interrogate people for a while like go talk to the leaders is this good if we hit these numbers is this bad why if i release this thing what do you think will happen what numbers will change right what what behaviors will change how will this make us better it usually can pull out what people believe the goals to be and sometimes they're just not explicitly written down so that's an exercise that i typically do too when i don't see strategy well manifested in these organizations i just go in and i say like okay let's like what does good look like for you like where is the vision where are we going and i ask all of these questions too to a lot of people and you find that there's different answers across the organization that shows a lack of alignment on a complete strategy as well i once asked all the executive team at a healthcare company like what's the vision for this company and they said to be the backbone of healthcare i said what does that mean and they couldn't elaborate nobody could elaborate on that and i said cool that's like a tagline but it's not a vision right what's what are we manifesting into what are we doing what are we not doing who do we want to be when we grow up five to ten years from now how are we different than we are today those things more often than not are not written down and they're not clearly communicated so one of the exercises we do is we write if i see that there's no strategy i'm like you need to write a two-pager um i have ceos write two pagers on where did the company come from how is it different today what are external threats to our market you know what's what's our competition how do you view our competition what should we what should we care about what should we not care about what are we going to do what are we not going to do and then prioritize their strategic intents or what i call them which are like really big business movers for the next you know two to three years so it's like are we going to go up market are we going to go down market are we going to expand geographically are we going to um innovate into a completely new market or a new opportunity those types of things need to be clearly prioritized at the top and then you can start to make the product portfolio at the bottom and when there's a missing strategy piece this i call it the missing middle is usually gone which connects those strategic intents and those business outcomes back into what the teams are actually doing so it's like great that team is you know building a widget for sales people to do cold emails why right like how is that going to move us into what we want to do for our vision is it retaining people because we have a problem with their current market is it allowing us to enter a new market if we put it together but if we think about all the things that teams do in isolation it's not enough usually to move those business metrics so what people do in lack of strategy is they spread the team too thin across tons of initiatives like one team usually isn't enough to get some really hard hitting metrics out there and then you don't see the progress that you're actually looking to see as an executive if a feature ships but no one knows about it did it really ship keeping customers and internal teams like sales support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard first you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person craft updates and then share them across all of your channels multiply this by the number of things that ship every week and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing that's why high velocity product teams like monte carlo armory and popsicle use make log make log makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like jira linear asana and github and then to write bite-sized updates which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are including within your app on slack over email and even on twitter no more long boring blog style change log posts that slow you down just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy try make log for free today just visit make log dot com slash lenny to get started so you're like a pm on a team or even just a leader of a company and you're like i think we might have a strategy maybe we don't i'm hearing like things that are true at our company and i'm kind of worried what does it look like for me to like have a strategy you you named a few things that you should probably have vision intents and actions and things like that what it's like kind of like the checklist of well if i have this this this that we have a we probably have a strategy in place at least a good test is you go to all of your teams and you ask them what they're doing and why exactly what i was talking about before and they all tell a similar story we're working on x y and z because it will it goes into this initiative right and it causes this type of value for these customers which in return is going to get us this business value and help us enter these new markets right they can connect everything they're doing from the tactical stuff on the team all the way back up to the business metrics and if you deploy your strategy well your product teams will deeply understand how their stuff actually impacts the business and if you don't deploy it well they're gonna be like i don't know why i'm building this stuff so if you have a bunch of people asking you like why are we building this then you didn't do a good job as a leader explaining what what it is that you're after right so everybody should be telling the same story another amazing sign when this is all done really well too that i love is there's hugely way less infighting across stakeholders and executives one of the biggest issues i see in organizations is when executives all have different goals and they're not aligned on the same goals for the company so it's kind of like sales teams over here like no like our goal is you know net new logos and you're like cool but like in what markets and how is that prioritized against what we're building from our product roadmap and why is this not in sync and i've seen really bad ceos like hit their executives against each other with different goals so they don't see each other as one team and the executive team should be one team and the best teams i've ever seen the most successful companies i've ever seen everybody works together and they're like these are our goals and these are our business goals so when strategy is deployed correctly and you have that type of culture too with your executives they're all on the same page so you can have very