Strategy Excellence for Product Managers w/ Greg Cohen, Product Management Author

Hello and welcome to another edition of Industry Product Interviews. Every 2 weeks we talk to some of the leading minds in product management and product development from around the world, and we're excited that you are here, uh, with us today. We've got a great guest and we're going to introduce you to him. You, you will see him there, but I'll introduce you to him in a moment. And but first, just a couple of things, a couple of updates. So as you can see, you're in a platform called Crowdcast. It lends to this kind of free-flowing video online interview very well. You will see that there's a chat box to the side there. Please feel free to introduce yourself, say hello, tell us what you're working on. And below, you'll see a link to ask a question. So if you click on that, you can ask a question. For Greg to answer. And what we'll do is I'll, I'll keep an eye on it and I'll pick out the top questions. You can also vote on these questions. So have a look through and if you see there's a question that somebody else has asked and you would like to see answered, just vote on it. So we are very excited about May in general, actually early June. Not only do we have Greg, who I'll introduce in a moment, being a part of this product interviews, but we also have Nir Eyal, and Ken Norton as well. So really excited to have the three of these, three of these great product minds on product interviews this month. So let's, let's get straight into it. Greg, I'm really excited to have you here.

Well, thank you for having me and inviting me in.

Yeah, no, it's fantastic. And I know you are in Dallas at the moment.

Yes.

For anybody who doesn't know Greg, He's the author of, he's the author of Strategy Excellence for Product Managers. I nearly hiccuped on the name of your book there, Greg. But he's also a 20-year veteran of product development and development of a whole range of different types of products from small enterprise to large enterprises building software as a service type products. He's what you might call a pioneer in Lean methods of product management, and also a former contestant in Flugtag, the event where he pushes himself off a harbor, and apparently he came last. Is this correct, Greg?

That is correct, yes. Red Bull Flugtag. We have the distinction of being in last place. Well, only team to score negative distance.

If you are also a contestant on Flugtag, please feel free to say hello in the chat box there. All right, so let's, let's get into it right away. Um, so product strategy is a term that often confuses me. I, I'm not quite sure exactly what it is. Greg, can you tell us a little bit about what you think product strategy is?

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm going to turn to sort of one of my heroes Peter Drucker, and he calls strategy analytic thinking and commitment of resources to action. And to me, that is what strategy work is about. It's doing that deep thinking, and when applied to product, it's 5 key areas: your customer and their needs, the market and trends and where it's going, your competitors and the environment you're in, the technology trends, and what the product needs to deliver. For the business. And it's those 5 areas and figuring out how you can carve out white space for yourself. And ideally, your goal is durable differentiation where you can be more successful growing faster than the market.

Okay, so when I think about product strategy in that world, it almost feels like an overall company strategy. How can a product strategy be understandable or even implemented by a product manager? Or is that even important? Is this more of an executive-level thing?

Right, no, no, I think it's absolutely critical. So I think you raised the point that product strategy and business strategy are deeply intertwined, and that's accurate. Now when I think about it, let's say like Microsoft's recent strategy moving into cloud, and even probably their differentiation there as far as hybrid consistency. To me, that's likely a corporate strategy decision. GE getting out of financial services, you know, corporate strategy. What markets do we want to play in? What geographies do we want to play in? And then those two both certainly affect people in the product areas. There's other corporate strategy decision— Medtronic's decision to do a reverse merger. Into an Irish company to reduce its tax burden. Those are corporate strategy decisions that don't impact product at all.

