Shelter from the storm
How do you purposefully design a system for your teams to address customer and marketplace expectations in a sustainable manner?
The elements always exist.
I live in Vancouver, BC, where it rains persistently for most of the year, with some scattered blissful months of sun and moments of snow. We’ve all been in a situation where we need to find some sort of shelter from the elements. Depending on where you work, a persistent amount of “rain” can be generated by marketplace and customer expectations. To weather this storm you need to put your teams in a position to sustainably address these expectations in a valuable manner that takes into account the nuances of delivery.
This article focuses on a simple approach that hinges on four areas of alignment that establish a measure of value.
- Teams are finite.
- You want to train and retain high-performance teams.
- You want to acquire new customers.
- You want to retain existing customers for as long as possible.
How do you purposefully balance these factors to drive the impact that your organization has aligned around?
Use the product umbrella.
Each “product umbrella” is a combination of two committed streams of work: A marketable feature release (aka. “launch”) combined with incremental enhancements to the active platform.
You have a large single arc combined with a series of smaller sequential arcs that form the concept model. These two streams of work intentionally address your desire to acquire new customers through awareness while simultaneously building deeper trust and confidence with existing customers through steady enhancements of marketable features that have already shipped.
These streams of work suggest HOW you approach work as a team in a way that confirms you are delivering value to your entire audience.
The umbrella puts you in a headspace to make balanced, informed decisions about HOW you organize around a roadmap. This concept does not tell you WHAT to build. It will not build your roadmap, but it will help you better understand how your roadmap streams intersect to serve the intended impact.
Break the product umbrella into logically staggered phases/stages of development.
Every time a release goes to market, it will automatically incur elements of "debt" that will most likely need to be reconciled—design debt, tech debt, performance improvements, etc. No matter how perfect you think your release went, some form of “debt” is 99% unavoidable. It is a natural byproduct of shipping digital products.
To break this down, I’ve deconstructed the umbrella into a logical, staggered structure. In this structure, the marketable release (the big arc) is “launched” and a series of small arcs “bounce” following the marketable release. This forms the base that we’ll now sequence to create shelter!
The question is now: “How prepared are you to reconcile the debt that has been incurred and where does it fit into the larger resourcing plan?” How and when you reconcile debt is a matter of balancing priorities between driving awareness and building consistent trust through day-to-day interaction with your customers. You find balance with how you leverage finite resources — your teams — to sustainably deliver, without burning people out or cutting corners. Don’t fool yourself, intentionally cutting corners is simply introducing additional debt.
Sequencing the layers creates shelter (and vision).
Having explained the concept of one umbrella, resiliency comes when you take the concept model and sequence the pattern across releases. In this final diagram, each umbrella conceptually relies upon this combination of launch and enhance to create this idea of an impermeable membrane that keeps the market aware of your product(s), keeping the top of funnel (TOFU) teams happy, while delivering consistent incremental value to the customers that use aspects of your product(s) on a regular basis.
This collection of interconnected commitments gives the product teams a clear vision of HOW work will be approached — removing that specific uncertainty and allowing them instead to focus all of their energy on driving the outcomes and impact that the business has aligned upon.
Behold…Shelter from the storm!
Always test the concept. Make it yours.
The analogy is meant to find a balance between strategic and tactical priorities that can be sustainably delivered by your team(s).
I’ve also used this to discuss product priorities as it relates to people resourcing, roadmaps, and customer journey mapping. I leverage it to explain the first 90 days onboarding into a new organization, by taking action on small cost initiatives while forming a stronger understanding of larger strategic initiatives. You can just as easily apply this to brand touchpoints.
Thank you for reading. Please experiment with the concept and let me know how it goes!
Thank you to David Sherwin and Richard Banfield for the editorial nudges! 🙏