calm trade-offs talks about are we gonna do you know strategic intent one or two if we do this then we don't get that are we okay with that and it's it's not emotional right it's more objective because we're all there together to further the business and a lot of times like people you know we complain as product managers about stakeholders all asking for different things and that's always going to be the case there's always going to be a little bit of that but you typically will get less of that on the team too because the priorities within each part of the business should be aligned to the overall priorities and it will be easier to manage and it's easier to push back on why we're not doing one thing over the other thing because we all know what our goals are we all know what the company priorities are and we can see why one thing versus the other won't work so you have these conversations which makes so much sense just talk it out see if everyone's on the same page about your goals how you think you're going to get to that goal what do you do with that usually recommend people throw it into like a google doc that everybody sits there and just confirms is happy and is there kind of like a template that you share with people well here's what we're going to fill out by the end of this say three month process yeah i think it varies from company to company some companies already have their own template and i'll just use that i don't try to reinvent the wheel when it doesn't need to be reinvented but i'll say like the memos that we would write are probably they're very easy to explain right two pages for me on what's the vision where are we going after how are we positioned in the market and against competition to reach that vision where are we today like what's the currency of our product what does it actually look like what are we going to do to get there right like what's our priorities and then i make people prioritize them so i'm like for if we're going this way are we solving this problem what does that mean context-wise and then what are the outcomes that we're actually trying to achieve when we get there and i do that at different levels so we typically have executive teams writing the strategic intents for the business level we've got product management leadership directors vp cpos writing the product initiatives usually cpos aren't writing them it's more like director level vp for their scope product initiatives are usually very problem oriented around um like big problems we can solve for our customers like they're meaty they're usually made up of multiple epics and then you've got your product teams on the ground floor working with the developers i use epixer such a nobody everybody doesn't agree on what they are i call them options sometimes too but it's the solutions it's like what are you gonna what's the solutions you're gonna build to actually get into those product initiatives solve those problems for the users and then hit those strategic intents so you could pretty much write a one page or two pager like that for every one of those levels and i think that's great i think the more we write about these things the more we talk about it the more we put it into prose the better and it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages it's like a two-pager just explaining what we're doing and why and that context we usually throw into google docs or a wiki or something like that link them all together so that you can go from one to the next and then read all the way up the strategy tree i love that so simple and like not so formulaic that feels like anybody the company can do it and it's not like there's a rigid one way to do a process yeah and i i don't think there should be for certain things you know i think every company with a lot of these processes and tools and frameworks that we get into you gotta massage it all and make it your own and you're gonna find things certain things are gonna work for one company that don't work for the other company based on their culture and what they do but i think the more that we can just write and talk about things the easier it is for all these different companies to find their way of working and then you codify that and you deploy that throughout your organization on the vision piece specifically it reminds me when i was managing pms one of the most common areas of development for them was get better at vision there's always this like here's an opportunity to get better vision and it's always hard to explain exactly what that means and how it looks when they're doing better vision other than just coming up with the incredible idea that we execute on so maybe very tactically what's like a form factor you suggest for folks to even lay out a vision it sounds like you really encourage writing is that how you like to think about it or do you find story boards are often greater sketches or anything else yeah like when i write out visions i like writing i think that to me is probably the easiest way i've seen people lay it out i've also seen people put together like a great athena health when i was in their consulting we had one team with a fantastic like head of ux and a vp of product who would sit there together and they made a great like presentation of the vision but they they mocked up prototypes and what it could be and it wasn't like it wasn't tested or set but the visual pieces of that got people really aligned over like oh okay and the diagrams i find when you can show like how certain things relate to each other sometimes it does come off in words so i like a combination i like a combination of some kind of presentation plus writing and i think if you do those two things together it becomes really powerful but for me and for a lot of people especially executives i've seen too sometimes they're more visually oriented so if you can you know grab your ux designer and sit there and sketch out ideas and it doesn't even have to be like it doesn't even have to be wireframes right it doesn't have to be the the end state of the product it could just be like how customers interact with things or diagrams about the ecosystem and stuff like that that just helps to draw a little bit more color on it but i think those two things kind of go hand in hand i love that i find that anytime i have a designer helping me with anything like that i always look so much smarter because they made it look so much better know exactly oh it's just a superpower it is and it's just like it's amazing um but i've seen that in in like every type of presentation like you bring in a designer to