Clarity for Product Managers: Part 1, Directional Clarity

I’m excited to launch a new mini-series of blog posts on a topic that I feel is essential for product people: clarity. Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing my tips and tricks for both individual product managers as well as product leaders. And without further ado, here’s the first one!

Clarity is a superpower for product people of all experience levels and in all contexts.

Clarity is crucial for our success and for ensuring satisfaction among the people we work with and for ourselves.

This is because as product managers or product leaders, our work always involves collaboration. We can only be successful when we work well with others.?

Here are a few common situations that can result from ambiguity:

• Everybody’s busy but you don’t feel like you’re making progress.
• We find out too late that we misunderstood each other and cannot complete our initiative as planned.
• Our efforts to work together feel disappointing because it’s not clear who’s responsible for what.
• Decisions take forever.

Particularly in turbulent times—like those many companies have experienced in the last two years—clarity becomes even more important and also more difficult to achieve.

We can’t just assume clarity will emerge naturally. And even when we do have it, we have to work continuously to maintain it.?

In everyday organizational life, we’ve gotten so used to a lack of clarity that we often don’t realize until it’s too late (when something goes terribly wrong) that we were lacking clarity for quite some time.

But we don’t have to wait for disaster to strike. There’s another option. We can notice the difference between having clarity and not having it when we take time to metaphorically “clean the windows.”?

My goal in this series is to guide you through that window cleaning process so you can start to identify situations when clarity is lacking and have a toolkit to help you address this before it becomes a major problem.

So who’s responsible for creating clarity and what steps can they take to achieve it? I’ll share a few of my suggestions in this article. But first, let’s look at some of the roadblocks that prevent us from achieving clarity.?

Common roadblocks that prevent us from achieving clarity

Clarity is something we all want, and yet many of us struggle to achieve it in our professional settings. Here are some common challenges I’ve observed:

• We are driven by time pressure and think that something can be done quickly (without taking initial steps to achieve clarity) even though it actually takes us much more time to correct misunderstandings that arise from a lack of clarity in the long run.
• We equate clarity with certainty. But as good product people, we are very aware of our "known unknowns," so we believe that we cannot yet create clarity. But in reality clarity—even when it’s on the things that are unclear—can actually help us deal with uncertainty.
• Sometimes, we do not want to know too precisely because we fear the consequences of clarity… We’re scared to see the reality of the situation. Possibly this is what John Lennon had in mind with the line "Living is easy with eyes closed" in Strawberry Fields Forever.
• And sometimes, we prioritize collegial harmony (getting along with others) over diving into details that may cause us to uncover differences. But if our project fails in the end, our feelings of goodwill are also going to suffer.

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The 4 layers of clarity

In my view, there are four layers where we need clarity in order to have successful collaboration.

Directional clarity: We need a clear direction so that we all pull together towards a common goal.

Situational clarity: We sometimes need to spontaneously provide clarity in a given situation to correct a misunderstanding or achieve alignment.

Role clarity: We need clear roles and responsibilities so we know what to expect from our colleagues and stakeholders.

Clear communication: This is the foundational layer—we need clear communication to facilitate all other types of clarity.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how product managers can achieve directional clarity. In future posts, I’ll explore the additional layers of clarity as well as the role product leaders have to play in helping achieve it.?

A closer look at directional clarity

A clear direction is important in collaboration so that everyone can contribute independently to their respective tasks and we can successfully work together toward a common goal.

This involves clear visions, a clear approach, and clear priorities.

You can check if you have a sufficiently clear direction in your environment by answering the following questions:

Who regularly refers to the vision and strategy?

A good sign would be if designers or developers in the team explicitly reference the vision or strategy, either as a reason for doing something or not. If they argue only within their own expertise and on a small scale, there is probably a lack of clear direction and you may not be working toward the same goal.

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How clear is your story?

Imagine you meet your CFO in the elevator: How well can you briefly and convincingly tell them what you are doing and why, and what the company will gain from it? If you find this difficult, you probably either lack directional clarity or at least you’re not yet able to provide it to others.

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Can you provide reasons whenever you have to say “no”?

It is normal for us as product people to be confronted with well-intended suggestions from all directions, including from influential stakeholders. If you lack clear arguments for saying "no," it may indicate that the priorities are not clear enough.

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How much is in progress and for how long?

