Working Through a Product Strategy Challenge
Recovering from a disconnect with business objectives
It's nothing new that organizations need the highest profits from every product in the portfolio. Recently organizations have been examining lower-margin products carefully. More and more product managers are on the frontline of explaining the profit and loss of their products.
The challenge in this product-by-product P&L examination is product dependencies. Poorly performing products might be enabling highly profitable products.
It is up to product managers to align their products to their organization’s business objectives. When there is this alignment, then product dependencies are a technical issue and not a financial issue.
Product managers become laser-focused on their own product challenges. As a result, they frequently lose sight of the changes in their organization's business objectives.
What do you do when your product strategy is disconnected from your organization's business objectives? Let's dig into recovering from this mistake.
Signs of a Disconnect
Pausing to reflect on your recent challenges can connect the dots so you can see your product from a different perspective. You can start with a list of recent stressful events. A few examples are:
Your manager had to step in to explain why you are making an investment request
Your explanation of recent sales declines is not acceptable
You are getting many questions about product spending and customer acquisition costs
Open disagreement on the direction of your roadmap
Think hard about the root causes of these events. Some of the root causes are under your control. Typical root causes for product managers are:
Limited collaboration with stakeholders
Lack of customer engagement
Underestimation of the financial impact of a product decision
Roadmap is too ambitious
Delayed response to competitive threat
Now that you connect the dots, you can see the disconnect between your product strategy and business goals. This is not the time to hide the disconnect! Better to be open about the situation.
Acknowledge the Disconnect
Take responsibility for missing the business objective. This is the best way to get help from stakeholders and the product team.
Usually, there are multiple small mistakes that snowball into missing key business objectives. Some of the small mistakes that product managers make that lead to a disconnect are:
Skipping opportunities to talk to customers
Neglecting to collaborate with all stakeholders
Not studying the competition
Missing changes in market trends
Not following your product's financial health
In fast-paced organizations, it is easy to cut corners. Daily reflection helps prioritize your time to be on top of developments inside and outside your organization.
Collaborate to Get Feedback
After acknowledging the disconnect with the business objectives, the next step is collaborating with senior leaders. Focus the collaboration with senior leaders on the following:
Understanding your organization's business goals and priorities
The simple vision of how your product helps reach the business goals
Use active listening to get the feedback you need. Create simple visualizations of the business goals and your product's role in reaching those goals.
Communicate frequently with stakeholders and your product team about what you learn from the senior leadership. It will take several iterations with the senior leadership to include their guidance. You will also need to keep the senior leadership updated as you re-align your product to the business goals.
Re-Align to Business Goals
Now it is time to get to work on making the changes to the roadmap with your stakeholders and product team. This realignment is going to be more than a few feature changes in the roadmap. To get to this point, with small mistakes snowballing to a bigger business impact, you will need to lead process changes as well as feature changes.
Put thought into performance metrics that tie into the business objectives you discussed with senior leadership. Since there was a disconnect recently, you will need to establish new key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor your product's performance to the business goals.
Provide training on the changes so the new expectations are documented. This will ensure that your team understands the process changes and KPIs that will be used to stay aligned with the business goals.
Be sure to celebrate progress with the team. Recognition of the hard work to meet the business goals will keep the momentum going.
Don't forget that you have senior leadership waiting to hear about progress!
Keep Aligned with Business Goals
Put in place a routine to check the KPIs from the re-alignment. The timeline for checking the KPIs is monthly or weekly depending on the sales cycle time of your product. Schedule time to evaluate the metrics and review them with your product team.Â
Prepare for the senior leadership update by summarizing the progress and the KPIs. Tie each leadership update to the prior update. Be ready to explain changes since the last update and progress in meeting the business goals.
Conclusion - Proactively Recover from a Disconnect with Business Goals
It is hard to acknowledge your role in a disconnect from your organization's business goals. Product managers making decisions and trading off outside work vs inside work can miss business goals. A daily reflection habit is a good way to catch potential business disconnects.
Taking responsibility for missing business goals frees you to take control of recovering. It is a great opportunity to discuss your organization's direction with senior leadership and put your product into the business goals. Your proactive re-alignment energizes your stakeholders and product team.
Other Postings and Connections
Article from Omar Halabieh on selling your ideas internally.
Article from Ant Murphy on evaluating incremental growth
I wonder how a disconnect would look like in communal cultures, as opposed to individualistic cultures.