help you with like board slides and you're like oh my god it all makes sense now right like i could talk over here you look like a genius yeah you look like a genius you're like damn these look real good and so i think there's just such a joint relationship with any type of presentation or trying to explain like where you're going or what you want to do if you can explain it through visuals and with design ugh it's just gonna be so much better for everybody yeah on the vision piece do you have any just general advice for getting better at vision i try to think about a lot of well there's there's a couple couple tips here one a vision should be concrete enough where people can picture what it will be in their head it can't be a fluffy like be the backbone of healthcare right like what does that mean i don't get it so people need to be able to look at a vision and say i can see how we're gonna like i can understand that we're gonna get there one day i don't know how we're gonna get there today but we will find out along the way right that's that's a good vision it's lofty far enough away where you can't just be like oh we build that one thing and we hit it it's not lofty enough vision right it should be something that you really want to iterate through and test and try to figure out how to get there uh it should not be what you are at today that's that's a sign of like you hit the vision already and maybe you're just tweaking and exploiting it which is totally fine but that's not really a good vision for the future i'd say two the way that i think through it is like how are we different and it's crazy how much how many visions i've read where nobody actually talks about how they're different it's like we're going to be the best be the best all right how are you gonna do that right and i think it's it's fine while you're formulating a vision and this is why i personally like writing i just literally brain dump in there and be like well our competitor a does x y and z and we definitely don't want to be like that so what could we do to be different we could do this this and this right and if you just brain dump all those ideas about you know what type of value it will bring for your customers who you want your customers to be right sometimes they don't read about other customer like future customers or who you want those customers to be in the future you know what's what's how is the value different than the value you provide today is it is it going to be different or is it just doubling down on what you do the ways that you provide those value uh how is it different than your competitors why is it better not just being better but like why is it better what's the ways that you're going to win and then also i think good visions also say what you don't want to do i love i love reading a vision that's like we're not going to be like that and that to me is so powerful because you're like oh okay we're not going to copy that right we're not going to go after that because you can easily have a whole team be like oh let's just copy what they did over there i'm learning a ton thank you for sharing all this this is for me really helpful too on that topic a little bit say pm wants to get better at strategy which we talked a little bit about do you have any advice someone trying to get better at being more strategic and thinking about strategy yeah um it was interesting i was just talking to one of the chief product officers who who graduated from my program last year and now she's the cpo of a company and i said what was your advice for especially people who are not chief product officers yet or ics because i hear from a lot of people you know i'm not getting the opportunity to work on strategy and i loved her advice because she said you know even when i didn't have that role or responsibility or that scope i sat there and i still imagined what i would do if i was in their position and i think that's powerful you know pretend you're the cpo would you do something different what would you do can you dig into the data can you ask questions can you get into there i'm not saying like go reinvent the wheel for the company but it's going to give you reps right it's going to give you the experience asking those questions so i think that's powerful picturing what what you would do in their scenario if you want to get better at strategy talk to people who really understand the market really understand the financials i'd go talk to your chief product officer if you have one and just ask them like what's your process how do you set this right like we got to these three priorities or something like how'd you get there would you look at i think that's important just having conversations with people about what their thought process is how they analyzed it what that means i think that's really important when you get into setting strategy at higher levels for product a lot of it has to do with the market and the customers and the financials and things that we don't get exposed to as much as you know as a team level product manager so the more you can talk to people in other disciplines go have conversation with sales and see why people are buying competitors like what was your win loss analysis why are we losing what do you think is the issue a lot of times we just don't go and talk to other departments and they have a wealth of knowledge and we've got subject matter experts sitting in certain places that can fill you in on how the market's moving and what things are happening there and how people are innovating and it is fascinating to talk to those people so i would do that i would talk to other departments i would talk to your leadership try to understand their thought process if you are a leader and trying to figure out how to do a lot of this um one of the the biggest issues i see for leaders and why i got very excited about product operations over the last couple years is the lack of data one issue i see is that leaders have never really set strategy before so they get into these positions and they don't know where to start and the place that you need to start is data from everywhere you need to start with internal data and you need to have an analyst on your team i also tell them hire hire a data analyst hire somebody some expectancy consultants like people they're great at crunching data i had them on my team it's amazing but they'll pull the numbers out they'll find interesting patterns for you and you you say i want to answer these questions and they will go get the data for you put it into ways that you can actually look at it and then you can