Nothing Matters if You Can’t Deliver: A Lesson All Product Managers Need To Understand
Vision requires strategy. Strategy requires execution. Execution requires delivery.
A lesson I’ve learned the hard way is that vision, strategy and execution don’t matter if your organisation isn’t effective in delivery.
As Product Managers, it’s our job to live in the future and understand where our products need to be, then have the plan to get them there.
We have to look into the future and align an entire business with our stance on where our product will be in 1 to 5 years’ time.
The truth is we don’t really know whether we’re right — It’s a highly educated guess, but a guess nonetheless.
The only way to bring assurance and confidence to this guess is to deliver and learn what actually works in the wild with real customers.
This needs the ability to ship experiments with strong hypotheses, reliable measurement capabilities and most importantly the operational capabilities to deliver code extremely regularly.
If you only ship one feature each month, you have one opportunity to learn each month. This means the likelihood of you validating your strategy and moving towards your vision is bottlenecked to the value of one learning per month.
This just isn’t enough.
As a Product Manager, you can’t neglect the importance of getting in the weeds of delivery to win hearts and minds if you need to. Your strategy mandates it.
If you need more Engineers, I’ve recently written a blog post to share experiences in how to do it here — we need more engineers.
