47. Martin Eriksson: The Decision Stack: How Strategic Alignment Unlocks Organizational Momentum

Martin Eriksson has spent three decades helping organisations figure out why they're stuck — and what to do about it.

He's been building digital products since 1994, built SaaS before anyone called it SaaS, and has worked his way through companies of every size and stage: The Financial Times, Monster, Huddle, Covestor, Cazoo, and most recently as Product Partner at EQT, one of the world's largest private investors. Along the way, he's advised over 150 companies on the thing most of them were missing: not better tools or frameworks, but the connective tissue between their strategy and the people doing the work.

Today, Martin works as a board member, strategic advisor, and leadership coach — helping founders, CEOs, and product leaders build the clarity their organisations need to move at pace. His most recent book, The Decision Stack: How Strategic Alignment Unlocks Organizational Momentum, distils everything he's learned about what it actually takes to align an organisation from vision to execution.

As the founder of ProductTank, co-founder of Mind the Product — together, the world's largest product community, active in over 200 cities — and co-author of Product Leadership (O'Reilly, 2017), he has helped define the product management discipline and shaped the practices of a generation of product leaders.

Transcript

Intro 0:00

What's it worth? Uh uh. Uh-uh. What's it worth? Uh-uh. Uh-uh.

Simon Hill 0:09

Welcome once again to the Total Innovation Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Simon Hill. Most organizations don't struggle because they lack ideas. They struggle because they lack decision pathways around those ideas and fail to connect them adequately. Vision often sits in one place. Strategy lives in a slide, a slide deck. Objectives are tracked somewhere else. Teams are empowered, but often without absolute clarity. And somewhere between autonomy and alignment, velocity turns into noise. Because speed without direction isn't a competitive advantage. It's organized chaos. Today's guest is an old friend. We go back to the early London tech days, the Huddle years, the product tank, uh, everything just getting started, really, a small scene where you knew most people in the room and usually ended up in the pub with them afterwards. We've worked together, swap notes for years, and had quite a lot of fun along the way. Since then, he's gone on to shape how a generation of product leaders think. He founded Product Tank, co-founded Mind the Product, together the world's largest product community, now active in over 200 cities globally. He co-authored product leadership, he's been an operator, a founder, an investor, a product partner with EQT. He's built an operating model and supported more than 200 portfolio companies in doing so. And now he's the author of a new book, which has just come out, The Decision Stack. I was fortunate enough to be asked to pre-read it. And I'll say this up front, it's great. One of those books that makes you stop, put it down, and look at your own organization differently. It isn't a book about product management, it's a book about how decisions flow or don't inside organizations and why coherence, not just empowerment, determines whether teams create real velocity and real value. And with that, Martin, welcome to the podcast.

Martin Eriksson 2:05

Thanks so much for having me, Simon. And thanks for that lovely intro.

Simon Hill 2:08

You sat there very still while I read all of that as well with a few smiles. I know it's always slightly awkward. Um, so as I said in my intro, you and I go back a little bit, um, maybe more than a little bit now. Uh I don't count all those years anymore. Um, so before we get into the book, let's rewind and take take people back to the early London tech days. I don't even want to put a year on it, but maybe we should. And just let's just remember what the scene was like a little bit back then in in London, in tech, um, as we were sort of building Huddle, but also you know, building products tank as well. What do you remember?

Martin Eriksson 2:47

Well, I think we're all trying to just figure it out. I think I think we're still trying to figure it out, but um, it was just a learning journey, right? Uh every startup in London, there was a lot more buzz uh for sure. Uh suddenly everything was coalescing around Silicon Roundabout suddenly. Um and yeah, I think it was just a really exciting time to be in the in London. And you see that ecosystem kind of building up now all over Europe as well. But I think there was just something special at the at the time of that coalescing of people, talent, uh, excitement, kind of ambition in London. Um, and yeah, it was a lot of fun. But I think we're we're all just trying to figure out like how do you actually build a company, how do you build a business, how do you do this thing called SaaS, which was fairly new at the time, um, and going from there really.

Simon Hill 3:32

So, product tank, I don't know whether it was ever an a strategic intent or whether it just happened accidentally in this figging figuring stuff out that that became this, you know, this huge global movement around products. Um maybe just talk me a little bit through that. I guess was it a strategic or accidental entrepreneurial journey? Were you were you meaning to build it? It was kind of a side gig for a start. It met started in a pub, right?

Martin Eriksson 4:00

Um definitely definitely an accident. Um I started it because I was the VP product at home, um, and it was kind of lonely, right? The engineers are picking on me, the designers are making fun of me. I had no one else to talk about product stuff with. Um and so I just wanted to have a meetup where I could meet other product people and have that conversation. And the first one was 25 people in the back room of a pub here in London, and that's probably all I actually ever wanted it to be. Like that's what I needed out of it. Uh, it was an amazing first couple of events. Uh, I managed to get mostly my friends to speak those first times. Uh, and then it just kind of took on a life of its own because I obviously wasn't the only one that had that uh need and had that want of kind of meeting other product people. And so within a year, there were a hundred people coming to every London event. Uh, within two years, we'd uh kind of spun out our first events. I think Amsterdam and Manchester were the first ones. Uh, and again, it just kind of took on a life of its own. That that growth was all organic. We've never you know paid anyone to organize it, never had to, you know, do any paid marketing for it or anything. It has literally just grown organically, and like you said, is now in over 200 cities around the world, which is kind of mind-blowing.