And so where does it start for the product manager when they're thinking of product strategy? Is this something that will likely be handed down, or for a product manager, say for those who are listening in today, what's the first step in understanding if there is one, or if there is a product strategy need to be made?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the product strata— the product manager needs to understand the corporate strategy and the product strategy. And one of those key pillars of product strategy is what is our business strategy. So quite often the product manager gets handed objectives, markets, someplace where we want to go, and product needs to You know, one point I was in a startup, I had bet on, had failed, were shutting that down, and the goal was getting the company to profitability. So the business strategy at that point was, how do we do that quickly? And the way it was determined was selling into existing customers would be the best way to do that. So product gets handed that, and we have to deliver on that and create a product, and I had to deliver in 90 days. Now that was very short-term strategy from the company side as well, but I had to know that because I knew if I missed 90 days, we wouldn't book revenue, and that was critical at that point. And I also needed to know the customer need so that I could deliver on the product promise, even though I had to deliver a product that did have a major design deficiency in it. But that it would still meet the need and it would be delivered on time. You know, fast forward a few years, company profitable, we own our own destiny, then as product we start investing in longer-term areas. So not a big short-term gain, but things that are going to lower cost and be better for our clients over the long term.

Yes.

I hope that sort of shows you the interplay between the two.

When you're thinking of product strategy, you mentioned yourself that there's different reasons why you might think in different time horizons. Is, is there an ideal time horizon for a product strategy, or does it really depend on a business or challenges?

Right, yeah, I think as product managers we have to learn to work along a spectrum of time horizons, which makes this job really interesting. On the short term, it's probably 6 to 9 months, and that's your agile roadmap. Then your product strategy To me, the sweet spot is 3 years. That also ties into your strategic roadmap and how that strategy is going to be realized over that time period. Business strategy is often more like a 5-year period, and then futurists, they're out at 10 years. And you certainly need to understand what's going on on each of those horizons to be able to craft a strong strategy and then tie that back to the short-term execution.

And should there be different people focused on these different horizons? So I suppose going back to what we were saying before, the big picture stuff is probably going to come from the C-suite, but maybe starting at the beginning, the 3-month horizons that are probably tied to agile development, who's thinking about this?

Yeah, so that depending on your company would be product owner or product manager. But I think the point you're bringing out is it's hard to know who actually— who owns product strategy in a company. You can't just say it's the product manager because product managers work at different levels within a company. So I might be a product manager and I'm working on a component that goes into a bigger product. No one actually buys my component, but it is part of why this product is successful. So I need to work with the product manager who has the P&L for that product to make sure that the strategy coming down from the product manager and what her strategy is, that my strategy ties into that and both informs her strategy and is informed by her strategy. And then you do roll out more to probably the director VP who's looking at portfolio strategy for the product area and influencing the business strategy. I think often product managers don't feel empowered to engage in that conversation, and they really should be. It's part of the role.

Absolutely. And so, yeah, we often talk about the importance of a product manager to have authority or influence just through knowledge and being, being knowledgeable and skillful enough to be able to, to, to impose some influence or authority across their team and up and down too. Would that be the same with product strategy? What exactly is it that they should be aware of? Let's start at the very beginning, like a newly made product manager. What are the key skills that that person will need to be able to be of more influence or authority in the realm of product strategy?

Right, so if you're a newly minted product manager, you're working on a single product or maybe in a component area, the most important things you can do are certainly become an expert in your customer and your market. And starting at that point and then growing out and beginning to understand what are the trends, where's the technology going, and you do need to then also know what to expect from your boss, you know, from the VP of product management. And it's reasonable to ask, what is the product strategy? What is my role in delivering on that? And also, what is the business strategy? Excellent.

So before I ask another question, uh, we've got a big crew here, so if you do have a question, please throw it into the ask a question link there, and I'll definitely get to it by the end of this conversation. So do ask a question there. You can throw one in the chatbot there if you want to, but it's more convenient that way. So obviously a product strategy needs to be flexible, right? We would be naive to think that, you know, we can execute on a 2-year-long product strategy, you know, perfectly. So what do you, what do you look out for, and how do you bend your product strategy when you hear things?