start making informed decisions so you want to take that data you want to take customer research so whoever's talking to customers you want to bubble that up and make sure that you can see that as well you want to take the company goals and put that into context and then really strategy always comes down to asking the questions about like how can we win how can we get further to the goal which is the vision right but it's also keeping in context of where we are now and what we're able to execute on now and i think it's interesting because it's like we don't always make the right choice when it comes to strategy but you got to make a choice and i think that's the hardest part part for some people they're like i want to be 100 certain this is going to work and you can't and i think a good aspect of being a leader whether you're a product manager on a team or even an executive is making the best informed decision that you possibly can at the time but then also being willing to correct yourself if you find out it's the wrong one by looking at all the information and then saying okay let's try something different uh and that to me is how we do great strategy right like we take all the information we can we make the best possible guess to go in one direction and then we just keep reevaluating it to make sure it's the right direction and if it's not we pivot i love that your answer is talking to people getting information gathering data thinking and it's not go read books on strategy go get an mba or anything like that it's you you do you get better by doing it and learning from other people right yeah and seeing it's too like for me when i'm learning about strategy right because it's not like i just you know started product management and started doing strategy immediately i analyzed how other companies did it so i was like how did netflix do their strategy how did this company do their strategy in reading how a company goes from point a to point b it's fascinating there's tons of articles on there about how companies have done it but it just helps you see that everybody does it differently everybody's got a different framework it doesn't matter what framework you use as long as it works for your company but they all got to that framework by asking those questions and looking at the data and deeply understanding the market and deeply understand their customers and just trying to piece it all together awesome you touched on product operations which you know is your the book that you're working on now i know that there's a role in emerging role product operations can you kind of give us a preview of what this book's going to be about and what people should be thinking about there yeah so um having worked with all these companies especially the ones that are scaling pretty rapidly i started realizing like hey we trained all the teams we deployed the strategy we've got a bunch of people now in this product management role and then you look at certain things and you realize it just didn't scale to the rest of the team and things broke down like one standardization of processes everybody had a different roadmap cool i can't do anything with that when i'm trying to set a strategy like if i can't compare your roadmap to that roadmap all your time horizons are off all your data's off nothing's like you know set in the right format i can't roll that up into my strategy as product leader two maybe there's no career ladders for the product managers three we're having like 18 different types of meetings and all the wrong people are in the room product managers can get the data that they need to make the informed decisions on the product strategy we're interviewing customers one off and then i find out like you know the same team is hitting up all these customers over here again they're getting really upset these customers don't want to talk to the same team over and over and over again product management at scale is really hard and that's where product operations comes in so what it does is it helps you get the right insights to the team and then help standardize those outputs and those check-ins to make sure that you're on track for the right strategy so there's usually three parts to it that i say and not all companies have all three and it depends where you're at for where you want to start with this but typically we have internal data and insights and that's a team that's going in and taking all the data that we have that lives in our financial systems our you know our user analytics all of these different things that live inside our company and they're helping to surfaces up in ways that people can look at them see the progress of our strategy and track those okrs and say okay we're going to go this way or that way so that helps give us the inputs we need for strategy helps monitor the strategy and it helps us make decisions then there's also customer research and user insights so that's really the external data and market research customer insights and market research so that's like the external data that doesn't live in our company that we need to get from our customers or our market to help inform strategy so from a market research perspective that might mean you know having subscriptions to publications or making sure that we have like subject matter experts who are giving us great advice where the market's moving but then also for customer research it's like standardizing the approach so that product managers can go talk to customers so we're not hitting up the same person all the time we're recording all the user interviews we do in a way where we can actually search through it and you know gain that information later and go and revisit those things it's really helping to streamline it it's not centralizing user research as a practice it's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research especially when you get into some of these companies like when i first started doing this it was at athenahealth and we had 350 product managers and we had to make sure they weren't bothering the people at the same hospital over and over and over again because they were when we came in and we said wow okay cool we've asked these people now the same question 10 times from 10 different teams like how do we make sure that those things don't happen but how do we also empower those product managers to go still talk to them when they need to so we're not taking user research away we're just helping make it more scalable more efficient give them more tools for it and then the last one is really standardizing your like processes your cadences