Product Management Webinar: Product Strategy

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] So hello everybody and welcome. This is the ProdPad series of webinars that we run here. Today we are going to be talking about how to avoid the five deadly sins of strategy. And we’re joined by Adam Thomas, who’s going to be talking us through that today.

I’m going to be doing a proper intro to Adam in just a moment. But I’m going to give you a little bit of info and we’ll jump into that. But As this is a series of webinars that we run on a regular basis. We run these things all the time. We’ve run them at least monthly for years now.

So we’ve got a big back catalog. If you head to ProdPad.com/webinars, you can see this history of all these ones that we’ve run. Recorded in the past. Some of them are fireside conversations. Some of them are more presentations and some of them are a bit of a blend of the two. So today, I’m just going to take us through a short presentation and then we’re going to have a chance to chat through it.

So get your questions in there as he’s talking and then we’ll talk through them. But all of these are recorded and today is going to be recorded. So you will [00:01:00] get a copy of this afterwards. You can share it with your colleagues and all that sort of jazz later. Yeah. And yeah, make sure to use the Q&A area to get your questions in.

So, a little bit about us before we get started. So, ProdPad is a tool for product people. It was built by myself and our co-founder Simon. We were both product people. You might know us from the mind, the product community. Product nerds here and we needed tools to do our own jobs and it didn’t exist.

And so we started hacking away and building it and shared it with some other product people. And now it’s being used by thousands of product people around the world, which is fantastic. But basically what it does and what it did for us back then it helped give us a sense of organization and control and an understanding about what was in our back.

Log, and what needed to go where, what sort of things we need to prioritize and get sent over to the Jira or the Trello or the Azure DevOps of the day to make sure that the right stuff was being built. So we’ve got these really tight integrations with [00:02:00] development tools and what it does, it creates a single source of truth.

What your big picture is your vision and your strategy and what’s on your roadmap as well as gives a sense of transparency for the rest of your team. So they understand what’s being built and why, how it ties back to that bigger picture vision and how it ties back to things that you’re hearing across the team and as well as from your customers as well.

So it’s a tool that you can try for free. You don’t need a credit card to get started. You can just jump in and start a trial. And we even have a sandbox mode and the sandbox mode is a version of ProdPad that’s preloaded with example data. So you might know us as the place that came up with the now, next, later roadmaps.

We have lots of examples, now, next, later roadmaps. You can try them out. You can jump in, play with them. You can see how it plays with OKRs. You can see how. It connects to your customer feedback and you can basically just move stuff around, see how it all fits together before seeing how it fits within your own setup and our team has made up a product people.[00:03:00]

So jump in there to see how it works for you and give us your feedback. We’d love to hear it. And special shout out for some of the stuff that we’ve been working on in the last year or so, which is building in some really neat AI stuff. And one of the latest pieces is our AI coach, this ability to use ProdPad to give you On the spot feedback about whether things like yours, the vision that you’ve put in there is any good, whether the roadmap you’ve built is on track, whether it matches your vision.

You can talk to it and ask it questions about it. Can you tell me what this particular customer has asked for and whether it aligns with our vision? Can you tell me whether this idea is aligned with what we should be working on? So use it as an instant coach. Really helpful tool that we’ve been using all the time internally, and really excited to get it out to you as well.

And on that note, really excited to introduce you officially now to Adam Thomas is actually somebody that I know [00:04:00] through the Mind the Product Network Adam, do I know you through, did you do originally a was it a talk at one of the the leadership events or was it a was it a workshop?

Adam Thomas: I feel like it could be all of the above.

Yeah, you’ve

Janna Bastow: done a bit of everything, right? And you were part of the MTP Massive for a while, so, yeah, part of the MTP core community. So we’ve crossed paths and hung out at all the events and all that sort of stuff. But you also know him as a VP product and product management expert in general and an AI lecturer at Columbia University.

