Episode 78: Dear Melissa- Answering Questions About Company Growing Pains
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about organizations that are at a crossroads. She talks about how to help reorganize a product hierarchy that’s lacking strategic product development, how to shake up an org that seems content to operate as a feature factory, and where to focus your company’s resources and energy during an economic downturn.
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Q: How often is a product strategy pivot one of the main players in a strategy theater performance? [4:22]
A: Strategy theater is [when you’re] not really doing strategy but you're talking a lot about it, you’re putting together lots and lots of road maps and diagrams and all of this stuff but it's not really a good strategy… Here’s what I look for when you sometimes need to pivot for the right reasons: when a competitor enters the market and starts to take a huge amount of share from you and you don't know if you can compete, you have to pivot something… there are lots of different ways to actually pivot and you need to think through which one of those you’re actually going after. What happens in strategy theater is usually this cycle and I've seen this happen a ton of times, but you'll be looking at your goals and you're like ‘Oh wow, we didn't hit our goals - that means things are not working. Let's pivot.’ [4:32]
Q: What would be a good way to separate the long term work of gathering ideas and looking at market trends versus the shorter term discovery and delivery work? [2:07]
A: It feels to me that the founders are delegating strategy into your teams instead of developing it themselves, so I’m wondering: who’s doing that strategic product development? If it’s not them, why? What is it bound by? What is the long term planning actually focused on if there’s no strategy?... When the teams are not being strategic, there's usually a disconnect between what we want to do, where we want to go with the goals, and what we're actually building for customers, so context gets lost in translation. We want to avoid that… The founders and the executives should be focused on 2 to 3 years out - what your next goals are for this year, your vision… then narrow down that scope… But the team should probably be thinking quarterly. [2:57]
Q: Do you have any tips for how I can interact differently with a team who seems satisfied to operate like a feature factory? [9:07]
A: So you’re doing the reverse engineering, which I think is a great first step for anything where founders start to dictate features. I just want to point out though that founders are allowed to have ideas; everybody's allowed to have ideas… I really like your approach where you’re reverse engineering and really checking it - I’ve seen a lot of people just go “nope, we're not gonna do that, we're gonna start from scratch.” Founders hate that, don’t do that… The idea here is to get the context and if there was no context or they didn't do the work, that will come up from doing user research… Remember that designers and engineers need to do design and engineering; if you are trying to pull them into too many activities, they will not be able to do the jobs they were hired for. [10:14]
Q: With a downturn in the economy, should I turn the attention of my product team more towards optimization rather than exploration? [16:11]
A: This completely depends on where your company is right now, but you should never let go of exploration. Even if it’s just minute exploration, you still gotta do it. Here’s the two scenarios I can think of where you might choose one or the other: let’s say you are a growth stage team who just found product market fit, and it's very clear what you should be doing… You gotta put your focus on retention, so this is where optimization becomes really important but discovery also becomes important because you gotta make sure your next set of features are what customers want… If you are a really large company and you’ve been puttering along… you're worried that somebody's going to come up and disrupt you - that's when you really need to start focusing more on exploration. You want to make sure that you're coming up with novel ways to capture people's attention so that they don't just go for whatever is the cheapest option or decide to cut you as a necessary expense in their life. [16:22]
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello. And welcome to another episode of dear Melissa. Today, we are talking about some growing pains with companies. So how do we move from founders leading product into the teams, doing a lot more product work? How do we get out of that feature factory? We're also gonna talk a little bit about this economy. Ooh, scary stuff, right? Recession. What do we do? What happens if there's a downturn, all really good questions and things that we should be worried about as product managers. But before I dive in here, I just wanna remind you that you can submit your questions to me as well@dearmelissa.com. We go through them every two weeks, pick out a couple to answer. Um, but I always love seeing what's on your mind and what you have questions on. So feel free to go over there. Drop me a line. Let me know what you're thinking about.And also we have this really cool new feature where you can even leave me a voicemail. It can be anonymous. You don't have to say your name, but leave me a voicemail. Say your question. And I look forward to hearing all of your cool voices, cuz all I'm doing right now is reading your text. So that'll be fun. So go to dear melissa.com. Leave me a voicemail call in, call her, tell me what's up. So now we're gonna get started.
