The Product Experience

The product momentum gap - Dave Martin and Andrea Saez on The Product Experience

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Many organisations and teams have faced the challenge of scaling a product. This week we invited Dave Martin and Andrea Saez, authors of "Product Momentum Gap", to share their wisdom and help bring together product strategy and provide customer value.

Featured Links: Follow Andrea on LinkedIn and her website | Follow Dave on LinkedIn | Dave's page at Right To Left | Sign up for release updates for Andrea and Dave's forthcoming book 'The Product Momentum Gap' | Dave's 'How to execute your product strategy' (using the Value Creation Plan) 10-Step Plan

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Speaker 1:

So, Randy, do you know what the secret to success is as a product influencer?

Speaker 2:

Oh god, I'm scared to ask Uli. I mean, I'm scared about what the secret is, but I'm also terrified what the hell is a product influencer?

Speaker 1:

That sounds awful, hmm, okay, well, you can come up with a better name for describing someone who looks at a typical product problem in a new and better way and provides a solution.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, okay, that's a good one. Okay, yeah, I've seen talks by let's see, teresa Torres and John Cutler and Lucy McClain and Jeff Patton, and all of them did that for me Totally big paradigm shift kind of thing. And then we amazingly had them all as guests on the show.

Speaker 1:

And today we've got someone who's also been on the show before Dave Martin, and this time he's with Andrea Size, to talk about their new book, the Product Momentum Gap, and I love the way that he describes this, because it's definitely a trap I've seen many companies fall into.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah. Well, dave and Andrea, they definitely fit the bill, but can we please come up with a better term than influencers for them?

Speaker 1:

Okay, sure, but let's just get to the chat first.

Speaker 2:

The product experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.

Speaker 1:

Visit MindtheProductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world, and online.

Speaker 2:

Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There's probably one near you, Dave. Andrea, thank you so much for coming and joining us on the podcast today. How are you both doing?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing great. Can we start again?

Speaker 4:

No, no, you know what Wing it? We are both great, we're fantastic. It's summer, we're writing a book. What else is going on? I've got a new job Wonderful, okay. So we're going to cover, well, lots of that.

Speaker 2:

Dave, you've been on the podcast before, so let's get you out of the way really quick. What are you up to these days? Give us a quick intro and then we'll go to Andrea.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, sure, super quick. Thanks for having me back, both of you. It's great to be here and you know I spend the last four years and continue plan to continue spending the next four years at least, being a product leader coach, specifically really helping founders and product leaders establish stronger product practices when their companies start to scale.

Speaker 2:

And Andrea, we've known you forever, but we've somehow never actually had you on the podcast. So welcome, we're really glad to have you, but can you give us a little bit of an intro? Tell people what is it you're up to these days and how did you get into the world of product related stuff?

Speaker 4:

anyway, First of all, it's an honor. Thank you very much. I've been waiting, waiting for my invite. I'll tackle the last question because it's funny, I think, like many, by pure accident. So I never planned to get into product. One day I asked why, and the CEO at the company that I worked at kind of went hmm, somebody should have asked me that three years ago. So he turned around and he made me product manager and I had to learn very quickly and now I'm actually a product marketer. So still still products. For anyone wondering, product marketing is product. So a lot of strategy, a lot of focus and go to market, but I also just really, like you know, writing about my experiences, about the stuff that I learned. So I work very closely with Dave and a few other product leaders to write content and, just you know, help them position things a little bit better in general.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic, and we asked you both to come and join us at the same time because you're working on a book together, so it's called the product momentum gap. Tell us a little bit about it. What made you want to write this book and why together?

Speaker 3:

Well, we've been working together on content for a little while and I'd writing blog posts together and it felt like it was going pretty well, so we thought we'd scale up. You know what's next. So we did a white paper and that went really well. So we thought, after the white paper, maybe a book. So that's where we've landed, and the book is a reflection of a common problem both of us experience in our careers and with the companies we both help. Now We've both seen the pains we describe and we've both used and experienced the tools that we've talked about in the book to overcome them. So I thought it was a good time to put it together and share it.