So from his early days as assistant programmer to his role of VP product at various growth stage organizations, he’s consistently managed that ongoing tension between customers, product teams, and organizational outcomes, which is the thing that we all struggle with. And so he’s got over 15 years of experience, including coaching roles at alt MBA and Columbia university.

And he’s known for translating con complex concepts into [00:05:00] actionable insights, and he’s worked at top tier organizations like Google. BP and smart recruiters to develop and implement effective data driven strategies. So everybody gives Adam Thomas a warm welcome and a big hello. Adam, thank you so much for for joining us and why not jump in with a A quick hello of your own and anything that I might have missed from your intro as we switch screen scares screen sharing because I know you’ve got something of your own to to put up there

Adam Thomas: Indeed No, I mean that makes a lot of sense the intro Teach at Columbia I used to organize and run the New York City product team, which I’m very proud of, very proud of the work that we’ve done here and the work that they continue to do.

And I love strategy. It’s the thing that I love to talk about the most, which is why we are here. So I am very excited to wait, am I seeing the [00:06:00] full screen or? We

Janna Bastow: can see your to-do list and inbox. Yes.

Adam Thomas: That’s not good.

Janna Bastow: No, that’s all right. Don’t think there’s anything too revealing in there. There we are.

Adam Thomas: This is the screen overcoming the five deadly sins of strategy. And so. Before we begin, I want us to make a commitment to each other. This is a workshop. This is time that we have spent together. This is time we’re going to spend together, so that we have a chance to drop everything and really focus on the topic at hand.

So for us to do that, here are a couple ground rules. One, mute by default, which I think we’re already good at here with how we’re set up. Two, use reactions. I love to see how you’re reacting to the information. Does it make sense? Does it not make sense? Please let me know, right? And I can adjust. Three, be prepared.

Why are you here? Think about why [00:07:00] you are here. What are you trying to get out of this presentation? Grab a set of notes. If you have paper notes, if you have Evernote, if you have Notion, whatever you need get prepared and use the chat, comment, talk, ask questions, use the QA function.

Okay. We’re here to learn. So that is also including how you communicate. So, I see people are already putting one in the chat. They have jumped ahead out of my first prompt. We are already hitting one. So if you are ready, please press one. We’re going to get started.

Awesome. So let’s start with a fundamental truth. Most teams get their strategy wrong. And the way that they get strategy wrong or how they get strategy wrong is they do one of these things. When you ask them what their strategy is, they’ll give you a list of features. A bunch of goals. There’s no priority.

They’ll confuse it with [00:08:00] the roadmap, which is one of, I think, the biggest sense of strategy that I’ve seen. They get prescriptive, which is just another way of saying that we’re going to create a plan and plans have no flexibility. If you tell people that we’re going to do X, Y, and Z, how can they adjust?

How can they deal with the complexities that product brings or their academics, they lead to no action. This was one that I did a lot when I was a younger product person. I would have all the white papers. I’d have all the facts. And isn’t this cool? And Kenevan and the worldly maps and all of that good stuff.

But people would look at me and go, well, I don’t know what you want me to do with this. And so, that is what strategy is not. Let’s define what it is. Strategy is focused on a problem, not a solution, a problem. What is the problem that we are trying to solve? [00:09:00] Even more so, it tells us what we’re not, what are the problems that we’re not going at.

Really good strategy helps us prioritize what’s in front of us. Strategy is descriptive. I mentioned earlier that we are talking about work that is in a space of complexity. What do I mean by complexity? I mean that the work that we do as product people tends to not have an end. What is the end of Asana?

What is the end of Gmail? What is the end of our, whatever tool that you’re using, right? What’s the end state? You probably don’t have one. If you have an end state, then you are working on a project. And that is not what products people do. So, we need to be descriptive. We need to help people see that complexity with the strategies that we present.

