How to Shine as a Product Leader during Annual Planning

As product people, we love to build great things that delight our customers. Wouldn't it be great if that was our only responsibility? An important part of a product leader's role is annual planning; establishing a great vision and strategy for the coming year. I know it can be one of the most annoying, time-consuming, and painful parts of the duties but it is also a very important, high-stakes part. Why?

A compelling product vision and strategy are what differentiates good product leaders from great ones. Becky Flint writes “A strategic plan requires big picture mission and vision, data, team input, and creative solutions. This is why strategic planning typically involves almost half of the company, from execs to directors, managers, and teams.” “To avoid chaos,” she continues, “a common solution we see companies apply is to remove teams from the process. This can simplify the planning, however, it often results in out-of-touch plans that lack creativity and are harder to execute.” She offers a four step process for the process of creating a strong annual plan in her blog How to Lead Strategic Annual Planning to Achieve More With Less.

A compelling product vision and strategy are what differentiates good product leaders from great ones. Strategic planning typically involves almost half of the company, from execs to directors, managers, and teams. As Becky Flint, CEO of DragonBoat, notes in How to Lead Strategic Annual Planning to Achieve More With Less it’s important to involve individuals where they can have the highest impact. When the process is done right, it builds confidence with the board, other execs, your product teams, and frankly the entire company by providing direction and alignment. 

Need some tips and tricks to do this successfully? I’ve got you covered! 

Keep reading for what I believe are the important steps to craft an inspiring strategy and how to evangelize it throughout your company.

Where to start Data or Vision?

Well, the answer depends on where you are as an organization with establishing a growth strategy and tracking metrics around it. If you don’t have robust data, start small; if you do, be intentional and focused on which metrics you choose to inform your strategic decisions. Either way, you need a strong sense of where you want to go before you dive deep into data about where you are now. A strong combination of both will lead to understanding your options for achieving your goals.

 This seems to be the right time to remind everyone that a vision is 3-5 years out and that there are three levels of vision related to the product. Each of them has different core metrics to monitor which inform annual planning.

1. Company Vision is measured by your North Star metric as well as ARR, NRR, EBITA, and overall NPS. Reviewing how the company performed last year against those will help set new goals for getting closer to the vision in the coming year.

2. Product Portfolio Vision is created by considering your annual product portfolio goals. How did the product portfolio perform last year? LTV, CAC and Churn could be good starting points to assess performance. 

3. Individual Product Vision helps with focus. By narrowing  in on the individual products that can help increase adoption, engagement, or NPS for example, and based on how the individual product performed last year.

I’ll assume you have a strong company vision and North Star metric (if you don’t read this and listen to this) When you are ready to set your Product Portfolio vision... Start here:

Steps to creating your vision:

1. Clarify and get alignment on how the product portfolio vision should help drive the company vision. 

2. Create a product portfolio vision in collaboration with the CRO, CMO, and CSO with associated North Star.

3. Select the biggest problems standing in your way of achieving your vision which you can potentially improve in the upcoming year.

Read Steps to Setting a Vision for more tips and concrete examples to guide you in this process. 

Steps to Understanding your Current State with Data:

1. Define the key metrics which will surface strengths and opportunities for improvement.

2. If you’re focused on revenue it should be new business ARR, net retention revenue, close rate, and time to recognize revenue

3. If churn and retention are the focus, be sure to deep dive into how product engagement metrics are associated with customer satisfaction and churn. 

4. Segment all data based on geography, customer groups, tenure of the customer, size of the customer, and anything else which is crucial to the way your company thinks about grouping its users.

5. Leverage the data to identify the biggest opportunities to include in your overall portfolio and individual product strategies.

Read Defining your Current State for more tips and concrete examples of evaluating the current state.

Steps to Choose a Strategy:

1. Review the 16 Strategies for Growth to ensure you explore all options.

2. Establish a scoring and voting protocol to evaluate the different options available.

3. Prioritization-Area of Focus: Work with leaders in your organization for alignment around the top priority problems including what not to focus on. 

4. Choose which strategy is aligned with your vision, goals, and current state.

Read for more tips and concrete examples of Generating Ideas and selecting an Overall Strategy.