If there are many things in development at the same time and this persists over a longer period, this is also a strong indication that the priorities guiding your direction are not clear enough.

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I’ve experienced all these situations firsthand. I’ve had to admit that we did not have a clear enough direction because we did not take the necessary time to create directional clarity, were overly perfectionistic with our directional artifacts (and therefore never finished them), or because we were afraid to commit in order to stay as flexible as possible.

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So, what can you do to avoid finding yourself in these situations?

Concrete steps for directional clarity: Advice for PMs

Here are my suggestions for steps PMs can take on an individual level to enhance directional clarity.

Just start!

The most important thing is to start refining a clear perspective on your area of responsibility. Even if you currently have little time to work on it extensively, this is still a critical step. And even if you feel that your organization lacks clarity on a higher level and you can’t for instance base your work on a nicely connected cascade of Vision, Strategy & Objectives as described in Martin Eriksson’s great mental model Decision Stack: You can still can create more clarity in your area and it’s your job to do so!

Just get started. Don't make it too complicated or overdo it.

?As an IC, this also means that you focus on things that are really within your sphere of influence and responsibility. For example, the product vision and product strategy do not fall into this category. In my opinion, it does not make sense for every product manager to develop their own vision and strategy. These are overarching means of providing directional clarity that should be handled by product leadership. Of course, you can and should contribute to this, but don’t stress about how exactly you should formulate the vision or what belongs in the strategy.?

Ask these 3 questions for more clarity regarding your initiative

You can start more simply, for example, by trying to answer the following three questions as clearly as possible for YOUR area of impact:

1. What insights are behind your initiative?

In other words: What have you learned from data, user research, discovery—or even from competitive comparison or changed conditions (e.g., new capabilities of APIs of important partners)—that prompts you to do what you want to do now (and not something else)? It can help to think of a particular moment when this insight became clear to you.

2. What is your core hypothesis and how do you want to test it?

It is an important step to make the hypotheses—which we all have about many things—explicit. Only in this way can we determine if we are seeing things through the same lens. And the question of how to test it is a great basis for a discovery and other measures to de-risk your endeavor and to gain more clarity about the next steps.

To formulate your hypothesis try the following format: If we… offer quick response options in our messenger Then… less initial chat messages will remain unanswered Because… responding is more convenient And we will know that this is true when… the rate of chats with only one message drops from the baseline of 30% by 5 or more percentage points.?

3. How do you want to measure success and what is your level of ambition?

This question targets leading indicators that allow you to check early if your initiative is moving in the right direction—but it is also important to explicitly clarify the future outcome and your ambition behind it. After all, every product initiative is an investment decision and you need to be able to explain why you think it is right to let a team work on something for 2 months, for example, which costs north of 100K EUR in most European companies.

With this investment perspective in mind it’s also important that you think about how your intended outcome relates to your company’s key business drivers such as new business, upsell, or retention.?

Develop a narrative in different formats

On the basis of these three questions, you can also work on writing a narrative for your product. In addition to the three questions, of course, also strongly consider the perspective of your users and how what you plan to do improves their future.

It’s also worth considering what’s in it for different key stakeholders so that you can more effectively connect your story to their standpoint.

I like Petra Wille's recommendation to develop the story at different lengths (150, 900, and 2,400 words) and to try out different forms of presentation. For example, is there a central image you can use to explain the direction you want to take your product? Again, remember: Starting and sharing initial results is more important than perfection!

Taking the time to develop this narrative means you’ll be much more articulate when you meet the CFO (or any other executive) in the elevator.

Repeat, repeat, repeat!

However, it is important that you not only share what you are planning but actively ensure, on various occasions, that your team and the rest of the organization understand what you are doing and why.?

One recommendation I always give to the PMs on my team is not to be afraid of repetition. I remember countless occasions when we thought we had already shared product-related information too often just to realize that we needed to repeat it much more frequently. "Repetition doesn’t harm the prayer," as an old boss of mine liked to say.

Final thoughts

To recap, we’ve covered why it can be so hard to achieve clarity, the different layers of clarity that facilitate your work as a PM, and looked at some specific tips and tactics that can help you gain more directional clarity.

Is there one idea in particular that stood out to you or one tactic you’re planning to try? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.?

And for the next post in the series, we’ll be looking at the topic of situational clarity and what steps you can take to achieve it.?

This article was initially published on my website's blog where you can also find other articles I've written since 2016.