How to find the biggest possible question — Part One
Scenario Planning For Everyone
Working for SuperAwesome is a real privilege for me. We are pushing out into unexplored territory, attempting to define a whole new category. The business of creating awesome products is always riddled with uncertainty and the path forward is almost never clear. Never is this truer than when you are leading the charge and have no one else mapping the terrain ahead of you.
As we attempt to tackle questions of kids privacy in the digital media ecosystem, and how to make the internet safer for kids, we find ourselves needing tools to help address big strategic questions and–in many cases–find out what the right question even is. In this pair of articles, I outline one of my favourite techniques for dealing with high-level uncertainty and then iterating towards a tangible vision to guide your product teams.
Scenario Planning is a well-established strategic analysis technique. It was invented by military intelligence, and businessitized by Shell in the 1960s. Shell’s version is the sort of grandiose thing you need when you are sitting atop the natural fortunes of the Earth and are big enough to have to factor the movement of tectonic plates into your long-term business planning.
With that provenance, it seems like an unlikely tool for a regular product manager in a small technology company to need to employ. This is not helped by the literature, which gives the impression of an extremely time-intensive and detailed business analysis process, requiring multiple days at a minimum.
This is a shame, as lurking at the heart of the Scenario Planning process is an incredibly elegant and endlessly applicable tool for reducing uncertainty in, well, anything really.
When engaged in product management in a category-defining company like SuperAwesome, I find the Scenario Planning tool is fantastic for rapidly exploring the “fog of war” around a particular product or strategic question. The process allows me to quickly identify and sweep aside the things I know (or feel strongly about) and highlight the things I don’t feel confident about yet. It’s a great tool for illuminating areas in which I need to do more discovery, and for forming hypotheses to guide the next experiments.
The best thing? You can do all of this inside an hour (I’ve even done it in ten minutes when pushed!)
The full Scenario Planning process employs many different exercises; I like to use two of them. I call the first part of the exercise “Key Uncertainties” and the second part “Alternatives Futures”.
By the end of the first part of the exercise, you should have a clearer view of what you do and don’t know about your topic. By the end of the second, you should have an impactful visualisation of your possible paths to success.
Key Uncertainties
We can’t know the future. Often, we don’t even know what it is going to be the cause for success or failure. We rarely even know what possible causes for success or failure lie in front of us. Scenario Planning suggests that if we can imagine and categorise our key uncertainties, we can create scenarios and plans for them. By doing this, we can make strategic decisions now that reduce the risk of the most impactful uncertainties turning against us.
Everything in product management is a quadrant. Here’s another:
This first part of the scenario planning process is looking for questions to which the answer really matters to the success or direct of the product or company, and which are extremely uncertain: either because they are currently unclear or because they are very much outside our control. The questions whose answers are high impact and highly uncertain are our Key Uncertainties, and we sure as h*ck want to know about them.
When I feel that there are too many unanswered questions surrounding my product, I use this “Key Uncertainties” exercise as a method to reduce uncertainty, and more clearly discover and state my remaining key uncertainties.
1. Choose Your Topic
Getting started is as easy as posing a question. What’s the big question you want to address? Write it at the top of a whiteboard, or a big sheet of paper.
In the past, I have run the exercise on topics like:
- Business strategy: e.g. What kind of business should we strive to be in 5 years’ time?
- Customer definition: e.g. Who are our key customer personas?
- Product strategy: e.g. Should our product remain B2B or offer a lightweight B2C version?
- Product definition: e.g. What is this new product going to offer users to delight them?
For this article, I’m going to explore the question “What do kids want in a social experience”, which is a real example of a time when I used this technique at SuperAwesome to explore and reduce the uncertainty around a key product question we had at the time.
Write the topic at the top of a piece of paper or whiteboard:
We want to jump straight to user testing to figure out from the users directly, but the problem space is too vast. If we want to test our riskiest assumption, we have to discover what our assumptions even are.
2. Identify Your Uncertainties
Next, start expressing questions about your topic as little spectrums. What are you unsure about? Ask: are we X or Y? Are we more THIS or THAT? Draw a line, write THIS at one end and THAT at the other. The answer is rarely black and white, hence drawing the questions as axes.
