Resilience in Action
Empower yourself to drive product momentum
Your product initiative is blocked in many directions. Your IT team can't support you due to priorities. The front-end team is tied up with rearchitecting for a corporate initiative. The backend team is ready to start design soon. The finance team has been tied up with other product initiatives for the past month.
Your senior leaders know there is misalignment among the products. They are working through many decisions about product priorities.
You and your product team are unsure of the future with the mounting issues.
How do you keep momentum while the senior leaders work through the organizational strategy?
Find Your Resilience Bones
Even with many challenges, you can work on your product initiative. Keep in mind that change is going to come quickly after the leaders decide on strategy.
You can use your time to be ready for one of the typical outcomes of strategy decisions:
Your product becomes a high priority: you will have new people coming to help. How will you absorb new teams in your product?
Your product is refactored: Engineering is going to need business justification for redoing the product structure. How can you communicate about the business opportunity for your product domain?
Your product is put in sustaining mode: the organization wants to minimize engineering investment. What is the bare minimum engineering needed to sustain revenue?
Defining answers to these questions needs collaboration and strategic thinking. Investigating these possible outcomes is valuable at any time. Having a point of view on these outcomes will be useful as your leadership team evaluates the organizational strategy.
A resilient product manager can communicate transparently about product outcomes.
Focus on What You Can Control
Your customers need your product and product team more than ever while your leaders work on the organization's strategy. You can improve your external materials as you support customers and sales. You likely have a list of things you'd like to improve in your marketing and sales material.
The second area under your control is requirements. You can develop requirements even with limited product team contact. You can research your competition and your market to write requirements on your gaps. If you find your product is strong compared to the competition, then you can turn your attention to business improvements based on your strengths.
As your leaders work through organizational strategy, there is an increased focus on what customers and sales want. You can polish up your forecast scenarios based on market analysis. The benefit of updating your business case and forecast is being able to communicate your product's unique value.
Work on areas where you can make meaningful progress.
Keep a Decision Log
With the organizational strategy holding up some key contributions, you need to be very clear on potential delays to your product. It is easy to forget decisions that hold up product deliveries.
Since a subset of your product team is affected by the organizational issues, your work-in-progress will increase as you complete items up to a dependency point.
Here are some examples:
Discovery and requirements: sales and customer contact are limited
Document which requirements are unvalidated
Document the contacts needed to complete the requirements
Planning: key engineering team is not available for requirements review
Review with a limited team
Document key contacts for final review
Delivering to customers: organizational strategy is needed for go-to-market positioning and sales training
Prepare for release without go-to-market and review readiness
Document the assumed positioning for later adjustments
An example Decision Log is below:
Document decisions and move on.
Document the decision enough that you can remember the context of the decision. This will help you adjust after the organization's strategy becomes clear.
Conclusion - Empower Yourself to Make Progress
Adapt to your situation as the organizational strategy emerges. You can drive success despite pending organizational changes.
Resilient product managers:
Develop a perspective on possible outcomes from the strategy changes
Focus on what they control
Manage a decision log through the changes
As a change agent, product managers are at the heart of product momentum during organizational changes.
Want to know what happened after a recent article? Premium subscribers get a peak behind the scenes of a recent newsletter. Last week’s backstory was about solving stakeholder problems instead of selling solutions to them. Solve - Don't Sell
Connect to Amy on LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram and X/Twitter