Speaker 1:

So tell us about that pain. What is it?

Speaker 3:

So I mean the biggest pain that we see is around when that stage when a product line starts to scale whether the product line is a company, a founder and a startup, or whether it's a product line in a big, large organization that starts to scale At some point we reach a point where the product manager and the product team need stronger leadership and the founder or whoever is the owner of it the MD maybe in a bigger company has got to step back and then other people make decisions for it to scale and go forwards.

Speaker 3:

And the pains that people see is that stage when, for the founder, they see scale and more money being spent but it feels like things are going slower and it feels often like sales aren't happening as quick as they once did. Things just the momentum starts to slow down and for the product people the product team, engineers and designers they can feel frustrated about that, that hippo effect the highest paid person's opinion coming in, feeling over, dictated, not feeling empowered, and generally disconnected from the business strategy a little too much, where the roadmap no longer feels like outcomes and connected to the strategy but feels like delivery, sometimes for individual customers, or just stuck in that future factory place that we're all familiar with.

Speaker 1:

Unfortunately, we've all probably lived it and what happens in the business to result in this lack of momentum or this kind of change in momentum and this perceived sort of problem at this stage.

Speaker 4:

Well, there's a few things, it's never just a one. You know one thing I was almost going to open that with. Well, it depends, and it does depend on various factors, but generally the sort of I hate saying generic answer, but it is lack of alignments and it does sound like oh well, of course everyone has lack of alignment. But it is a very, very serious issue and it doesn't just affect the product and engineers or engineering teams. It actually goes so much further than that. It affects marketing, it affects sales, it affects customer success. So part of what we've worked on is called the product VCP or the product value creation plan, and essentially the VCP touches on several aspects, starting from strategy and actually extending all the way down into positioning and understanding your customers better. Because if you don't have that alignment from the foundations as you start going out and start, you know, going to market and positioning your product, it's all going to fall down.

Speaker 2:

So, one of the things you talked about in the book. One of the reasons that you said that alignment gets screwed up is that leadership gets so busy trying to scale the business that they lose sight of how to scale the product. What is what do you mean by that? What is the difference between these things?

Speaker 3:

So perhaps the what's worth thinking about is what's the experience? What actually happens? You know the founder and the business or the product line gets to a point where it's got traction we've passed early adopters, we started and show that this thing is worthwhile and typically at that point there's some investment, more investment, maybe it's Series A and we start to scale. At that point we hire a bunch more people, we hire more salespeople, we hire more engineers and the pressure to deliver revenue accelerates massively. It gets so much more pressure on the founder and that team to deliver and as things get bigger and new people are in, mistakes get made, obviously, and the stress gets more. Distraction gets bigger and what typically happens is we end up saying, well, to expand faster, we'll go slightly broader from that core niche target market we initially had. So we initially had great success with a certain very niche sub-segment in the sector and we expand slightly, we make the fishing net a bit bigger to catch more fish. Unfortunately, when we do that, we don't stop always to recognise that their problems are slightly different from that initial sub-segment. So as we get broader, our product market fit effectively gets weaker and unfortunately that what that looks like to the business and to the leadership and to the board is how sales cycle is slowing down. Our lead to sale or our win-loss is slowing down. It's getting worse. The conversion is lower and the immediate answer to that is often let's go a little bit wider. Instead of recognising the problem is the product, we're taking the product to a slightly different problem. We've got to change the product slightly. We, instead of recognising that, we go broader and as that happens, the pressure gets bigger. We end up with even worse market fit for the people at the edge of the breadth of that scope and we end.

Speaker 3:

Some deals come through, but they come through with large feature requests for problems that we never knew existed and never tried to solve before. And that's where we end up with the whole process where sales, the sales pressure is well, if we had feature X we could close the deal. But unfortunately typically what happens is that feature X isn't representative of the new, wider market, it's just representative of that individual customer. So we don't necessarily end up building those features for the market. So we end up in this dangerous place where we're writing closing codes to just close deals and we're not really scaling the business properly from a product standpoint.

