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Product Leadership and Sticky Notes

Our industry owes sticky notes a tribute.

Sticky notes have become a prized item in the product leader toolbox. We use them to brainstorm, sort, prioritize, vote, organize, group and rearrange everything from thoughts, domains, and problems to ideas, concepts and user stories. It is fair to say we would be lost without them in the product development world today.

We have learned a lot about how to use them and how not to use them along the way. Stick-note sorceresses, whiteboard wizards & flip-chart fortune tellers might improve their craft by learning from our misfortunes and innovations over the last couple of decades, so I am sharing them here.

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The Nature of Competition

Experience is what creates sustainable competitive advantage. This is the nature of competition.

The Experience Puzzle

Economists have argued for centuries about the nature of competition.

According to Adam Smith in the 18th century, every individual “intends only his own gain.” Therefore, he exchanges what he produces with others who sufficiently value what he has to offer. One thing many economists agree on is the elusive nature of individual utility. What one man values, others often ignore. This simple fact is what drives human innovation and ingenuity.

I was taught many things about competition and positioning in the course of earning my MBA, We read about Michael Porter’s five-forces model, Jerome McCarthy’s 4 P’s of Marketing, and a few other generic frameworks, which invariably describe the relationship between cost and target positioning. One model that stuck with me, as I have seen it used countless times in business, is a more traditional contextual model for determining the positioning of your product, your services and ultimately for your firm called “The Tradeoff Triangle.”

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Measuring Loyalty

Authentic, self-determined loyalty only occurs after hard-earned, authentic trust is well established. This is true for interpersonal relationships just as it is for the relationships between customers and firms or between employees and firms. Trust is always a fundamental prerequisite to loyalty. If you are serious about earning sustainable and authentic loyalty, you must have established an authentic and thorough foundation of trust.

Once you have gained trust, the next natural step in your customer relationships is loyalty. The “buy 12 cups of coffee and get the 13th cup free” type of loyalty behaviors some companies use to bribe through discounts or freebies are not sustainable. You have to keep giving the discounts to continue to get the behaviors. The type of blind loyalty demanded by drug warlords or mafia boss “leaders” who use fear, manipulation or outright bribery is generally feigned as well. When a more powerful, more frightening or higher paying leader comes along, loyalty is quickly questioned.

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The Leadership Flip

Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.

Useful Frameworks

A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.

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The Momentum Framework

To produce momentum, develop a digital product innovation plan that is worthy of your brand, and establish a lean and adaptive strategic framework for future planning that can be used to continuously improve upon and periodically revisit, to keep the organization’s digital assets fresh and powerful, well into the future.

All of the following components are required to create and sustain software product momentum. We have summed it up with this simple formula:

Vision + Capability + Motivation + Roadmap = Momentum

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