Musings on Building High Performance Product Organizations & Culture

There have been multiple great books and blogs on envisioning and building great products. I'll share some of the ones that I have found particularly useful and handy, towards the end of this post.

Before that, I wanted to share a few of my own perspectives on some of the core product / general leadership tenets that I have come to internalize over the years w.r.t. creating kick ass products and world class product teams. Hopefully a few of you who get to read it will find it useful and helpful at some level.

1) Customer at the center of value creation

In any given company, at any point in time, one is always optimizing along 3-4 dimensions for value creation. That means having to deal with multiple stakeholders - from business to finance to marketing to technology & infrastructure organizations. While all those dimensions and functions matter, by design this situation splits the PM's focus and mindshare into optimizing for multiple variables & internal stakeholders. In such times, what I have found truly empowering is being able to zone out a lot of the noise and zoom in pretty much 100% on what "value" we are creating for the customers.  In this almost zen like state of mind, more often than not, one can come up with really simple answers/solutions to the problems on hand. In addition, many of the debates, discussions and contra perspectives on growth, profitability, market-share, competitive advantage, brand management - la Porter Four Forces will get settled when we intensely & relentlessly zoom in to what matters to customers, amidst all the clutter !! Try it and you'll love it, if you arent already living and breathing it.

2) Be the Customer 

This is a slightly different nuance than the above point. Over time, I've come across way too many self proclaimed product gurus / leaders who despite hardly ever having used the products at a deep / almost subliminal level, offer advice on the future of the product. The best way to counter and put to rest those unsubstantiated arguments is by being a fierce / fanatical user of your own products daily and continuously record what's working / not working.  For e.g., if you are an employee in a Retail E-commerce company, try ordering an AC and figure out all the pain points you face as a consumer. Whether the vent arrives first, followed by the compressor three days out, followed by a call by an installer to schedule a visit another few days later and then you have a 'Oh shit' moment when you realize there is no 20 Amp electrical point in your daughter's bedroom and you call your electrician, who turns up on a different day then the installer :-) If you dont go through this pain, you'll never be able to solve for a fully functional / magical experience for your customers. Once you know your customer in and out, building products and convincing the stakeholders (both the ones that matter and mean well, as well as the folks offering random advise) becomes much much easier.

3) Get the Strategy together

Let me start by quoting Peter Drucker here - "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all". Most of the time the execution mind takes over and we find ourselves running around fixing fires, taking products to market in quick succession, making incremental changes, and so on, churning the execution machinery six ways from Sunday. It is extremely critical (and deeply fulfilling I must say) to take a step back (actually multiple steps back) and scope out a medium term and longer term strategy for the business & customers. Mostly The What, The What Not, The Why, The Why Not, and a bit of The How. A simple 2-page strategy document is usually enough to be deeply clarifying on the vision & mission, the path we are taking, our core value proposition to customers & market, how we create a sustainable long term advantage & moats, and key operating tenets / guiding principles. With this pivot in place, coming up with mid to long term roadmap for value creation becomes a ton more simpler.

4) Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Now that we got Strategy out of the way, let's invoke another Peter Drucker quote and mess with the previous tenet on Strategy :-). "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast". Of all the zen idioms I have come across so far, this one hits home the most. While culture is a very broad term, things like engagement tenets - how do we treat each other, how do we prioritize when rubber hits the road, how do we empower our people, do we over index on customer experience or business growth/profitability, how do we do performance management of our people - become so critical that, getting culture right has trumped almost anything else I have had to do so far. Which brings me to expand on one of the cultural tenets (for purposes of limited time) - Empowerment, that I am deeply passionate about.

5) Empower, Empower, Empower

In the recent past, I've been extremely lucky to have hired a world class product team. People, who I can align with on the overall strategy and just let go and get out of their way. With some of them, I can even meet once a quarter and still be extremely confident that they have figured out the customer & business opportunities, nailed the experience and roadmap, created significant value and resolved majority of the execution challenges. The only areas I provide help to them is breaking down any major barriers they may have w.r.t. cross organizational alignment, resource prioritizations etc, and just plain listen to them. Spending the time needed to hire dozens of world class PMs (from all over the world), comes at a cost - which is the time you have to give up from whatever else you are involved in- strategy building, execution, change management, or spend extra hours etc. etc. But it pays for itself once you get this team into high performance mode. The most damage you can inflict on this team is to micro-manage them - push your ideas/will on them, get them into pointless meetings for status updates/alignments etc, drill them on metrics ad nauseum and so on. I've been guilty of some of the latter doings myself - but have learned for the better over time.

      The uber point being, hire someone better than you, point to the opportunity and let go... They will make it happen. They'll come to you themselves if they need help. Dont screw it up by meddling & being just plain overbearing.

6) Data at the soul of decision making

If anyone thought the touchy feely stuff was all that was needed, sorry to burst the bubble. Yes, we have all heard that Data is the new Oil and so on. What I am saying is beyond that. We  dont exist without data. Period. In a world where we deal with tens of millions of customers, taking a call on anything - be it business model change or a new type of Newsfeed or even change the placement of a "buy button", has to grounded in data - structured & unstructured. In most cases, I’ve found that the data tells us that 80% of user needs are solved through 20% of use-cases.

So, yes, the data will tell the story on its own, IF you actually have it. Many challenges come to mind - Data usually resides on multiple platforms depending on use-cases - Hadoop, Teradata, Singularity etc. In certain cases, there are availability, integrity & reliability challenges. It becomes really really critical to solve for these challenges. While the pain points could mostly be a function of the architecture choices of the past, the “Data First” culture you instill can transform the choices of the future, once you have truly internalized that, no critical decision can be made without access to multiple layers of data. In case you are interested, here’s a link to a talk I gave related to this topic in Microstrategy’s Global Data conference in Barcelona a year or so ago.

Ending this thought on a joke - In the recent past, when my 2 year old was asked what he wanted to be when he grows up, he answered "Big Data". Sincere advise to PMs who dont know SQL and depend on Analysts to get the data for them - That 2 year old will be learning SQL when he is 8. In case you noticed, that's not a joke. So, please get upto speed.

7) Make Process your friend

By saying make process your friend, I mean institute light-weight processes that doesnt overwhelm your team’s bandwidth, but increases productivity & excellence at the same time. While the processes should be customized for your company’s needs and ways of working, here are a few useful forums that have been super helpful to me and the teams I have worked with - weekly focussed problem solving sessions, product and design deep dives with a really small, select audience with familiarity of the domain/use-cases to provide targeted feedback and 1-2 decision making forums a month to unblock roadblocks - such as prioritization conflicts / dependency resolutions / resource allocations etc. And lastly, simple OKR (Objectives & Key Results) process at the beginning of the product development cycle and check-in once in 2 weeks.

Finally, set your team free and let them make it happen.

Anyways, feel this has gone quite long already !! Time to share a few really cool product perspectives from people / firms whose advice & real world experiences, I admire.

1) Good PM / Bad PM - Khosla Ventures

2) Good PM / Bad PM - Andreesen Horowitz

3) Building Products - Angela Zhou (Facebook)

Will add more over time. Signing off, for now..