Steps to Deploy/Evangelize Your Strategy:

1. Establish themes related to the set vision, goals, and focus areas for this year and share them with the individual product teams. You may be using OKRs for this, but product key results are often delayed.

2. Allow the product managers to create more precise goals for their teams and to generate outcome and feature-driven roadmaps for their products for the upcoming year.

3. Consolidate the most strategic items into a portfolio-level roadmap for the exec team and internal stakeholders. Share it with smaller groups so that you can iterate based on feedback and get buy-in before sharing widely with the board and customers. (This is important!)

4. Evangelize the established goals and themes throughout the company and make sure to communicate this will continue to be revisited throughout the year as progress is made.

Read more about Outcome and Feature Driven Roadmaps as well as How to Broadcast Them. 

What's Next???

Now that you’ve established and promoted your annual plan based on the set vision and current state, it’s up to you as a Product Leader to empower the product team to reach the goals you’ve set. Ensure that they have enough time to invest in customer discovery, building prototypes for testing, and solution validation and that they are involving the whole balanced team in these activities. 

Remember, annual planning is a snapshot in time…then the real work of execution starts! During the coming year, it is your responsibility as a Product Leader to push the product managers to always be working on the most valuable items and to help them navigate when plans need to shift based on market changes or new information. Good luck and stay tuned for more helpful tips on how to do that.

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.

5 Steps to Interview and Hire a Great Product Manager

As a Product Leader, a big part of your job will be building your team. Sometimes it's because the company is growing and other times the trigger is someone leaving. Either way, it's an opportunity to find a great Product Manager who will add value to your organization.

If you're looking to hire a product manager, it's important to know what to look for in order to find the best fit for your team. In this post, we'll outline five steps that will help you interview a product manager and assess whether they are the right fit for your company. Keep in mind that the best product managers are not only great with strategy and planning, but also excel at execution, so be sure to ask questions that will help you gauge these skills as well. Thanks for reading!

1) Know your goals: Define what kind of Product Manager you are looking for such as their level of experience, their knowledge of the space, their technical skills, their growth experience, their management skills, etc. and establish a scorecard to assess each candidate in a standardized fashion. Iterate on it over time as you see which qualities you might have been over indexing for or others you forgot to highlight.

2) Ensure the right people are involved: Product Managers will interface and collaborate with engineering, design, marketing, support, sales, legal and other teams. Round out the interview loop with representatives from key stakeholder groups who you will want buy-in from. This will allow you to have different perspectives on the candidates, generate goodwill internally, and set the PM up for success. Have the outline of the interview stages available to provide to the candidate if they want to know what the next steps are.

3) Divide and conquer: Don't make the candidate answer the same question over and over again, it makes your team look unprofessional and undesirable. Inform each interviewer of the part of the ideal profile you want them to evaluate and share some sample questions with them for assisting in screening. A full set of questions around skills and experience is available here, but please adjust them to your company. Try and encourage people to start questions with "Tell me about a time when..." AND "What would you do if..." to encourage open ended responses and allow for people without the perfect experience but the right mindset to explain what they would do in similar scenarios. Also, add some fun questions in like "Teach me something" or "What blog/podcast really caught your attention recently?" to let them show their personality too.

4) Provide an IN PERSON Case Study: There has been a movement towards case studies over the past few years, and it's great to see someone in action, but steer clear of a few things. First, DON'T use your own company as an example; it's unfair to ask for free consulting. Second, DO have it be a LIVE experience, so you see how the person works and aren't allowing them to have unlimited time and resources to get the project done. What you're looking for here is the PM's ability to problem solve, realized when assumptions are being made, and collaboratively ask questions to get to the best answers. Provide a board enough case study but one that can be solved in an hour or so. This will be a big time commitment, so it should be reserved for top candidates.

5) Know perfection doesn't exist: It's great to have goals for what the ideal candidate should have, but nearly all of the time you'll have to compromise on some of your "requirements". Treat it like a product and figure out which qualifications you listed are actually "Nice to Haves" and prioritize accordingly. Remember that if someone already has everything you need they'll probably get bored pretty quickly because there isn't much for them to learn and then it'll be back to recruiting time for you. It's better to hire someone who is hungry for knowledge and growth than someone complacent.

