Top 9 differences between Terrific Companies & Terrible Companies

Sometimes the difference between success and failure is the result of how some companies approach their business and the values they stick to.

Here’s a list of differences between Terrific Companies & Terrible Companies, at least how I perceive them. Whilst the list could be long, I’ve trimmed it to the important ones.

This is a topic that is close to my heart, and has been sitting in the drafts for a while.

Hope you enjoy the list.

Please do share your thoughts!

Strategic Planning

When you realize your current business is not growing or is declining fast, the best thing to do, after a sincere prayer to the Almighty God, is Strategic Planning.

In simple words, Strategic Planning is the process of retreating to the drawing board, understanding your mission & vision, assessing the current business situation, and aligning on strategic & tactical course corrections to realize your vision.

Let’s take a deeper look…

Typically, the participants in the process include:

• Leadership team – CEO, Business Unit Heads, Heads of Product, Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Support, and Operations
• External consultants – to ensure there is a third eye

The participants are required to do some assessment of various aspects of the current business situation.

Inputs to the Strategic Planning process/discussions

• Vision/Mission
  • A mission statement clarifies the purpose of why you are doing the business
  • A vision statement is the end goal of where you want to get to, what you want to achieve
• Current situation
  • Business
  • Operating environment
  • Organizational challenges
  • Challenges & obstacles
• SWOT Analysis
• PEST Analysis

During the process/discussions

• You refresh and re-understand your mission and vision
• You come up with ideas for course corrections on the way forward, both strategic and tactical moves
• Align on the way forward to achieve your vision, with sub-goals & milestones in the form of roadmap(s)

Outputs from the Strategic Planning process

• Clarity (vision/mission)
• Improved Strategy
• Revised Roadmap (goals/timelines)
• Alternate Tactics
• Stakeholder & org alignment

It’s essential to communicate the outcome with your organizations so they are aligned on the new direction with renewed energy and focus.

Frequency

• The frequency at which a strategy planning is required is whenever there is a need to refresh the basics and the business direction and/or every 6/12/18 months as deemed appropriate for the company.

Would love your feedback on this short and simple article!

 

 

Management-by-OKRs (MOKRs)

A lot has been said and written about the roles & responsibilities of product managers but not much is discussed about the role of leading a team of product management professionals.

In this article I’d like to share some thoughts around the key responsibilities of a product management leadership role — it could be a Head, Director, or VP depending on the size and structure of your company.

In addition to the usual suspects such as product vision & strategy, I feel a product leader’s key responsibility is to build product managers. Building a great product management team requires best-in-class processes for setting goals and achieving them.

Most of us would have come across Management By Objectives (MBOs), invented by Peter Drucker in the 1950’s.

Some of us (read millennial) will be familiar with the concept of Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), a popular goal setting mechanism used by Google.

OKRs stand for Objectives & Key Results — a lot of information is available on the Internet, but some of its fundamentals are the following:

• OKRs is a business success enablement tool and helps align individual efforts with company vision, business direction, and product priorities.
• OKRs are individual goals to move the business forward.
• OKRs are dated and scoped to a specific time period, usually quarterly.
• Objectives are bold and ambitious goals that contribute to business & product success and push you to rethink the way you need to work at peak performance. Ambitiousness of the goals should take you out of our comfort zone.
• Key Results are well defined concrete deliverables with objectively measurable metrics to gauge achievement of the goal.
• OKRs is not a laundry list of everything you do, it’s a representation of your top priorities.
• The motivators that started projects in the first place have to be achieved. Instead of tracking delivery of projects and tasks, you should measure the indicators that motivated them in the first place.

Now on to Management by OKRs (MOKRs) — after much thought, I have realized that OKRs is a powerful tool for leading a team of product professionals, hence the term Management-by-OKRs.

Product leaders could use OKRs as the key mechanism to drive their product and project teams to greatness.

And this simplifies the core responsibilities of a product leadership professional into three levels:

1. Primary focus will be on the vision, strategy, and company level OKRs
2. Then, focus on the product team’s OKRs. Lead team in setting OKRs and achieving success in them.
3. After that, think about chores (routine and mundane tasks)

This way almost everyone is focused on things that matter the most to the company and product success.

Would love your thoughts on MOKRs!

Following your competitors is not smart. Here’s why!

It’s very common for companies to build stuff their competitors already have and the only reason they have is that their competitors offer it.

Building stuff that your competitors have is a blind approach.

Your competitors might have a bunch of features that you don’t have — while they may have a roadmap of how they want to get rid of some of them, you might have a roadmap to build them! Sounds crazy, and such things do happen.

