(76) How to achieve organizational alignment towards your product strategy ?
Who is responsible for achieving organizational alignment towards your defined product strategy?
To be frank, I don’t know who it should be, but the buck definitely stops with the product leader in the organization who is responsible for crafting the product strategy. Effectively communicating the product strategy and ensuring organisational alignment is as much a part of his responsibility as is defining the product strategy in the first place.
What are some of things one should be doing to effectively communicate the product strategy:
Make product strategy exercise a participatory activity
A top-down product strategy that is pushed down the stream for the organization to implement alienates a lot of people. If you can let your employees to participate in the exercise, you get automatic buy-in from everyone in the organization eventually. While you are working on your strategy, announce it to the organization, share the tradeoffs you may have taken, share the hypothesis that you consider, and seek feedback and insights from them. You may or may not act on all the feedback individually but state it in an internal blog or a post on why you chose to act and not act on broader feedback sets. Easier said than done, but with a little thoughtfulness and patience, you can make this possible and the resulting rewards are worth the pain.
Appeal to the hearts of your people
Defining a winning product strategy is not enough. To galvanize an organization, that strategy must be translated into a compelling leadership message that wins the hearts and minds of the employees. Human beings are engaged and motivated through stories, metaphors, and pictures that trigger their imagination. If you need to communicate your strategy, you need to weave a good story and say it like a good story teller.
Repeat the message till you are sick of it
Strategy communication cannot be a one time affair. It is an ongoing campaign. For a message to be understood and acted upon, it must be endlessly repeated.
Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin once said, “In order to effectively communicate to an audience, you need to repeat yourself so often that you grow sick of hearing yourself say it, and only then will people begin to internalize the message.”
“In order to effectively communicate to an audience, you need to repeat yourself so often that you grow sick of hearing yourself say it, and only then will people begin to internalize the message.” — Jeff Weiner
Drafting a product strategy is different from communicating the product strategy. Drafting product strategy upwards to stakeholders is not enough. It has to cascade to every individual in the organization. If there is even one person in the organization who complains about product strategy not being clear for the immediate and long term goal, the onus lies on the product management function to clarify it.
Find a compelling Why
A roadmap is different than a product strategy. Product strategy is the why and roadmap is the what. Magic happens when every employee knows the why. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “people will do almost any what if you give them a good why.”
‘People will do almost any what if you give them a good why.”- Friedrich Nietzsche
What are some of the tactics one could follow to communicate product strategy effectively in the organization:
- Long form strategy narration: I am a big admirer of Jeff Bezos’s six pager memo style. I try to write a long form strategy narrative on an internal wiki and make it available for the entire organisation to read. Strategy on a powerpoint slide is good for certain context but accompanying a long form narrative makes it full proof. A powerpoint is susceptible to miss details and gaps, which a long narrative form would never.
“When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences, complete paragraphs it forces a deeper clarity,” — Jeff Bezos
2. Cascading to larger organization
If its a smaller organization, you could go and share the strategy presentation with different teams. For a larger organization, send the strategy slides to the managers who then share it with their teams.
3. Ensure commitment, not just compliance
To ensure every employee has gone through the strategy document, seek feedback from every manager from their respective team members. Managers can conduct a feedback workshop with their team members to gather feedback. A good feedback mechanism is a proof of engagement and understanding of the product strategy.
4. Ask this question at every given opportunity
All my meetings and interactions end with a standard question — “By the way, are you fully aware of our product strategy?”. If there are umms and ahhs, that’s a trigger for me to point them to the strategy document.
5. Link your strategy document in your email signature
Nothing works better than this. Add a signature to your email with something like this: “Have you had a chance to read our product strategy? If not, read here.”