Hiring a product manager role can be daunting, but if you go in prepared with solid goals and the right strategy, you'll set yourself up for success. Remember to set your interview goals, ensure the interview panel is composed of people who will inform your decision, be selective of who will ask different questions, provide an IN PERSON case study so they can demonstrate their skills, and don't strive for perfection because it doesn't exist.

You've got this! Now I want to hear from you. What are some of your favorite interview questions?

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.

Turn Your Video OFF

Last week while taking part in the CPO Series for Dragonboat I was asked about the nature of the more hybrid workplace and what product leaders should do. One of the suggestions I provided was to setup some zoom calls where turning on your camera is OPTIONAL or encouraged to only happen if you are speaking.

Why? Because Zoom is exhausting!!! Especially in our current back to back 30 min increment work that many product folks find themselves in. So here are a few things you can to to minimize Zoom fatigue for the product organization (and everyone else because let's be serious we talk to EVERYONE!)

1) Take a look at the meetings on your calendar which you lead and see which of them would be fine without video. These are probably team meetings or status updates (which maybe you can eliminate all together and do asynchronously via a dashboard, email, or Slack), but in reality a lot of one-on-one meetings could also be done as voice only. When I mentioned my no video idea to Tad Martin, he told me that he has started scheduling calls with some of his team members instead of video chats.

2) Evaluate if everyone really needs to be part of the meeting. Some of the best companies have strict rules about how to minimize extra people in meetings. Periodically review the list of attendees and ensure that everyone is both receiving and providing value. Be honest that some participants could probably be just fine if they received an email update after the meeting and only attended larger strategic discussions on a less frequent basis.

3) Setup cultural norms for how people with their videos off still need to be engaged. It cannot be that their camera is turned off and then they walk away or allow themselves to be engrossed in another task. This may be through using in app gestures like thumbs up, or responding to group questions via chat functionality, or something else you come up with but do something ensures they are paying attention. And per #2 above... if you don't get enough value out of the meeting, question why you are there to begin with.

Zoom can be exhausting, but there are ways to make it less so. By evaluating which meetings don't need video, minimizing the number of attendees, and establishing cultural norms, you can make Zoom more manageable for yourself and your team.

So... what are you doing as a leader to minimize Zoom/Teams/Hangout burnout??

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.

Everything is a Product, Even You

When I tell product leaders to think of themselves as a product, sometimes they give me a confused look. I get that we’re people not products which are bought and sold. But when I say everything is a product, even you, I mean it to help product folks realize that they already have all the tools they need to skyrocket their careers. I believe the steps to launch and advance a successful product, can be applied to a software suite or a person’s own career trajectory.

Let’s take a step back to how I came to this conclusion. I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in product at tech companies in the US, and served as an advisor for companies around the globe. Time and again I’ve seen talented product leaders make missteps in their own careers, including myself. There are variations of course, but the main problem I’ve seen boils down to this: people don’t leverage their strengths as product managers to advance towards their own career goals.

To make my point, I’m going to draw parallels to the activities product managers are already familiar with and discuss how those actions can be applied to their career. As a coach, I love to help other product leaders develop their individual growth trajectories with this product mindset. If you like what you’re reading and want to schedule some time to chat, you can reach out to me here.

Setting the Product Vision = Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Whenever I teach about Product Strategy, I emphasize the importance of starting with a vision. Product Strategy is a system of goals and related choices that work together to accomplish the mission and vision of the organization (-Melissa Perri). The mission and vision represent where you are going, and the strategy is the framework that guides decisions to get there together.

Similarly, you should have a vision for where you want to go which guides your own specific near term goals and choices.

Some people have an established path but many of us aren’t clear about what we desire as an outcome, only that we want a change. When establishing a vision for yourself, you must ask similar questions that you would when setting one for a product. How do you want the future to look different? Which customers (in this case company types or stages) do you want to serve? What are the values you want to be embodied in the vision? What is your role in enabling that future state?

Answering these questions will help build a path forward that will align with both your career and personal goals. You’ve potentially heard of the famous V2MOM’s that Salesforce uses when setting strategic directions for products, but you may not be aware that every employee also has their own personal V2MOM which summarizes their vision and goals for the future as well.

