Stay Focused
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
I’ve worked with several founders whose heads were virtually bursting with ideas for products solving multiple business problems across different verticals. Similarly, many Product Managers I’ve worked with see far more things that could be done in and around their products that can be done, given the realities of budgeting. This kind of creativity and energy is often fun, and always interesting, but also sometimes a little scary, because that energy can easily become an endless source of distraction for the organization they are trying to lead. Constantly shifting focus and prioritization can do a lot of damage: it’s demoralizing for the team doing the work to have the goalposts for success to be changed underneath them, and it doesn’t take long for unfocused product leaders to lose credibility with the teams expected to deliver against ever-changing priorities. Whether you’re a founder starting a venture or a product manager with responsibility for a product or a module, part of your job is to understand the many unmet needs of your internal and external stakeholders and curate those into the best, prioritized set of solutions to pursue — then maintain that focus until it’s time to plan the next project.
To risk generalizing, there are always more solutions requested by your stakeholders than can actually be delivered. It’s hard to disappoint your stakeholders, and unfortunately disappointments are inevitable in making trade-offs between time, resources, and scope. But there’s also deep satisfaction to be gained from the painstaking work needed to evaluate solution candidates, assess the value they will bring to different stakeholder groups and to the business overall, determine the cost and ability of the organization to deliver, and chart the best path forward from all of the available options. You will almost never make everyone happy, but it’s imperative to lean into this challenge and focus on prioritizing the right opportunities:
What work will have the greatest revenue impact, and why? Will they drive more wins? Will they secure renewals? Will they increase deal sizes? Can they be delivered as chargeable modules?
What work will have the greatest impact on internal stakeholders? How much time and cost will they save? How much risk will they eliminate? How many customer dissatisfaction drivers will they address?
What aligns with our strategic goals as a business, and how do they help us achieve those goals? How do they help us grow? How do they help us cement customer relationships? How do they help reinforce the story we are telling to the market about who we are and why we are the right partners to do business with? How do they help us cement the notion of our segment in the minds of customers and key influencers? The list of questions you could ask here is very long.
Can we make it happen? At what cost? Are we the right company to deliver this? Are we able to get behind making it successful across the whole organization? If so, why? And if not, why not?
Solution ideas are in like weeds in at least two ways: You will never run out of them, and they are hungry for scarce resources. A key challenge for Product professionals is to sort the things we should do from the things we could do, using analysis to prioritize, and business cases to argue for a commitment. Once the decisions about commitments have been made, it’s important to remain vigilant and focused. Customer and other stakeholder escalations will of course happen, but few of these are ever as important as the items that have made it to the top of your well-analyzed list. Push the latest distractions aside and keep the team working on the things that will ultimately matter most towards your success. Stay focused!
As always, thanks for reading.
J