Right, yeah, it's a great question. So product strategy, if we even just sort of think about how product managers work today, creating hypotheses, going out trying to validate those in the marketplace. Strategy has a similar structure where you set up signposts and guardrails. So when you set out your longer-term strategy, you say, what are interim milestones? These are the signposts that would suggest this strategy is working. And the guardrails are, what are the signs that this strategy isn't working and that we need to really deeply reevaluate it? So if you're rolling out a new product, one of your objectives might be end customers signed up by end of year. And therefore you'd expect maybe a couple customers signed up within the first quarter or first half year as you go out and you create awareness for this. By the same token, guardrails might be, if we don't even have 2 customers signed up after 6 months, we really need to reevaluate. The value prop here. Is this even the right strategy for us to be going down? Can we be successful in this market?

Interesting. So there are two defined structures. I presume you've outlined this in your book, that these are two ways of staying flexible.

Yes, and you always need to be looking at it along with your strategic roadmap, which you should be revisiting at least quarterly.

And so when you have, um, in terms of what you're listening for Obviously there's competitors, there's going to be a lot of noise coming from competitors, and some of the biggest mistakes a product manager might make are caused by reacting to what the competitors are doing rather than what they're doing. But other than the competitors, there's other things that you'll hear. What do you think is most important for a product manager to look out for when keeping one eye on their product strategy and the other eye on something else? What's most important to look out for?

Yeah, so that is one of the great challenges of product management. It is so highly contextual. But the big thing is to understand where you're trying to go because— I mean, one of the reasons I even wrote this book was As I've been a champion of Agile since 2001, I wrote a book, Agile Excellence for Product Managers, on that because it makes the product management job so much easier. But because we have this great power of flexibility, it's easy to become reactionary. It's easier to just respond, and I feel like we've lost some skills in developing product strategy and doing this hard, hard work of thinking of how do we differentiate in the marketplace. And how do we carve out this durable white space that we can compete in and compete in effectively over a long period of time.

That's interesting you say that, that our ability to change quickly and change direction quickly and to get released quickly through lean and agile can be a negative thing as well as a positive thing.

Right. It's neutral. It's how you use it.

Right. How, you know, since you've, you've come from, um, you know, an Agile background, um, and then that's morphed some into product management, or maybe there's a middle ground, how important is Agile now to, to product management, and how, how is it, how is it best employed? I know it's a big question because this is your whole, your, your whole, uh, career is about teaching this, but Can you give me a kind of a summary of how that might— those two worlds might join together?

Yes, I think what agile does is it lets you get there in small increments and it lets you adjust plan based on new learning. That certainly wasn't possible or easily possible in the waterfall world. It's interesting, you know, if you look at the changes going on, I think it was in 1991 Gary Campbell coined this term expeditionary marketing, and it would be the of knowing that there's a lot of value out there in a market space and just having to get out there and learn about it. Now this is 1991, and in his assessment, the companies that were doing the best at it were getting product to market in 1 year. The standard company in '91 was getting a product to market in 3 years. I think we all know what is the situation we're living in now. Now, you know, where we can launch products into the market, you know, 60, 90 days that deliver value to customers. And we are reacting, you know, probably at least on a monthly cycle, sometimes even earlier or shorter than that, to new information that's coming in. And that's what agile unleashes, is that real—

yeah. Yeah, sorry, experiencing some technical issues there. Can you hear me, Greg? All right, folks, I think we're experiencing some technical difficulties. We hope to have Greg back on. Line soon, if you'll just bear with us. So while— he's gone to space after all. Thank you, Jason. While we're waiting for Greg to get back— that's right, Ross. This is pretty much how product demos generally go. This is the life of the product manager, folks. Um, all right, so he is— he's popped out. So let's listen, let's see if he comes back. But while I have your attention, um, if you guys have any questions for, um, Greg, please do ask, um, log them in the ask a question thing. Um, I might as well do a little plug for our industry conference coming up in October, October 1st to 3rd. We're about to launch a more expanded agenda for that. So look out for that message soon. All right, where's Greg? But you can go to— oh, there you are. Okay, there you go. Greg is here. Bear with us. We're getting there. We're getting there. No, Greg, we cannot hear you. You're not live. One second. All right. Isn't this fun, guys? All right.