Your personal vision should be three to five years out, and it will provide guardrails for what interim goals you will establish.

Understanding the Current State = Where are you NOW?

When you use Google Maps to get somewhere, you need to set your starting point as well as your destination.The same goes for setting your vision; you can’t achieve your desired goal without knowing where you are RIGHT NOW. Likewise, once there is a clear vision for the product, the product manager steps back and evaluates the current state. We ask things like: What customer segments are happy or churning? Where are deals being won and lost? Which features of the product have high adoption or are ignored? What are the most common complaints from customers and prospects?

If YOU are the product, those questions would be transformed into: What do my peers and managers appreciate about my work? Where have I been successful or failed? What skills do I have that are shining through or are underutilized? What experience am I lacking that impacts my ability to advance my career?

A big part of assessing the current state is doing research. The steps are familiar: check out your competitors, do an honest assessment of capabilities, identify the missing pieces in the core product or the whole offer, talk to stakeholders and customers. Assessing YOUR current state and capability gaps may involve looking at the people who currently have your next dream job and see what roles they had prior to getting there. It will definitely require talking to people who hire and collaborate with people in that future role.

Developing empathy for stakeholder needs helps you develop a product that’s more likely to resonate with your market. When thinking of yourself as the product, that means talking to other team leads, executive leadership, and your peers to develop a better understanding about their roles and what they expect of a product leader. This 360 feedback loop will help you know which actions you can take to get them excited about you being promoted to a higher position.

Now that you understand the current state, you can figure out the gaps to fill which will help you accomplish your goals.

Setting a Strategy = Where will you focus?

You have a vision of where you want to go and understand where you are now. It’s time to assess the obstacles in the way and create a plan to overcome them.

Review the capability gaps, prioritize which of them are most important to solve, and then figure out what you need to improve to get to an improved state. While this is standard when working on a product, this might feel more challenging when thinking about your career. Remember that any growth strategy includes who you will serve and how you plan to serve them. The strongest strategies use competitive advantages to grow in ways others cannot.

Therefore, think about what are YOUR unique selling propositions that only you can bring to an organization. Focus on how you can leverage those skills and experiences to launch yourself into the next step. Joao Moita describes how he utilized Teresa Torres’s Continuous Habits Opportunity Solution Tree for evaluating your own career in this awesome post.

Executing the Strategy : What should you do next?

There is no big red button that says “LAUNCH”. The process of getting towards launch is an iterative one. If you’re going to be presenting to senior leadership about why you should be promoted, think LEAN. Talk to stakeholders, get feedback in loops while building the story of why you deserve this. Tweak your message, reduce risk of wasting time on the wrong focus areas, build your own confidence, and win advocates within the company. Help people see how your accomplishments and progress make you uniquely suited for new responsibilities.

The development of empathy that I mentioned earlier goes both ways here. Share with your peers that you’re looking to advance in your career and that you are actively looking for ways to improve. If they are quality leaders themselves, they should respond positively to your openness. Beyond the feedback you receive through a 360 process, you will also gain support within your organization for the next step.

Years ago, I had a coaching client who was pitching their CEO that they should be CPO instead of SVP of product. With that clear goal in mind, we assessed the barriers ahead which included that their company had never had a CPO and that the CEO wasn’t really sure what the value of that role would be in their organization. Together, we worked to develop a deck that showed what a CPO does, what they currently were doing, and the minimal gaps between the two.

Before presenting the deck, my client networked with some board members, the CRO, and Head of Support to get them on board with this new role and them being the person to fill it. They worked to get their feedback on what they would appreciate in a CPO and we incorporated that into the presentation. When it came time to share with the CEO the PowerPoint, the idea of promoting the individual to CPO had been socialized and supported by many key contacts and it was approved without hesitation.

You don’t have to work with a coach to do this. You can work within your existing network, both within your company and elsewhere, to get the feedback you need to best position yourself.

Monitor Progress = When will you know you’re done?

