Product Vision in High-Growth Company
Why do you need a resolute product vision in a high-growth company?
Consider that you are a Product Manager in a peer-to-peer parcel service. You own an internal product designed for delivery executives aimed at boosting their efficiency. The growth has plummeted for the company. Analysts find that the company is unable to covert new visitors on the app and recommend adding more user reviews to the consumer app to gain confidence of the visitors. The CEO charges the marketing team with the mission of boosting user-generated content on the company’s customer-facing mobile application.
Naturally, the marketing team gets this new feature included in the Consumer App that prompts their customers to write a review after a successful delivery of their parcel. However, the challenge is that people rarely check their apps once they have shipped the product and only come back if their packages have not reached their destinations in time, in which case they tend to write negative reviews. While there is a lot the marketing team can still do to generate more testimonials, the CEO’s patience is already withering.
Now, someone in the marketing team comes up with a brilliant idea of taking reviews from the recipient rather than the sender.Also, the team feels that the delivery guys are the ones who are best suited to boost this campaign. They want you to build a similar feature into the delivery executive app that can elicit customer response after a successful delivery. The mobile app team feels that there should not be too much overhead as they already have a module for this which they are willing to share with you.
Should you be integrating this new feature?
Nope.
The marketing team’s problem here is genuine, and the demand seems innocuous. How can you be so callous to deny this request?
On all such occasions, you need to step back and remember your product vision, which, here, is to reduce the delivery time per package for the delivery executives. Does this new integration help with your product mission? Definitely not. And, therefore it does not fit and must not be supported.
While experts put in a lot of emphasis on being flexible and remaining open to changes in high growth companies, I would like to advocate the case here for having a rigid vision for your product in such an environment, especially if your company has multiple interdependent products and several minor internal stakeholders. The argument may not be valid for companies with only one primary product or several independent products or very few internal stakeholders as the challenges encountered by the product managers in such organisations are very different.
Three conditions prevalent in a fast-growing companies are :
- Most business processes are sub-optimal and they keep on changing
- Most business teams are overworked and are struggling to keep up with the growth
- Most internal products are infantile, half-baked or outgrown
And this concoction often lead to spillages leaving the teams to firefight those situations.
In our parcel company, the marketing product was infantile and needed improvement.
Since these problem-solving sessions are tense, they often lead to improvised solutions where several interdependent products are being leveraged or hacked into to sustain one process. While these improvisations (jugaads) are not always wrong, they can often lead to a vicious cycle where you may end up doing further jugaads/improvisations to support the initial unplanned intervention. And soon a lot of ad hocs will sprawl into your product tracker, and your roadmap will go for a toss.
In our parcel company example, you might be forced to beautify your app as it has suddenly become customer facing. You might also be asked to support multiple improvements in the testimonial feature.
The challenge is that if these interventions happen a lot, you may no longer have a product roadmap at all. Your product will get into a phase which I call Ginger Growth. It will lack the intentionality that a good product has. One way to recognise a ginger growth products is that they will have too many features that no one uses or needs and its core features is no longer helpful to anyone.
A ginger product neither delights the user nor inspires the developer.
The only way to save your product from being hijacked and turned into a shock absorber for other teams is to be intentional about it. You must have a strong non-negotiable product vision with a clear understanding of :
- Who is your primary user?
- What are you solving for her?
Having a product vision in a frenzied high growth environment is essential as it helps in curtailing unnecessary integrations and putting your foot down when such requests are made and base all such decisions on a defined framework. Having this clarity will also help the higher-ups in understanding your product’s mission and respecting its sanctity.
I do not want to endorse the idea of being unadaptable or unwilling to improvise but only to ensure that you do not compromise on the non-negotiables of your product, lest your product be dispersed in the tides of growth. I believe this intentionality of product is crucial if you want to do justice to your users and remain relevant in long-term.
Have you as a product manager faced such a scenario where you were asked to make an inapt integration? How did you handle that in your organisation? Do write back to me at vishweshwar.vivek@gmail.com, I am really keen to hear your approach.