Well, the comment, this is like a product demo.

I know, right? So true.

So true.

Oh, good times, good times. That's what it's all about. Um, all right, okay, so, um, Agile and product management. I just want to throw something, um, at you. Um, so we had, um, Ryan Singer from Basecamp, uh, speak at our conference in, in Dublin just last week, and somebody asked him a question, something like, so do you validate ideas And he said, no, we don't, we don't do that. We don't even know what we're building 30 days from now, or, you know, 60 days from now. They, they have no product strategy. Are you familiar with that way of working, and what, what are your thoughts on it?

Yeah, I think to have no product strategy is a problem, even if you're in a brand new market. Uh, so we've always had a product strategy in any group. They'll certainly— when you're in those situations, your product strategy may not be at that 3-year mark. Maybe it's more at the 1-year mark because you are out and your biggest goal is learning and validation. But to have no product strategy means you're not even aware of where the trends are going, how to pull in technology. It's kind of goes to the Wayne Gretzky quote, right? Why he was a great hockey player. So they don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be. And we as product managers need to balance that and need to start pulling resources out of existing product to where we want to position ourselves in the future.

Yeah, I think, I think, I don't know what Ryan would say, but I'm trying to channel him here. And he would say, well, you know, nobody knows where the puck is going. So, you know, everything is so fast-moving, everything is changing. So the thing that we should do is get something out there, and if somebody buys it, then we're on the right track, et cetera, et cetera.

Exactly. So I think then you run the risk of sort of local maximization, but maybe where that happening isn't even the best market you want to be in. I mean, Snap got caught by this, or Snapchat, right? Facebook knocked off one of their key features within Instagram, and they're really struggling. They just missed their numbers again. Google invested a huge amount in Google+. They did this beautiful ethnographic research around it, around circles, felt that a killer feature was going to make this product succeed. They really didn't fully understand the competitive challenge they were up against. So you have to be aware of that, and then you've got to have those guardrails there to know when you need to adjust your plan.

Yeah, but it almost seems— it seems a little crazy to have to defend that way of thinking, right?

I mean, so the— and I would say, at the end of the day, whether it's product strategy at 3 years, business strategy at 5, or the futurist at 10 years, the fundamental belief is that by going out and looking at this and analyzing it, we will make better decisions today. Certainly Basecamp doesn't believe that's true.

Yeah, here, let's go to a question here by, um, Sid. Sid asks, uh, curious, Greg, if you have any frameworks you use to define product strategy and provide some consistency from product to product. Any thoughts on that?

Right, yes, I have a few of my own that I use. I definitely still rely on SWOT. I rely on something that I call market mapping, which helps you plot yourself against your competitors along the value chain and what you deliver, and you can see where they're investing and where their likely moves and strengths are, as well as other areas that they may not protect as vigorously.

Market mapping— is there somewhere that people can find more information on that, or just Google it?

That would be in the book.

Okay.

And there's a number of frameworks. For me, frameworks are lenses that help structure the decision. And I like to use multiple because they all have strengths and they all have blind spots.

Yeah, excellent. I think there's another question that relates to the same thing. Um, a little bit different. What do you use, or what format tools do you use to document your product strategy?

That's a great question. I largely, you know, started in big documents, moved to wikis, and I'm I don't like to do product plugs. I am finding Realtime Board, now that I've used it for a few years and they've really enhanced it, to be a great place to get a single view of strategy. It's sort of like a giant whiteboard. And I do a huge amount of strategy work in there now. It especially works great with remote teams too.

Yeah, and just before I ask this question, please do ask another— we have time for another couple of questions, so do please ask a question. Related to the documentation, I want one more thing on that too.

I should just say that the reason to me why Realtime Board is so great is it's visual, and people understand things better when it's visual, and it's easier to convey the message. And so same thing too, did it on a whiteboard at work or on a wall. I think there's a lot of value in that, in seeing how the pieces fit together in context.