As you know, a product launch is never the last step. Once a product or feature is out there in the world, we always monitor whether it is reaching the intended targets. For a product, we have telemetry to provide data around our success metrics. For your career, this means both having honest follow-up conversations with leadership… and yourself. This process is iterative and should be revisited regularly.

Are you accomplishing the goals you set for yourself? Are your peers satisfied with your performance in the new role? What more do they wish you were doing? Do those things fit within your vision for your career growth?

By now you’ve established a pattern of communicating around the organization, keep doing that. Check in with the people you spoke to along the way to ensure that the problems you’d discussed helping them solve are still the right problems to work on. Talk to your higher ups about interim goals (some people like the 30–60–90 day timeframe), and communicate your progress. Reach out to those who helped you along the way to say thanks.

One thing which I can’t emphasize enough, is keeping track of your accomplishments. The only guarantee is that things will change, in life, in business, everywhere. Find ways to highlight your achievements in your new role so everyone knows you deserve to be there and potentially be given more responsibility. This shouldn’t be the last time you advocate for yourself, nor your last promotion. Maintaining a list of your successes will provide you the confidence to self-promote and always be growing.

Now, Get to Work!

My hope in laying out the above is that product leaders realize that they already have the tools they need to manage their own professional trajectory. You’re already doing many of these actions EVERYDAY. Think about the ways you can apply the tools you have, and get started on your vision. You don’t have to work with a coach, maybe there are people in your office or broader network that you can ask for help. If you want to set up some time to chat, ask questions and see if we’d be a good fit to work together, reach out to me here. And remember, you’re not the first person, nor are you the last person who will go wants a promotion… the difference is in the actions you take to reach your goals.

3 Tips for Getting a Big Investment from Your Board of Directors

If you’re a Product Leader, then you know that getting a big investment from your board of directors can be a difficult process. It’s important to make sure that you have a clear plan and can communicate the value of the investment in terms for the board to understand. In this blog post, we will discuss three tips for getting your board to approve a big investment!

First, you need to be able to communicate the value of the investment in terms that the board will understand. This means being able to show how the investment will impact key metrics such as revenue growth, churn reduction, and expansion of the total addressable market. It’s important to have a clear plan and firm numbers to back up your case.

Second, you need to build consensus around your plan among your peers and CEO. This is essential in order to get the buy-in from those who control the purse strings. Make sure that you are on the same page with your sales or revenue counterpart before presenting to the board.

Finally, you need to understand your board’s perspective and timelines. Board members, especially investors, will have their own ideas about where to spend money. It’s important to be able to understand their concerns and what they are looking for in an investment.

By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to getting board approval for your next big investmentץ If you find yourself struggling to do any of the above, it may be worthwhile to reconsider your plan to ensure it is value-oriented, accepted by your peers, and appealing to the board. Thanks for reading!

Do you have any other tips for getting board approval? Let me know in the comments below!

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.

Most important PM document

I’ve shared this document more than any other template I’ve ever created. It’s call the Product Initiative Summary. The goal is to get the core details of a product initiative onto a single page so that everyone (developers, designers, stakeholders, sales, marketing, etc.) can have the most important info available in a single place.

Anatomy of the document:

• Initiative Name — the title the company will use to refer to the product initiative

• Goals — the desired outcomes of the initiative and how are they related to company objectives

• Customer/User Groups impacted — the segment will this initiative serve, quantify when possible

• Current Issue / Situation — the problems you want to solve

• Proposed Solution — the current idea you have about how to solve the problem (it is open to discussion and change)

• Prioritization Reason — the thought process behind choosing to invest in this initiative over other options

• KPIs — the metrics you’ll monitor to know if the initiative is a success

• Milestones / Roll-out Plan — the high level outline of who will get access to the parts or all of the solution and when.

• Screenshots / Mockups — the visual representation of the initiative which could be a wireframe, a clickable prototype, a system diagram, or a user flow

Please note that all portions of the document may not be ready at the outset of a project, but hopefully they are all filled in before the Kickoff meeting for the initiative. Also, this document is 100% designed to be edited post-kickoff as you and the team learn new things throughout the development and launch process. Therefore share and save it in a way that you are sharing a link to the document instead of a hard copy… and keep sharing the link as things advance and more stakeholders get involved.