First question, dear Melissa. In our scale up company, we have grown from five to 40 employees in about a year. There are three dev teams. They're all feature teams, which are aspiring to become product teams, but the founders are still telling the teams what they should do right now. Management has made a distinction between what is called strategic product development, long term planning and operational product development, short term planning and delivery. To me, this seems like a strange separation. Anything we develop should be aligned with the company and product strategy, which is currently lacking. And it seems like operation product development is just another word for delivery. Building the features someone else has decided. Does this separation make sense to you? And have you seen that kind of structure elsewhere? What would be a good way to separate the long term work of gathering ideas and looking at market trends versus the shorter term discovery and delivery work?
So it feels to me reading this, uh, that the founders are kind of delegating the strategy into your teams or into this strategic product development, uh, instead of really developing it themselves. So I'm wondering like who's doing that strategic product development. I'm not sure, but if it's not them, um, why <laugh> like, what what's it bounded by, right? Like what is the long term planning actually focused on? If there is no strategy you are right, this doesn't make sense. Um, this almost feels like what, uh, safe try to do were they separated out product management, which was more strategic and product ownership, which was all delivery focused. And you see a breakdown here when, um, the teams and especially if you've got a small te group of teams here, you've only got three, right? When the teams are not being strategic, uh, there's usually a disconnect between what we wanna do and where we wanna go with the goals and what we're actually building for customers.So things get lost in translation. Context gets lost in translation. So we wanna avoid that. Typically when teams scale, what it should look like is that we've got the founders and the other leaders coming up with a good strategy. Um, they are looking at, you know, where do we wanna invest? What are the goals we wanna hit? What types of customers do we wanna go after? What are the big problems we wanna solve? And then the teams are helping to figure out how do we get there by doing, you know, good hypothesis driven product management.
Now this doesn't mean that the founders can't have any ideas. I wanna get that out of the way. That's totally fine. We want to make sure though that they're the right ideas. And that is what the product team should be doing. They should be contributing to the ideas, but they should also be testing any ideas that we think might be worth their salt.So we wanna make sure that, uh, we have planning done on multi-year horizons. So the founders and the executives should really be focused on, you know, if you're small two to three years out, what are our next, you know, goals for this year? What are the next goals for the two years? Where's our vision? Where do we have traction? What's our product market fit in? Where do we wanna grow? Then we wanna narrow down that scope as we get to the teams, but the teams should be thinking probably quarterly. The smaller you are as a company, the more rapid, um, your future releases usually are. So, you know, quarterly, uh, planning is plenty for a company of your size. You don't wanna go like three year planning. Your three years is gonna look very, very different than, than what it does now. And you're probably just gonna be wasting your time, but you do need to know what's the strategy for the next like two years, you know, one to two years, if you're rapidly improving.So you want them to be higher. And I would think of like, you want the founders and you want the executives to be higher focused.
Um, the one thing that I will say here though, is it sounds like you're, I don't know. So this is what I observe with founders. Like a lot of them don't know what they should be doing when it comes to strategy. Uh, they don't know how to put together a really good company strategy. They don't know how to put together a really good product strategy if you need any alignment that way. And, uh, it sounds like by separating these things, going strategic product development and operational product development, they're kind of taking some of that strategic work and putting it into this bucket when that's some of the stuff they have to take on. Now, that doesn't mean that, uh, they're doing all the work themselves.Usually what you would do is get a chief of staff, uh, work with the product leaders, have somebody on the team help you gather those ideas, those market trends, um, do the long term planning, right? Like you need help when you've got a day job as a CEO or a COO or a CTO or a CPO, like you need somebody to help do a lot of the legwork, bring you the information so that you can actually observe. So, so this is what seems to be lacking. Um, separating out the long term, work of gathering ideas and looking at market trends.
