Melissa Perri: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's a fair question. Signs that there are no strategy, teams are all working like dogs. They're working 80 hours a week. I see this all the time. People are heads down, crunching, crunching, crunching, releasing, releasing, releasing. Or sometimes not releasing, but they're working like crazy and none of the metrics are moving. So the executive team is going, what is happening? Product is a black box. Tech is a black box. We've got all these people. What do they do all day? A great example of when there is no strategy. And what usually is happening is there's this missing middle. It's like, we all know exactly what each team... We don't all know, actually, what each team is working on. The teams all know exactly what they're working on, which is usually some kind of feature enhancement, new features, whatever you've got. Bug fixes, all that wonderful stuff. The people they report to usually know what the teams are doing, but the executives are like, cool, how does that matter to our business? How does that actually ladder up into our vision, where we want to go, our objectives for the year, our goals? Great sign that there is actually no strategy deployed correctly. Now, when I say, too, there's no strategy, there's usually some kind of strategy, but it lives in people's heads, and they're really bad about writing it down and getting it out. So I always tell people, too, if you think that there's no strategy, go interrogate people for awhile. Go talk to the leaders. Is this good if we hit these numbers? Is this bad? Why? If I release this thing, what do you think will happen? What numbers will change? What behaviors will change? How will this make us better? I usually can pull out what people believe the goals to be, and sometimes they're just not explicitly written down. So that's an exercise that I typically do, too, when I don't see strategy well-manifested in these organizations. I just go in and I say, okay, what does good look like for you? Where is the vision and where are we going? And I ask all of these questions, too, to a lot of people. And you find that there's different answers across the organization, and that shows a lack of alignment on a complete strategy, as well. I once asked all the executive team at a healthcare company, what's the vision for this company? And they said, to be the backbone of healthcare. And I said, what does that mean? And they couldn't elaborate. Nobody could elaborate on that. And I said, cool, that's a tagline, but it's not a vision. What are we manifesting into? What are we doing? What are we not doing? Who do we want to be when we grow up? Five to ten years from now, how are we different than we are today? Those things, more often than not, are not written down, and they're not clearly communicated. So one of the exercises we do is we write. If I see that there's no strategy, I have CEOs write two-pagers on where did the company come from? How is it different today? y're not clearly communicated. So one of the exercises we do is we write. If I see that there's no strategy, I have CEOs write two-pagers on where did the company come from? How is it different today? What are our external treats to our market? What's our competition? How do you view our competition? What should we care about? What should we not care about? What are we going to do? What are we not going to do? And then prioritize their strategic intents, or what I call them, which are really big business movers, for the next two, three years. So it's like, are we going to go up market? Are we going to go down market? Are we going to expand geographically? Are we going to innovate into a completely new market or a new opportunity? Those types of things need to be clearly prioritized at the top, and then we can start to make the product portfolio at the bottom. And when there's a missing strategy piece... I call it the missing middle is usually gone, which connects those strategic intents and those business outcomes back into what the teams are actually doing. So it's like, great, that team is building a widget for sales people to do cold emails. Why? How is that going to move us into what we want to do for our vision? Is it retaining people because we have a problem with our current market? Is it allowing us to enter a new market if we put it together? But if we think about all the things that teams do in isolation, it's not enough, usually, to move those business metrics. So what people do in a lack of strategy is they spread the team too thin across tons of initiatives. One team usually isn't enough to get some really hard hitting metrics out there. And then, you don't see the progress that you're actually looking to see as an executive. If a feature ships but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First, you have to dig through tickets and poll requests just to see what's been done. Then, you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every week, and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high velocity product teams like Monte Carlo, Armory, and Popsicle use Makelog. Makelog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like [inaudible 00:26:54], Linear, Assan, and GitHub, and then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience, wherever they are, including within your app, on Slack, over email, and even on Twitter. No more long, boring, blog-style change log posts that slow you down. Just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try Makelog for free today. Just visit makelog.com/lenny to get started. So you're a PM on a team, or even just a leader of a company, and you're like, hmm, I think we might have a strategy, maybe we don't. I'm hearing things that are true at our company, and I'm worried. What does it look like for me to have a strategy? You named a few things that you should probably have, a vision, intents and actions, and things like that. What's the checklist of, oh, if I have this, this, this, that, we probably have a strategy in place, at least?…

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