Last, it’s driving learning. Are we learning with each [00:10:00] iteration? Are we learning with each sprint? As I mentioned before, academic strategies that don’t tell us what we should be learning don’t really drive strategy. It doesn’t really help us. But if you’re telling people, if x happens, we’ll do y. We’ll let you know.

So we can adjust and do z or one or two or three later. Well, then you’re learning. Then your strategy is evolving. And that’s what a good strategy is. Good strategy is evolution. It’s not a statue. It’s a plant, something that grows as we use it, as we engage with it. Because as Roger Martin mentions, Often these days, Roger Martin, who’s the author of playing to win.

Maybe a few folks have read the book. Strategy is the opposite of planning strategy. It is a plant, not a statue. And so today we’re going to talk about executing strategy. I wanted to give us a place to [00:11:00] level set. on what strategy is so that when we’re talking about strategy execution, we have a good sense of where we are.

And so strategy execution. I think this quote from the balanced scorecard, which came out in 1992, is insane because it’s still relevant today. 90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategy successfully. 90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategy successfully.

90%. What’s a hint that you’re not executing your strategy? successfully. This is one of my favorites. Put the two in the chat. If you know what this screen is, we have a couple of twos here. What the screen is the activity dashboard. Thank you. No one has looked at my document screen. Very good. That’s exactly what it is. Right. Also known as the activity [00:12:00] dashboard. The activity dashboard is a tool that Google has for all of your Google Docs that will tell you who is viewed how often are people viewing, how often are people commenting, how often are people sharing your work, and in this case, the strategy, and if it looks like this and you’re me, this isn’t good.

As Elle mentioned, no one has looked at my document. That’s the screen. And if you’re wondering if your organization is executing strategy, this is a big hint. Your strategy is probably in the Google Drive graveyard. The Google Drive graveyard is where all your strategies go. No one looks at it. You can probably find a bunch of strategies from this year, last year.

They’re all well written. They all have a bunch of comments from the executives. We had a kickoff for all of them and then we never looked at them again. And [00:13:00] that is a huge problem because if you’re never looking at the strategy and we know the good strategies are plans, what happens when you don’t?

engage with your plants? What happens if you don’t water your plants? What happens if your plants don’t get air?

They die.

So, our first exercise that I want us to do is, I want us to answer five questions in the chat. You’ll have a couple of minutes, five to seven, and I want you to write a high level of your strategy. David in the chat mentions, is it partly because strategies are nebulous or ill defined? Well, we’re gonna put some structure around what our current strategies are.

So I want you to answer five questions. The questions are, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? Who’s the customer? Who are the stakeholders? How often are we communicating the strategy and how often are we updating the strategy? You have seven minutes. I’ll go quiet and let’s see what you write

All right. So I hope this exercise is [00:14:00] done. How do you start to think about the strategy as a whole? What are we doing, right? And before we get into the five deadly sins of these operations, really check yourself if you have a clear strategy. If you’re finding, if you find yourself lacking in any of these questions, well there’s an opportunity to go back and go back with your team and really ask that question.

Because you may find you, and some folks didn’t write at all. And they may find themselves in a land of no strategy. What are we doing? We’re just kind of going from place to place. The thing is a land of no strategy is a strategy in itself. It’s very reactive. And what I would challenge you to do is after this conversation, take a look at these five questions and just put a stake in the ground, right?

What is our problem? What is our customer? Who are our stakeholders? How often are we communicating and how often are we evolving the strategy? Take some of the things that you’re going to learn in the next few [00:15:00] minutes and just see where it gets you. You can also email me. I’m happy to help figure out what the strategy is for your company.

That’s what I hear. That’s what I do. That’s what I love to do. So back to strategy execution. If you are a leader in your company, You’re a product director, a VP product, head of product. Your job is to create the environment where the strategy can be executed. If you’re an individual contributor, your job is to provide data that improves strategy execution.

