How To Get Buy-In For A New Product Strategy That Focuses On Customer Problems

Another post sharing learnings around the use of the Lean Value Tree to prioritise work at scale. The context is a company that builds software for both sides of a marketplace. It operates across multiple international borders at some scale but growth has stalled. The challenge is ensuring the focus is on the customer problem as the engine of renewed growth and then driving company-wide alignment around this.

Part 1: Use a common framework To Underpin Your Strategy

The problem with frameworks is they are only interesting to some people, other people have other priorities and at best will nod politely and not listen, at worse will challenge you along the lines of “this is all very clever, but we just need to get Sh*t done, what about this thing I have been asking for for years”.

However, the problem with not having a framework is there is no logic to why some things are prioritised and others are not, it is one rule for one area and another somewhere else. This can work for a bit, but after a while, people lose patience, then one area needs work from another area to get something done, but the priorities are all on different criteria so it is impossible to align. You can always rip it all up and start again, but then you are back to the patience problem with the added loss of credibility :(

So you need a framework, but you also need to keep it in the background. You can probably use any number of frameworks but in this example, we applied the Lean Value tree framework because the strong focus on the customer problem elevates this as the main discussion point rather than the framework itself. The other good thing about the Lean Value Tree framework is that it can work across the whole org with some bets being delivered by product, UX and tech, others by ops or marketing and some will need a combo of everyone and the focus on creating value for the customer and validating this early can short cut discussions over long-awaited features and projects.

Part 2. Use Workshops to explore all the options and build consensus

Below is the comms map we used to embed the framework into the way our company worked and get everyone focused on our customer’s problems. The main format was workshops to maximise collaboration, but the order of these, locations and invite lists was carefully structured. This post covers the first part of the map illustrated below (with detail on the meeting types at the end of this post)

Important: Think carefully how you communicate and engage people

LVT Comms Map

Workshop 1: Test & Plan

The first workshop was just with the senior product leadership — a super small group of 2! The purpose was test concept to check for a fit against our organisations and align on language and comms

Workshop 2: Testing the water with the team

The second (more important) workshop was with the whole product and UX collective. We arranged a whiteboard into columns than in classic workshop-style applied index cards to the columns and discussed why they were there and whose column they should be in.

The good news:

• The mission was pretty clear.
• And it was relatively easy to get to a shortlist of strategies

The not so good news

• We had long lists of bets/features for our external customers and internal users. But our empirical understanding about the problems these requests addressed was actually quite light and are the ability to connect solving these problems with actual measurable value created was even poorer

While this sounds far from ideal it is actually very common. In many companies, Product and UX are at the receiving end of ideas from everywhere: Sales, Marketing, Customers, C-level and there are nearly always too many!

Also while the list of strategies was short it was still 7 big items. This was a warning to me as I’d seen bigger and richer companies struggle to get that many objectives done. Also I knew that beyond product and UX there were at least half a dozen more “committed” strategies.

At this point, the exercise had already been one of the most valuable the team had undertaken. As a group, we were now all thinking about how would measure value created for the customer as we approached their next road map items.

It also showed me that we had some problems to solve.

• Too many strategies and goals
• Too many features and projects
• Not enough of them creating real new value for any customers

Workshop 3: With the CEO.

This framework has been super useful to get this far and provided a consistent way to review the whole product roadmap. But to do that we needed CEO buy-in. We kept the session super short, ran through the concept and used the material from the product and UX Workshop to highlight why we needed to review the roadmaps and focus more: No one will “buy” our products if they do not meaningfully solve problems our customer’s have.

Workshop 4: With Engineering Leadership

Around the same time, we were sharing the concept with the CEO the senior layer of the product team was tasked with looping in the engineering leadership (Delivery managers and senior leadership). In all product development, it is essential to tell the story together and to help with execution we needed our engineering colleges to be in on the process from the early stages as we would need 100% of their help and energy to validate bets as early as possible to try and identify value.

Workshop 5: Socialising The Concept With The Rest Of The Business

With the CEO on board and engineering in on the party, we now had the green light to move our focus to everyone else in the business who had historically had an ask of the product. The next workshop was in the same format as the product and UX one but this time the participants were Sales and Marketing and also we ran the workshop in one of our regional offices. This was deliberate as we wanted to achieve three things:

• Educate beyond product and UX about why customer value creation matters
• Involve more people in the conversation to gather feedback and begin to build company wide consensus around the value we could realistically create in the next cycle (3 to 6 months)

Out of the workshop, we got good alignment around the mission and exposure to a number of other regional opportunities that we had missed back at head office.

This was great, but the main win was embedding of the concept of customer value first across the organisation and start of a common language that we could all use regardless of the area of the business we worked in to describe how we were working to deliver value to the customer and stay true to our corporate mission.

Workshop 6: Aligning The Top Table

With the CEO briefed, The product team thinking about the details and a successful trial run with a diverse set of senior influencers the next workshop needs to share the progress so far with the whole exec team and get their buy-in for the process and also start the process to agree on the strategic goals for the next planning cycle.

There is probably a whole separate post on how to set strategic goals, but in this example, we used the pre-meetings to get into this topic with a pretty well-understood set of options and had already had a few key conversations about the constraints and what to focus on in the workshops prior to this one. But it is not an easy or light conversation so buckle up for a long meeting and be prepared to spin up follow-ups and 1:1s to get the senior team to an agreed position that they can all get behind. This is essential to do as if people are not aligned you end up with schisms, side projects and general frustration down the line.

Side notes:

i) Too many ideas

Product and UX teams have loads of ideas and invest time and effort into how to make the product better. But also everyone else has ideas too! This can mean the role of a product is reduced to just collecting all these ideas together and finding any way to get as many ideas done as possible. But what the Lean Value tree workshop showed us was that in just trying to keep track of all the competing ideas and trying to move some of the “obvious” ones along, no time was left to really look at what might create value for the customers. The challenge is to create the time for this and have a framework that allows the rational curation of all these ideas through the lens of customer value.

ii) Meeting types

• Loose structure and conversational: Works for small groups with high trust. Allows a very open discussion that is easy to bring back on track because of the trust and small number. Some of these are marked on the map, but you can almost never have too many of these!
• Well Structured and organised: A bigger group so people are sensitive to their time, classic workshop rules: Be prepared, manage the conversations and roll with the outcome
• Informal but focused: Essential for keeping people updated on what is going on. Because they are often over coffee or on a 1:1 walk it is easier to check the sentiments behind what people’s public opinions are. It is easy to forget these, but they add huge value and are super important in aligning people to get the best out of bigger more participatory workshops