Driving Business Outcomes and Impact — Part 2 of Becoming a Product Leader
Product Leaders drive impact for the business by taking on complex initiatives and defining strategy across multiple teams. This is Part 2 of the “Becoming a Product Leader” series. In this series, I’m tackling different outcomes and traits that individual contributor Product Managers can practice and cultivate to move towards becoming a Product Leader.
Leading Complex Initiatives
As a Product Leader, you will be expected to lead and drive initiatives that span across an organization. So the potential impact you can have on the business— either positive or negative — increase commensurately. Your leadership team, stakeholders, and individuals doing the work all need to trust that your influence will result in better outcomes.
And nothing proves the ability to drive major business impact like past success. So it’s important for individual contributor PMs seeking to become Product Leaders to take opportunities to drive complex initiatives.
What this looks like varies a lot by the company and organization you’re in. But initiatives and projects led by Product Leaders tend to need major coordination and alignment. They’ll work with more leaders and more stakeholders than what’s expected at the team level.
Examples of scope for a team level Product Manager vs. a Product Leader:
Look at what other product leaders are responsible for compared to team level PMs at your company. Within Autodesk Construction Solutions (ACS), PMs are responsible for their individual product areas. There’s still a lot of cross-organizational collaboration, but they tend to stay relatively focused. Group PMs or Directors will lead initiatives that need delivery from many teams or even the entire organization.
Big scary initiatives and the fear of failure
I took on the responsibility to define a strategy for an initiative with complex technical tradeoffs and without clarity on the exact customer needs. I’m going to be a bit vague, so I apologize if this isn’t perfectly clear. But essentially, we realized that within next couple planning cycles, we were going to face serious sales and development challenges if we didn’t come up with a compelling story and proper solution.
A fully built solution would require months of development effort from almost every team in our organization. No one else wanted to even look at this; we were all still busy just grinding away at our immediate goals. But we needed a plan.
I hesitated to take this on. This initiative had the potential to get very complicated, very quickly. There was little data available, and no good way to talk to customers about it at the time. Getting involved could mean staying involved for a long time. And at any step in this process, I’d run a risk of failure or embarrassment.
But it needed to be done, and it was exactly the kind of complex, ambiguous problems that other Product Leaders in my organization were facing. And it was a really interesting problem to solve. So I decided to take on the responsibility.
In leading this initiative, I was able to collaborate with leaders across R&D and GTM teams that I would never have otherwise worked with. I learned a lot about our products and the customer and business needs driving this initiative. And I continuously presented our evolving approach and our plans to the leadership team, eventually getting buy in on a strategy.
Together, we were able to formulate a phased approach that allowed us to build incrementally towards a full solution, while having time to evaluate and make changes to the plan as we progressed. This plan is actually still evolving and ongoing, and code is starting to be shipped.
One of the key things I learned from this experience was that with big, scary, complicated initiatives, people appreciate someone stepping up to try and make sense of things. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have the best experience or that I was learning as I went.
Another takeaway was that with large enough initiatives, even just creating alignment on a plan is a major outcome. Shipping code and impacting customers is still the goal, but the challenge to get so many folks pointed in the same direction is significant, and other leaders recognize it.
Ideas into action
As an individual Product Manager, look for opportunities to tackle complex initiatives outside of your immediate team level responsibilities.
If you’re working on an existing product that’s stable, are there big new market opportunities that you could extend towards? Building a strong business case is a great project. You collaborate with other product managers, marketing, sales, and research and data. Best case scenario, you get approval, build it, and drive a huge win for the business. Worst case, you learn a lot, build relationships, and demonstrate bigger picture thinking and impact.
Or is there a big gap between product visions that needs a coherent narrative? You can help create a powerful story that unites the organization and builds excitement with leadership and stakeholders. And in driving that alignment, you can create better business outcomes.
Look for opportunities to step outside of your individual team and work. Talk to your manager, the leadership team, and even senior stakeholders to learn about what kinds of problems are looming and need a leader to champion. Yes, it’s more work, and no it’s not required. It may not go anywhere outside of a document or presentation. But that’s the work of a Product Leader — lots of exploration, alignment, and bets that sometimes pay off and often don’t.
Organization-Wide Strategy
Product strategy drives business outcomes. As a Product Leader, you will be expected to define, align, and drive strategy across an organization. Product Managers are often thinking about strategy and prioritization for their team’s backlog. Whether in planning cycles or in grooming the backlog, they should always be able to explain why the team is doing what they’re doing. Yet PMs often don’t take the time to articulate a clear strategy when making their plans.
So, two questions to discuss: “how does one define product strategy?” and “how does one lead strategy across an organization?”
Defining Product Strategy
Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann in Cracking the PM Career did a fantastic job defining strategy. To briefly summarize their thinking, product strategy has three components:
- Product vision
- Strategic framework
- Roadmap
Most Product Managers are familiar with selling a vision and creating a roadmap. A lot of PMs skip the strategic framework.
The product vision is the high level, inspiring description for where the product can go. It’s often aspirational and excites folks with what the future holds. PMs don’t always spend a lot of time building a grand vision, but they can usually explain where the product is going over the next 2–3 years.
The roadmap is just a list of things you say you’ll be working on. Whether a high level backlog, or a rough timeline of initiatives. It’s what most stakeholders are asking for. When are we going to satisfy this customer request? What’s going in our big quarterly marketing push? But a roadmap by itself doesn’t say anything much about meaningful goals and outcomes.
The strategic framework is the missing piece in most PM’s plans. It answers the questions of “why this list of initiatives,” and “how are we going to achieve our vision?”
Key considerations for your strategic framework:
- What are the major goals you are trying to achieve?
- What customers are you targeting with your goals?
- What business impact do you believe these goals will have?
