The Most Important, Missed Success Factor for Product Teams — Filling Cracks
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau
Have you ever heard that great product managers are CEO of their products? Great concept, albeit aspirational. Very few product managers have that much control. Rather than a CEO, I’d argue a great product manager is a mason. Ensuring the foundation is solid. Filling cracks that only they can see.
Imagine sitting in a conference room or on a zoom call. You’re reaching the end and the team is discussing the next steps. You start to have a sinking feeling. They are missing a critical step. Why aren’t we calling out the need to bring the compliance team into the product development process? A crack is forming. You know the foundation of the product won’t be sound without their engagement. What do you do? Do you ignore it and hope someone else will pick it up. Or do you raise the issue?
There are tens of thousands of articles about what makes a fantastic product manager. What makes a great product team. There are lists of success criteria, endless methods, frameworks, and descriptions of the magical unicorn product manager. And yet, I can say they almost all miss a critical success factor — a ruthless focus on eliminating cracks.
Have you ever heard that great product managers are CEO of their products? Great concept, albeit aspirational. Very few product managers have that much control. Rather than a CEO, I’d argue a great product manager is a mason. Ensuring the foundation is solid. Filling cracks that only they can see.
In my college days, I worked for a mason. While it was grueling, back-breaking work even for someone in their early twenties, I learned a critical lesson. Whether building a house, a wall, or a walking path, if you don’t get the foundation right, the structure can’t compensate. You need to check your work constantly, filling cracks that might lead to structural failure — and sometimes starting over when those cracks are too big.
Product leaders, strategists, and managers need to do the same. Lay a solid, crack-free foundation. Once I passed my days as a wannabe mason, I started a new journey as a product manager. A journey I am still on. Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to try different roles as a product manager, strategist, company founder, management consultant, and product leader in the Fortune 500. While these experiences certainly give me perspective, I still take time to reflect. After listening to a podcast a few weeks back and reflecting on the words of wisdom, the connection between my days as a mason and product manager hit me like lightning. Great product managers don’t let cracks form!
Having a concise way to describe it, I could look back at my career and realize this philosophy was a significant contributor to my success. Sure I had to nail the basics, build products users love, and the thousands of other things product teams do. However, what made my approach different than others is the simple idea of a solid foundation. Being ruthless about preventing and eliminating cracks as the master mason taught me early on. While I didn’t recognize the pattern until recently, it is now clear that a significant part of my brand is centered around this idea.
Early in a product’s life your focus is minimizing and fill cracks rapidly or starting over. However cracks occur until a product is sunset. Just like maintaining the structure of a building where physical cracks can form, your product can experience cracks at any point in its lifecycle. For example, imagine you are three years in, and new industry regulation emerges. Many people might not notice until it’s too late. However, as a vigilant mason, you see this crack early. Instead of ignoring it or hoping someone else picks up the mantle, you tackle it head-on. The result — no panic at the deadline for implementing the regulation, your customers feel safe, and perhaps new market opportunities as a result of being prepared.
Making it real, what can you do to prepare? Let’s put ourselves in the hypothetical donut business again. Our north star is to launch physical donuts coupled with unique, NFT-based digital art that is tradeable (refer here for more background — Reflecting Strategy In Roadmaps — Features Are Not The End Game). Six months post-launch, the FCC publishes a new regulation that requires reporting the sale of digital products associated with physical products effective in one year. If you are vigilant, you will see the impact early on. The question is what to do to prepare. There are a few tactics I find set and keep a solid foundation (pun intended):
- Take a step back and think. The best way to prepare to build or repair a foundation (or demolish it) is a plan. What can I do to minimize the size of the crack or the damage radius? Can it be contained, or will it spread? Is the probability high or low of it happening? If we can’t sell donuts with NFTs due to regulation, what would the impact be? How would we address the crack it would create?
- Assess the size of the crack. Conduct an impact analysis. Work through scenarios. What is the best and worst-case impact on our business plan if the regulation becomes law?
- Review lessons learned from previous launches. While the exact crack didn’t happen in the past, others of similar size and character have. You can always learn from past positive and negative outcomes. Look at how teams prepared for or reacted to emerging or spreading cracks. What can you draw from those lessons? How could you possibly use the past to prepare for regulation about tying donuts to NFT artwork? What about promotions tied to donuts, loyalty cards, sports card giveaways, and gift cards for purchases? There must be something.
- Plan your foundation and structure just like an architect. If your product is new, draft a blueprint. As Thoreau says, an architect building a skyscraper or castle in the sky would not start from the structure and skip the foundation. If your product exists, plan the renovation and repair.
- Create a cross-functional steering committee. You would be surprised how a diverse, cross-functional team can help think through the impact of a crack. They have seen similar situations, may know the current regulation better (think the compliance team), or may have experience dealing with similar issues in other industries. Ask them to review your blueprint or help you create it.
- Maintain a crack log… eh-hem, I mean a RAID log. RAID (Risk, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) logs are a great way to build a maintenance log. Like a building manager would inspect and keep track of repairs, a product manager needs to keep track of and create their product’s repair schedule.
- Realize you are not in it alone. If you are unsure what to do, you can always reach out to others inside and outside your company. You might be surprised how many former masons are out there.
Don’t let cracks get the best of you. Stay ahead of them before your product collapses. Fill them out even if it isn’t your job. Bring others along with the concept of product managers being masons. I’ll leave you with this thought to ponder… how many product failures and collapses result from cracks in the foundation?
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