And so that’s what we’re going to talk about here. Overcoming the five deadly sins of strategy. You may ask yourself, what are those sins? Well, there are five of them, as I hope you’ve gathered by now. And they are hiddenness, Ambiguousness, untrustworthiness, selfishness, and staleness. You can translate [00:16:00] into these questions.

Does anyone know this strategy exists? Who is this strategy for? How can this strategy build trust in our work? How does this strategy help us, not me, but others? And when does this strategy change to fit reality? And so what are you getting today? You’re going to learn some tactics that will help guide your team to cohesion.

That’ll help guide your team to execute the strategy well for leaders. And for ICs, you’re going to learn some questions you can ask to help that process to push your leaders, to start building in some of these tactics.

Yeah, let’s go through this. We’re going to talk about this fun fake company. That’s an amalgamation of. Clients that I’ve had in the past called Bobco. And there are five portfolios, each going through a different set. We’re going to talk about each sin through the eyes of that product leader. And then we’re going to walk through how do we absolve ourselves?[00:17:00]

Start with hiddenness, the dilemma of invisible strategy. Now at Bobco Jane and her leadership team designed a strategy to enhance AI data utilization, but failed to communicate its essence across the organization. As the year progressed, Jane noticed a lack of proactive engagement. Teams were merely following orders without understanding the broader strategic con.

So let’s talk about hiddenness for a second. One of the easiest ways to know that your strategy is hidden is the strategy activity document. If this is something that is supposed to guide our teams, direct our teams, create a space where our teams feel confident in the direction that they’re going, they should be looking at it.

They should be referencing it. One of the ways that you can check if teams know it. It’s just ask them where [00:18:00] is. Hey, have you seen the strategy lately? Because if they don’t know where the strategy is, right, they’re just gonna start to tell the story that they have in their head as the story that needs to get the work done.

What I mean by that is, unless your team is actively sabotaging each other, which is, requires a whole different presentation. Everybody’s trying to get to the same place. We’re trying to make something happen. that is successful. But if I don’t have a strategy, if I don’t have a story, if I don’t have something to reference that confirms or helps me adjust my beliefs, Then I’m going to create a story in my head based on what is happening to me at the time.

And that is called becoming reactive. And so oftentimes when this happens to teams, people start playing the blame game. When the truth is most of the time, if you just stop and ask, Hey, does anybody know what the strategy is? [00:19:00] People may just go, I haven’t seen it. Right. And so there’s an opportunity there to make that available.

And that’s how you absolve it. Bring the strategy into meetings on a regular basis. Now, if you’re an IC wondering, how do you, how do I do this? How do I get folks to start to connect? You can ask a couple of questions like, how do our current projects directly support the company’s strategic initiatives?

Could you direct me to the latest version of our strategy document? Considering our strategic goals, could we review and align our backlog accordingly? What priorities should I focus on? Now, if I’m a leader and I hear one of my direct reports asking that, I’m like, oh, okay, I better have a strategy because they’re asking questions.

That are going to push me to make things more available. And at Bobco, that’s exactly what Jane did. Jane implemented a strategy session in the weekly planning meetings. And that strategy session doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be a whole meeting. [00:20:00] It could be five to ten minutes.

Here’s the strategy. Here’s what’s important. And that’s it. The team actively engaged asking questions and discussing strategic direction directions and as a whole as Bobco decided to standardize that strategy accessibility folks felt like it was very easy to reference so they started to build that into their story

Let’s talk about the next ambiguity: the chaos of unclear strategy Now at Bobco, despite the vibrant start to the year under Larry’s leadership, the team produced features that failed to connect to the big picture, resulting in a scattered product that did not advance the company’s vision. How many folks feel that’s familiar?

You look back 18 months and you go, wait, all these things are cool, but what? What, where did we go? And so, the team made these products with, without focus. There’s [00:21:00] wasted time and effort. There’s no way that you can qualify your product against the vision or the mission of the company. So when, whenever an executive may come by and go, okay, how does this tie to the big picture?