Simon Hill 5:06

Yeah, it's a phenomenal achievement. And I I was thinking in in the build-up to today, the parallels between the product management's uh profession and the innovation profession, which although it possibly, I don't know how close you are to the sort of day-to-day life of an innovation manager versus a product manager, but it probably possibly feels like innovation's quite mature. However, it doesn't really have a professional body, it's not really got a you know a very clear job description around it, and it can be, as you've described it, quite lonely, right? There's often not that many people inside the organization who are explicitly doing that role. They sit in slightly weird pockets quite often that can often get bounced around in slightly different areas with a very horizontal uh need across the organization, um, and slightly odd lines of autonomy and and decision ability as well. So I suspect there's quite a lot of parallels between certainly the early product manager and the early innovation manager, and maybe maybe all the way through as well. I don't know if you have a reflection on that.

Martin Eriksson 6:08

No, I think that's that sounds very true. Uh, I think products, you still every once in a while get people coming to you know, product tank and minor product events who are like, oh, this is what I do, right? Because their title's been something different, and they're like, oh, this is the thing that actually connects adults for me. Um, and so that that was definitely the case when we started Product Hank all those years ago. Again, I'm not gonna put a date on it. Um, but I if I think it is still true. And I think it is one of those roles, right? We're both innovation and product, where there's such generalist roles, right? And to your point, they sit in different parts of the org. There's no kind of classic, you know, you go to this school, get this degree, you become this role. And so people come from different backgrounds, they have different uh life experience, different work experience, different skill sets. Uh, and it is sort of a generalist role. So you kind of do feel a little bit in the middle of all of these things. Um, and I think in product, especially, I don't know if this is true for innovation, but curious to hear what you think. You then get a lot of imposter syndrome, right? Because you are kind of a generalist in a room full of experts, right? Because everyone else you're working with is a deep expert in either engineering or design or you know, has the MBA background or whatever. And then you're coming in there as a generalist trying to sit across uh all of those and connect the dots for all of those. And it can be a bit of a challenge.

Simon Hill 7:20

Yeah, I think there are many, many parallels actually, and and quite possibly because innovation is very closely aligned to products in many organizations, not exclusively, but but quite often, um, at least philosophically, I think should be, right? From uh from a business perspective. Um the other parallel is building a community, right? You you built, you found this community of need, um, or maybe want, or maybe both, um, that that kind of that just came together. And as you said, you didn't really put, you know, you weren't paying people to speak, you weren't necessarily paying people to, you weren't paying people to to spin these things up either. So what did you learn about community, I guess, um, and also the the intrinsic value of that of that community um as as you go and grow? A topic you know is close to my heart because of, you know, I very much, very much believe in the global innovation movement is driven by an open community of uh of change makers.

Martin Eriksson 8:19

I think it really comes down to authenticity for me. I think the community side of things, and and I think why Product Tank grew uh the way it did, and then Mind the Product, the kind of conference and for-profit side of it, is really because it was authentically built to solve that need, right? And we were all uh so I founded Product Tank, and then I met uh two co-founders who we co-founded Mind the Product together. But we were all product people, we were all kind of in these startup modes, we were all trying to figure this stuff out and really using this community as a way to help scratch that uh uh that itch, right? And so we built it to solve our problems. And and even then, I think as we scaled it, we realized, as good product people should do, that once you kind of start building it, you're probably not the customer anymore. So, how do you put the customer front and center? And how do you how do you make that uh central? Uh and that's one of the stories I share in the in the book, right? Is that kind of journey that we went on and redefining our vision as we started scaling a team, started hiring people for this, and putting that front and center for people who are not necessarily authentically product people, but were there to serve that community. And so I think it comes back to that real deep understanding of like who you're doing this for, why this is important, uh, and how you're there to empower them as opposed to put yourself front and center. I think that's one of the reasons, another reason that we were very successful is that it was never about us. It was never about you know the individuals that set up the organization. We were there to put create a platform to bring people together.

Simon Hill 9:43

And I think that that journey, and I wouldn't mind winding you forward then a little bit more, and part of this background is really to set the scene for you know why you're an authority in the book, which is much more beyond much more than just product, right? So we've done the huddle days, the really scrappy early stage, you know, figure it out. There's not playbooks. London didn't have all of the playbooks we really had right now either, right? The ecosystem was very early. Um, perhaps nowadays, whilst there's lots of net new we're figuring out, there are more established ecosystems, more playbooks, more wise people to come and share their experience with than the than there perhaps were circa 20 years ago or whatever it was now. Um, what does the next stage of your career add to that that builds towards getting this book out?