Speaker 3:

At some point it becomes clear that there's a problem there. The pressure gets too big. It sort of starts to implode and at that point something happens. Now it's either the founder or the leaders bring in a new product leader. They recognise they've got to step back a bit further and bring in somebody professional to run the product function, and they go through that journey. Or it might be that they feel uncomfortable with how the existing one is performing and they swap it out, exit the person, and we have something difficult to deal with. But there's always an event that happens that people recognise. This is the problem and it's always connected to this market reaction getting slower, Just to confirm that?

Speaker 2:

is this specifically targeted at B2B SaaS or is this a wider application?

Speaker 4:

B2B SaaS.

Speaker 3:

Our experience is in B2B SaaS. I'm sure there are lessons from this that I would count to other organisations and I've worked in B2C and more complex like EdTech, where you've got very multi-markets and I'm sure there's lessons that both of those could take. But our experience in the book is very focused upon B2B SaaS specifically.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds to me like you're indicating and I'm going to make an assumption here that the potential solution is to remain focused on your initial target audience rather than go broader, or is that? Not necessarily the case.

Speaker 3:

I think the key here is to remain focused on what the business strategy is and to support the product strategy has got to support that and at some stage normally there is many left on the table if going deeper in the core target market that you serve really well. So I definitely would encourage teams and businesses to choose to do that first to make the most of that. But that is going to saturate at some point, obviously and we need to go broader for the founder and the investors. We want to make the valuation higher, so we need a larger market to go after, so we are going to have to go bigger. But it's about going wider incrementally and going wider from a product-led perspective, recognising that there will be product discovery and product work to do to understand those new nuances, to create the value that the market desires, to support and deliver the business strategy. Do you have anything to add there, andrea? Did I cover it all?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, what I would add to that is I think one of the problems is, as companies are going wider, they assume that because they had product market fit in that niche, that is just going to be the same, and often product market fit is treated as this binary yes, no, we have it, we don't have it situation. But it's not like that. It's continuous. So if we do continuous discovery and we're doing continuous development, why aren't we doing continuous product market fit? So, as you're expanding slowly, continue to do that analysis, that research, and continue to find what product market fit looks like as you're expanding, because just because you found out when you were smaller and you had a niche.

Speaker 4:

It doesn't mean that, as you're moving into other segments and other industries and their markets, that it's going to be the same.

Speaker 1:

And that sounds like a really difficult balance to continue to have and a difficult line to tread. How do you help businesses understand where they are in terms of the momentum gap and how to plan for it in the future?

Speaker 3:

So I think the tool that we describe in the book is a technique called the product by accretion plan and by going through, and the tool is there to articulate strategy in a better way, to articulate product strategy in a way that's more outcome driven. That isn't a roadmap, so it's a better artifact than that, so that we're not committing to deliveries and we're committing to outcomes and so that it looks like something that can be managed in a similar way and held as accountable to other parts of the business. So it's very friendly, especially for board members and senior executives. And the creation of that tool, the creation of that, if you're creating your product by accretion plan, which is unique to every business, obviously you're going to have to answer some questions. You have to be really clear on the business strategy, which sometimes means there's some work to do in the business to work that out.

Speaker 3:

It often raises some questions further upstream that need resolving and when we identify those value assumptions of how user behavior is going to impact client value, customer value and then eventually then business objectives, when we identify those assumptions, those nuances, and where you might be come out pretty openly because we're recently a very transparent and everyone's aligned and can see the same point of view. The assumptions where people have previously nodded and thought two different things, thinking each other was thinking the same thing, start to be unpicked. It's more transparent, there's no hiding place for the thinking and we end up starting to get alignment. When we start to get that alignment, then the decisions are clear to make and it's much easier to understand where we are now and where we want to be in order to move forwards.