See these cool stories we created, right? Like they don’t have much of a way to tell a bigger story for them in a way that they understand. And so the way that you absolve this, is to leverage a tool from journalism that I love, which is the five W’s. Who, what, when, where, and why. Ask yourself that on a regular basis when discussing your problem statement.

Remind people often, if you’re an IC, you can ask about the success metrics. You can ask what what ways does this initiative benefit our target customer? Who is our target? I’d like to narrate our strategy to stakeholders using these key elements. Could you confirm their alignment with our strategic goals?[00:22:00]

And so at Bobco, Larry started to put the five W’s at the beginning of. Every sprint Hey, during sprint planning, these are the five W’s. This is who, what, when, where, why. And so, and beginning to work with the team to explicitly connect whatever initiative or product that they’re doing to those five W’s.

And so what ends up happening is you start to create a story. Now, Larry can go tell that connective story based on a person, right. Based on a hero, based on a persona that makes sense. What they’re doing is super clear to anybody that listens to it. Hey, before this, our persona, Bob, couldn’t do X.

Now with this new feature, they’re able to do Y, which contributes to our vision. Z. Now that story becomes a regular process for you and the team. Untrustworthiness, the peril of secrecy. Hannah’s department at [00:23:00] Bobco was seen as a black hole of information, creating distrust and resistance among other departments who are crucial to collaborating to their success.

So, tell me if this sounds familiar, communication starts to dwindle from other stakeholders, right? First, they start to be interested and then they are just not connecting with you. And in fact, you’re starting to see sometimes even actively they can be actively stonewalling.

If you start seeing people affected by your strategy, go to different people to confirm answers. Start to run around the company trying to make sure things are right. You have a trust problem. Trust is required for teams to work efficiently. Without it, everything grinds to a halt. The Google Aristotle project, the project where they took a look at how teams worked.

They measured efficacy and efficacy was 60 [00:24:00] percent based on trust, right? If I give you a test, one to a hundred, and I take 60 percent away, right? What’s your grade? You’re fail. And so teams that don’t have trust eventually fail. So one of the reasons why this happens is people see the product as a black hole that never talks about wins or losses.

And so the way that you absolve this is just pure accountability. Make a promise, keep it.

If you are an IC or an individual contributor, you can ask who are the key contacts in team X for building strategic relationships. You can ask what steps we can take if something fails. And if I’m looking to increase collaboration with other teams what are the best ways to do that effectively?

Why am I saying what if something fails? Failure and being open with failure is a trust check. If I am continually telling you about my successes and failures in an open way, [00:25:00] and they see those failures improving over time, you’re going to build trust with everyone in the organization. You can do this with post mortems like Hannah did. A post mortem is where you say what’s wrong.

Why something bad happened and how you’re going to avoid it in the future. And so Hannah decided to make that public on Slack, right? Just to let teams know, right. Product is not just here to look good. Product’s not just here to deliver features and not hear back. Product also makes failures and then product also is trying to get better.

And so her team’s engaged in open discussion about success and failure. Of course. So, cause that cascades back to the team. If your team is open about success and failures. And then the leaders open about success and failures, right? Teams are going to start to trust you because they feel like you’re a straight shooter.

Bobco involves by fostering transparency and building that interdemental interdepartmental trust. It went from a failing grade to a succeeding grade. [00:26:00] Selfishness. The shortcomings of siloed success. Scott’s strategy at Bobco seemed initially effective, but other teams didn’t really see themselves in it.

And so they started backing away. Now this is a little bit different than untrustworthiness. This is Where untrustworthiness, the team might see you as, right, going for just for self and openly just they’re just openly not trusting you, right? Selfishness is just blindly going, well, the strategies for us and other teams go, Oh, I guess I’m not affected.

