Orient Yourself to Deliver a Product Strategy That Works
How orienting your thinking around your concept, capability, culture, and context can support great product strategy
There are lots of different approaches to defining your product strategy, the best all start from an understanding of your organization, your product, and your context.
Many startups have a single product, and the business and product strategies are one and the same thing. Often as disrupters, they know more about what they are not doing than what they are. This can make product strategy something obvious and something you look to the founders to provide.
In larger companies, there can be many products and product strategy is informed as much about what has already been achieved as what is still to come. As a new Product Director for the ECM product at TechnologyOne, this is where I found myself, and I needed to orient quickly to understand where we already were as a product strategy update was overdue.
Satya Nadella’s Three C’S
Fortunately, I had recently come across Satya Nadella describing how successful companies evolve in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly, where he looked back at how Microsoft started.
One of the things that I’ve come to realize is that in companies that have been successful, one of the things that happens is the original idea or the concept that became a hit, the capability you built around it, and the culture that implicitly grew as you were growing the business all get into this beautiful, virtuous cycle.
Satya Nadella
“Microsoft’s next act”, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2018
Nadella links success to having a core concept that encourages the growth of a particular capability and culture. These are the “three C’s”. He goes on to say how important he feels having the right culture is to continuing success.
But there’s no such thing as a perpetual-motion machine. At some point, the concept or the idea that made you successful is going to run out of gas. So, you need new capability to go after new concepts. The only thing that’s going to enable you to keep building new capabilities and trying out new concepts long before they are conventional wisdom is culture.
Satya Nadella
“Microsoft’s next act”, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2018
In another interview with Avanade Insights, Nadella talked about how he uses the “three C’s” of concept, capabilities, and culture to identify new opportunities.
He’s very open on missed opportunities and the challenges of pursuing multiple trends simultaneously. As CEO, he says he will continue to invest in new technologies and new markets, but only if they meet “our three C’s — do we have an exciting concept, do we have the capabilities necessary to succeed, and a culture that welcomes these new ideas and approaches.
Satya Nadella
Avanade Insights, November 24, 2017
Nadella has been lauded for the massive culture change he started at Microsoft, and he has written about how important he feels culture is to the job of CEO. However, he also was key in reimagining the company’s core concept to be more than just putting Windows on every device possible.
Put It Into Context
I was inspired by his words and example when looking at updating the ECM product strategy at TechnologyOne. However, I thought that one of the missing components was the effect of external factors on your strategy, the business and industry context you operate in.
I put my take on the four C’s into a simple Venn diagram, that I could use to communicate with my new team in order to help me quickly tease out what we already had, and learn what we could rely on.
Before I sat with the team I thought about my own take on each of these areas. Because we operated in a similar industry to where I had come from, I was able to identify important elements of context for myself. Likewise, the culture of the company, and our product team, in particular, was something I’d picked up on.
However, I wasn’t sure about our core concept, even though it was still “ECM”, it was subtly different from my previous products’ concepts and I had no idea about capability — having never seen the development team in action, and with very little practical exposure to the product’s extensive existing features.
I facilitated a workshop with the key team members to identify the top three elements in each of these areas. Below is the result, with some minor tweaks to make it less specific to our product and company.
To be honest, the results weren’t breathtaking, nor particularly different from my own starting opinions. They were important because they a) involved the entire team, and b) they were, as modest as they were, true to our actual position.
“Actual position” is a really important point. Like sailors in the open ocean, we needed to find landmarks that could help us know where we were, and how to get safely to our destination. We needed ones that weren’t subjective, and ones we could all agree were important, that we could use to navigate by.
These landmarks oriented us to our actual position — e.g. we have a small R&D team but a historically strong product — and identifying our actual position informed our subsequent product strategy choices.
Since that time the product team has continued to focus on what is true for us now, and what that means for our product strategy moving forward. It doesn’t stop us dreaming big, or being bold in our choices — but it does mean that we do that with a clear idea of what we have, and what we might need to change.
Changing what is already true in the four C’s is hard.
Your capability won’t magically increase because you’d like it to. Having a different concept might be easy to imagine, but in a multi-product ERP, like the one TechnologyOne has, changing your core concept might well mean stepping on some other product’s core concept and unintended consequences abounding. Culture can be changed, but in our case, it really doesn’t need to, and context is not something you can change without costly choices about changing industry or markets.
Building a product strategy with an understanding of the four C’s is easy.
The team has a shared understanding of the reality of their situation, and an appreciation of our key strengths and weaknesses. New features that play well to those and that can have a big impact are then easy to get agreement on. Being aligned means fewer surprises; from customers, from executive meetings, and from technical debt.
We don’t have the four C’s diagram on a whiteboard or refer to it much in meetings. With no personnel changes and a market that is fairly slow-moving, there isn’t a need to update too often.
What we have found is confidence in our product strategy. We all know it makes sense, we are all aligned as to why we chose it and what alternatives existed. As a product team, and as a business, we are confident that we’ve got great product-market fit and that our strategy will deliver better results for our customers and our business going forward.
Try using this model yourself. Use it to assess your current actual position. Any surprises? Any opportunities you weren’t aware of?
Socialize it, use it to build shared understanding with your product team, or stakeholders. Orient your thinking around your actual position and see if it brings clarity to your product strategy.
