Creating Context & Making Sense of it

Every level of product management happens along the lines of two areas: Creating context and making sense of it. While creating the context partially depends on the environment you work in, making sense of the context mainly depends on the hard skills a product team has.

For Product Strategy, the context consists of the internal and external data points about the market, your capabilities, how you plan to differentiate, your mission, as well as long-term goals. Making sense of it means to form the right relationships between these areas, derive concise conclusions, and communicate it the right way.

For setting (team-level) OKRs, the context contains inputs such as the purpose/mission/vision, Product Strategy, Company OKRs, and Roadmaps. Making sense of these means identifying KRs that capture the product from as many angles as possible, describing changes in behavior (Outcomes), and allowing the team to adjust their actions (leading indicators).

The context of Product Discovery results from defined goals, strategic priorities, as well as existing qual and quant insights about your customers. Making sense requires creating a narrative around the problem space, prioritizing the right research questions and interpreting insights, ideate solutions based on proven challenges, and validating before building.

For Delivery activities, the context results from your goals and validated solutions to build. Making sense of it requires prioritizing stories in the best possible order to ship high-quality value as fast as possible and making the right tactical decisions about implementation.

Where do you see the more significant challenges for your team? Creating the context, or making sense of it?