How to find the biggest possible question — Part Two
Finding Your North Star
If you are a product person, you will know that the question you are asked most, by pretty much everyone in the company, including every member of your own team, is “what is the vision for our product?” If you are a product person, you will also know what a deep and profound ambiguity often surrounds the answer to that question. It depends on so many things.
As product people, we have to be extremely comfortable with ambiguity. At the same time, we have to see ambiguity as a call to action to begin analysis and discovery. We must seek to eliminate ambiguity where we can, and yet remain comfortable that we will always be drowning in the stuff.
At SuperAwesome, our mission is to make the internet safer for kids. We do this by becoming in all aspects of global kids digital privacy law and rigorously applying it to everything we do to ensure we truly live the values of privacy by design and responsibility by design.
Making the internet safer for kids is a HUGE job. There are just so many interesting problems to tackle. We are drowning in interesting problems we could be tackling. Like many other teams, picking the right things to focus on is the hardest part of our job, day-to-day.
A key ingredient in providing this focus is a strong vision for the team. Without getting side-tracked with a discussion of what constitutes a strong product vision, I want to share one technique that I use when I feel particularly beset by uncertainty.
When I find myself in a particularly thick pea-soup of uncertainty, I often use a simplified version of Scenario Planning to sketch out a map of the surrounding terrain and start making headway again. In my previous article, I showed how to go from a blank piece of paper to a list of your most uncertain and impactful unknowns. In this article, we will use those key uncertainties to sketch out a number of alternative futures, each of which might be your north star.
Alternative Futures
In Part One of this article, Scenario Planning For Everyone, we defined the topic we wanted to explore and generated an array of “axes of uncertainty” to put structure around the mess of questions that unpin our core problem. Here’s where we got to last time:
Here’s what we do next.
1. Choose Two Candidate Axes
Choose two of your key uncertainties. It doesn’t really matter which two at first. Stand one of them on end and make a quadrant with them. (I mentioned before that everything in product management is a quadrant, right?). Label each end of the X/Y axis.
Should we be a video chat thing or an image broadcast thing, etc.
2. Plot Your Competition
Look at the quadrants you have created. In each quadrant is a kind of business or product that you might focus on being. Think about an obvious competitor. Where do they sit on this graph? Plot them. Do another. We are creating a map of other people’s north stars.
3. Try Another Couple of Axes
You likely have a few key uncertainties. Combine them in different ways to make more graphs and experiment plotting your competition again:
4. Plot Your Future Selves
Put your product or company logo in one of the far corners. That could be you. Is that where you want to be? Try a few other locations. What does your product or business do in each of these cases? These are your Alternative Futures. Presumably, you could be any of these futures. Some will be harder than others. All will require compromises. You can’t be everything. What will you be?
I find this visualisation, when done well, to be extremely powerful for both the product team and for its senior stakeholders. It boils down a very broad set of uncertainties to a key question: where do we want to be on this graph?
5. Name your Scenarios
To bring them to life, and give your team and your stakeholders a shared language, I try to give each alternative future a cute name. In our example, we might have:
A) Unitato.TV
B) Chat ‘n’ Watch
C) Twitch-a-sketch
D) Draw With Friends
E) BingeStreak
These named futures could represent products or business you are or want to become. They aren’t literally, they are just future scenarios that you can make reference to in discussions. Some might become warning signs. If you feel you are heading away from your north star you can tell a story about what you might become instead, and that can be a useful framing device. There are also jumping-off points for more analysis, either through an examination of the hypothesis that underpins their value, or the pre-conditions that must unfold for those futures to become true.
How to find the biggest possible question
At the end of this pair of exercises, you should have gone from a deeply ambiguous and foggy question to a clear set of questions and areas to focus on next. You have some candidates for north stars and a way of explaining those candidates to team-mates.
If you have been successful, you’ll have created a new quadrant diagram (I told you everything in product management is quadrants), and you can now ask: where do I want to be on this graph?
You won’t learn everything you need to know about your product or business strategy from this exercise, but I guarantee you’ll feel more confident and purposeful after it.
As I try to navigate through the sea of opportunities we have at SuperAwesome in making the internet safer for kids, I find it very valuable to have tools like scenario planning in my toolbox, and I hope you can find a use for it in your product analysis work.
If you have enjoyed these two articles, you oughta know that we are hiring! If you want to work with a world-class product and engineering team making the internet safer for kids, click here.
