3 Unconventional & Game-Changing Ways Product Managers Can Boost Their Effectiveness Through Strategy
The keys to unlock personal, team, and product potential
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Work harder! Bill more!
As a consultant running mobile and Agile product engagements, I used to think success was all about brute force, hard work.
The greater the number of hours I could spend “executing,” the more hours my consultancy could bill the client.
But since becoming a full-time employee, and working closely with Product people at all levels of the Enterprise, I’ve come to see that forcing people to work as many hours as possible only leads to
Average results
Poor quality
Multiple mistakes
Constant rework, leading to
Unhappy customers
Burnout
Attrition
More is less
Organizations don’t need their Product people to invest more hours — they need them to be more effective, work together in ways that boost team collaboration, and make smarter choices with their products and services to provide creative solutions to their customers as they deliver on their organization’s most mission-critical goals.
Strategy is the key to achieving all three.
Strategy to the Rescue
There are many approaches to strategy, but ultimately, the definition I’ve found most helpful is a “set of choices” designed to achieve effectiveness in solving a problem.
And one of simplest and most effective ways to design strategy is Roger L. Martin’s “Playing to Win” strategy framework. Where many strategy approaches are obtuse, complex, and inactionable, reserved only for elite MBA graduates, Martin’s (despite being a double Harvard grad himself) approach is squarely focused on being simple, straightforward, and solidly actionable, available to anyone who wants to be more effective.
And here are three ways Product Managers can increase their effectiveness through strategy:
1: Design a Personal Strategy
2: Collaboratively design your team’s strategy
3: Collaboratively reverse-engineer your product’s current strategy
We’ll delve into each below.
1: Design a Personal Strategy
Personal Strategy represents a radically different approach to making the most of every hour you spend at work.
The overwhelm most Product Managers experience comes from letting work happen to them. Without an intentionally-designed set of choices around where they can be most effective, their calendar will fill up with meetings and people will pile work on them that will take them farther away from the things that really need to get done.
Many try to do it all, and end up falling continuously farther behind.
How to create your Personal Strategy
Designing a Personal Strategy really involves nothing more than consciously and intentionally making a set of choices in answering the five questions of the Strategy Choice Cascade and how they relate to your role:
Winning Aspiration — “What unique value will you aspire to contribute to your organization?”
Where to Play — “To which activities will you allocate your scarce time, in what proportion?”
How to Win — “How will you create disproportionate value from each hour of work?”
Must-Have Capabilities — “What capabilities will you need to develop and exploit to create maximum value?”
Enabling Management Systems — “What systems will you create to help build and maintain the capabilities you must possess?”
Adapted from Roger L. Martin, “Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks”
The focus is not to answer them one-by-one in order before moving on to the next; it’s to continuously toggle back and forth between them, and consider them as working together and supporting each other.
Understanding expectations for the Product role
Research and dig deep into what your manager and your team expect you to handle, in particular focusing on what your predecessor did well (and poorly), and how expectations might have changed.
In stepping through the five questions to design your strategy, match your strengths to areas where you may be especially strong now, or have particular interest in developing skills in that area.
Are you great at presenting? Written documentation? Have a background in User Research and testing?
Lifting up others on the team
Working with your manager and your team, look to delegate areas where you may be less strong to others who are more capable or better-suited.
Perhaps there are some areas around Governance, Risk, and Compliance (“GRC”) you can delegate to a Business Analyst. Maybe someone else can step up and track the effectiveness of social media outreach?
Once you’ve identified your choices, keep constant discipline around how to use your time most effectively. Recognize when you’re most effective, and block out deep work time in your schedule to access Flow states to do your best work in your chosen areas.
For more on Personal Strategy, read my full article here.
Subscribers can read the full article at this free, hidden Medium link here.
(No Medium subscription required, but registration may be necessary.)
Revitalizing a business school through Strategy
Roger L. Martin recently marked 10 years since leaving his post as Dean at The Rotman School in this bittersweet LinkedIn post.
I excerpt below:
"[I decided] to take a 90+% pay cut to do patriotic service in the province and country of my birth as Dean of Rotman. As of 1998, Canada had no globally consequential business school and none heading that direction. UofT, Canada’s top-ranked university, had merely the fourth best business school in Ontario. It was a tiny, deficit-ridden entity referred to derisively as the ‘Faculty of Mismanagement.’ Rotman was largely irrelevant both in global scholarship and to international students, with only a handful annually of the latter in the flagship full-time MBA program.
By the midpoint of my time as Dean, Rotman had become Canada’ global business school star and a source of pride, rather than embarrassment, for UofT. By the end of my term, it was globally relevant and admired as the most innovative business school on the planet. It attracted hundreds of international students to every class. It doubled in size and more so in quality of students. Objective external rankings placed us 3rd in the world for faculty output, ahead of powerhouse private US giants including Stanford, Columbia, MIT Sloan and Chicago Booth. I was named the 2013 global business school dean of the year (and the 1st non-US and 1st public university Dean) by the most influential business school publication.”
The story of how Roger Martin achieved this is laid out in this Medium post (no paywall):
Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks
Pay careful attention to the Dean of Rotman Case Study section, and in particular, this quote & everything that follows:
“…to have an effective personal strategy, you need to be deliberative about choosing where to deploy your limited available hours in tasks that your particular set of capabilities enable you to generate a win by creating disproportionate value for your organization.”
Absolutely powerful & essential reading on increasing your personal effectiveness.
Personal Strategy
I compared & contrasted Roger Martin’s Personal Strategy with Christina Wodtke’s Personal OKRs in this piece:
This quote is important context:
“For Martin, the two limiting factors in personal strategy are the unique capabilities each person brings to the table, and the limited number of hours available in any given day.
The way to “win,” or meet your challenges and consistently succeed, is to create maximum value for each hour spent.”
The Strategy Choice Cascade
The five questions of the Strategy Choice Cascade form the foundation of the “Playing to Win” framework, and allow it easily bring better strategic choice-making across so many industries and applications.
“Through understanding and systematically answering each of the five cascade prompts with your team, you can take advantage of a deceptively powerful way to create the integrated set of strategic choices that will increase your odds of creating a winning future.”
The “Playing to Win” Framework — Part III — The Strategy Choice Cascade
There’s No One “Right” Way to Do Continuous Discovery - Part 1
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion have done an extraordinary article and video on the first three fundamental underlying principles of good Continuous Discovery, the foundation of translating user-centric strategy into things a software team can build and ship:
Collaborative decision-making—encouraging your teams to make decisions as a product trio. How they do that is up to the team, but we really encourage this collaborative model.
Externalizing your thinking. Here’s an opportunity solution tree. That’s one way to do it. Customer journey maps, story mapping, impact mapping—there are lots of ways to externalize your thinking.
Being outcome focused. How do you help your teams shift from just thinking about outputs, like “What code did we ship?” to thinking about what impact that code had and asking “What metrics did we move?”
Read the full article & watch their conversation here.
That’s it for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go Up- and Downstream to explore the Full Value Delivery Stack.