So, following your competitors blindly is not smart at all — instead you should be assessing your competitors’ offerings and gauge what you need to do to move ahead of the competition without losing sight of your vision. This way you’d position yourself in a leader’s spot and that’ll take you closer to your vision faster.

And as someone said it: ‘Don’t copy competitors to the point of losing your own identity as a brand.‘

Steps to approach competitive lead position without copying them

1. Identify who your direct competitors are
2. Look into what they have
3. Assess how best their offerings/features fit your vision and strategy
4. Identify what are some of the leading alternatives
5. Consider building a feature only if it absolutely takes you at least one step closer to your cohesive larger vision
6. Plan execution with a strategic differentiation mindset around why your solution should be 10x better than the leading competitors’ and other alternatives
7. Execute with superior design and attention to detail

As Simon Sinek correctly put it, ‘The goal is not to “beat” our competition but rather to improve ourselves.‘

To summarize, the point I’d like us to recognize is that you shouldn’t worry about the competition more than losing sight of how your product can lead the market.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Synopsis: The Art of Product Management

I was fortunate enough to bump into a presentation from Sachin Rekhi (@sachinrekhi) called The Art of Product Management.

It was an excellent read. Here’s a synopsis from it, for my product management friends.

Product managers drive the Vision, Strategy, Design, and Execution of their product.

Vision – articulates how the world will be a better place when you succeed

• A compelling vision articulates how the world will be a better place when you succeed
• Get excited about being at least one step forward, one step closer to it
• Best format: write a customer oriented vision narrative. Jeff Bezos expects a 6-page narrative!!
• A vision is valuable only if it inspires the entire team
• Communicate the vision — the power of repetition — just as it takes 7 impressions to garner a response to a marketing message, you need to constantly repeat your vision. Ask your team about what they’re doing and gauge if they are communicating along the lines of the vision, using words & phrases from the vision.

Strategy – iterate & refine until you find product-market fit and you are dominant in your market

• It’s about how are you going to win
• A vision should be stable, but your strategy needs to be iterated on and refined until you find product-market fit and until you are dominant in your target markets. Again refine to expand to new markets and find product-market fit there.
• A better fit leads to a more appealing product for the target market
• A faster fit means the product will enjoy maximum differentiation for a longer period of time
• Best format: Product-Market Fit Hypotheses
  1. Target Audience — bulls eye of your very best potential customers
  2. Problem You’re Solving — it’s important to articulate the problem independent of the solution, get to the root of the problem than scratching the symptoms, fall in love with the problem you’re solving for your customers and not with the solution
  3. Value Propositions — not the feature list, but the promise to your customers on the value you will deliver for them
  4. Strategic Differentiation — why is your solution 10x better than the leading alternatives
  5. Competition — how will your solution win against direct competitors and indirect alternatives
  6. Acquisition Strategy — how will you find & attract your potential customers in a cost-effective way
  7. Monetization Strategy — what are your primary and secondary ways to make money, is there strong willingness to pay
  8. KPIs — what are the right metrics for you to know if you are headed in the right direction. Spend time frequently (almost everyday) reviewing critical metrics & dashboards.
• Minimize your dimensions of innovation. Don’t innovate on all aforementioned dimensions, instead innovate on few and use best practices for the rest.

Design – keep it simple and bring emotional intelligence

• Work hard and iterate to keep it simple
• A compelling design delivers a useful, usable, and delightful experience to your customers, by bringing emotional intelligence to your design
• Develop personas – a persona typically describes the goals, pain points, behaviors, and psychology associated with members of a particular segment. Give them a name, a profile image, and sometimes associate a background history with them. A team usually develops one or more personas to represent the core audience of users they are optimizing their product/experience.
• Increase Exposure Hours — it is the amount of time your team spends with observing customers
• Delight through attention to detail and by making people feel accomplished
• Measure delight through NPS

Execution – it’s not about project management it’s doing whatever it takes to win

• Be relentless, it determines whether you’ll make your vision a reality
• You must spend about 60% of your time in execution, else it will go wrong
• Execution is not about project management, but doing whatever it takes to win
• Ensure you’re pointing the team in the right direction. Reward engineering velocity.
• Execution Loop: Define >> Validate >> Iterate
• #1 Goal: Increase execution loop velocity
• Establish yourself as the curator, not the creator of great ideas. Everyone contributes great ideas.
• First nail it, then scale it — first build software quickly (no elegance required in architecture, etc.), validate it, and then scale it with elegant architecture.
• Invest in retrospectives

Hope you found this blog post useful. Thanks to Sachin Rekhi @sachinrekhi. Cheers!