Many resources for first-time or associate product managers tend to paint a rosy picture of the average company's strategic chops. They tend to emphasize the importance of using, say, your company's north star metrics to help prioritize your team's work; or drawing from the product organization's overall strategy to formulate your own.
However, the more I coach product managers, the more I hear that these idealized portrayals fail to live up to a much more sober reality. Most of the PMs I coach, frankly, not only find themselves in organizations without a product strategy; they also feel expected to form a strategy for their team or their product without that broader frame of reference. Moreover, they often don't have much help, if any, from their leadership.
When I sit down with these mentees, they don't want book recommendations. (In fact, they've almost always already read the classic resources like Inspired, or the Lean series, that I could suggest.) Instead, they want tactical game plans and real-life advice on building strategy in a vacuum.
Before I go any further, I'll admit that I have firm opinions about how product strategy ownership should work. (Hint: product leadership needs to be heavily involved.) As I've written in the past, I see the move from top-down management to autonomous squads – while primarily fantastic – as having eroded some of the helpful, strategic “glue” that helped create alignment among different teams. And, in a way, that lack of cross-team facilitation and decision-making is getting worse. The individual contributor product managers who “grew up” during that transition are now product directors and leaders who don't understand the importance of a cross-team strategy, much less how to form one. So when their newly-hired associate product manager asks them about strategy, they push the question back on their report, failing to understand why broader context is needed to create a team strategy. (You may think I'm being hyperbolic here. I promise: I'm not.)
In other words, I think many new product managers find themselves tasked – many times unfairly – with strategic tasks far above their level, and they understandably struggle. They struggle because their managers don't have a product strategy and – in many cases – don't know how to walk them through building one.
Situations like this can be challenging to navigate as a coach. I can't magically make a strategy appear at a mentee's startup any more than I can make the expectations that a mentee will craft a strategy in a vacuum disappear. What I've found the most helpful, however, is to encourage compromise: simultaneous ownership of strategy (which leadership often wants) without letting strategic work that should exist at the cross-team level of leadership get pushed down to the level of the individual team (which individual contributors don't want). Unfortunately, necessity drives a lot of this approach: simply asking upwards for a “strategy” rarely works (because what does that mean, really?), and there's no time to sit around waiting for one.
Achieving this compromise requires new product managers to do two things. First, it requires them to have questions they can ask upwards to get strategic clarity. In my experience, most new product managers don't even know what strategic questions to ask their manager or head of product (and, frankly, how can we expect them to know?). Second, they need to accept that the kind of idealized organizational strategy they've read about in books doesn't exist in their situation and stop looking for it. If it doesn't exist, it certainly won't appear overnight, even if they do push some of that work upwards. And, even if they shouldn't have to do it, they'll have to play a large part in driving that conversation.
Last week, I wrote about seeing strategy not as a finite “thing” or output but as something living that's never really “done.” I have struggled and have seen others struggle with remembering this in low-strategy environments. It's easy to feel like you have to work overtime to get to a solidified direction. But it's often better – and less combative – to aim for something broad.
Specifically, I advise mentees to aim for what I call a “240-pixel strategy”: working with their manager to build enough a picture so that they can make appropriate decisions without becoming hyper-focused on an ideal or any one part of the strategy. It's like those potato-grain videos in the early days of YouTube: it may not be perfect, but you can still watch it.
Getting to a 240-pixel strategy
Knowing which questions to ask upwards requires understanding the questions a product strategy should ideally answer. I won't claim that the following list of questions is perfect, but I've found them helpful in my practice, and my mentees have found them useful as well.1 (In fact, you don't even have to ask these upwards – you can use them for any strategic initiative. More on that in a second.) What I hope is clear when reading them is how easily they create a cascading narrative that one can use to communicate both near-term and long-term focus to others.
Strategic questions to ask
1. Needs
What are our business goals?
What market trends are we seeing across our prospects/competitors?
What are the most significant opportunities we have across our customer base?
2. Vision
Based on the above, what is “good”? Where's the intersection of the market, business, and customer needs at which we’re aiming?
3. Strategy
What are the biggest obstacles that prevent us from achieving that vision?
How are we planning to get around those obstacles?
How are we thinking about prioritizing those obstacles?
4. Success
How will we know when we've successfully circumvented those obstacles?
What metrics will we use to hold ourselves accountable?
5. Roadmap
From a broad/overall product perspective, what milestones do we see along the way to achieving our vision?
Now, you may be reading this list and thinking, “But all these questions are huge! So many of these require in-depth research and work to answer!” And you're correct: they do – at least if we're aiming for 1080-pixel fidelity.
But in the situation I described earlier – when there’s no strategy – we're not aiming for perfect. We’re a pretty long way from being able to think about perfect. Instead, we’re seeking 240 pixels: we want to get a rough outline of a strategy in place to have a little more direction to build a strategy for our team or product. Answering even just half of these questions is more helpful than developing a strategy in a vacuum. (Not to mention, you're much more likely to get an answer to the question, “What are our business goals?” than, “What's our strategy?”)
I typically advise mentees to use their next 1-1 with their manager – or to book an hour with them – and to go over these questions. I tell them not to worry if the answers aren't perfect or if there aren't yet answers for some of the questions. The immediate goal is to get out of the vacuum by starting a conversation about that higher-level strategy.
There are still some watch-outs. For instance, what do you do if your manager doesn’t have any answers to these questions? Or if they think it’s your job to answer them? (Again, not being hyperbolic – this does happen.) I’ll aim to tackle those topics in a future post.
For now, however, recognize that the beauty of these questions is that they work at the team level, not just the company or product organization level. So they can be used to build a 240-pixel team strategy very quickly, and asking for feedback on that strategy can reveal pieces of the higher-level goals. So it’s rarely about just waiting around for answers from leadership – there's always something active new or junior PMs can be doing in this situation.
That’s it for now – thanks for reading and I'll see you next time.
My approach has been heavily informed by the fantastic book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt. It’s a fantastic resource and I can’t recommend it highly enough for how much it stresses the importance of obstacles and goals when developing a strategy.