Speaker 2:

So I got a chance to read a draft of the book the other day and one of the things that really resonated with me is this is a. It feels like it's a chance to change the culture in a lot of organizations where we've got all these tools that we've used for years and years, like roadmaps and OKORs and things like that, but they're misused in many organizations. It sounds. It feels like the VCP the value creation plan is something that you use to change the culture around setting alignment, building products and measuring and tracking the value. Tell us a little bit about the VCP itself. What does it look like and how do you use it? Let's start in the beginning part about in setting direction.

Speaker 3:

Well, the outcome of the VCP is really simple. It's a table of value indicators. I guess you could call them KPIs we don't specifically, because we want to think about value here and they're based around user behaviors, the assumptions of high level user behaviors that our product is going to create or modify for our customer. That will create the customer value. And it starts, it defines those and measures those measures.

Speaker 3:

The design comes and it's focuses on user behavior, because that's what a feature release does. That's why, in the end of the day, we are in the business of building features and then we don't want to become feature obsessed, but that's what we do, and when we release a feature, the only impact we actually have, the direct impact, is we change the user's behavior. We either create a new one or we modify an existing one in some way and hopefully that creates value for them and for their employer, because we're working B2B, the users are employed by someone. So it's essence it's a list of value indicators, user behaviors, with targets of where we want to try and take them and then understanding where they are now and now based on our strategy. It's not creating the strategy, it's articulating all the good strategic work that teams already have done. Upstream, the collaborative work will help create the alignment to get us there with some key questions using key parts of the tools. Andrea, do you want to talk a bit about those? Perhaps I feel like I'm hogging the mic.

Speaker 4:

No, it's all right, you can hog the mic all you want. So, yeah, I think Dave touched on something that's really important, which is behaviors, and when we're building products, we don't really stop to think about the fact that we do have an impact on behaviors, right, whether we like to admit it or not, and there's also perhaps an ethical line to think about there. Are we creating good behaviors, bad behaviors? Think about how social media affected everyone.

Speaker 4:

You could argue those were definitely not good behaviors, looking back at things. But, as you're working through the VCP, one of my favorite parts is the value pyramid, which, essentially, is really what helps the entire business come together. After you've answered some of those questions, so you can very clearly communicate who it is that you're serving. So who are you solving problems for? Why? That is important, what those problems and challenges are. But the most important part and the key part are what are the experiences you're trying to provide for people and what are the behaviors?

Speaker 4:

And those behaviors don't just affect products, because let's say that you're working on a product and one of the behaviors is people need to process more data through your products. But the action of processing that data that may come through education. We have to educate people as to why they should do it. And that's CS, that support, that's marketing, that's even sales. It may not necessarily have to do entirely with a product. The product will have that functionality, but you have to have product like growth, you have to have marketing, you have to have a lot of education to get people to engage and to proceed with that behavior.

Speaker 4:

So it really affects everybody and I've used it a couple of times in the companies that I've worked with and people just go oh my God, I didn't know that's what you were doing, which you think that people might know this. But if there's one thing I've learned and all of you have probably experienced this as well is people don't read. So you might have very detailed, eight-page jobs to be done documentation, but I can assure you that your marketing person is not reading through that. So if you can take all of that information and put it in one space where they can truly understand all of this stuff, it's going to make everybody's life easier.

Speaker 1:

So when you're working with business through the value creation plan, is that a document or is that a number of workshops, and how long does that process take to create that artifact?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, great question, I think. Well, the book explains how to do it so anyone can and takes them through, explains the process in detail so they can do it themselves. Most importantly, so that and the the book provides templates and Ideally those templates would be filled in, I think, in a in a workshop environment or at least some form of collaboration. Every time I've personally done it with a business, we've done it in workshop environments. I'm just not not only one go, I hasten to add, as it would be a Little overkill and when you need some time to synthesize. So We've done this or I've done this in teams and companies where it's taken two weeks start to end. We're three or four workshops to get it complete. This doesn't take too long at all. Really, you could do it much more accelerated if you really wanted and you know, if you had a strategy away day, you could probably get this done in two days, really get everything aligned.

