Boardroom Engagement — Part 3 (Communicate balanced horizons)
In my first two posts of this series on Boardroom engagement I discussed:
1) Boardroom Engagement — Part 1 — The importance of transparency of communication when interacting with a Board
2) Boardroom Engagement — Part 2 — The importance of having the right people around the table and knowing where your jumping-in point is
In part 3 I want to talk about what, in my experience, the Board is going to be looking for Product & Technology professionals to provide. My view, in established organisations at least, is that this broadly falls into two categories:
1) Stability of core operations with a view to efficiency, optimisation, incremental gains and predictability
2) A path to new value or material growth
Let’s start with stability…
A company will want a solid foundation on which to build. However, I think this is often misinterpreted to mean over-investing in the existing technology — the big costly IT projects that put in place systems to last for many years, if not decades (not to be confused with investing in the platform, which is an altogether separate topic I’ll unpack in a future post). I’m not saying you won’t need a certain amount of replatforming or foundational work, but this isn’t really the stability I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about the stability of the core product offering, the mix of products, services and experiences that are well established and provide enough breadth to weather any turbulence, be that an economic downturn or a particularly disruptive Google Core algorithm update. This reliable income provides the stability to pay the bills and set an organisational heartbeat around which other activities can be built.
Don’t get me wrong, just because we’re talking about maintaining the status quo in this first section, doesn’t mean there won’t be considerable work to be done. There is typically a significant time and money investment required to keep the ship steady while also setting course for the promised land (you know, the highly engaging product/service that keeps customers coming back time and again while also evolving to continually meet changes in customer demands).
Patching and maintaining systems, refactoring code, building incremental feature enhancements or using automation to drive efficiencies are essential in this optimisation stage. You’ll need good hypotheses, experiments and a culture of incremental gains. However, I have seen companies become consumed by this alone, seeking an ever better product at the expense of the step change that’s really required. The key is to acknowledge the product maturity and market conditions to invest the appropriate level of resources in these activities at any given time.
Let’s now take our second point into account.
A path to new value or growth…
One of the worst things you can do is package new value up as ‘innovation’. It can be innovative, but in my experience, this label often encourages the wild and wacky marketing-led ideas which get everyone very excited but, in practice, rarely meet product-market-fit. We don’t want glossy but vacuous, we want genuinely engaging experiences that see appropriately strong repeat usage (I say appropriate because we want customers to stick around, but we don’t want them to doom scroll their way into oblivion — add value to the human experience, don’t detract from or harm it).
In this section, what I’d present to a Board is a framework and/or analogy for new value thinking. I particularly like some of the horizon thinking. See the 3 Horizon Model as one great example that you overlay your business and ideas on to help communicate the balance of your portfolio and in turn, roadmap:
Between Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 we then have The Bridge, which specifically seeks tactical things you can do to keep Business 1 generating income to fund the build of Business 2:
I also quite like the ice-water-steam analogy for conveying the various states of certainty of ideas, or the now-next-later model, although whenever I see this I assume later will never come and I suspect senior stakeholders probably assume the same.
I think it’s important to say that this new value work will have a very different and much higher set of risk appetites than the steady-state work. This is where investment will likely be more forthcoming, often referred to as a big bet. It might feel frustrating at times that you acquire seed money for the new ‘data-powered B2B feed of the future’ but you can’t get money to pay for a few more licences to cover an existing system used on a daily basis. This is very normal, it’s all a part of placing bets and seeking to make the money to work as hard as possible in the different horizons or outlined contexts.
To summarise, I would advise you to have a 2 slide pack which speaks to each of: stability of core operations AND new value generation; this should ensure you’re always able to have a constructive conversation with your Board.
To conclude this three-part series of posts on Boardroom engagement, start with transparency, work with the governance to make sure you have an ally in the room and know your jumping-in point, and speak in a balanced way to both near-term stability as well as future growth strategies. These points should hopefully put you on the right foot.
I’d be interested to hear what else you find helpful or important to consider when engaging with the boardroom, so as always do drop a comment or connect with me on LinkedIn to share.
Just in case you started at the end, you can also read the other two parts of this series here:
Boardroom Engagement — Part 1 (Transparency)
Boardroom Engagement — Part 2 (Know your jumping-in point)
Check out more from my series of Leadership articles or my practical guides on building and operating effective Product Engineering Squads.
All thoughts are my own.
