The 6 layers of goals we set to lead our product organization
“When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not anymore successful, so the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the company, and product people get driven out of decision-making forums, and the company forgets what it means to make great products. The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out.” — Steve Jobs
When a colleague of mine shared this video from an interview with Steve Jobs, my mind immediately ran to Clayton M. Christensen’s groundbreaking work around disruptive innovation, mainly included in his books “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution”. Large, successful companies often see in their size and success the very reasons that will bring them to being disrupted and fail — or at least this was the case in the past according to Christensen, who brilliantly analyzed this path in the hard-disk industry. Things may have changed a little bit in the last 20 years; Google, Facebook, and Amazon, for example, seem to have learned the lesson about continuous innovation quite well and it seems unlikely that they won’t be at the forefront of innovation for at least the next 10 years.
Nonetheless, we think Jobs’ prophecy should be taken seriously. Even though Casavo is not even close to being an established company, we always try to think long-term and build things the right way or, to say it with Italian words that are dear to some of our most senior tech colleagues “fare le cose dritte” (I didn’t know how to translate this, sorry). So, our first question was: how do we build a strong product foundation to bring real innovation to the market in order to make things go well for the company? And the second one: how do we make sure we do not mess up, as Jobs described, in case we manage to make things go well?
Together with Casavo’s product team and above all the precious contribution of Lorenzo (our first product manager), we designed a 6-layer structure to guide us through the years to come. It is still under construction because — as all the product people know — good things take time and despite everyone’s efforts, a baby needs 9 months to be born, no matter the number of mothers you put in the process (if pregnancy was the subject of a lift-off, time and scope would be the first priorities, quality the third and budget, as all mothers know, will be very low-prio).
The 6 layers
Before sharing it, I would like to make clear that this is something that we saw fit for our needs, and we think it is working pretty well. Some initiatives are actually under testing during these weeks, though!
So here it is (you can also find an image that summarizes the concepts in a more user-friendly way):
VISION:
- Timespan: 5/10 years
- It describes our utopistic end-goal and is close to be unreachable
- Breadth: the entire product organization
- How we delivered it: for now it is a nice slide shared with the team — we may translate it into a poster for our physical office
- Flexibility: none
STRATEGY:
- Timespan: 12 months
- It describes how we plan to reach our vision, with a series of steps we aim to take to achieve it
- Breadth: the entire product organization
- How we delivered it: same as vision
- Flexibility: very low (we update it based on new strategic findings)
OKRs:
- Timespan: 1 quarter
- Following the strategy, the Objectives define the goals we want to achieve during the quarter, while the Key-Results clarify what metrics we will measure to determine whether or note we’ve reached the Objectives
- Breadth: one team within the product organization
- How we delivered it: slides shared with the team
- Flexibility: low (we do not change them during the quarter, but they can be completely replaced from quarter to quarter)
ROADMAP:
- Timespan: 3 to 6 months
- Based on our objectives, we built a roadmap accordingly — sometimes new ideas pile up during the quarter and that’s why we might want to add some items beyond the 3-month horizon
- Breadth: one team withing the product organization
- How we delivered it: we use Product Plan and we like it a lot!
- Flexibility: medium (this is a flexible item, we are allowed to change its elements whenever we want, but we notice that we’re doing something wrong if we modify them too frequently)
SCRUM/KANBAN BOARD:
- Timespan: 2 up to 4 weeks
- We set our goals and we decided what to measure: the scrum (or kanban, based on what methodology we are applying) board provides visibility over the things that we decided to build to achieve them
- Breadth: one team within the product organization (our people are divided in teams based on the pursuit of specific business outcomes)
- How we delivered it: we use Jira, at the moment
- Flexibility: high (we might have to anticipate/postpone user stories and epics based on their feasibility at specific moments in time)
USER STORIES:
- Timespan: a few hours up to 2 weeks
- These are the atoms: they describe exactly what we want to build
- Breadth: usually 1 or 2 members of the team, but it can theoretically go up to the entire team based on complexity/needs
- How we delivered it: Jira
- Flexibility: very high (one of Agiles’ principles says that changing requirements, even late in development, are welcome if they are meant for the customer’s competitive advantage, but we try not to overexploit this capability because we think the people working on it can easily get tired)
Did all these things come all at once?
First of all, when the product team was created, we started with very short-term needs and left apart high-level goals. We created a sandbox and a backlog, implemented scrum, created a scrum board, and started filling it with user stories. We knew all along that we were starting from the furniture, but that was what the company needed, and ideals must sometimes be assigned low priority 😊 — in case you use the same approach, though, go ahead but never forget you are lacking the foundations! When we finally put them in place, we wondered how we managed to work for so many months without them.
Later, with remarkable effort and managing things from remote due to the pandemic, we worked on the foundations, making sure that the furniture could stay quietly in place. We developed a product roadmap in order to create transparency and better align within the different functions to accomplish the product vision, the product strategy, and our Objective Key-Results (OKRs).
Now an answer to a question that may have arisen:
- How do you align the product’s vision and strategy with the company’s vision and strategy?
We think they should be beautifully (and this is the hard part) entangled. If you look online you will find some templates based on the format that follows:
“For [our target customer], who [customer’s need], the [product] is a [product category or description] that [unique benefits and selling points].
Unlike [competitors or current methods], our product [main differentiators]”
I personally think this is not the best example of a long-term, inspiring product vision, that should sound more similar to:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
The culture
We want a team of missionaries, not mercenaries. We tried to translate our company’s vision into something that could drive the development of our products.
One final note before I conclude this article: before all this, we made sure we had the right culture in place. At Casavo, we were lucky enough to meet each other along the way in product and tech, sometimes discovering a posteriori and with great excitement that we were tuned on the same frequencies. Anyways, we know the exercise of spreading the right product culture is not something we can do and then stop; the temptation to build what someone thinks is the right thing rather than diligently listening to the market in order to address the biggest problems doesn’t fade away easily. We keep working on culture every day, and first of all, we keep working on ourselves because anyone can fall in the trap! This is a topic that could easily fill an entire post, though, so I will leave it for the future.
Wow, we covered a lot of topics! Let us know if you find this post worth the time needed to read it and please share your questions, but above all, if you feel like we could do something better, tell us!
A final big thanks to Casavo’s product team for supporting all this and, as said above, to Lorenzo, who provided many of the tips you find written here. Francesco Dominidiato, our CTO, and Gabriele Tondi, a senior engineer here at Casavo were also very precious in the writing of this article, and Marco provided the beautiful image with the table you see above. You can reach them out here: Lorenzo, Francesco, Gabriele, and Marco.