Speaker 3:

The key about the conversation about how long it takes is how Unaligned you are, your teams might be, and how quick where the compromises are, and quick they're, everyone's willing to pick up on what on the new place. So I've had an experience now and then where it's highlighted some real challenges and some work, some experimental works and discovery works. That's because gone and done to provide more evidence for the business to make decisions. Normally what that means is strategy wasn't clear in the first place. You remember this isn't a tool to build the strategy, it's a tool to align everybody, articulate it, make the strategy actionable and make it so you can execute. Make sure strategy is at the heart of your decision-making, of your prioritization and and how have been accountable. So normally when that, when it takes a bit longer, it's because it's found Problems in the end of like strategy.

Speaker 2:

Hey Lily, you're a senior product leader.

Speaker 1:

Why yes, randy, how kind of you to notice I may have led just a few product teams in my time.

Speaker 2:

So you know how important it is to hear stories and get insights from other product leaders facing similar challenges.

Speaker 1:

Oh, my golly gosh. Super important and, to be honest, not so easy to find that these days. So much has changed in the past couple of years.

Speaker 2:

Oh god, I hear you. Well, the reason I bring it up is because mind the product have just released a series of brand new case studies From senior product leaders, all about leading product teams through change.

Speaker 1:

Tell me more.

Speaker 2:

Well, in this brand new and totally free resource, mind a product to explore the stories of five product leaders who have effectively navigated change near current and past positions, unveiling crucial lessons and sharing the principles you need to embrace in order to tackle challenges in your role as a product leader.

Speaker 1:

Very interesting. So who are these product leaders?

Speaker 2:

Well, they've got some goodies. There's Dave Walsh, who is the former CPTO at Zupa, kate Lito, who's an amazing product leadership executive coach, and Navya Rahani Gupa, cpo at peak, for starters, and there's even a bonus tip section on how to look after yourself as a product leader and oodles more further reading suggestions.

Speaker 1:

This sounds amazing. How do I get my hands on it?

Speaker 2:

Oh, oh, that's the easy part. Just sign up at mind the product calm leading through change. Well, let's talk a little bit about that accountability and the and the tracking. So the output of the VCP, as you said, the final thing is you KPIs or the, what you're going to track. How do you turn that into action? How do you use that outs Once you've created it, and create that, that level of accountability through the process?

Speaker 3:

I mean it depends what level we're talking about, whether a team level or whether or maybe a leadership level. I'll start a leadership level and maybe Andrea can help more. At team level We'll talk it through together. But the you know leadership level.

Speaker 3:

Often when a founder has got a new CPO or a first maybe product leader, it can be really difficult to understand what this person is responsible for, really hard to know what they're accountable for, and so big blood line between is this the CPO's responsibility or the CTO's, and most boards of director, kind of like I'm not saying this is a great practice, but it's what they like, you know, most investors and directors on the board, kind of like a throat to choke when something's not going right. They want to be able to pin it on someone to go and get them to fix it. Yeah, exactly, they want to charge somebody for it. So I'm sorry, I just realized Randy just made a Funny choking look on his face and the audience won't see it because of course we record a bit, don't record video, so making me smile. But you know that they need that exactly. They want to be able to point to that person, go fix this thing, and quite rightly, you know, the end of day, we are paid to do our jobs and and sometimes it's hard to measure whether we are and what that often ends up happening.

Speaker 3:

The outcome of this being done wrong is often the only promise or artifact or commitment whichever phrase you prefer that we give as product leaders to the business is the roadmap. And Then we complain that we're getting beaten up because we are based on delivery items on the roadmap. You know, we set ourselves up for this. Really in the industry, we give, we give people this list of stuff we can have built to deliver an outcome and then when we learn is the wrong things to build and we change it, we get beaten up because we didn't build it when instead, we need to give a different promise in the first place, and the VCP is that promise.