When you are higher up in an organization, you're gonna be doing that constantly. You should be doing some of that work yourself, but you should also be hiring a team around you and have a position that would help you bubble that up. If anybody's doing that type of work on the teams, you wanna make sure that they have an opportunity to share that with leadership as well.So how do you create opportunities for people to share, uh, where are the trends going? What's the market outlook what's happening here. That's what leadership should be looking at, but they wanna take all of those things, you know, bring it all together, analyze it, look at it in fun ways. And then be like, we're gonna go this way, right? And by this way, I mean a high level direction of where the company should be going, that vision, those strategic intents, not we're gonna build a calendar feature on our product, which happens quite often. Uh, that's what the team should be coming up with. Calendar feature. The executives should be like, we're gonna go after B2B customers in healthcare. Um, we wanna start with the midsize market because we think we're appropriately positioned for that. And we find that a lot of people are helping the enterprises.We can't go there yet. And the small ones, um, don't need what we are selling. So that's the type of level that we wanna get from the executive team. And they wanna think about how are we differentiating and where do we wanna invest in our types of differentiation compared to our competitors. So that's what they should be really looking at. And you don't wanna separate this completely out of product management. This should be funneling down from the high level product management all the way down to the team level, product management.
And you still need your product managers on teams to be strategic. They should be putting together that long term product vision around their feature set or their product. If they own a whole product, like they own that vision. If they oversee a feature set, they align back up to the overall product and they explore problems to extend it or, um, you know, have solve different problems through it.So we really wanna make sure that our product managers are being strategic around products. Our executives are being strategic around the company, and then we're bridging that together and working together. Uh, but we don't wanna separate it out where we're saying, Hey, product managers, you're not gonna be strategic at all. All you're gonna be doing is putting things in JIRA backlogs. They don't get the exposure they need to grow. You are just gonna have like a bunch of people sitting around probably unhappy. And I wouldn't say sitting around, they're probably gonna be working like crazy, but unhappy because they can see where products don't work. Um, and they don't have the opportunity to surface that up because somebody's told them what to do. So I think if you start taking the approach with your executives, um, by asking like, why are we doing this? You know, where are we going with this?What's the goal we're trying to achieve? Is there a certain, uh, market segment that we're tackling? All of those questions can help surface up, maybe where you're thinking about, uh, concentrating on a high level market overview or high level product overview, but you might have to help them kind of piece some of these things together, um, and make them put like a stake in the ground and say, this is the way that we're going.
. And this is a great, um, and this is a great question that kind of segues into our next question, which is similar, but somebody's actually taking action around exactly what you're just talking about. So let's hear from them too.
Dear Melissa, my company is a classic feature factory. The founder has ideas and features, product managers break that down into JIRA. Tickets designers slap an on brand UI onto it. And a scrum team builds a feature over the course of a few sprints each month. We describe to the company which features we're released with no context about the goal or whether it's working. I'm an individual contributor level PM, and I'm trying to start a grassroots revolution to better engage design and engineering more in the solution design stage. I'm reverse engineering. The problem, the founder implicitly wants solved scheduling calls with customers who are likely experiencing that problem and dedicating time each sprint for the design and engineering teams to engage with the problem.But it's like pulling teeth to get the team to participate actively. Some members of the team dutifully come to the user calls and workshops, but they seem checked out the way for me to suggest a way to solve the problem and then verbatim design and build the first thing I say, do you have any tips for how I can interact differently with a team who seems satisfied to operate like a feature factory?Great question. And I like that you are kind of taking the next approach, um, or the next step from what our previous, uh, person who wrote in was talking about. So you are doing the reverse engineering, which I think is great first step for anything where founders start to dictate the features, right? We start to ask questions, uh, why are we doing this? Where is this problem coming from? Uh, I think it's also good.
I just wanna point out though that founders are allowed to have ideas. Everybody's allowed to have ideas. Sometimes those ideas are really good. So we can't just think that every idea that comes out of anybody's mouth is bad. So I like your approach where you're like reverse engineering it and really checking it, which is perfect. Um, I've seen a lot of people just go, Nope, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna start from scratch. Founders hate that. Don't do that. Um, usually they have a lot of domain knowledge and they can see things, uh, but they may not have explained the context to you. So the idea here is to get the context and if there was no context or they didn't do the work that will come up from doing user research. So for my previous person who asked a question, um, that's a great first step to do with founders as well.So for you, it seems like you're there. Hopefully you've got the founders buy in to do all this work. Sounds like it.