Oh, I’m no foul. I’ll just go over this way. They’ll call me when they need me. So how do you know the strategy, your strategies? Running into the realm of selfishness. Well, you use I a lot in your written and vocal communication or the team or my team or the product team. When you talk about strategy, you’re not really talking about how that affects the company.

And so if a team sees no benefit in what you’re doing for themselves, they can only give you so much. Again, it’s not, [00:27:00] we don’t trust you. It’s just that I don’t know where I fit here. I don’t know how this affects us. And so, I mean, if you need something, come tell us. And why is that bad? Well, we’re working in complex systems.

There’s no way you’re going to know what you need all the time. Much better if somebody that works in a different space can tell you what they’re seeing and then contribute to the strategy that way. For example, if there’s a salesperson, eh, that is out there on the road, getting a lot of information, they’re not going to know what to tell you to help make the product more sellable.

If they look at their strategy and you don’t have anything like win rate in there, something that speaks to what’s important to them. So you’re going to miss out on this treasure trove of information. So, learn what other teams do, make other teams tick and leverage leading and lagging indicators to tell that story.

Leading and lagging indicators are a great way of connecting [00:28:00] what you’re doing to other teams. Don’t have enough time to talk through leading and lagging indicators, but if you do know them or if you have any questions, please feel free to send them to me and I’m more than happy to talk you through it.

Some questions for an IC. How does this strategy enhance value across the organization? How does the impact of the strategy affect every department? Has it been assessed? Do we know how it’s affected? Or even better, could I spend a day with TeamX to better understand how our product impacts their work?

Shadowing a salesperson, shadowing a customer success person, shadowing even somebody that you work with regularly, like a designer could tell you a lot about what’s going on with your product. And that’ll change your communication pattern. So Scott integrated other teams incentives into the strategy during lean coffee.

A lean coffee session is when you get other stakeholders in a room, you set the agenda and you say what we’re talking about or what’s important over the first five to 10 minutes. And then you [00:29:00] just have an open session, right? You let folks write Post-it notes on what they notice, comments, questions.

You vote on those questions and then you talk about them together. That is a great way of understanding what is on the team’s minds. So Scott started to integrate that into the team and started to take the language of that and put it into the strategy. So people started to see themselves in the strategy itself.

And so Bobco evolved with teams talking to each other. Bobco got a chance to, to. To learn about each other. They stopped being siloed

the lesson, staleness, the risk of complacency. Alicia’s team at Bobco enjoyed early success with their strategy, but they failed to adapt to the dynamic market. And so they started losing market share pretty quickly. How do you know? Well, the last updated class updated metadata will tell you if the [00:30:00] strategy hasn’t been updated in a long time and remember the last Strategy is descriptive, not prescriptive.

It should change to explain the environment that you’re in. We work in complex environments, and so things are changing around us all the time, whether it’s legally, whether it’s competitors, whether it’s economic conditions. There’s a million things going on, and if your strategy isn’t taking them into consideration then it becomes stale.

And then why am I looking at it? So you should institute a regular strategy review and update session. With stakeholders, because not only do you need to update it, but your stakeholders are stakeholders for a reason. They have insights as to what’s happening outside in the world. So bring them in, ask them questions, and then give them an updated strategy that shows their insights, whether you accept them or not.

For an IC, you [00:31:00] can ask, when’s the last time we updated? What recent market trends and performance metrics should we prioritize? That’s a great question because it’s being specific, right? Stuff is happening in the marketplace all the time. And if I’m a leader and I get that question, I better have an answer or I need to go find that out.

What methods can we employ to continuously integrate fresh insights into our strategic process? That tells me we might have insights, but we got to get them baked in. And so, you can ask, how do we do that? How do we keep ourselves fresh? So Alicia instituted monthly strategy update sessions where she would ask stakeholders and then she would come back with an updated strategy.

Every month her team would supply her with fresh data and feedback into the strategy regularly, and they started getting their competitive edge back, right? The analysts came in. Where they were middle of the pack, they became a strategic leader based on the [00:32:00] analysts from X journal that came in and looked at Bobco.

