Product Leadership

The idea behind working capital is that a business should always have more assets than liabilities.

You call several doctors’ offices and tell them you have a fixed budget and timeline to work with and will be selecting a winner from competitive bids. How do you think this scenario ends? The most qualified doctors laugh at your suggested process and ignore you. The least qualified doctors low-ball the budget to get the work. Good luck with your surgery. When you bid out a product creation project to outside firms with a fixed budget and timeline, you’re doing the same thing. In these situations, the rates used by the outside partner undervalue its effort, and the client’s reliance on the comparative market rates as the metric simply reinforces this undervaluation. This is a lose-lose scenario. If the project is undervalued, the firm or studio will fail to meet its obligations, and the client won’t get the quality it desires.

Every business has a solar system of partners, agencies, customers, external stakeholders, and vendors that orbit their core business and help them deliver value. In these enlightened customer-centric times, it might be more accurate to say that each product company is orbiting the customer.

The role of the roadmap is to illustrate our vision of where we’re going,” says Matt Poepsel, Predictive Index’s Vice President of Product. “I think we’re doing some pretty innovative things in this space, and to be honest, a lot of our competitors are not; they’re sort of stagnant by comparison.”

How would you spend one hundred dollars in our platform if you only had one hundred dollars to spend? It’s a great prioritization exercise to do with customers.” These highly targeted or structured communications are designed to extract specific data or insights from customers

During their first 25 years, Adobe measured just one thing as its key metric: how many software packages it sold. But this metric doesn’t tell you anything about adoption rates, usage, or customer satisfaction, nor does it incentivize developing a long-term relationship with customers.

Any good product leader will tell you that you can’t be everything to everyone. All companies go through this struggle. They need to stay focused on a specific market while still scaling their business. For the most part, this might be easier when companies are small. Early-stage companies tend to be more focused on a specific problem, but this becomes harder as they grow. By the time they are enterprise size, the pressures of growth and scale diffuse any hope of staying focused.

To test this vision, the product team designed a wireframe of the new version of the app as envisioned by Skonnard.

The difference between vision and strategy is in how the value of ideas flows inside the organization. In healthy organizations, leaders, including product leaders, come up with the high-level vision for the organization. Then the execution of that vision happens at the individual practitioner level. Here’s the rub: just because the leaders are developing the vision doesn’t mean the value begins and ends with them. In order for the organization to remain focused and aligned, the value of ideas needs to flow up from the execution level back to the vision level. In practical terms, this means that practitioners need to be connecting their work to the vision, and leaders need to be willing to adjust the vision to accommodate the incoming insights from practitioners and customers.

Fine-tuning your listening and co-creative skills doesn’t just make you a good product leader; it makes you a good product manager.