Now. You're like, okay, what do I do to get my team to participate? Uh, one, remember that designers and engineers need to do design in engineering. If you are trying to pull them into too many activities, they will not be able to do the jobs they were hired for. So I wanna make sure that you're only doing this once in a while. When we say that we wanna bring context to people, uh, you don't have to give them the same exposure and do all these activities to transfer that context. So what do I mean by that? You are deep in this problem. You're exploring it as a product manager. You are talking to the customers, you're going through the data. You're talking to everybody else in the company.You talk to the founders, you understand the goals. How do you translate to that to them? But remember that they also have a job to do that doesn't involve doing your job as well. So if you have them come along to every activity that you do, they're probably gonna be checked out because they're like, when can I actually do my work? Which is the designing and engineering part of it. Now part of their job is to understand the context. I don't believe designers and engineers can do their job well without really understanding what they're getting into. So that is fair. Second thing. Let's say like, Nope, I only do this once in a while. Cool. I, and you gave 'em all the other stuff you distilled some of the information for them. You gave it to them in like a little packet, showed them some user research, all that stuff.If you've already done that. And you're only interrupting them from the design and engineering parts, like let's say during a big, um, discovery push or during, uh, you know, a couple times a month. And they're still really annoyed with this.
Here's where I think one of the issues is, um, I had trouble with this when I first got it started and was trying to bring my designers and engineers into it as well. Are you giving them enough boundaries where they can make a decision fairly quickly, uh, when people are not used to coming up with the different options, if you give them endless opportunities, right? Or endless options, let's say you like sit down in the meeting and you're like, what should we do? They're gonna like, just balk. They'll just be like, oh my God, I have no idea where to start. You're usually gonna go around in circles in those meetings.Um, you're gonna have people like saying stuff where you're like, wow, that's wildly off topic. Um, you will have so many options that it's gonna be really hard to choose from. To get people comfortable with ambiguity, you need to tighten the bounds until they start to feel comfortable with this stuff. So what I'd say is maybe don't go in there and just be like, Hey, you guys come up with all the ideas. What you wanna do is ask for tangible feedback, get in there, present all the evidence and then bound it. We believe that we wanna solve this problem. Here's the attributes about this problem that really matter to people. Here's what we have today. And this is why it's not working. Um, do you have any ideas on how we could solve this problem specifically addressing these concerns? If you are getting no answers, framing it like that, maybe you start saying here's a few options I thought through.What do you think of them? Can you think of other options that are better? Uh, that's gonna get people a little more comfortable giving feedback.
It's gonna get people a little more comfortable because you put something in front of them and they can react to it. Uh, it's really hard to start this type of work off the bat. If you're just like, give me all your ideas and it's like a free for all. And they have nothing to align themselves towards. There are no boundaries. This is what we see when we have issues with strategy deployment as well. If there's no firm strategy, there's no clear direction around like a vision and goals. And you know, the boundaries, the guardrails that I talk about where it's like, we can't do this, we can't do that. Um, we wanna keep it in this realm. People get really uncomfortable because the span of options gets too big and they don't know how to evaluate it.So you wanna tighten those boundaries. It's okay for them not to come up with like 7,000 ideas, you don't need 7,000 ideas. You need two good ones to evaluate and figure out which one to go after. So think of it that way. How do you get super tangible feedback.
Also. How do you get them to realize that this is important, right? They might just be like, well, your job is to come up with all the ideas. And you're like, maybe you just be like, okay, it's not my job. My job is to really make sure that whatever we build between all of us is gonna hit the business goals and the customer goals. Like I gotta make sure that we balance that correctly. Um, all of our jobs is to come up with a solid product and here's our goals. And this is what a solid product means.Here's the implications on design. Here's the implications on engineering? What can you do with your stuff to make this better? How do you contribute to a, um, more amazing product that we could possibly build? You know, you wanna make them understand that their job is not just to spit out designs or spit out engineering, but it's really to make a better product. So maybe change the way that you talk to them about doing that. So they understand and they get evaluated, uh, for doing a good job, not on, you know, just code quality, but on really participating in creating a great product. But number one problem, I see a lot of people do here in where you get a lot of pushback is they try to bring them to everything you don't, they don't need to go to everything. That's your job. Can you distill some of the information back to them? And then can you make an engaging and can you make it not so scary for them to actually participate in giving options? That's the two things that I would try here and hopefully they'll work for you.
