Build the right products, for the right customers, at the right time
This past week Salesforce announced the ‘Workforce Engagement’ product during the Dreamforce 2020 keynote. Through this note, I want to share my product reflections and learnings.
2020 has been a universally strange year; changing and challenging every sphere of our lives. Circa 2019, product workflows were created on white boards, ideas were exchanged near coffee machines, and product vision was set in team off-sites. Not anymore. However, as product managers and leaders, our greatest strength is adaptability. We chose to learn, reflect and reinvent the core pillars of innovation - people, product and process.
Here are my four key learnings as I reflect on our product journey -
People: Candor, Trust and Growth
Candor builds trust that propels the growth ecosystem. The more confident you become, the more candid you can be - which yields reasonable and actionable feedback. Trust is paramount while building our products but also our teams and culture. Why? Because, no one likes to work with a person they don’t trust! It’s even more pervasive in our distributed and remote world today.
So how do you establish this cycle of candor, trust and growth -
- Lean into transparency - both upwards and sideways (there is no downwards in a team).When you are a small and nimble team, efficiency can be best achieved by relaying information and removing artificial approval barriers. Selectively sharing data to make things look better by highlighting the positives and minimizing the negatives will not serve you well in the short term or the long run.
- Establish the candid feedback loop (with all your key stakeholders). If someone shows the courage to give you direct feedback, acknowledge it. You can then decide whether to act upon it.
- Celebrate successful milestones but also widely acknowledge the learnings from your failure; don’t shame failure - it kills one’s risk appetite and the propensity to innovate and grow
At the end of the day, you need to empower teams, through systematic but flexible processes, to build impactful products.
Product: Prioritize, Re-prioritize and De-prioritize
“But, is this the right priority - that’s my question?” Over the course of last year, I have either said this or heard it at least 10 times (every week). So how do you determine a priority? It’s fairly easy to construct a weighted formula:
Rank = customer impact + business value + technical feasibility (cost)
But that formula changes dynamically and, as such, so does the priority. That’s the only constant thing about prioritization. It changes! Then, how do you reprioritize? I go by Mr. Bezos's guidance -
“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.”
Don't compromise on core jobs to be done through your product. Avoid the complexity of features (who wants to use complex products?). Be agile on the depth of features, ways to invoke them, and on prioritizing those that are necessary. It’s crucial to know and be able to convince why a product or feature is a higher priority and drive this alignment across your stakeholders and team.
Process: Create Options
Decision making is hard. It tests your resilience and your patience and over a period of time it also tests your intelligence rigor. However, what has conclusively helped is weighing the options, before making a decision. If you ask me, options are one of the most powerful tools a product leader can have in their back pocket. Do the analysis, make the pros & cons list, understand the tradeoffs and defend your choices (and sometimes be ready to pivot and alter those choices). In today’s modern world where scope, timeline and cost changes so fast, options led by systematic data, are the best way to guide conclusive decision making, be it for design, technical architecture, user experience or prioritization.
With option analysis, you can balance core value assets with defensible advantages that will truly instantiate a run of play for longer periods of time.
Innovation: Iterate and Establish
Organic Innovation is not about hiring a bunch of smart people and telling them what to do. Innovation happens organically when employees identify a problem, decide if it is worth solving, pinpoint where to start, and ultimately, resolve it. It takes multiple prototypes and cycles to arrive at a vision which is simple and intuitive enough to alleviate customer pain but also add incremental value to their lives. And controlled chaos drives agility, especially during those early stages of vision development.
I have been fortunate to work with some of the smartest people across geographies and directly from the land of Innovation - Israel.
So, embrace the storm and look back and marvel at the ride once it has settled.
And for this ride, I am deeply thankful to my team, mentors and leaders.
In the end, I want to reiterate this quote by Reed Hastings
“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call ‘stunning colleagues’ - highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively."