Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
There’s a pattern I see, especially at enterprise software companies, where the go-to-market materials present a glowing product picture – but underneath there’s a jumble of mismatched pieces, arcane product history, incomplete testing, and randomness. I call it product sprawl.
I see some software companies classifying multi-year development contracts as SaaS ARR. Here’s why I don’t think investors should be excited about that…
Most of us don’t get much practice resigning from corporate leadership positions, but it’s important to do this gracefully. Plan it the way you’d plan your next product: clear communication, succession plan, helpful transition. And be a mensch: you’ll be working with many of these people again.
Many companies have replatforming efforts underway. This is an essential part of the software product business, but fraught with poor assumptions and lack of experience/understanding. I’ve seen the majority of these replatforming and reimplementation efforts fail…
We know that external customers must recognize a problem before they consider buying our solution. But I often see product managers / product leaders forget this when dealing with internal stakeholders and executives. We push for product-side practices and processes without clearly framing the underlying problems. I think of this as ‘selling philosophy.’
Product management work is much easier when the product team is well-respected: when stakeholders believe that we’re smart and hard-working and good at product stuff. So an under-appreciated skill of product leaders is merchandizing good product work and good outcomes from our teams.
What does that look like?
Company leaders who aren’t steeped in how software is designed and built can apply less-than-useful analogies for how software products are built. These analogies tend to highlight predictability, scheduling and cost management… but may not be that useful. This post unpacks a few of them.
CEOs may not see their role in systematic product/development problems, and product leaders may not know how to frame their concerns so CEOs can hear them. Can we get past buzzwords to difficult organizational discussions?
When coaching our product teams (and others), it’s important to remember our objective: to build up skills and talent so that we can delegate as much ‘line’ product work as possible. Plenty of leader-level work left for us…
Everyone wants innovation, especially if we can plan and schedule into each sprint.
But innovation is uncertain. Can we shift the discussion to planning and scheduling and funding of discovery that can (often) lead to innovation?