So the strategy was able to adapt to the marketplace and then not just give them market share, but also credibility. That’s important because we’re not trying to end up here. That Google strategy graveyard is real. It happens a lot. And we don’t often get a chance to connect, and it’s not purposeful.

We all write our strategies. We all go through the rituals of creating strategy. And we all, we all want to tell the same story, but oftentimes we get in our own way. We inadvertently hide it. We’re not very clear about who this is for. We break trust with the teams that are working around us.

We don’t use other teams’ language to, and encourage them to provide information for us. And we don’t update our strategy. We’ve got to, we get complacent and then we end up like this January, [00:33:00] all of a sudden it’s March and no one’s looked at this besides you in the last hour. And so it’s important for us to absolve ourselves, connect with the strategies that we make and avoid hiddenness, ambiguity Gain trust, connect with other teams by being selfless instead of selfish and being dynamic instead of stale.

And so what I want you to do is write three takeaways that you got from this presentation into the chat. You got five minutes. And if you have any questions, perfect time to throw them into Q and a before we move forward,

Two things really quickly. The first thing is, if you’re curious about connecting this with your team, I’ve worked with Miro to create a board that we will be sharing after this, so that you can go through this entire workshop on Miro.

It has spaces for the five questions. And you have every single SIN lined up with a whole bunch of exercises to [00:34:00] walk you through.

And the second thing is feedback. I have a link. Either save it now and get back to it, or it should only take a minute or two to complete. It’s a way for you to get any extra questions in or let me know how this was. Or if you want to work together let me know. So yeah, Jack, it’s going to be in the follow up email the mirror board, the link to the mirror board will be in the follow up email.

Janna Bastow: Adam, thank you so much for walking us through that. And let’s take some time to jump into some of these questions because we’ve got one here from Justin, but it also is eight thumbs up.

So everyone wants to know when you talk about the problem to solve, is that the user or customer’s problem or the business problem, e. g. we have problems we’ve trouble differentiating versus customers needing a better way to staff that are operating rooms.

Adam Thomas: So what I think when I think about this question, customer or business hate to give the, it depends, but it kind of does

Janna Bastow: It wouldn’t be a real product management talk if there wasn’t any, it depends somewhere.

Adam Thomas: Indeed, [00:35:00] everybody grab, grab a sip of water. It happened. So, I think about this question, I generally default to user though, right? Because we’re telling a story about a user and the strategy should be, how do we solve our users problems clearly? And how, and that connects back to the story that we’re telling on a regular basis.

So it depends because in some places it’s going to be the business in some places. And that’s just how it has to be. But if you have the opportunity, I would tend to opt towards the customers, the users problem. And I would try to tie some sprinkling of the, how that affects the customer there, but focused on.

Janna Bastow: And just a really quick follow up. How would you differentiate between a business strategy and a product strategy?

Adam Thomas: Business strategy is all about revenue. And then I would say product strategy is all about the problem.

Janna Bastow: All right, good stuff. That was a follow up question that somebody had, and five people wanted to hear about that one.

All right, so somebody anonymously asked this one. If you have a product that serves different markets, how do you ensure the strategy needs for each [00:36:00] market can align to the larger strategy needs of the company, especially when one product serves all markets?

Adam Thomas: First, I would interrogate that. Do you really serve all markets?

Second, I would interrogate the value of the product if we’re trying to be everything for everyone. Third, I would take a look at our product engagement numbers. They probably tell a really bad story. Because if we can’t tell a singular story for one person, how are we telling it for 50? And so there’s a lot of, I think there’s a lot of value in asking yourself and your team and doing the tough work of saying, who is this product for?

How do we make that as sharp as possible? And then how do we tell a story that essentially lets the folks who may feel a little scared doing this, the value of being focused, right? The value is we can start to leverage tools like value based pricing to, to get the optimal pricing out of our customers.