Speaker 3:

It's the articulation of this product strategy which the CPO typically ends. It's the Inner form focused on user behavior. Now, if I use a behavior as we think we've got a modifier wrong, then our strategy does need revising and that's okay, great, we've changed it. But it doesn't mean we have to build feature X to achieve it. We'll learn what the features and the right solutions are with our teams. It empowers our teams. So it gives accountability for the CPO that isn't about the roadmap and it then, for the teams, gives Transparency to the teams and guard rails of what's important and what isn't. So it gives them tools to make decisions and then country. You might have seen teams do that in the lower level, a bit more than me possibly.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. So I've had this experience several times over, where you know the, the OKR or the goal that is given to the product team is to increase AR. That is a terrible OKR for a product team. I you know. In case I have to actually say why Increase ARR is not a product objective, it is a business objective.

Speaker 4:

I don't know a lot of teams that know what to do with increase ARR, like where do you start, what are our guard rails, where do we look? It's a lot right. So essentially, what the VCP provides is that product outcome, that product objective that you can view, the product objective that you can very clearly understand what is the impact, both to the user, through value, and to the business, because inevitably they are going to be linked to each other. Yeah, but it gives you a path of focus. So by having that, you're even extending that impact, like I said earlier, to marketing, to sales, to cs, because they understand what the behaviors are. So once you establish those behaviors and products, then the rest of your teams can can focus on supporting that as well and communicating those messages, whether it's through product like growth, onboarding, emails, marketing messaging, whatever it is.

Speaker 3:

And there's a, there's a think. Another benefit when we talk about accountability. You know if we, if you've, come up with a product strategy for the business I've believed in that in a collaborative way as a product leader, whether the people in the business of the leaders and with your product teams, and you've, you've got this approach, this plan, to achieve your vision. With the VCP, we can measure whether we're actually executing. Are we achieving it? Are we making it happen? And then then we get to ask a really important question. So let's pretend we're in a company that sets some behaviors they want to make happen and they do. They win. This product team smash it, behaviors have changed, but the revenue or the business objectives aren't being hit still. Then there's a different question for the except team to be asking the leadership team to be asking they can start. It's easier to look at that and be very subjective around. Well, was the product strategy wrong? Did we make some? There was some. It's like some core assumption that's wrong. Do we need to re-strategize? And we can do that earlier than waiting 12 months when we generally have a look at these things, so we get to react faster. It's really important.

Speaker 3:

Or and this is what I see more often than not. It highlights the other problems in the business elsewhere and it highlights my movie. We've got some positioning challenges or some marketing challenges or we've got some sales challenges. They understand the product. Probably there's miss sales, it's miss sold, etc. Etc. You know the the parameters for the business objectives to be hit a very, a lot. There's many of them and there's only a few of them that can control or exist in the product function. It does this other functions in the business. So it really helps the leadership team to be able to shine the light on the right part of the business and it helps us to be truthful and honest about our strategy of whether it's working or not, so we can react faster and Move forward quicker.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I really like the saying move fast and learn things, and the VC P enables you to do that. I've never been a fan of move fast and break things. I think it's a terrible saying, but you should be learning as quickly as possible and and mitigate those risks so, in terms of sales and marketing, what's their kind of role in the creation of the value creation plan?

Speaker 1:

Are they involved from the beginning? And and if they're not, then how? How do you Kind of get alignment with them as well? I?

Speaker 4:

Love that question out. I was actually gonna bring this up earlier but I forgot For the record. Randy had a little microphone issue and I lost my train of thoughts, but no, it's a great question.

Speaker 4:

So definitely, all business-facing team members should be part of this, this VC P creation. The people that know what those behaviors look like and what people are asking for and what the feedback looks like, are your support teams, your marketing teams, your sales teams, because they're talking to people all day long. Yes, product should hopefully be talking to people all day long, but I have been, you know, part of teams where the product team may be spoke to one customer in 10 months at best, and that is when you know tapping into the knowledge of your business-facing teams is going to be super, super helpful, because there is still that knowledge gap that exists. And, at the end of the day, the VC P is about alignment and it is about bringing everybody together and everybody does not exclude marketing, sales, support, cs indefinitely includes them.

Speaker 3:

I think the other thing they really really importantly is the process isn't designed to formulate the strategy. It's, you know, it's there to help articulate and make it actionable and stress test it. And it does stress test it. So by bringing a broader audience in, it's part of the comms process anyway, and it's part of the stress testing of the product strategy, so that we we've got a stronger plan and if that means we have to go back to the drawing board slightly and it Rates and things in the product strategy, good, because that means it's going to be improved and we've. And it's very cheap way Of getting us to a better place quickly, far cheaper than spending a few sprints, three or four sprints and then finding out, or even longer, especially when the average product team costs sort of 25 Bramper sprints on average. So we could spend a lot of money really quickly before we realize that error. So it's a perfect tool for that instance.

Speaker 2:

Andrea, that's really interesting was have this whole definition of what a product team is, and, if my theory is, it's not just about people who are at daily stand-ups. If they are instrumental In making sure you realize the value of the product, then they're part of the team, no matter what what you call it. So, to that end, can you talk a little bit about the culture change and what goes in? So, if you, if, if the way that the success of the product team isn't being measured on delivery of features, if it's being measured on delivery of outcomes, how does this? How does this work? How does the VCP Do that? Can you talk us through a story about where this might have happened?

Speaker 4:

Sure. So there is one example that comes to mind, and when I first kind of joined the team and and helped them out, I mean, aside from a lack of strategy, there really was no alignment around. You know, behaviors who were even, let alone behaviors, take 20 subs back. They didn't even know who they were serving. Right, who are we building products for? What problems are we solving? It was very, very basic and there was a very huge mistrust between product and marketing. Huge mistrust Because products didn't know how to communicate to marketing. So marketing was kind of flying solo. They were kind of making stuff up, you know, as they do, but there was a bit of a lack of accountability, I think, from product saying maybe the problem starts with us. Right, we should bridge the gap there and Communicate things better.

Speaker 4:

So we went through the process, of course, you know, creating that product strategy, going through the VCP, which Dave did On his end, and then I brought everyone together and I said, okay, you know, let's talk about those behaviors, how do we communicate them to marketing, to sales, to see us and it was my opening and sales, you know, would sometimes go hey, can I get a printout of the value pyramid so I can present it to a customer because this is really good and it really kind of helps us show that we know what we're talking about and and and gives them all the information.

Speaker 4:

And, you know, maybe we can brand it or whatever, and and it was really great to kind of see them get super involved and taking bits of information where they can go. Oh, hey, we're, you know, affecting this behavior. Can we have some sort of sales? And they will be documents or one pager or block post or something, because I'm talking to this customer and this is exactly what they need, or what they need us for, and you know it. It looks like it's a very simple pyramid, but there's so much wealth of information in there that can be helpful in so many ways and that really, you know, started bringing together product and marketing and sales and all the business-facing teams it to, you know, start communicating a little bit better in this particular company.

Speaker 3:

The Organization was an experience really great, high growth. They've really done well. They've got a smashing market fit. They were really knocking it out of the park but they started to expand as we talked about at the very beginning. They're a perfect case study of suffering the problem momentum gap and I'm sure many people have gone through this process. They expanded into wanting to be more enterprise. I wanted to go to bigger, larger companies and of course the fit is slightly different. We all anybody's working B2B understands that pain at some stage you either go down the ladder regard scale of clients or you go up it depending where you start. But you're gonna go one direction at some point to make your market broader. So they went up to enterprise and that that immediately Were before the VCP was created.

Speaker 3:

The product team itself have been suffering with a lot of reactivity. They get sales person saying it doesn't do this. This is why I'm losing a deal and I quickly go up to the founder who would quickly get excited about that problem and opportunity. I want to see it built. But that particular thing very often quite large to build, quite often Was way more money than the deal in question was worth and wasn't something anybody else needed very specific to that particular workflow of that particular enterprise. So what the VCP did was a particular slide, a particular template in the book called the value explorer. When we look through the value explorer and then start to understand the Company goals, the business, our business objectives, company the values, the company values we expect to deliver, which normally we've articulated pretty well in every product strategy we're pretty good at that we're going to help our clients do XYZ and then we'll make the money in this way or save the money in this way. This particular template takes that to the next level too. What are the behaviors? As soon as we got that one pager, people really started to understand it and started to feel positive. It's changed the team. It allowed the founder to trust the teams. It gave because the decisions were being made based on this criteria. So instead of having to feel like they're going to be part of it all the time, they could feel comfortable that the teams could maneuver, make good decisions and they could see the decisions match the criteria. And it allowed them to step back a little bit, gave the team a bit more space to maneuver.

Speaker 3:

We talk about empowered teams all the time. But it's very hard to empower a team when you aren't given guidance. That's not empowerment, I mean, that's just asking them to make all the leadership decisions and not pay them for it. That's not guidance, that's exploitation. You know, guidance is needed to make them empowered and it's also crucial when you've got more than one team, like this company had, and they're dependent on each other quite frequently.

Speaker 3:

So the VCP is often we've done it a product line and I've had some clients who have taken it much lower level and done it real low level. Some are company-wide, some have cascaded it down and each time they've used it to drive those decisions and empower people. And when we talk about culture change, I mean that's the hungry grail of product engineering, culture and empowered team. We want teams that feel some level of autonomy, the ability to achieve mastery and feel purpose, and two of those things support and autonomy and feeling purpose the VCP helps with. It doesn't help with mastery, that's down to somewhere else be mastering my craft somewhere else but we help on those two, which is going to drive a motivated culture.

Speaker 1:

And it sounds like it's inevitable for any growing B2B business to fall into this trap of the momentum gap, as you call it. Do you think there's also an element of naming this phase that you go through and acknowledging it as a phase in order to then address it, and kind of acknowledging and recognizing where you are as a business in order to then tackle that phase on?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we just had this discussion the other day, didn't we? If there's two things that I would say are the best possible outcome, the first is leadership recognizes that there is a problem or leadership realizes that they are part of the problem. And if one of those two things can happen or do happen, then you're already on the path to be able to fix those issues. But if neither of those happen, then you have a situation where you don't have a good culture, your teams are unable to experiment and do discovery and essentially it just turns into feature building, feature building, feature building and leadership is just going to grow more and more frustrated.

Speaker 3:

I mean the point you make there, Lily, is exactly the point John Cutler has made and John's writing the forward to the book for us. And he's made the exact point that naming the problem. That allows us to talk about it, allows us to address it, allows us to be aware of it, and once it remains anonymous, it's really hard to deal with.

Speaker 4:

Awareness is the first step. If leadership is just aware that there is a problem, fantastic, that's really the first step. But if they're blinded to it and they're like, oh you know, it's the product team's fault and there's no accountability from leadership, you know, then that's not so good. You can't just put everything on the product team and, like Dave was saying earlier, giving them all the decision making without the pay. That's not fair, because leadership is still there to guide and that's what's important.

Speaker 1:

Andrea. Dave, it's been so great talking to you on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your insights into the growing, scaling B2B world. I'm sure many people recognise this problem and will be desperate to get a hold of your book.

Speaker 3:

Thank you very much. It's been great talking to you both.

Speaker 4:

Thank you both.

Speaker 1:

The product experience is the first. And the best Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.

Speaker 2:

And me, Randy Silver.

Speaker 1:

Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Speaker 2:

Our theme music is from Hamburg based band POW. That's PAU. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank Regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Speaker 1:

If there's not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Forward slash product tank.