All right. We got our last question. Dear Melissa, with a downturn in the economy, should I turn the attention to my product team more towards optimization rather than exploration? That's a great question. Um, this completely depends on where your company is right now, but caveat, you should never let go of exploration. Even if it's just like minute exploration, you still gotta do it. So here's the two scenarios I can think of where you might choose one or over the other. Let's say you are a growth stage team. You just found product market fit. And it's very clear what you should be doing, what you should be building. You're growing, growing, growing, signing all of these new customers up. Now, what you really need to do to weather a downturn in the economy is retention.You gotta put your focus on retention. So this is where optimization becomes really important. Um, but discovery also becomes important because you gotta make sure that your next set of features your next things that you got on the roadmap. Those things are going to be, uh, what your customers want. So if you're in the growth stage, onboarding new people, you wanna make sure that you keep them during the downturn. It is costly for them to switch to somebody else, but they will do it. If they find that there's a better deal out there for them. So think about that.
Um, now, if you are a really large company and you've been on like a down swing for a while, let's say you're puttering along, you've got ton of money. You're really, I'm thinking of like some of the larger enterprises here got a lot of money.You could withstand this downturn for sure, but you're worried that somebody's gonna come up and disrupt you or something like that. Uh, that's where you really need to start focusing more on exploration. You wanna make sure that you are coming up with novel ways to capture people's attention so that they don't just go for whatever's the cheapest option or decide to cut you as a necessary expense in their life. Because when the economy downturns, you have to remember that people will tighten their belts. So they're not gonna be spending as much. Now, if you are a necessity, your let's say like your product is a must have, it's a necessity for people's everyday lives.
Um, it's a little easier to weather these downturns, but if you are not, and let's say maybe you're a B2B product. That's a really nice to have, but there's other ways, or there's other products out there or bigger suites that people typically have that do your job to be done for your product, but they don't do it as well as you, people are gonna conserve money.Companies are gonna conserve money. So this is where exploration becomes really, really important. Uh, you need to make sure that you are creating a product that is 10 times better than what else is out there. You need to be looking at. How do I use my design, my experience, my, uh, data, my technology, to really solve these problems in new, exciting ways. And that's where exploration really becomes key. So usually your company is not on a super high growth spurt at this point where we're talking about this scenario. Um, you probably have been around for a while. You may feel a little bit stagnant. That's where you're gonna want to really make sure that you are in exploration mode. Uh, you wanna optimize what you have because you wanna retain who you have, but you gotta come up with the, the thing that's gonna give you an edge.And if you have no edge, if you are completely on parody with your competitors, people are just gonna compete on price. That's usually what it comes down to. So you don't want that to happen. You wanna make sure that you're differentiating your product and you're figuring out what those needs are to a point where you're just better than the competition, right? That is the thing that's gonna set you apart. So, uh, growth spurt, you can look at optimization, really focus on retention, but it's not so much like a, I guess, an optimization versus exploration question right now it's more of a retention and capturing new market share during a downturn, which is gonna be a little bit harder. So you gotta make sure that you're choosing appropriately for the stage of business. That you're in. Excellent question though.
All right. That's it for dear Melissa this week.If you have any questions for me, please submit them to dear melissa.com. And thank you so much for listening to the product thinking podcast. We always appreciate your attention every week. Uh, I love to hear your feedback as well. So please hit me up at Twitter. My handle is at LissiJean L I S S I J E a N. Uh, I always love to hear what you're thinking and tell me what you wanna hear about next. Uh, we will be doing more interviews, more things to come. So hit that subscribe button and don't miss out every Wednesday. When we release a new episode, we'll see you next time.