- How do the goals align with the broader organizational strategy?
- How do the goals tie into your broader vision?
The goals should explain the building blocks that form the vision, as well as the business outcomes that justify the investment over time.
However you create the framework, the key is that the strategic framework answers questions on why work is worth doing.
I have a simple template that I’ve shared with the PMs in my group. It’s designed to drive alignment with other teams, and explain the prioritization of our roadmap. This is helpful, as we have a lot of dependencies with other teams, and work often gets delayed. When push comes to shove, our framework makes it clear what work can or can’t get cut.
- Goals: What do we plan to accomplish this half? How will things be different for our customers or our organization as a result of what we do this half? How are we aligning with or supporting broader organization wide goals and direction?
- Strategy: How will we do the above? Who are we focusing on? What are we prioritizing as a must have, a nice to have, a won’t do?
- Milestones: Are there incremental wins we can deliver along the way? What types of initiatives and timeline would enable these incremental goals?
Each initiative in our roadmap can be tied to a specific goals, milestone, and strategic priority.
I’ve found this framework to be very helpful when presenting to our leadership team and to stakeholders. A vision by itself is an empty promise. A list of initiatives by itself explains nothing. The framework provides a meaningful plan and creates context for what we’re building. It sells the why, the story behind what we plan to build and where we’re going.
Driving Strategy Across an Organization
Product leadership in strategy is about defining, aligning, and selling a broader strategy across an organization. An organization wide strategy should instill confidence that everyone is working together towards bigger outcomes. It should empower teams to define their own strategies, aligning with organization-wide outcomes.
Two major considerations:
- Driving alignment with other leaders and stakeholders
- Providing the right level of guidance to teams
Aligning with other leaders and stakeholders
This is a common thread with any kind of Product Leadership activity. You’re impacting a broader scope, and more people and teams are impacted and have opinions. Likewise, you’re interacting with and dependent on more outside teams. Driving this alignment needs to happen constantly, not just during planning cycles.
Building alignment and excitement early on increases the likelihood that your plan will be supported and resourced and your vision realized.
I was leading a team to discover a new product opportunity. We wanted to start small — focus on a single step in a larger workflow, and build a case to expand. But it was clear that customers were going to want more connections with other products in ACS. My initial instinct was to hand-wave the longer term opportunity so I could focus on the hard work of validating the immediate MVP. But I realized — with advice from others — that this was an opportunity. I could build more excitement for the opportunity and demonstrate leadership across a broad product area.
Over several months I collaborated with many other team leads to build a shared understanding of our products and visions. We brainstormed long term opportunities to create more powerful workflows for customers. This culminated in stories we could tell in product specs and presentation. Driving and engaging in these conversations built a lot of excitement. Leadership and our sales and marketing partners saw the opportunity, and our MVP proposal was green-lit. And I learned a lot about collaborating on a broader vision with other leaders.
Providing guidance to teams
Good strategic guidance aligns teams toward shared goals. By aligning teams towards specific goals and outcomes, you can drive greater business impact. Crushing three goals will have a lot more impact than barely touching ten goals. Effective guidance clarifies priorities. It answers questions for an organization that teams can’t easily answer for themselves. But it leaves space for teams to define their own problems and solutions.
In a recent planning process, I worked with several other leads to form a coherent strategy for our part of the business unit. We discussed what made our product area unique and what we saw as long term opportunities for our products, within the broader context of the Autodesk Construction Cloud. With this, we were able to agree on a high level vision for our product area.
We defined strategic pillars that supported our vision, aligning directly to each of the organizational goals set by our leadership team. Each of these pillars was a long term opportunity of investment, with increasing maturity levels. We defined maturity levels on an axis of manual effort to automation and insights. Essentially, does this work flow exist, how easy is it to complete this workflow, can steps in this workflow happen automatically, and can we predict steps or provide insights for this workflow?
A key insight was realizing that over-investment in one pillar’s maturity at the expense of another could create an unbalanced experience that didn’t satisfy a significant portion of customers. Every pillar mattered, and we wanted to make continuous, meaningful progress along the maturity axis for each pillar.
Each team in our broader group is responsible for specific features and pieces of each workflow that we own holistically. By creating this framework, we were able to provide more transparency across the group as to how far along each team was for each pillar.
This made it easier to identify strengths and gaps to be closed, in order to create a more consistent approach across our portfolio of products.
With this high level framework, we left a lot of room for teams to define how they’d achieve these goals. But they also had clarity on how to define team level strategies that would align across our group and with the broader organizational goals.
Ideas into Actions
If you haven’t yet, define a clear product strategy for your team. You should be able to articulate how each initiative ties to your product goals. Each product goal should serve a higher level organizational or business goal. You should be clear on who you’re building for, and why you’re prioritizing them over other customers or users. You should be able to quickly determine what work must get completed this half and what can be pushed out. Answer the questions listed above, and answer any questions that your team and stakeholders ask.
Once you’ve defined a compelling strategy for your team, start looking outward. Look for broader strategic narratives that you can create with other teams. Help your product leaders craft the broader strategies by coming with data or research insights. Go and talk to other teams about what they’re building towards, and raise awareness of misalignments or opportunities.
Summary
Being a product leader requires driving bigger product and business outcomes. Individual team level focus isn’t enough. Find opportunities to take on initiatives that impact multiple teams. Collaborate with others on strategy and vision beyond your own product area. Find ways to prove that you can work with others to move the business.
Remember that the goal isn’t do everything or to do it all perfectly. It’s about learning how to increase the scope and impact of your actions. Working across a broader section of your organization and with more leaders will provide you with new challenges and problems to overcome. Maintaining a good attitude and focusing on learning will carry you a long way.
Next in the series — Part 3: Establishing Excellence in Product Management.
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