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.

Identifying Stakeholders

A key part of product management is managing stakeholders, as most teams require participation, guidance, and approval from a wide range of people across the organization. But oftentimes, product managers treat all stakeholders equally in terms of focus or time expended. A key component to effective stakeholder management is identifying your various stakeholders and grouping them by need. Having this knowledge will help your product team communicate effectively with these groups, and therefore gain early alignment on goals and plans, as well as address any conflict or risk early on.

Often stakeholders can be grouped by their levels of power and interest. A simple two by two can map these out - resulting in four groups: Players, Context Setters, Subjects, and Crowd. (This matrix was popularized by the book Making Strategy: Mapping out Strategic Success.)

The needs of each of these groups are different.

Players
High Interest, High Power
- need to be managed closely
- need high-quality data/insights regularly
- get buy-in on big decisions early
- ask for feedback often

Context Setters
High Power, Low Interest
- need to be kept satisfied
- they can influence the future overall context
- raise awareness with them
- could convert them to players?

Subjects
High Interest, Low Power
- need to be kept informed, "read only" stakeholders
- make use of their interest through low-risk areas of involvement
- "goodwill ambassadors"

Crowd
Low Interest, Low Power
- not worth time to actively manage
- inform via general communications
- aim to move into Subjects

How you interact with these groups in form of the cadence, information provided, and size of audience will all vary. But it is important to keep these general needs in mind, as the more you can tailor communication to gain support or approval from various stakeholders, the more likely your initiatives are to succeed.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Have your team do a stakeholder analysis by first listing all the groups (or individuals) they know to be stakeholders for your product. Then work to sort these folks into the 2x2 matrix, paying attention to both the level of power and interest. After their needs are identified, the product manager and team can begin to create tailored communication plans, focusing on building and maintaining trust with each of the groups.

Types of Innovators

The job of a product team is to solve problems for its users and the business. We might not always think of it in this term, but that problem solving is innovation. Some problems require higher levels of innovation than others, but always that should be a goal of our product teams. A Harvard Business Review article explores the roles we take on during the innovation process, “to identify where specific people are needed and who should work together to generate new breakthrough ideas.”

HBR identified four innovation styles: Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer, Implementer

The research found that generally, these innovation styles are not evenly distributed. The most people were found to be implementers, folks who take action to put solutions into work. The least amount of people were found to be generators, those who find new problems and ideate based on their own experiences.

This is problematic for two reasons. One, the product teams you are working on are likely lack a balance of innovation styles to be insufficiently cognitively diverse. To solve the most wicked problems that rise on your product, you’ll need support from all four of the innovation arenas. And two, the style you are most likely missing is generators. If we aren’t identifying the problems, are we best serving our users?

Bringing this framework to your product team can help the team understand where they might have gaps, and which innovation styles they might need to lean into.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

After they learn about the innovator types (have them read the article, or walk them through the above graphic), ask your team which innovation style they lean toward. Is the distribution the same as the general population? Which areas are missing?

Ask them to think about how to encourage an even distribution of styles on the team, as well as how to create more generators within their team and the organization. Remember that innovation styles are cognitive state, not fixed personalities. How best can you use identifying these styles to create more true innovation on your team? How can you use this to smooth the pain points in your problem solving processes?

AI in Product

Artificial Intelligence is a HOT topic right now. With headlines like “If You Aren’t Using AI, You’re Falling Behind” and “AI is changing jobs across industries” and “Forget about the AI apocalypse. The real dangers are already here” no average person can not be thinking about AI. But as product leaders, we bring a different lens. We need to be thinking through how the ubiquity of AI and machine learning can benefit our users, our processes, our products.

To get your team thinking about how AI might affect them - and generally change the world - try having a stand-up discussion dedicated to it. These YouTube videos can be good thought-starters:
- How Will AI Change the World - a 6 minute TED Ed video
- The Urgent Risks of Runaway AI - a 15 minute TED Talk by Gary Marcus, an AI researcher

Like so many technologies and innovations, there is no one right way to incorporate AI into your product or processes. It is on us as product leaders and within our product teams to learn about the technology and the options available and determine if this will be useful. However, it is also important to understand our team’s hesitancies or excitement about the possibilities. It is hard to maximize the effects of something that you are fearful of. The below prompts can help open up discussion.

And after the discussion, if your team wants to learn more, this free learning path from Google Cloud Skills Boost could be beneficial.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Before stand-up, ask your team to watch one of the videos above that provide an introduction to some AI concepts. At stand-up, focus on how the team feels about the rise of AI, and if they have any fears or concerns.

One way to do this would be to imagine the future a few years from now. Using a whiteboarding platform, they can place themselves along a spectrum of opinion on various parts of AI. Another way could be to just ask open ended questions about their concerns or what questions they have. Likely, you’ll have a wide range of responses, as well as a wide range of familiarity with AI and its concepts.

To add some humor, maybe show your team this meme.