Shaping the Future: Product Strategy in the Age of Uncertainty

"Shaping the Future: Product Strategy in the Age of Uncertainty," was a talk presented in partnership with Product Management Today.

Summary

A value-driven product organization optimizes team structures, funding cycles, processes, and metrics to drive traction and growth across the entire product adoption curve by identifying opportunities to solve valuable customer problems and closing those market gaps for either over-served or under-served markets. It starts by formulating a benefit hypothesis to shift your mindset from output orientation to an outcome orientation, then surfacing and challenging our assumptions.

In this webinar, we’ll explore the 4 key pillars that a value-driven product organization leverages to ensure they are connecting their strategy to execution to deliver business outcomes:

1. The Product Roadmap (Orient to Value)

2. A Cascade of Requirements (Vertical/Temporal Alignment to Strategy)3.

3. A Cadence of Ceremonies (Horizontal/Lateral Coordination)

4. A System of Metrics (Inspect and Adapt Progress & Performance)

Snapshot:

In the 1990s, as more organizations looked to digitization to increase value realization and grow margins, software engineering became a primary constraint (bottleneck) in releasing value (through features) to customers. As software libraries and tools grew, and with the introduction of agile/lean methodologies, the constraint moved downstream in the product lifecycle. 

By the mid-2000s, the primary constraint became test, operations and support. The DevOps Movement rose to meet the challenge and introduced “soft” interventions like methods and practices from theory of constraints and lean thinking (e.g. Flow Thinking, Kanban, Value Streams) and “hard” innovations (e.g. CI/CD pipelines, containerization, infrastructure as code) to automate the simple, and refocus limited capacity on the very hard human problems of communication, collaboration, experimentation, strategic alignment, and continuous improvement. Now the bottleneck or constraint in high performing software organizations has moved again. We can build things fast. We can ship things fast. But which things?

Bottlenecks in the value streams never disappear, they just move. For many organizations the constraint limiting the fast flow of value to customers has moved to Product Management. Given limited time and resources, the primary challenge that organizations face, then, is ensuring they are effectively investing finite resources to discover the right product that solves a validated customer need. Sitting at a nexus connecting marketing, strategy, engineering, design, operations, sales, and support, the required competencies, capabilities, and responsibilities of product leadership can feel almost insurmountable. 

Creating new customer value which delivers top-line revenue growth, the very purpose of product-driven organizations, requires us to create the right structures, processes and practices optimized for throughput of value - this workshop focuses on the practices.  Great product strategy involves talking to the right customers, generating the right options, and placing the right bets including markets to serve, customer needs to solve, capabilities to create, and talent to develop, and products to sunset or sell. We’re gonna dig into the WHAT and HOW to do those things and set some baseline standards for how ideas become software customers love.