The value is now [00:37:00] we can start to tell a clear marketing story. So we’re not wasting time from a sales or marketer point of view. The value is we are maintaining or clearing up our costs because we’re not bubbling up and taking over the time of customer success and customer support, dealing with a whole bunch of tickets that are irrelevant and information that’s irrelevant.

Right. And you start to tell that story, the story of focus And how that can make not only a connector strategy, but make everyone else’s lives much easier. And doing that, of course, bringing some of those people in and helping tell their side. Cause I’m sure they have a ton of complaints about this.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Excellent. Olivia asked how do we deal with strategy that’s handed down to us from global leaders who aren’t involved with our team?

Adam Thomas: This is a trust question first. And what I mean by a trust question is, Unfortunately, that global leadership team does not trust that strategy is understood or drafted or can be handled by the team [00:38:00] itself.

And so you’ve got to go through the long process of building that trust. The first thing is trying to see how much information you can get on. Well, first you would take a look at how close is that strategy being handed down to reality? What’s the difference, right? And that’s the delta that you have to clear.

Right. How would it be different from the strategy that you’re making on the line, looking at what’s happening? Second, you’re going to have to build a relationship with that stakeholder and whatever, however you can. And so you would, and you would lead those conversations with execution, right?

We’re following through on your strategy, but I have an idea. And that idea will come from your point of view on strategy and you would slowly start to, to build that trust, right? Because your ideas should be, they should work, they should be better, right? Then the ideas that they have are coming from them.

They should be feeding them information, right? This is what I’ve learned. And I would, I, this is what I see the difference between information that we’re getting and the strategy that you have. And I would slowly have the conversation about making adjustments. [00:39:00] Based on, again, the strategy and the Delta that you’re, the Delta that exists data and things that you’re producing based on the strategy that they gave you and the opportunities to make it better.

And so, again, this is not going to be an overnight process. It’ll take some time, but the important thing is you have to gain trust from that stakeholder first. And probably if you do this for a strategic cycle, you’re going to be off into the races. I think you’ll be good.

Janna Bastow: All right. Good stuff. And I think we have time for one more. If we have to cut it short, let me know, cause I know you need to go at the top of the hour. But Rai asked, what is the right level of granularity for a strategy?

Adam Thomas: So I tend to look at strategy as a problem that we can solve over the course of a couple of quarters.

So two quarters, to about six or so, right? Six to 18 months. That’s the level of granularity. And [00:40:00] then as you look at objectives underneath that, you can get more granular, right? So if you use OKRs, right, your objective should tie back to that strategy that is being tested over the next six to 18 months.

And that level of granularity within six to 18 months, and then your objective is within a quarter. And then inside of that you have your tasks or whatever, they should ladder up to that objective. So about that level, I can’t tell you exactly the number because that’s going to vary business to business usually tied to your sales cycle is a good indicator of thinking about your strategic cycle is thinking about your sales cycle.

But yeah, have those loud ladders.

Janna Bastow: All right, good stuff. All right. I want to say a big thank you. And just as a final send off, I want to remind folks that we’re going to be back here for another one of these sessions. August 29th, we’re going to be talking about how to gather and maintain a consistent flow of user feedback, useful feedback.

So I’ll be talking through that, but in the meantime, Adam, you have [00:41:00] been instrumental in breaking down these five sins of strategy, really getting to the guts of it. A lot of people just don’t get it. Get into what a strategy is or what we’re doing wrong with it. So thank you for really diving into it with us and answering all of our questions.

I know there were more questions than we could possibly tackle. But I really appreciate you diving into those. So huge thanks. And yeah, I really appreciate you. Everybody says a big thank you to Adam and Adam takes care. And we’ll chat again soon.

Adam Thomas: Indeed. Thank you for having me.

And thank you all for spending the

Janna Bastow: All right. Bye for now. And thank you everybody for joining in.