The strategic building blocks are social
How the different internal functions relate to business, customer, and market needs
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If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you know that I tend to write about not just product management itself but also where the role intersects with other functions in a tech company. Today, I want to pick up where I left off in my last post about strategic building blocks and talk about how those building blocks offer opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.
As a review, when we’re building out a product strategy, we do so from three building blocks:
What the business needs;
What the customer needs; and
What the market needs.
Each of these building blocks has independent tasks you likely already know. For instance, we can understand market needs better by setting aside time to analyze our competitors’ recent offerings or broader emerging technologies; we can understand business needs by analyzing our company’s top-line metrics.
But something I’ve experienced frequently and seen through the coaching I do is that product work (especially product strategy!) dangerously tends to happen in a vacuum. The way modern product roles are structured can even seem to encourage that independence: the archetypal product manager must be comfortable with ambiguity and exercise autonomous leadership skills.
Comfort with ambiguity, however, doesn’t mean going it alone, nor does autonomously leading mean being a loner. (Remember: the “ideal” product manager doesn’t need to be independently brilliant.) On the contrary, ensuring that other functions are involved in strategic work – not reactively but proactively – helps forge stronger connections cross-team and cross-functionally. Not to mention, it will likely make you happier as a product manager, and your job more enjoyable, because you won’t feel so isolated.
In my last role, several features my team brought to market were, in fact, brainchildren of Customer Success managers. It feels reflexively vulnerable to admit that because most people, I think, would assume that “working with customer-facing teams” necessarily means “building whatever requests they relay from customers.” That wasn’t the case for us. Instead, we worked together on discovery: I invited Customer Success managers to help us scope out the market, conduct research, validate the request, and more. Sometimes, that resulted in an invalidated bet, which was easier to communicate because we in part gathered the evidence outside the Product team; it wasn’t the cheap and automatic “no” to which many Customer Success teams have grown accustomed. In other cases, that resulted in successful features that were all the richer for coming from a functionally diverse team. Not to mention, some of those features were the ones customers loved the most.
Being curious about and collaborative with other departments will improve your product practice. And, the more you consciously open yourself up to cross-functional opportunities, the more you’ll start gravitating towards them naturally.
Linking strategic building blocks to different SaaS functions
Each major function within a SaaS organization corresponds with at least one strategic building block. (Some correspond with several, but I’ll keep it simple here.)
Business needs
Executive team
A frequent question that comes up on product management message boards is, “What do I ask the head of product?” Or, “I have a meeting with a startup founder. What questions can I ask to impress them?”
One answer: ask about high-level business needs. Executives spend a lot of time thinking about (a) high-level metrics and (b) how to leverage different teams in the organization to meet their goals.
Using your skip-level 1-1s or interactions with executives to ask about the bigger picture can inform your individual strategic work by placing it within the proper context.
As a note, however, you want to be somewhat prepared and have done your homework beforehand. For example, using your skip-level to ask what the company’s revenue targets are will probably be a waste of time. But asking about which metrics are the most important, how the executive is approaching them, what they’re most concerned about, is a great way to gather information to inform your strategy.
Analytics and operational teams
One of the most common skill deficiencies I see when I meet product managers who need help becoming more strategic is that they aren’t sufficiently aware of the business. You can’t just rely on management and other teams to understand how the company is performing – if you’re going to think like a senior product manager and above, you need to become familiar with how the business operates and how it’s doing. Most organizations have someone responsible for regularly analyzing or reporting business metrics. In small organizations, this may be an executive (see above); in others, it may be a data analyst or sales operations manager. Sitting down with this person and getting a walkthrough of the key business metrics – or at least how they’re calculated and where they’re located – can be a great way to familiarize yourself with how the business is doing while forging a cross-functional relationship.
Legal and Security teams
Admittedly, Legal and Security teams can feel like a drag on product work, especially in larger organizations. But getting to know at least one person on your Legal and Security teams can help when questions arise, and you need to ensure that the business is well protected. Doing so is particularly important if you work on a team or in an industry that’s more heavily regulated. When I worked in insurance technology, for instance, the legal implications of my product were far more stringent than when I worked on a marketing analytics platform – although Legal was, of course, necessary in both cases. Don’t forget that part of being the “business representative” in the product triad means looking out for things like legal and security constraints, not just growing revenue or solving user problems.
Customer needs
I’ll be honest; I have a bias: Support and Customer Success teams are my favorites to work with in any product role, even though the dynamic can be challenging given the different focuses of each team. In particular, customer-facing teams tend to focus on resolving issues for individual customers, while as product managers, we focus on a much broader kind of problem resolution. In the past, I’ve written about having empathy not just for customers but also for customer-facing teams; I can’t reiterate that point enough here.
Support team
There are often several support teams in an organization, from front-line chat or phone support to more in-depth technical support and documentation teams. All of them, however, should have a good gut sense of the biggest issues customers run into, as well as what frustrates customers the most. Sometimes this is immediate (e.g., angry chat messages), sometimes it’s more subtle (e.g., a high number of page views on documentation for a feature that doesn’t make sense to customers). Using your Support team to quickly identify trends across customer needs can help you streamline strategic research and especially back up whatever strategic direction you choose. Additionally, reducing support tickets can have a positive business impact in multiple ways and be a valuable signal that a bet or new feature is working.
Customer Success team
As I mentioned in my anecdote above, Customer Success can be an extremely positive force strategically if you take the time to listen while maintaining your business savvy. Like Support representatives, Customer Success managers have an excellent handle on how customers struggle. However, they’re also responsible for ensuring customers leverage your product as much as possible and, like you, are responsible for thinking strategically – just in a different way. It’s not uncommon for Customer Success teams to already be aware of customer needs on a strategic level and to have solved product problems in manual ways (e.g., through a one-sheet or recorded webinar). Not to mention, validating how market trends are impacting your actual customers is an integral part of strategy definition and something with which Customer Success managers are perfectly primed to help.
Market needs
Sales team
A while ago, I polled product managers around which team they struggle to work with the most. Above all, the answer was Sales. Unfortunately, Sales teams can have a bad rep among product managers. If you work in a Sales-driven organization, you may primarily find yourself being the tail wagged by Sales’ dog.
But partnering with Sales can give you a deeper understanding of how the product is failing to meet the market’s needs. This conversation is often bidirectional – I’ve often learned about market trends from Sales representatives, just as I’ve validated (and invalidated) how relevant trends are among prospects by asking the Sales team.
It’s again important to remember that Product is not the only strategic function in an organization. A Sales team without a strategy would be a terrible one indeed. If you don’t take the time to understand, as a product manager, who your Sales team is selling to and why – and, as you get more senior, if you don’t join that conversation – you’re closing off one of the most critical strategic avenues available to you.
Marketing team
Marketing departments essentially own how everyone – not just customers – sees your product and company, from social media to brand to analyst relations and positioning and more. Unfortunately, many junior product managers underestimate how broad – and how vital – Marketing is in a company. But it’s critical to learn because it’s the function that overlaps the most with product management, and the smaller your organization, the more marketing tasks you’ll find yourself owning.
Most product managers will work most closely with product marketing and potentially customer marketing and analyst relationship managers. Like the Sales team, your Marketing team has a marketing strategy that you need to understand because it impacts your product. Product marketing, in particular, should be a close partnership that helps you read and analyze the market needs on one end of the development cycle and position your product on the other.
Even if you don’t directly interact with some Marketing functions, it’s worth understanding them or meeting people on the Marketing team. It’s essential to know how the product you’re building is represented relative to competitors and why and identify how the product needs to reflect the company’s brand.
That’s all for now – I’ll see you next time.