Do You Know *Exactly* How Your Business Defines Success?

For most of my career as a working product manager, I didn’t worry much about the goals of the broader business. That was for the fancy executives to think about. My team’s responsibility was to find the next most defensible thing to build, and then to build it as effectively as possible.

Eventually, I learned the hard way—as many product managers and teams do—that you can build defensible feature after defensible feature and still not have it add up to what the business really needs. Sooner or later, one of those fancy executives is going to wonder whether your oh-so-effective product team is actually contributing enough to the overall business to justify its substantial cost. And there’s no way to get out ahead of this if you don’t know what exactly the business really needs in the first place.

Unfortunately, I fear that many product teams are operating without such an understanding. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with a product leader who ran a workshop with her team using the powerful questions from Impact-first Product Teams. The question that this team struggled most to answer wasn’t about their team OKRs, roadmaps, or initiatives, but rather about what specific amount of what kind of success the business at large needs by what specific time.

Folks on teams like this may very well be doing interesting, important, and impactful work—but they have no way of knowing whether that work is impactful enough to help the business achieve its most important goals. Understanding what success means to the business at large is a prerequisite for understanding why any product team exists in the first place. And yet, many product teams still struggle to have this conversation proactively on their own terms.

In some cases, not understanding business-level goals can block product teams from making any meaningful progress at all. In my last book Product Management in Practice I shared the story of a team that assembled a “hierarchy of needs” to help them move through several conversations that all seemed to be getting stuck at the same time. And the very first conversation in that hierarchy of needs? The thing that was blocking them from crafting a strategy and assembling a roadmap?

Yup. “What are the high-level company goals (revenue, growth) we should be working toward?”

All of this is to say that, if you feel like your product team is disconnected from the success of the business at large, you’re probably right—and you’ve probably got some work to do. But you don’t need to do it alone!

I Can Help!

I wrote Impact-first Product Teams to give teams guidance and structure as they talk through these challenging questions. If you could use help focusing your product team on what matters most to the business, drop me a line at [email protected] and let’s talk. I'm doing some new workshops and consulting engagements around topics like high-impact team OKRs and impact-first AI adoption at approachable rates, so don't be afraid to send an inquiry.

I was the 100th guest on Leah Tharin’s ProducTea podcast!

When I saw Leah Tharin speak at Mind the Product back in March, I was… well, dear reader, I was frankly quite a bit envious of her impeccable humor and wit and timing. So naturally, I bothered her incessantly until she invited me to be a guest on her excellent podcast ProducTea. I do, after all, love to spill some tea….

I somehow wound up being Leah’s 100th guest, and the conversation was both delightfully casual AND productively business-y. Some personal highlights:

• Answering the question “are you one of those corporate asses?”

• Putting specific dollar amounts on a product team’s roadmap (fast forward to 28:00 if you want to get right into it)

• Standing up to Gary

• The SRV strat hanging up behind Leah 👀

Upcoming Events

• August 8th: Product Hive Utah (Remote)

• September 8th: ProductTank Birmingham, Birmingham UK

• October 2nd-3rd: Agile + DevOpsDays, Des Moines Iowa USA

• October 20-Nov 2: EU Impact-first Tour (More soon!)

What I’m Listening To While I Write All This Stuff

My friend Nathan Larson plays guitar in one of my all-time favorite bands Shudder to Think, who recently reunited for a few surprise shows in LA. He also fronted a band in the mid-90s called Mind Science of the Mind (featuring Mary Timony of Helium and Joan Wasser of Joan as Police Woman!!!) whose one self-titled record recently returned to streaming services. It is so good. Give it a listen or two or twenty or fifty. Personal favorites are “Infidels”, “Do You Rule?” and “Does It Rain in Your Womb?” Ye Gods I wish I had the swagger of this record.

Thanks so much for taking an interest in my work. As always, you can reach me directly at [email protected].