Episode 58: Answering Questions About Approaching Discovery Mode, Aligning Team Strategies, and Missing Company Visions
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to successfully lead the discovery process at a new company with a strong product culture, how to align product strategies across large corporations, and what questions to ask when your organization doesn’t have a clear vision statement to work from.
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Q: Do you have any strategies or steps that can help me with feeling more empowered? [0:45]
A: What you have to establish first is the boundaries of your choices. OKRs and strategies are laid out in product management to provide a box to experiment through; we give those guidelines to product managers so that they can decide what's next… What you wanna do is understand your OKRs and your goals. Those are gonna be your bounds; every option has to help you get to those goals, you don’t want to go outside them. For discovery, you’re gonna want to do a couple things; one, outline all the key assumptions about this product, if they even exist yet… and two, get the leaders in the room or the people who actually proposed this and hear what they think to be true. [1:55]
Q: What do you recommend large product organizations do so that strategies are aligned? [7:25]
A: The thing you're gonna want to do is what I do: go around to every team, try to figure out what they are working on, and bubble that up. Go to the 40 or so PMs and say ‘Hey, send me a one pager on what you're doing right now and why.’ Look at those and group them by themes, and by what I would call initiatives at that level of product strategy; that tells you what the big pushes that everyone’s working towards are. That’s usually the missing middle in product strategy; aligning the strategic intents back to product initiatives. The only way we can find out what people believe them to be at the moment is to figure out what they're working on now. [8:04]
Q: What should I do if my company is missing a vision statement? [12:42]
A: This one is tricky and depends on how big your corporation is. If you are at a place that's like a bank with 10,000 divisions and businesses that run independently, your corporate vision may not be super transparent; it's probably gonna be a little fluffy. Let's say you're in credit cards… Everything you're doing in credit cards is the job of the leadership of that division, but your product vision should probably follow the vision of what the credit cards division wants to be [at present] and in the future… [13:06]
If you're just repeating mission statements that are fluffy and don't differentiate you from any other company, that's not a good vision. That's what you need to go and talk to your leadership about… ‘What makes us different? What makes us special? How are we better than them? How do we want to be better than them?’ Those are the conversations that need to come up through a vision statement, so I would start that conversation. [15:17]
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