Product Stability Risk

Vision is by nature a long-term perspective - peering off into the future at an undefined point. A product vision, therefore, drives strategy, priorities, and execution through agreement on long term outcomes. But as product teams, we cannot solely focus on the long term. We must align on the short-term risks that threaten the long-term outcomes and stability, so we all understand how to navigate the product's survival.

In Radical Product Thinking, Dutt defines five categories of risk to a product. They are outlined below with some examples I’ve pulled from my experience.

Technology / Operational Risk
- Needed tech solutions are not available / feasible
- Operational issues (such as, scalability)
- Cybersecurity issues

Legal / Regulatory Risk
- Not meeting necessary compliance standards
- Risk of being sued / receiving demand letters

Financial Risk
- Running out of budget before launch/completion
- Not generating enough revenue
- On-going budget not enough to maintain product

Personnel Risk
- Product cannot survive departure of key personnel
- Resources being pulled into other projects / products

Stakeholder Risk
- Powerful stakeholders are skeptical of product / outcomes
- Potential to lose executive sponsorship

Identifying the immediate risks to your product is necessary for any team. This allows not only for mitigation of the risk, but an additional framework for prioritizing product activities. Then each activity can be placed on the below quadrant, which measures alignment to vision and stability.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask your team to think through what they think might be the biggest stability risk to the product at this moment? What category does it fall in? Are you all aligned? You might also think about risks in terms of time scale - what do you project the biggest risk to be in the next 3 months? Next year?
Once the stability risks are identified, ask what the consequences might be if the risk was realized. Then you can begin brainstorming a mitigation plan.

Inspiration via your 5 senses

Inspiration can come from a myriad of places, but often we don’t take the time to cultivate it. The author Gretchen Rubin encourages us to understand more about our five senses, and which ones we might be neglecting, as a key to unlocking more inspiration in our lives. She says, “When I started work on my book Life in Five Senses, I hoped that by tuning in to my five senses, I’d find a new source of energy, love, luck, mindfulness—and creativity. But I was unprepared for just how sparked my creativity would get! I found that when I paid greater attention to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, I ignited my imagination and my desire to create.”

By making intentional direct contact with the world through our range of senses, we can find more inspiration. Sometimes to the key to the mind is through the body. In an extreme case, some folks experience synesthesia, where stimulating one sense can trigger a seemingly-unrelated sense. For example, a sound creates a specific a color. An article simply titled Sensory Inspiration in Avant Arte explains how some artists throughout history have had almost superhuman sensory inputs and responses.

But you don’t have to be super human or call yourself an artist to solicit more inspiration from your five senses. Gretchen Rubin makes the case that just determining your most neglected sense and leaning into it can unlock inspiration. She’s created a 5 Senses Quiz to help folks identify their most neglected sense, and then provides novel ways to engage it. For example, if your neglected sense is smell, maybe find a flower shop to literally stop and smell the roses, or if it is hearing, change up the tone of your phone alarm.

Enhanced inspiration and creativity is not just for those in the design field. Creativity helps with problem solving, cultivating a growth mindset, and empathy - all traits any product team can benefit from.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask your team to take Gretchen Rubin’s 5 Senses Quiz. Compare results. Were you surprised by which sense was most neglected? Do you agree with the results? What are some ways you can “awaken” this sense more in your day-to-day?

Then just share sources of inspiration with each other. Where do you typically turn when you need a boost? A specific site / substack / podcast? A place like a museum or library or park? A person? An activity? Is that with people or on your own? Create a mini-catalog of inspiration for each other.

Personal Prioritization

Product Managers are ace prioritizers when it comes to business requirements and feature requests. However, they, along with other product team members, can suffer when prioritizing their own work. Each day our schedule and our to-do lists are an exercise in prioritization. We can approach this work in a value/effort matrix or any other sort of prioritization framework, but things like scrum ceremonies and standing meetings have a way of skewing the results.

With a full calendar it can be difficult to see what modifications can be made, and even harder to follow-through on eliminating them. But, imagining a clean slate can be a way to think through prioritization. Use this stand-up exercise to spark a discussion (afterward, maybe think about beginning to default to no to protect your calendar).

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STAND UP EXERCISE

Invite your team to an imagination exercise. Picture waking up and all your responsibilities and obligations have vanished. What do you miss? What items do you immediately add back into your schedule / to do list / life?
After making a full list, contemplate the flip side of this question - what do you fight to keep off of your calendar?
Can you use this theoretical exercise to prioritize your calendar going forward? How do you add in more of or focus on the first set of items and deprioritize or cancel the second set?

Exploring Polarity and Strategic Tension

A topic we often dive into as a product team is competing initiatives, resources, or stakeholders. We attempt to remedy through prioritization frameworks, gaining further insights, and negotiation. However, some tension, some competition in these realms, is good. Tension keeps your rope taut, able to understand the push and pull of what you are tethered to, keeping you aware of your surroundings and its forces.

If we think about our goals or initiatives in the same way, we can explore the opposing forces pushing or pulling the organization or team in several ways at the same time. Product teams that address just one of the poles in a tension are apt to miss opportunities and fail to deal with threats. Looking for the tension between opposing forces broadens the search for strategic responses and increases the prospects of taking appropriate action.

A few weeks ago we explored polarity through contradictory users. The exercise below broadens our exploration into several different forms of polarity or tension, in terms of short term and long term initiative planning.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

John Cutler wrote a list of prompts for exploring tension as a part of the annual planning process. Distill the list into a handful you believe your team will find most valuable. Add them to a white board or virtual Miro and ask each team member to choose one fill-in-the-blank prompt. Though reticent at first, my team quickly began filling in multiple prompts. Discuss what the team came up with.
And remember, strategic tensions are dynamic - they can change as the strategy is executed or the initiative develops. Revisit these statements to edit or add as needed.

Cumulative Actions

Cumulative actions are compounding effects - the sum of the whole effect is worth more than the individual effects of the parts. The phrase actually comes from medicine, where it can be lethal. Repeated consumption of a drug, even small amounts, can accumulate enough in your body to become toxic. However, we can think of it more positively in terms of actions throughout our day that can collect into a habit. About 43% of our actions or behaviors are habitual - it is how we maintain the cognitive space to function as humans.

Most daily actions evaporate. Some accumulate. To pinpoint the ones that accumulate, and identify the accumulation as positive or negative can be a very enlightening exercise. James Clear writes in his very popular Atomic Habits that, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity."

This accumulation of “votes” or actions can happen in our personal lives or our professional lives. The exercise below can help make them more intentional.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

In a white-boarding tool, ask the team to identify daily actions that are serving them, ones that they could begin to accumulate. And then in a separate column ask which actions are not serving them, and perhaps are negatively accumulating. Leaving the responses open to personal and professional scenarios opens up talk about scheduling a day, or work/life balance, or some challenges of working remotely. This exercise works especially well in a format where team members can “up vote” or +1 other’s responses.