Michael Porter, the famed Harvard professor who is considered the godfather of the modern strategy field, declared “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” So true.
Have you ever worked for a leader or organization where great ideas are in abundance? Perhaps your CEO or Sales Leader is frequently exposed to new opportunities from big, important customers. Maybe you’re at a new company and your stakeholders have strong, yet very different opinions about the direction of the product. Or perhaps growth has slowed and there are many theories but no clear path.
These are common situations that we experience as product leaders, and if left unaddressed, the surplus of ideas and theories can make decision-making difficult and cause havoc for your product development team. As product management leaders, our job is to partner effectively with our stakeholders, help our organization prioritize effectively, and make good product decisions. We are responsible for ensuring that all stakeholders share a common product vision and stay aligned on strategic product goals. When in alignment, we are able to test new ideas against that strategy and protect our teams from endless changes that lead to poor execution.
In this article, we will explore the concept of “go early and often” as a guiding principle to engage leaders and stakeholders and provide practical tips to help you stay aligned with your stakeholders on strategy.
Embrace the “Go Early and Often” Principle:
We borrowed “Go early and often” from surfing. One of our Product Rebels podcast guests, Rachel Neasham, shared a story of growing up surfing with her dad. He often repeated this saying, and she applied it to a lesson she learned about aligning on strategy within a new role. It completely resonated with us and reflected our own lessons in a pithy way.
The “go early and often” principle emphasizes the importance of engaging stakeholders from the initial stages of your product role and maintaining that dialogue throughout your tenure. (And if you’re not new to your role, that’s okay….No time like the present to get started. This applies regardless of your tenure.)
By involving stakeholders early on, we can gather valuable insights, gain buy-in, and avoid misalignment down the road. More importantly for execution, we can vet and decide on new ideas quickly and protect our teams from the churn that comes from constant change.
Here are some pro tips in the context of going early and often that work well to “pulse check” your strategy and stay aligned with your leadership team.
1) Map out Your Stakeholders
A stakeholder map is a design-thinking technique that enables us to identify the core folks we need to collaborate with on a specific project or effort. It helps us understand their level of influence and interest in the project, and ensures that we’ve considered the right stakeholders. This exercise is critical too as we build out our product strategy. We need to know who to engage with the most.
When building the list of stakeholders, it’s important to make sure that we’ve covered the right functions and titles so that we don’t miss someone important. For example, legal and regulatory functions may not be functions that come to mind immediately, but could be critically important in informing and evolving our strategy. Also, are there external stakeholders
you need to include? Partners, vendors, key customers, etc.
Prioritize stakeholders to determine when and how much to engage with them. Consider their influence and mindsets, when prioritizing. It’s a good idea to run the list by a colleague as they may help us identify stakeholders we’ve missed or have different perspectives on in terms of who has the most influence. If you haven’t built a stakeholder map before, the “map” part is where we lay out stakeholders on a matrix or a bullseye chart. It provides us with a helpful visualization when determining who we need to spend time with “early and often.”
2) Always Lead with Your Strategy
Reinforcing strategy may sound like “motherhood and apple pie,” so let’s examine what is a very tactical but highly effective way to keep stakeholders aligned. Simply put, always start meetings with a 1-page view of your strategy, including key priorities. If sharing a presentation, put it as the first page in the deck. If working off of an agenda, include it as boilerplate content at the top. This serves as a gentle reminder to the participants that you’ve all made decisions about the product direction, and anything discussed should be in the context of that agreed upon direction.
Does this mean all meetings? Any meeting where we plan to make product decisions or act on our strategy is appropriate. Staff meetings, executive meetings, planning meetings, customer learning reviews are all great opportunities for reinforcement. It can be especially helpful in one-on-ones with executives or key stakeholders you’ve identified through your stakeholder map. For example, as a product leader reporting to the CEO, it’s helpful to include it as a reminder to what your team is currently focused on. If a new opportunity comes up, you can align on where it fits (or not) within the strategy and priorities. It’s also a good approach when meeting with our sales leaders as they are constantly exposed to new opportunities and ideas and need this context for effective tradeoffs.
3) Conduct Regular Learning Reviews
A learning review is an operating mechanism to summarize and share customer learning over a given period of time. We are accumulating new insights all the time from various listening posts. Some, such as survey results, may be already shared as KPIs that get circulated. But often it’s the customer visits, phone calls, usability sessions and other qualitative interactions that yield the deepest and most important insights. This learning review shouldn’t be a brain dump, rather a structured presentation of themes, trends, surprises, or new data points that are most pertinent to your current strategy and priorities.
For example, you may want to schedule this in advance of regular planning operating mechanisms. This serves as a forcing function to make sure you are keeping your stakeholders apprised of what you are learning but also leading to alignment around any changes you need to make in strategy and coming product plans.
4) Reframe Ideas into the Strategic Context
We frequently hear stories from product leaders who are overwhelmed with new ideas from stakeholders. We certainly don’t want to staunch the flow of ideas, but we do need to manage them in order to stay strategically aligned. One of the best ways that to do this is to frame new ideas as hypotheses that need to be tested. A conversation with your CEO telling you about an idea she wants to pursue can go a little something like this:
“That’s a cool idea… So the problem we are solving with this idea is XYZ? Can we test this hypotheses before trading anything off to make sure the impact of solving this problem is bigger than other priorities we are working on?” This brings the conversation up to a strategic level vs. arguing the merits of a feature or technology.
This takes some practice and requires a mindset of viewing ideas as customer problems to be solved (and hypotheses) first, then testing to prove or disprove whether they fit into the strategy or not. BTW testing could be as simple as talking to 5 prospects or customers to better understand the problem and the relative impact solving that problem has on the strategy and outcomes.
The goal is to capture these hypotheses on an ongoing list and prioritize them based on strategic importance and level of risk they create or eliminate. Keeping your stakeholders informed in terms of the prioritization of those hypotheses but also where you are in testing them will help you maintain alignment on the current strategy but also when that strategy may change as a result of your testing.
We’ve found this approach useful on multiple levels: yes, it’s great for teams to focus more on problems to be solved and iterating through product questions, but it’s also helpful to gain alignment on larger hypotheses that impact the product strategy, such as those questioning the business model or the direction of the market.
Change is Inevitable
No strategy is impervious to outside factors, new information or new influences that require making adjustments to your strategic direction. In dynamic environments where companies are undergoing fierce competition or regulatory pressure, or trying to launch a new business, strategies may need to evolve. That being said, we will also be faced with doing things outside of the strategy from time to time. Our job is to help the leadership team understand the implications of changes to the strategy (including what needs to be dropped to make it happen) so the company goes into each decision/change with their eyes wide open.
Chances are, if we’re “going early and often” to align with our stakeholders, these changes will not create chaos; rather we’ll be able to pivot quickly and smoothly because we are so tightly bound. And that can be a competitive advantage.
By embracing the “go early and often” principle, we can enhance collaboration, build trust, and maintain alignment with our stakeholders. It takes effort, focused communication and the ability to adapt, but results can be extremely rewarding.
Author: Steve Cook Last updated: 7/5/2023