for strategy check-in so it's like hey we do road map check-ins every month these are the people that need to be in the room we do you know quarterly uh planning sessions with executives and this is the inputs to it this is the outputs to it here's the decisions we make in this meeting this is what we review and those people can help do that part and then help standardize the product management processes that touch other divisions so for instance like if i need to update roadmaps to sales like they will help you know own that cadence of what that looks like and how those formats go out but what i say is it doesn't standardize stuff that only belongs to a team like i don't care how a team does their stand-ups like you choose how to do that i'm not going to standardize that but i do care what format your roadmap comes in i do care how we make sure that we have a good working relationship with sales i do care that we have a good working relationship with product marketing those types of functions that's that's kind of the interactions that we want to standardize i can't wait to read this book when do you think it'll be coming out we're aiming to get it out before the end of the year oh wow okay that's pretty soon i know it's coming out kind of on that topic as a pm trying to learn trying to get better there's so much information out there there's books newsletters guilty of that uh tweets uh advice podcast all these things that are always coming at you as a pm and i hear a lot from vms they're just like burnt out by all of the information always coming at them and it's just like never ending advice do you have any advice for either new pms or just any pm of just like how to take in knowledge that's all out there and not just kind of burn out i'm gonna burn them out with more so i'd say one the the best thing that you could possibly do as a product manager even if you're you've been in this role for a while is to make sure that you're always learning but the way that you're going to learn the most usually is from execution so what i'd say is first focus on that focus on doing your job every time then i would analyze your job and say what's working what's not working and then take out certain pieces of it that you want to get better at and then do a deep dive into that so like for me when i was thinking about you know my career and my stuff i did a similar approach where i just run into problems and i'm like i need to learn more about like why that problem is causing this so if you know one of them was like agile like i found out that a bunch of people who never did product management before became product owners they were writing like 8 000 user stories for like very small little features i'm like why are you writing so many user stories so i went down like a rabbit hole interviewing everybody who wrote the agile manifesto and did scrum and taught all those things to find out like where this came from so then i could figure out how to fix it and i think you need to carve stuff out like that where you go what's this topic i want to get better at what's this going to do to help me get to the next level where do i need to learn and help fill in my skill gaps so for instance if you're not good at user research or you haven't had a lot of experience talking to customers i might deep dive on that if you're not great at data analytics i would deep dive on that but i think there's you know there's a certain point where we get to okay i understand the basic product framework and everybody's going to have different opinions about what that framework should look like but we all generally agree at the end of the day like you should be talking to your users you should be working with your teams to develop what that you know what a test should be run some tests figure out what your users want build it with your team in an iterative fashion measure success and keep going from there that all generally stays the same but how you do each part of that you're going to find some people have one opinion some people don't and you have to find something that works for you and then stick with it and find out that if it doesn't work for you change it and this is where i get really passionate and frustrated with agile processes which i used to write about a lot but i feel like some some places we've solved this problem some places we haven't but i try to tell teams that you know started with scrum or started with some of these more dogmatic processes if it doesn't serve you move on change it right everything's meant to be iterated on everything's meant to be adapted if it does not work for you you do not have to keep doing it and i think that's the biggest message i can tell to anybody learning is really sit down do a retrospective with yourself and say is this helping me get better at being a product manager and if it's not change it right change your approach do something different if it is keep it keep it in your toolbox right create your own toolbox and and go from there what a perfect way to end our conversation where can folks find you online and how can listeners be helpful to you yeah i am on twitter all the time at lizzie jean l-i-s-s-i j-e-a-n so feel free to tweet with me i love hearing what you guys are up to you can also submit questions if you have questions to me at the product thinking podcast so if you go to producthinkingpodcast.com or dearmelissa.com i take questions there all the time i'm always curious what everybody's thinking about what are your questions what are your burning questions that's how you can help me i am just very passionate about figuring out like what are the problems that we're facing as product managers and that's that's what makes me happy trying to figure out where they're coming from how do we solve it what's on people's minds so definitely hit me up with questions i always answer them on the podcast and then my website melissa perry.com has all my other information if anybody needs to get in touch amazing if anyone has any problems in their pm job just tweet you and they will get an answer is what you're saying yes do that amazing thank you so much melissa thank you that was awesome thank you for listening if you enjoyed the chat don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and even better leave a review which helps a lot you can also learn more at lennyspodcast.com i'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Lenny's Podcast

Views: 30,867

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Id: FCxkT8ULrVg

Length: 53min 42sec (3222 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022