Martin Eriksson 10:30

So I think what happened after Huddle for me was I kind of went on that same journey a few more times, right? So I went into a couple of other startups. So uh CoVester, which is a fintech, Pelterian, which is an early AI business, Kazoo, all as that kind of first VP, CPO, um, and helping set up the product function, helping professionalize it, taking over from a founder. So that was all happening in parallel to building product tank and mind the product. Then at some point, I did go full-time on mind the product as a startup. As you said, it kind of became a business in its own right. We ended up with 20 full-time staff. Uh, in addition to the 200 meetups around the world, we had conferences in London, Singapore, San Francisco, Hamburg, and Manchester, a training business, all these sorts of things are really, again, elevating the product craft. And then as I stepped out of mind the product, at least in the day-to-day, I was still the exec chair. Um, I had this opportunity to initially part-time and then eventually full-time join EQT, which is one of the world's uh largest private investors, to help them with product challenges with their portfolio companies. So I think, as you said in the intro, kind of helping build that operating platform uh across ventures, growth, and private equity, and then helping the portfolio companies most importantly within that. And I think that's really where I got that kind of pattern matching and that richness because I ended up working closely with probably 100 companies and at a distance to nearly 200 portfolio companies, as you said in the intro. And that's really where you get that like broad view, uh, and bringing that hat of both the product operator um, but also the founder, and then obviously as an investor, board advisor, that kind of portfolio advisor, uh, I think is what kind of really brought me to where the book ended up.

Simon Hill 12:07

Great. Um, so a solid foundation. Let's talk about the build-up to the book as well. Um, it's not your first one first, so this wasn't your first rodeo. You knew what you were getting yourself into and you still did it. Um I know what that decision looks like as well. But talk to me a little bit around, you know, that that journey, what it takes from the background we've just spoken on, um, that started to get this to something that you that crystallized in your mind was worth sitting down and putting the many months of work, if not years of work, into.

Martin Eriksson 12:41

Yeah, I think as you ask the question, I kind of realized there's a common theme here to to product anchor mind the product, and that it was actually fairly organic. So I started this as a talk uh in 2019 at a product leadership event in Hamburg. And it was kind of a last-minute thing. I threw together this like idea of how to connect the dots for people and how to connect these things for our teams. And I kind of assumed it would be fairly um obvious almost to the audience. And it turns out it really wasn't, and it really unlocked uh this kind of way of thinking for a lot of people. And since then, I've been honing it. So I've been giving it as talks at big conferences, small conferences. I've been giving workshops on it in corporates, but also you know, public training workshops, and kind of honing the concept. And the pull really to finish the book was I kept getting asked when the book was coming out. So, again, that great kind of pull that you get from a market when you know that you're actually scratching an itch and you're solving a problem for people. And that was the motivation for me to take on this painful process of writing a book again. Uh, because you're right, I I have done it before. It was a lot easier the first time because partly I was doing it together with two good friends. So we had there were three of us working on this problem. Uh, and we really wrote that book as an excuse to go interview uh over 150 product leaders from around the world uh on what the best product teams look like, what that uh common commonality is. And that's what ended up being product leadership, which was published in 2017 by O'Reilly. So I knew how much work would go into that, and I knew that kind of doing it on my own was going to be even tougher. But I again, that pull from the market and you know, people I really respect in the industry kind of asking for this as a tool, telling me how much value they were getting from using it with their coaches, with their their consulting clients, that was really the pull that uh made it, yeah, made me wanted to do it basically.

Simon Hill 14:30

Well, congrats. And and you know, I don't need to teach the product person how to sell cakes here, but if you find uh if you can address an an obvious need in the marketplace that if you know, whilst it may seem like it was already addressed, was not, then you know that there it therein lays uh product market fit, I guess. Um and I agree with you, on the surface of it, what you write about does feel like it should already have been an itch that was scratched. I don't think it is, or at least it wasn't. I think possibly it is now. Um it's also a pretty accessible book, I would say, as well, right? Like I found a found a lot of personal identifying uh stories and traits within it. But let's set the scene, right? You've called it the decision stack. Um it kind of leads a little bit into what this the foundational problem of the book might be. But can you just frame that for people? Like what is what is it about?

Martin Eriksson 15:21

Yeah, it's really about connecting the dots from top to bottom and bottom to top in our organizations, right? So from the top to bottom, we're we're making these decisions. Um, and basically it's in answer of five core questions that I think every organization, every business, every product uh has to answer, which is where are we going? How are we going to get there? What matters right now on that journey? What actions are we going to take to get there? And then finally, how do we make the choices? And I think those questions are really, really simple, but it's surprising how often I go into organizations, start asking them, and you get either no answer or you get very disparate answers from people who should be in leadership or in team leads who just don't know how to answer some of those questions. And I think the decision stack is really there to highlight that like the answers to these questions, and and I and I really like to think about this as a mental model, not a framework. So I kind of don't care how organizations answer those questions, but I like to use vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and principles to do it. And if you're creating these things, the the reason I call it the decision stack is you're making decisions at every layer, right? So your vision is the first decision, right? What who is the customer you're going after? What does the world look like when you solve that problem? Then the strategy is your uh how you're actually going to achieve that. And it's a set of decisions on its own. Then your objectives are you know, what's important right now on the path towards that strategy, and you're making decisions. And so that's why it becomes this stack. And I think it's important to think about it as a stack because it's not a cascade, right? I think in so many classical strategy books, you have this like cascade where everything just flows downward and there's never kind of an upward flow. Um, but the stack for me is really only works as you know, almost Lego bricks, right? Where they connect both upwards and downwards. And again, just really empowering our individual teams to be able to ask the question why? So from the bottom up, if you're looking at a piece of works in front of you, you should be able to ask why, connect it to some goals, objectives, okay ers, whatever you're using. And then if you ask why again, that should connect to a strategy, and ask why again, that should connect to vision. But so often again, it doesn't. So it is that connection from top to bottom and bottom to top, but it's also making clear that we are making decisions at each of those steps and not trying to do everything for everyone.

Simon Hill 17:39

How do you because we started this off very much clearly putting you in the world of products, products, products? And this very much shifts you into a world of you know organizational strategy and other things. Um and I agree with all the points you've made, but how do you how do you think about that from the background we spoke about, the experience that you've got, and and and this isn't a product issue, although it sort of is a product issue as well, right? So how do you how do you reconcile, I guess, your own personal experiences into the topic that we're talking about here?

Martin Eriksson 18:15

Yeah, I think, I mean, going back to your point of like how this came to be, I think what crystallized it is that experience I had at EQT, right? When I would get involved in so many portfolio companies, and inevitably, because I am quote unquote the product guy, I get pulled in because they have a product challenge, right? Whether they're, you know, they don't feel like delivery is happening fast enough or their roadmap isn't quite right, or customers aren't gelling with a new product, whatever that kind of product challenge is that pulled me in, I would start coming in and ask these questions. I'd try to connect the dots and very quickly realize and be able to highlight to the organization that it's not a product challenge, it's not a people challenge, it's not delivery, it's strategy, right? So often these organizations that I went into just did not have the clarity of strategy that would actually let their teams execute at the pace they were expecting. And that happens for a variety of reasons, right? I think there's there's nothing, no one's fault necessarily. It's often just the natural kind of accident of growth, where as you start as a startup, especially there's you know, three, four, or five of you around a table. Everyone implicitly and explicitly understands exactly what you're doing, why you're doing it, what's important right now. But you kind of forget that as soon as you grow past that 20-ish people, you go to 50, you go to 100, you go to a few thousand, that coherence disappears, right? Unless you are very, very actively managing it and very intentional about designing it. And so that was why, again, that crystallization for me of why this was a challenge and why this needed to be written up, is I would just face that issue all the time. And to your point, it's not a product issue, it is an organizational one. And it's something the whole leadership team, the whole company needs to be uh focused on.

Simon Hill 19:51

Yeah, I was actually, I was at um an exec training course uh earlier this week uh within CIAD, teaching boards on a whole variety of different topics, um, but sort of board members and future board members. And one of the areas that wasn't we know, lots of it was sort of legal and governance, and all these other areas, and we had a session on strategy, and it was probably one of the harder sessions for people to really get their head around. Um so without leading the horse rhetorically to water on this question, you talked about this as a sort of mental model rather than a framework and a stack. And I do like the idea of the stack, the Lego brick analogy came up actually in the in this this this training session as well. Um, where do you see that the stack most commonly fractures or where it's weakest and and why?

Martin Eriksson 20:44

I do think it is sadly strategy. Like it it's funny, right? Because that should be the thing that we all know the answer to, right? There's so many strategy books out there. Most leaders have come up through an MBA program or at least some kind of business program. They're taught strategy. We read about strategy, we talk about strategy, and yet so many organizations I go into just don't have either a good one, or even if they have a good one, it's not clear to the rest of the organization. Uh, one of the headline stats I use in the book is this HBR research uh from a few years ago now, but it still feels fairly true, in that 95% of employees don't know what their company strategy is. And I think that's just a shocking headline, right? But if you actually start going in and talking to people and organizations, the really shocking one is when I go ask exec teams individually what their strategy is, they all give me different answers. And if the exec team doesn't know what the strategy is, if they don't have that clarity, how can their teams possibly, possibly know what to do, right? And so for me, that's the biggest one missing. And and again, it's not always that it's necessarily a bad strategy, it's just that it's not clear. They haven't made clear decisions, they haven't articulated it well enough, they haven't communicated it well enough to the rest of the organization. And then everything else below on that stack just kind of crumbles, right?

Simon Hill 22:00

Yeah, one of the one of the takeaways that I had actually from this session, and again, it's not rocket science in any way, shape, or form, but it is quite a hard discipline, was that you know, every board pack should have a strategy on a page on it, which isn't, you know, hugely a dynamic thing necessarily, or not a regularly changing thing, but should always have one question in the board meeting of you know, is this still true or is there anything that we need to change? And um, but it also just renders it visible. Um, and yeah, I'm openly we don't have that right now. I'm not sure that you get the same answer from across my board and business either on what is your strategy. Um, and I suspect there's very again back to this sort of parallel between innovation and the product world that you originally came from. Uh, it's impossible to do for innovation to do its job if it doesn't know that. And I suspect that most innovation teams they may say, Oh, yeah, we do know our organizational strategy, but the number of innovation projects that are so far removed from what the what the organizational strategy appears to be would widely suggest that they do not, right?

Martin Eriksson 23:04

So no, and I think that's 100% true in product as well. And and I think that is the that's the symptom, right? And again, that's where so often organizations start realizing like, wait, this isn't working, but they're looking at the wrong layer, right? And this again, the stack concept I think helps in the understanding that if something's not working on the delivery side or the innovation side, it might actually be a level up that is the problem, right? So it might be your objectives that are wrong, and if your objectives aren't working, it's probably your strategy that's wrong, and so on. And so, again, that's where the stack has been really helpful for people to try and use it as a diagnosis uh and to understand where these things are breaking down in their organizations. Yeah.

Simon Hill 23:39

Because none of them are inherently complex words, right? We've all heard the words, but actually once you start to peel back those the onion in each case, they are quite complex things, right? And I think that even the words of vision, mission are, you know, many people would would have a sense of what they were, but do they understand how they stack back to that language in the decisioning flows that we're thinking about? Perhaps not. Maybe you can just bring that to life a little bit for through a you know, through a story or an analogy.

Martin Eriksson 24:08

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the words are important as well, right? I think we we often think about strategy as like, oh, well, it's this understood concept. But even if you actually get a team around the table and ask them, you know, not even what the company strategy is, but what does strategy mean, you'll also often get different answers, right? Um, your go-to-market team is probably just focused on, well, it's the which customers I should be talking to. Product is like, well, it's what technology style, and like it's not really coherent that way either. So I think the most important thing is just to get in a room and agree with the definition is like what are we actually trying to get out of our strategy? And then we can start thinking about articulating it. But I think the the cat the kind of stacking challenge comes when you don't have that clarity, and then uh suddenly every team starts making these decisions on their own and start heading in different directions, right? So I think you know, you see this all the time when you don't have uh a lot of resources in a startup or a scale-up or in a small innovation team. You know, you're trying to build one product, you kind of identified that we're we're gonna go after you know this problem, this is what we're gonna solve. But then down to on the individual team level, you know, one team goes, okay, we're solving this problem for enterprise customer, but the team right next to them is that thinks they're solving that problem for, you know, SMBs or uh sole traders, right? And those are very different choices. And neither one is right or wrong, but if they're not aligned, they're gonna start spreading out in very different directions, start doing, you know, spreading the company too thin, not really get to product market fit, and so on. And so it's just that clarity of the choices and decisioning that you're making throughout the stack that really helps align teams, but also actually finally empower them, right? I think another reason I'm so passionate about this book is that when we wrote product leadership, the outcome of those 150 plus interviews we had was basically that the answer is the best product teams, the best innovation teams are empowered, right? Or autonomous. But that only works if they also have strategic clarity, right? If autonomy without clarity is abandonment, as they say in the book. It's basically chaos. Everyone starts running in their own direction, making all these decisions over and over again on their own in different teams with different contexts. But if you provide empowerment and this clarity, then suddenly each of these teams can go full steam ahead in the same direction and just finally actually unlock that momentum at the organizational level.

Simon Hill 26:25

So I I like this, you know, this sort of empowerment versus direction. Um, and you know, we both come from a world where we try and both live and breathe, but also you know, really, really lead with that hands-off um approach to, you know, and you built an entire global community with a very hands-off approach and just showed how incredible it can be when done. For most organizations, though, and perhaps it's because they don't have this very clear stack, or perhaps it's uh you know just human nature, you do often see see people just reverting to control. And you could argue that even OKRs are a form of control in some way, quite often poorly done. Um, and incentives are a form of control in other ways, quite often poorly done. But how do you how do leaders provide that clarity and I guess get that out their own conviction and monitoring of what's happening to know, right? Like it's like you can believe you've got a I don't think any many businesses don't think that they've got a clear strategy, they don't think that they've got a poor you know connection of the stack, yet evidence suggests that that they do, right?

Martin Eriksson 27:30

Yeah, I think the empowerment thing is is a challenge, right? I think a lot of a lot of us when we go from being the individual contributor to being a manager, it's really hard to let go of that problem-solving mentality, right? Whether you're in product or engineering, design, innovation, you your whole career up until that point has been like, I'm here to solve the problem and come up with the answer, right? And good leaders are really about asking the right questions, not providing the answers. And that's a mindset shift, right? It's not an easy one. It's it's something I still struggle with every day of like not jumping in and just giving the answer or what I think is the answer. And so I like to think of empowerment and um the decision stack as really empowering for leaders as well, because it's actually saying you have a massive role here, and it's about providing context, not control. So it's about providing a direction, which in within which your teams have a lot of freedom and empowerment to go figure out the right solution to. And I think that's a different unlock than to say, oh, you have no role here other than to coach and and you know lead people, um, or to jump in and be command and control, right? There is a there is a middle ground where you're there to provide the context, you have a lot of work to do. Like this is this is your job as strategies, looking at the big market shifts, looking at the big trends, understanding where this is going, you know, the whole world is turned upside down the last two years. Like that is your job, but then to translate that into context within which your teams have freedom to operate. And I think that is a very different kind of uh conversation than what we've been having before that around, again, those extremes of either command and control or complete, you know, autonomy hands-off.

Simon Hill 29:04

Yeah, I think it's also why this book is a wonderful book for innovation people. It may not necessarily sing out to thus. It may not from a, you know, may not feel like you know, strategy or product is yeah, I don't know, it's not a pure product, but but the background you're coming from is for innovation people. This is absolutely the wrestling match that innovators inside companies are struggling with. And quite often to get the right decisions aligned to the right uh strategic outcomes that the business is is pushing for, the person doing the work knows it. It's the organizational structure that's kind of fighting against it and often moving it away from the value-based true north that's that's that's there. I suspect if we as we keep digging in this, we're just gonna find that these two roles are almost identical from our two backgrounds without ever really realizing it as well. I want to talk a little bit about um, again, another challenge that that innovation people really struggle struggle with, which is scaling and uncertainty. So a lot of your background comes from you know, fast-moving environments, areas of high uncertainty, startup land, early stage, growth businesses. How does the stack behave in those kind of environments, do you think?

Martin Eriksson 30:18

Yeah, I think it's it's about, again, the context, right? So the younger an organization is, or, or even a division or product within a more established organization, the shorter the cycles have to be, right? So that stack looks very different timeline-wise in a startup than it does in a massive corporate, but it also looks very different, you know, the the parts of the stack within a corporate that's looking at innovation or a new product area or a new market is going to look different than the parent. Um, and so it's about having a cadence really of how do you think about not just the change of those elements of the stack, but also how often you review them, right? I think the most important thing, especially as the world is moving so quickly now, is to have a cadence of review that's actually a lot shorter than you think, right? Even in enterprise and corporate environments, it's not even about quarterly OKRs anymore. Like you might set them or and not even have to change them every quarter, but like you should be checking in every six weeks. Like, is this still the right direction? Have we learned anything new? Has the market shifted beneath us? Like, should we change direction? And I think those kind of conversations and questions should be happening more. And again, I think the stack just helps highlight those and empower people who are at the coal face, right? That's that's the thing that we have to remember. The the individual contributors, the product managers, designers, people who are out there talking to our customers, they have more insight, data, um, know what's actually working on the ground and not working on the ground. We have to have a system that lets them highlight that and bring that up and challenge the core assumptions in our strategy before it's too late, right? We should never wait for that, and you know, oh, we have a three-year strategy, let's wait until the end of three years to review it. That's how good companies die, right? It's really thinking about how how do we check in all the time? Like, has anything new, you know, changed an assumption, uh, undermined a core idea that we had, should we change direction? And I think that's where the product skill set comes in. And I think actually innovation as well has a lot of this is like, how do we de-risk these things, right? What are the tools that we have to de-risk this? So even in a world where we can build anything, like we can use those skill sets that we have to de-risk these things, right? I think um one of the core conversations I'm having a lot now on products is to bring people back to the first principles, which is uh Marty Kagan said this, obviously, godfather of product management. There's four core risks in product, right? It is is is this valuable, i.e., does the customer want it? Is it desirable? Are they willing to pay for it? Is this viable? Like, do we have a business model that can support it and pay for it? Is this um feasible, which is the the building constraint? Like, can we build this? And then is it usable? Like, can the customer actually use it? Is it you know user-friendly? Has have good UX? Those four risks are core to every digital technical innovation that we have, right? And I think that's that's true in innovation, that's true in product. And even though the feasibility risk has gone down to nearly zero, like we still can't build everything we want, the other three risks are still there, right? So we still have to think about the viability, and even more so in a world where we're probably having inference costs, we're paying for AI tooling, everything else, we still have to think about the value cost, and all those calculuses are changing. So I think thinking about how to de-risk these things is one of the core things that um innovation product people have to do, and bringing those skill sets to bear in a fast-moving environment of like not just how do we build this to test this, but like how do we do assumption testing? How do we, you know, do all these tools that we have around um, you know, uh just A-B testing or paper prototyping or you know, all these things that we can do to figure out if we're headed in the right direction, de-risk the most riskiest assumption we have before we move forward with the whole thing. I think that same skill set uh brings to bear. And I think actually the decision stack enables more because you have much more clarity of these are our strategic bets, these are our objectives, but also the assumptions that go into them. This is why we've made these choices, this is why this is important, so that if anything does come up that unlocks that or questions those assumptions, the whole organization can sense that very, very quickly, flag that up, and make the uh course change that is necessary.

Simon Hill 34:17

What is your and again, there's huge parallels, as you as you rightly say, between the the the worlds that we're talking about here. Um a lot of it's risk related. How does AI, we've got to talk talk a little bit about AI in this podcast, I know you mentioned it a little bit. How does it play into this? Obviously, you were writing the book, I would imagine, through most of the uh sort of public awareness of AI just exploding and everyone trying to figure out what the hell it was, it is going to be. We probably still mostly don't know the answers to many of that, but the language is changing very quickly. I think in the innovation world, there was a huge as we go through these change curves and mental sort of processing of it, the initial piece was all innovation is all creativity, and you can't you can't automate creativity. And I think there's a huge shift to the other side of it. That is, you know, it's lots of, as I said in my introduction to the decision stat, there's lots of black box data across the innovation value chain. It is very hard for each of those different bits you've spoken to to find to come together, and therefore it's almost impossible for innovation people to really know whether what they're doing is what the organization wants it to be doing on and should be doing in a world that's changing that quickly. So I feel like coherence in innovation land is going to be massively aided by the you know the forcing of AI of bringing these data sets together into something that is more intelligible by something that's perhaps more intelligent than than than than the than the individual human. How do you how do you view the decision stack um in the basis of you know sort of a genetic capabilities, AI capabilities, et cetera, et cetera?

Martin Eriksson 36:00

So I think there's two parts that which are important. So one is um, and this is actually one of my beta readers that highlighted this. So the the chief transformation officer at Miro highlighted this to me because I I hadn't really thought about it until then, which is the decision stack is crucial for human alignment, uh, and it's it's sorely needed for that purpose. But it's actually even more important in a world where we're starting to, you know, have agents in our teams and build stuff at the speed of machines. Because if they're not aligned, they're gonna run in different directions even faster than humans can, right? So creating this stack, having that clarity is so important, not just for our humans, but even more important as we start bringing in agents, if we start bringing in other ways of work in our organizations that build at that speed, right? Without that clarity of mission, strategy, objectives, they're gonna run off in a million different directions so much faster than any human ever could. So I think that's one side of it. I think the other side is AI is going to be are is already a fantastic toolkit to help do some of this stuff, right? I think one of the reasons people don't have coherent decision stacks is it takes a lot of work. You have to write this stuff up in like three or four different versions of everything. You have to communicate it all the time, you have to update it, you have to look back at all these assumptions that you have with new data and like did anything change? Like a lot of that is just super intensive work that AI can do beautifully for you, right? So I think we're gonna see lots of great tooling coming out. There's already people playing around with this, or agentique tooling that can help you actually make sure that you are more aligned and you have that coherence and everyone has that information in front of them or can flag up when conflicting information comes in. So I think there's there's both even more a need for it, but also better tooling, hopefully coming out for it.

Simon Hill 37:45

Hey, great. Uh I know we're we're coming slowly towards the end of this discussion. It's been great. Maybe just anchoring back into writing the book for a second, what what was the hardest part for you? Where did you find it most sticky? It was bits of the book that I when I was working on it. I just thought, oh, I'm never going to get through this this mud, right? I just don't know what I'm doing. So where where was hardest?

Martin Eriksson 38:06

I think the hardest thing, and and maybe this is a strategy analogy as well, right? Is where do you draw the line, right? Where where do you where do you choose to focus and not to focus? I knew I didn't really want to write a new strategy book. I didn't want to redefine strategy. I wanted to point to the greats, I wanted to build on the greats. So I reference, you know, Roger Martin and A. G. Lafley a lot. I I reference Richard Brumelt a lot. Um, you know, these these are amazing strategy books that are already out there in the world. I don't want to pretend that I have a better idea of what strategy is. So it's really trying to find the line of like how do I put enough information in there about what good strategy is and how those choices are necessary for the stack, but then really focus on the connection pieces, right? Like how should that connect then upwards to vision, but then also downwards into objectives. And so finding that right balance, I think, was one of the trickiest parts.

Simon Hill 38:56

And then last couple of questions. Uh one, what did you learn? What surprised you most from the book?

Martin Eriksson 39:06

I think a few things really around the implementation of it, right? Again, it's a very simple mental model, but then when you get into the sticky weeds of like how do you actually put this, bring this to life in an organization? Uh, I definitely unlocked a few new things in my head. So throughout the journey of honing the concept, I think I started, I didn't use opportunities as my core layer. I was more product focused originally. I had something like Epics from the Agile world because I was much more into the kind of the roadmap and into features. So that was a huge unlock for me in the early days, inspired by Teresa Torres, who's one of my heroes in the product world, to really recast problems into opportunities and really think differently about, you know, uh, one opportunity might be a problem to solve for a customer, but there's also opportunities to delight. There's opportunities to, you know, open new markets. Like it's a very different way to think about things. So that was one major major unlock. I think the other one for me was that OKR layer. I think it's something we all struggle with. Uh, I don't think it's a perfect system, but I think it's one of the best, best ones out there. But I think another big unlock there, and again, building on the on the greats, so Jeff Gotthelf and Josh Syden recently wrote a book that really connected the dots between how do you set out company objectives and then translate those into useful team objectives. And I think that's one that so many organizations get wrong, where you know you might have a company objective about retention, but it makes no sense to give one individual team retention as a goal. Like, where do they even start with that? Like, what does that even mean for them? And so that translation layer, again, the connecting pieces, I think were the really big unlocks throughout the journey of developing um not just the book, but the model behind it.

Simon Hill 40:45

Yeah, it's um I find it always interesting. You kind of start off with this broad idea in mind and then take all these dead ends and everything else, but you don't quite realize what you're learning until you finish the thing as well. I I I found at least anyway.

Martin Eriksson 40:57

Yeah.

Simon Hill 40:57

Um were you gonna add something there?

Martin Eriksson 41:00

Yeah, even uh even today, I think I'm I'm I'm still you know, I'm constantly coming up with things like, oh, I should add this, and I wouldn't want to add this, but you know uh now the book's in print and out there, so I'll have to do that on the blog later on.

Simon Hill 41:11

Oh, there's always version two, the uh that you could that you can write. The the the and and this is kind of linking it back to to innovation um as a as a as a case, but I'm gonna go slightly different angle than I was gonna go originally in the innovation land and probably more bright broadly generally, there's somewhat this concept of innovation theatre, but I actually think quite often it's just a failure to kill things that should be killed, right? It's okay to run experiments, but it's much more important to end them as quickly as possible when they're not the right thing. How do you think the decision stack aids with not just pushing on and starting and doing more of the right things, but also stopping as quickly as possible the wrong things?

Martin Eriksson 41:55

I think it's the stack itself, I think, is probably um about focus, right? So it it's really emphasizing that you have to make these decisions about you know your vision, where you're going, but also the strategy, where how are you going to get there, what customer groups are you focused on. And within that context, as you start new things, it's much easier than to see that, oh, this isn't serving us anymore. This isn't serving that goal, this isn't serving that objective. And so it's much more natural to kill it off. I think the other thing that I pull into that, though, is again building on the greats, is Annie Duke's thinking in bets, right? I think that's another another major unlock for people, which is to think about innovation, think about product as bets as opposed to you know these ideas that I have, because suddenly it becomes about the bet and not about the person. I think so often in in innovation and in product, we have this thing where like whoever came up with the idea becomes identified with them, and it's like, oh, this is Simon's idea. So like this is a beautiful, perfect thing, and we can never kill it because Simon's the CEO. Whereas if Simon comes in and says, Oh, I have a bet that we can do this by doing X, if that bet doesn't work, it's fine, right? It was just a bet. It's kind of a different language. And and this is where semantics sounds ridiculous, but it becomes so important the language you use in your organization.

Simon Hill 43:07

Yeah, I think I think there was a there was a piece on strategy, even where we were talking about it as a hypothesis or a set of hypotheses to be tested at quite a high level, but still that language, as you said earlier, matters. And I think sometimes people feel like strategy is this more absolute thing. It's if it were, it would be something different, right? It's not. It is it is perhaps a bet feels a little bit too flimsy at the sort of strategy level, but you know, a hypothesis is essentially a bet in in a different semantic world, right? 100%. So you're very humble, and probably your Scandinavian background makes you very humble. I think you're also one of those greats having walked in these shoes and built these communities and um and now produced this book, which is a build on everything that you've done and and more. You spoke about sort of you know goals and vision. What does what does this what is your vision? What does your personal journey look like from here? What are you hoping the book gives and and and what are you bringing to the world?

Martin Eriksson 44:00

That's a very good question. I think for the for the next year, it's very much a book tour year, right? So doing a bunch of events, podcasts, things like that to try to get this out there. I think really what I'm just hoping to unlock is better conversations, right? Within all of our organizations, that clarity I think is so important. I think empowering our teams is so important. I think in in every job I've ever had, when I've been able to empower teams and give them that context, the unlock is amazing, right? It's it's motivating, it's empowering, you get better results. And so that's really what I want out of this, to have that conversation with the world where let's let's let's empower our teams. And here's how you do that in a way that also brings momentum to your whole organization. And then I think it's about, as you said, the AI conversation right now, right? It's like we don't know what the world's gonna look like. Um, but I do think it is going to be ever more important to be thinking strategically, to be thinking about this high-level goal setting. Because even though the world's moving really, really quickly, if we don't keep coming back to those core points of focus, we're gonna get sidetracked so easily.

Simon Hill 45:01

Absolutely. Well, listen, congratulations. Um I know I'll see another picture of you flying off to some cool place to do another cool talk somewhere, somewhere very soon. Um, thank you. Thanks, Martin. What I love about this book, as I said all the way through, and hopefully you've got this sense through it, is it's a lived experience book that brings to life a lot of you know the last couple of decades of real experience from you personally and from a whole bunch of other people that have helped to inform that uh that journey, turned into something that felt blind in the obvious, probably is blinding the obvious, but isn't pulled together in the way that um that you've pulled it together. And I think it's super important. It tackles structure, not just slogans. It reminds us that empowerment without coherence doesn't create velocity, it just creates friction and chaos, as I said earlier. So whether you're running a business, a startup, a business unit in a larger company, an innovation portfolio, if the decisions do not connect, then performance will stall, right? And you may not realize it for quite some time, but that drift is happening and it's expensive for a variety of different reasons. So the decision stack, in my opinion, is a book about clarity and clarity that scales, right? That's really where we need to we need to get to. Thank you, mate, for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure. And to everyone else, thank you for listening. If this landed at all, please subscribe to the Total Innovation Podcast. This is one of many great episodes that we've had this season, and many more coming today, uh coming soon as well. And do go pick up a copy of the decision stack. We tried to get this in before it went live, but now it's live. And so go get your copy and find out where Martin's talking. As you've seen today, he's a great guy, but feeling and living this in the real world as well is something I actively encourage. So we'll share what Martin gives us in terms of links to the book and where you can you can pick up further bits of information. It is definitely worth your time. Once again, Martin, thank you very much. Thank you. It's been great.

Intro 46:56

What's it worth? Uh uh. Uh uh. What's it worth? Uh uh.