Do it fast. Don’t get hung up on whether the poles of your axes are actually binary or whether you are duplicating questions. Ask as many questions as you can about your topic and draw them all as axes.
You should quickly end up with a page filled with uncertainties. Do we build things or buy things? Do we care more about growing revenue or users right now? Do we want our users to invent stuff of remix things? Should we go global or just stay focused on a local market? Should we be amazing in one thing or generalists across a range of connected things?
I find this part of the process both fun and cathartic. A chance to take all your secret worries and spread them all out in plain view.
As the brainstorm starts to lose speed. Access the axes you have and look for proxies and clues to other hidden questions. As an example, you might have a wordy axis that asks:
- “we provide value to our customers by integrating the best tech ←→ we build unique tech that is easy to integrate”.
We might try to break in up into simpler axes:
- Integrate ←→ Innovate
- Systems Integrator ←→ Supplier
- Turnkey ←→ Specialists
You are looking for opportunities to restate or simplify axes in a way that hopefully reveals lower-level questions that provide more granularity.
Similarly, there is likely to be axes that are actually proxies for something else more fundamental. Here, you are just looking for opportunities to restate or simplify axes in a way that reveals the high-level questions provide more strategic context.
Essentially, you are looking at each axis a second time and asking: what other uncertainties does that dichotomy suggest?
An example might be:
- Great documentation ←→ No need for documentation
This is an interesting question, but it perhaps suggests a deeper uncertainty about what success truly feels like to you. Perhaps this axis is actually a proxy for something like:
- We focus on powerful features ←→ We focus on ease of use
If you find more fundamental axes, write them down.
3. Calibrate
You should now have a ton of little horizontal axes. Look at them all, like slides on a giant mixing board for our problem.
Now, we start mixing.
Pick any axis at random. Draw a dot on the line at the point you believe most accurately defines how your product, customers or company either fits or wants to fit with the question. This is the little knob of your mixing slider for this uncertainty.
If you find you can’t easily pick the right spot on your axis for the dot, that’s great! You might just have found one of your Key Uncertainties! (More on these in a moment).
If it is pretty obvious to you where on the spectrum your little control knob should be for this question, that’s great too! You have found something that you ACTUALLY KNOW. Draw the dot in the right place and never worry about this question again. You just eliminated some uncertainty from your life.
I find this part of the process exhilarating. You can see the shape of your problem being revealed, as the terrain behind the fog of war. On each axis, you either discover something specific you need to know more about or something that you realise you’ve known all along.
4. Prune and De-dupe Proxies
The next step is to reduce the noise, in search of our most uncertain questions. We start crossing out axes. We are going to:
- Cross out any duplicate axes. Just keep the best phrased one.
- Cross out every axis you were able to calibrate. These are low uncertainty.
- Cross out any axes that you actually don’t care about the answer to. These are low impact.
By the end, the picture might look like this:
To get here, we look across the axes with a critical eye.
There will be axes that are duplications of each other. Perhaps something was important, so the brainstorm returned to it several times. One will be phrased best, so choose that, or write a better one to summarise the different versions. Cross out the duplicates.
There will be axes that, on second look, aren’t that important. The answer to the question they pose doesn’t really matter in a big way. You don’t really care what the answer is. These are of low impact. Cross them out.
By now. you should have a bucketload of uncertainties. Most of which have been crossed out. The ones that remain are candidates for our Key Uncertainties. Your Key Uncertainties are the fundamental questions that underpin the whole topic. If you knew (or could agree) the correct calibration of those Key Uncertainties, you could confidently orient your team, your customers or your company towards that as a north star.
At this point, let’s clear the whiteboard and re-draw what we know so far:
In the example above, I have summarised those axes that I was able to confidentially calibrate. These are my knowns. I feel confident that these assumptions hold water. I don’t have to worry about these right now, they are swept to the side of my analysis space, leaving me to focus on my key uncertainties, on the right.
At this point, a fresh cup of coffee is well earned. In Part Two, I’ll show you how to take these Key Uncertainties and create a focused set of Alternative Futures, (our “scenario”) in a simple visual that will make you look like you have Your. Shit. Together.
>>> Turn to Part Two
