Ezinne Udezue: recommendation

Transcript context

…10,000 options because you can't pick one. Yeah. The experience is so murky, chalky, nobody knows what the hell to do because you can't make a decision. Make it simple. Come up with an opinion and put your opinion out there. You can change. Leave the configurations and the options behind, but leave them behind the scenes if you must. But try and create the most compelling, the simplest experience and you will actually have better adoption. You're better off doing that and being wrong. Many times we leave and ship convoluted experiences because we don't have the courage, number one to make a decision, create a point of view and ship it out there. The reality is, and my experience has shown that, you're better off picking an opinion, shipping it out there, being wrong, and then adjusting than leaving too many options because you then can never learn what was the better experience overall. So that's one thing. The other major lesson I've learned is actually one about strategy. It is that the best way to go from strategy to execution in a way that activates the entire organization is communication. You will never spend too much time communicating the why to your organization over and over and over again. I don't remember what movie it was, I think it was the movie about sending someone to the moon, right? I'm forgetting what it is, but the idea that everybody in NASA knew that we were working to send a man to the moon, even the janitor knew that. So that idea of ensuring that everybody in the team understands the why behind what we're doing and can speak to it. I saw something on LinkedIn the other day. I think it was Martin Erickson who actually posted this. It talked about how the same way we talk about crossing the chasm and figuring out who it is that will adopt a product, we should think about the change management required for strategy communication through that lens. There will be early adopters. Think about those people. Those people will hear the message, the strategy. And by the time others are just beginning to understand what it is, they're probably on the next version of the strategy asking, "What can change? What should change?" And that was so clarifying for me because I always wondered why strategy could get muddy sometimes is because when you look at your entire population, about 5% are going to be the early adopters. They get it. They buy into it and they're moving. Four months later they're onto something wondering what the next version of the strategy will look like, how do we build on top of this? At that same time, some people are just beginning to get it. And honestly, that answered a lot of questions for me as to how it is that you can be working on a strategy, some people get it, can recite it, tell you why we're doing what we're doing, while some PMs are still struggling with, "But why? How come? Can we do this?" Because they are in fact laggards out there. ome people get it, can recite it, tell you why we're doing what we're doing, while some PMs are still struggling with, "But why? How come? Can we do this?" Because they are in fact laggards out there. That idea of trying to really activate a strategy into pure execution, if you think about communication as a critical element, and then also look at it as, "What is the crossing the chasm version? Who is at what point in this change management journey?" I think that was one of the major lessons I've learned as a leader in product.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.