The Missing Piece in your Strategy Puzzle
Hidden Strategies for Scaling Product Teams
Every once in awhile, you get to have one of those ah-ha moments that causes a wave of fresh thought and self-examination that ultimately ends with you looking in a mirror saying “How could I have been so blind!”
Products and companies are hard to build. They can take years of pivots and scrappy business moves. Strategy and execution often set the best apart from the rest, but there are common roadmaps that have been taught for decades. The following approach to product strategy should be very familiar to anyone taking the time to read this article:
This framework has always been an inspirational target for many startups and is an excellent starting point. But as a company begins to scale, this pyramid has to expand. The challenge is that the deeper layers are often only visible as a company and its product teams begin to scale.
How it all begins:
Step 1
Mission and vision are the guiding stars that cement the establishment of great companies. It can take years for most companies to even come close to getting their vision and mission clearly defined. Coming up with the ideal goal that stretches your company while providing enough direction to guide product decisions is often an elusive shiny star never reached by many CEOs. But you have to try, it is the first step and often a large one, but it is required before moving on.
Step 2
Once your vision is defined and you’ve told the world “why” you exist, it is time to focus on your strategy. Defining “how” you are going to achieve your vision may actually be harder than determining “why.” This particular step has to inspire confidence and give firm direction that the entire company can rally behind.
Step 3
Now your focus shifts to product, and you realize that your team has been working the entire time trying to build a plane in flight. They have fought through constant change and pivots and success rests on them to turn that north star into a tangible, exciting, functional, and feasible product that customers are willing to hand over cold hard cash for.
Execution Phase:
Maintaining tight alignment to your strategy brings challenges as you grow. More teams and an expanding feature set drive you to tighten up processes, at least a little, and you hear about these things called OKRs. This is that time in your company’s growth and Objectives and Key Results seem like the perfect answer to help maintain alignment to your larger company values. OKRs are a great method for doing just that. So, the pyramid begins to look like this:
If you have made it this far then you are already outperforming many, or dare I say most, of the companies around you. Nailing a company vision and strategy is no small feat. You should feel proud of what you have accomplished. Executing that vision and maintaining high alignment across your teams will also help further set you apart. At this stage, everything is going great and it is time to grow.
Growth:
Strangely enough, the growth phase is where many companies begin to struggle instead of flourish. They by no means fail, but further growth and product advancements no longer come at their previous break-neck pace. This growth phase in a company’s lifecycle begins to expose the limitations in the strategy model above.
This is exactly where our team found ourselves earlier this year. We were crushing it! Sales were breaking records every month. We know how to execute and scale for sales. Things were good. But something still felt off, like we were missing something.
Our product teams were already amazing. We truly focused on the customer and their needs. We focus on outcomes over outputs. Each team’s individual products were spot on. But scaling product organizations brings a new set of issues. Our product teams have more than doubled in size in the last year. A vision and strategy that was once executed by just a few teams were now spread across almost ten teams.
The Ah-ha moment:
It turns out that customers don’t experience our product in silos, so if you build in silos you will lose track of the larger experience.
Every once in awhile, you get to have one of those ah-ha moments that causes a wave of fresh thought and self-examination that ultimately ends with you looking in a mirror saying “How could I have been so blind!” Our amazing, independent, and autonomous product teams were focused on tightly scoped customer experiences. This focus was causing us to miss the larger customer journey and overall product experience even though the micro experiences were excellent. It turns out that customers don’t experience our product in silos, so if you build in silos you will lose track of the larger experience. These overarching, but specific, experiences often become lost as teams scale and more tightly focus their individual scope.
If the entire team is not focused on the same experience, the customer’s journey becomes siloed. To avoid this, the pyramid now begins to look more like this:
The key to this version of the model is that the objectives cannot be general company goals, they have to relate back to an experience to drive a cohesive customer focus. Objectives like; improve our customer retention, or reduce churn, or grow revenue by 10% are not enough. Yes, they are measurable and work well for OKRs, but with a large team in the growth phase, the product focus becomes too disconnected.
Objectives need to be tightly coupled under an overarching customer experience like; the customer onboarding experience, self-service capabilities, or for my company Weave, it might be the incoming communication (phone/text/fax/chat) experience. These experiences cross teams and feature sets. They consider the shole of the journey, not just the piece in your team’s purview.
These experiences should tie back to your company strategy and when executed correctly, they will lead to your sub-goals, like revenue growth, reducing churn, etc., but will do it in a cohesive product approach that maintains a real focus on how the customer experiences your product.
Depending on the size of the company, there may need to be more than one experience at a time, but they should be limited. At times not all teams will be able to contribute to the higher level experiences, but having most teams focused on it will allow the larger vision to bring consistency and real progress to achieving your vision and customer focus.
Really, it's True:
After the ah-ha moment, our team began looking for examples and other companies that had recognized or even potentially solved this issue for their teams. With a little networking and discussion, we realized it was not a unique problem.
What we found was that fast-growing companies, in the process of scaling their product teams, often ran into similar issues. Many have not actually identified the problem as much as experiencing similar effects from siloed product teams. Few had experimented with solutions. As we worked on solutions, the modified strategy proposed above was first introduced by our V.P. of product, Johny Wudel. It has been key to several changes that we have introduced into our planning process, and though it is a work in progress, it just feels right. It has provided us a missing piece in our strategy, and we are going to continue to iterate on options for scaling our team.
If the model above does not whet your appetite, then one of the most extreme solutions I came across was presented at Front, a product and design conference in Utah. Nate Walkingshaw delivered a case study called “Organization Design: Going from features to experiences.” If you really want to go all the way with “Experience Organization Design”, look no further than how Pluralsight has reorganized their entire company to align around experiences.
Happy iterating!