And does Does a product strategy end up being somewhat triangular in that there's a very simple strategy outlined from the very top, say, hey, we need to do this, and then right down the bottom that there's more detailed— there's more detail in general? So would there be different documentation types needed for each?

Yes, there are. And so the top level is the vision. Vision doesn't necessarily get you there. It doesn't always take into place the competitive environment. It may not be realistic that you can achieve that, right? And that's where strategy comes in. So strategy is sitting at the center of vision, of your roadmap. I talked, I think, at the opening about Drucker. Strategy is about analytic thinking and commitment of resources to action, right? So you get your roadmap now that's about 3 years, and then you got your backlog. That's The backlog is where the commitment to action happens. And those are the 4 key documents, I think, or areas. It's vision, product strategy, you got your roadmap, and your product backlog.

Excellent. All right, so one more question here. We have time for another if somebody gets in on time, but let's go to Sean Collier. He asks, do you see a big difference in planning for service-based products versus physical or digital products?

Yes, physical products definitely have more significant constraints around them, right? Longer planning, you have supply chain issues, they're not as easy to iterate. And then it also depends where you are on the curve of market maturity. I do a lot of work in healthcare. It's a slower moving market. There are regulatory concerns. You can't just put things out there, right? The way you can in a consumer online product or in a service model, which is usually easier to iterate on. So definitely they all have their unique attributes to them.

Awesome.

Definitely it's not one size fits all.

Great. Well, Hannah Stone has left the most difficult question till last. So let's get to it. So actually I wanted to ask this, but I hadn't thought of it. So you have a great product strategy, and of course your roadmap is constantly hijacked, um, or taken hostage by sales opportunities. So how do you effectively champion an organization being product-driven versus the alternative?

How do you stick to that? Actually, I think a great point, and even ties into your earlier question about base camp. If you don't have a strategy, if you can't articulate where you're going and why you want to be there, and why that's the best opportunity, then sales will hijack what you're doing because all you have to react to is what's immediately coming in front of you.

Right.

So I think the goal there then is to, you know, as best you can— I do a lot of B2B work, so yeah, these big deals come in— is to figure out how to politely say no, how to structure those sales so that they advance your roadmap and where you want it to go. And at times, if nothing else, your job and responsibility is to raise up to executive leadership, but we can do this, we can take the sales opportunity, or we can build this new capability that's going to let us enter this new market. Which one would you want? Because we can't do both with our current resource allocation. And part of strategy helps us drive those discussions And that lets us help keep the organization connected all the way from development up to the C-suite and make better decisions.

It seems to often come down to the need to sell, the fear of missing out, FOMO, I suppose, should there be a strong push to implement a feature or new product because of a sales opportunity. So yes, that is a great opportunity, but there's a fear of missing out on a huge market, or there's a fear of the company collapsing altogether if, you know, you allow these other people to come in. You almost have to sell the negative side of these things as much as the positive.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably true. Absolutely. And you have to be open and receptive to sales.

Yeah.

Right? And you're going to learn from taking those sales, but you have to say, which— if you have a sale that's not going to move you in the right direction, then you really do have to question big resources off your network.

And of course, there would be no jobs if there was no salespeople.

Exactly. It's an important role. That stakeholder needs to be informed as best we can. We want them selling the vision. But, you know, when you're starting out and you're doing especially big enterprise deals, you take the deals you can get. The product's not ready to support them. You put services around it. And support them until the product can actually carry its own, and you do whatever you can to make them successful and referenceable customers. And that's really important in those early stages.

Great. Okay, I think it's a great point to end our session with. So thank you very much, Greg, for joining us. As I said, folks, Nir Eyal and Ken Norton are coming up later in May and in early June. So please register for that and hope you can join us for that. Really thankful that you've taken your time to, taken the time to join us. Please feel free to reach out to me, paul@productcollective.com, if you have any thoughts about this. Very excited to be here. Thank you very much again, Greg, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you, Paul.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye.