Focus. It is a simple enough word so commonly used in general conversation, that it is often misunderstood in the Product context.
Most business leaders I have worked with believe that they have done well on the focus front, that the resources within the organization are matched up well with the initiatives that are underway. Now, the problem with that belief is that available-resource-to-incoming-material allocation is not a yardstick for focus. The right yardstick is the incoming material itself and how closely the outcome aligns with the Product Strategy.
One company I have worked with, let’s call it Acme Corp, about 80 people strong with more than half of it in the Engineering dept. It has a product MVP with paying customers. It also has two other products that are in development and is at the initial phase of starting a new product development that one customer asked for. The scope for the new product was roughly 20x the size of the product that is paying the bills. Now, talking to the leaders at the company, I can see that they have fought off an amazing number of directional pulls to settle on these. They believe that they have a good product strategy and because all these initiatives fall under the umbrella of their vision for the company, they are focused enough.
A year later, the company has lost the customer that wanted the new product and has not made progress on the in-development products. Most importantly, very little progress has been made with the product that had an initial set of paying customers.
Now, one can argue that this here is an issue with the Product Strategy and Leadership, and in some aspect it is (we’ll address Strategy in another post).
In this particular case, what I saw was a bright group of individuals, with an ambitious Product Vision, who wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that were presenting themself. From a strategy point of view, the new product presented itself as high ground, that could unlock the valley below (with a healthy amount of customers who could be potentially developed into reference customers), once the hill was captured.
The fallacy in their approach was in the belief that by merely deciding to add and prioritize the New Product into their product line, they had created a focused strategy for the Product team. Believing that the squads that were busy capturing the small hills can now somehow capture the mountain, without bringing in a new battalion.
Learning the importance of focus
2014 is the year I ventured into Product, with the inception of Blokko. This was the year that taught me all about what not to do when developing a new product. Our vision was very ambitious, coupled with inexperience in building and running a product team that resulted in an approach that spread out our small team. We worked 16 hour days for months building features that we thought had to be in the MVP (and believing that we were doing the very minimum required to get to value) but didn’t contribute at all to moving the needle on launch. This period taught us some hard lessons in Strategy, Focus and Prioritization, and we took those lessons to heart and utilized them to drive the success of our subsequent company.
How can we do this better?
Focus, as I see it, is the step between the high-level Strategy and the tactical-implementation Roadmap. It is the step to lay out the logistics for the tactics for the next phase and to communicate that well.
In the diagram above, Focus is the defining-outcomes step from which a phased Roadmap is then created.
The phased approach to Roadmaps is itself borrowed from the excellent book “Product RoadMaps Relaunched”, by C. Todd Lambardo, which I have found to be an excellent approach in practice.
A focused approach can be visualized as a series of snapshots that define the area of attack within the Product Vision space, for a particular period of time. The fundamental premise for creating Focus is that, the smaller your area of attack within the Product Vision space, the higher probability you have for success. These snapshots when put together should then be able to tell a coherent story about what the team is trying to achieve.
In other words, the focusing step can be achieved through
Adding the dimension of time to Strategy, and creating an outcome-driven phased map of what the company is trying to do
Mapping the initiatives in a specific phase to the Product Vision space, where the smaller the area of attack and more supportive the items are of outcomes defined for the phase, the higher the probability of success
Resources on the topic
Marty Cagan of SVPG on focus : https://svpg.com/product-strategy-focus/
Product Roadmaps Launched, by C. Todd Lambardo : https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction-Uncertainty/dp/149197172X
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt : https://www.amazon.sg/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951
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