What makes an organization a modern business operation? What do you need to do to keep your company on top of the changing industry?
Not only are modern businesses and their structures always in flux, but so are the industries in which they operate. In the fast-moving world of technology, product teams need to be empowered with contextual information and decision-making abilities to discover beneficial solutions.
Keep reading to learn how a modern business should operate, from a strategic plan to learning from failure.
Step 1: Start With a Strategy
Just as a good coach begins with a game plan, the first step to setting a modern business operation in motion is turning the company’s overall vision into an actionable strategy that defines the path to the company’s goals in terms of quantifiable objectives. Your strategy should focus on a handful of specific goals that you can reappraise as you gather information from all levels of your company.
The product vision and strategy are the bedrock of any successful organization, acting as a shared goal for all involved. Marty Cagan and Chris Jones write that while the company’s vision defines the impact you hope your products will deliver to your customers, your product strategy is the roadmap to how you’ll achieve your company’s vision. It sets out each specific team’s objectives and outlines how you plan to reach your business goals. For instance, if your company’s vision is to provide frozen breakfasts that taste like they’re homemade, your strategy will outline the steps required to formulate your product, scale up to mass production, and deliver your breakfasts to grocery stores.
Cagan and Jones argue that a well-crafted product strategy has a narrow focus. It should concentrate on no more than two or three business goals at a time—chasing too many high-priority objectives can hinder progress rather than aid it. To cultivate a strong but adaptable product strategy that stands out from those of your competitors, focus on your customers’ needs—such as what product features will have the most impact—so you can maximize the business value of your team’s efforts. In other words, a narrow strategic focus provides the most return on the work your teams do by targeting no more than a handful of user needs at once.
Since a good strategy is customer-focused, you have to gather details about your customers and then translate those details into actions. Cagan and Jones describe this as an ongoing process involving rigorous study, learning from customers, and being open to ideas that can come from anywhere. They recommend encouraging contributions from all rungs of the organizational ladder, including junior staff and anyone who interacts with the customers themselves. These details, which include who your customers really are and what value they actually derive from the products, will form the bedrock of all your strategic decisions, which you’ll put into motion via actionable objectives for each of your company’s product teams.
Step 2: Set Team Objectives
Remember, overarching business goals and visions are essential for steering your company, but they’re not effective at letting individuals and teams know what to do. Defining realistic yet challenging objectives is crucial when implementing a successful product strategy, and Cagan and Jones strongly prefer the business tools known as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Objectives should be designed to encourage creative problem-solving while also making clear how progress will be measured—teams need to know exactly what success should look like.
Cagan and Jones highly recommend using OKRs to define how you measure success. OKRs merge the qualitative nature of objectives with the more quantitative dimension of key results—all while ensuring that success is measured according to those results instead of merely the amount of work done. For example, your objective may be to develop and release a new product feature, while the key results you use to measure your progress might be benchmark dates, such as when the product goes into beta testing. OKRs shouldn’t be set in stone—a healthy back-and-forth between leaders and teams may change objectives or key results to reflect unexpected challenges or happy breakthroughs.
When putting a product strategy into action, leaders should focus on team objectives rather than objectives for managers or employees. By setting objectives at the team level, you give the individual members of a team the freedom to experiment with different approaches. After all, say Cagan and Jones, the people best suited to discover solutions are those who are closest to the problem itself. Allowing teams space for creative problem-solving encourages them to push for the best outcomes, and if at first they don’t meet with the best results, a team empowered by their leader’s respect and guidance will persist until they’re successful.
Step 3: Test, Fail, and Learn
While OKRs define the range of acceptable results and give teams targets to hit, it’s unrealistic for a leader to expect their team to achieve their goals every time. A fully empowered team that embraces experimentation doesn’t fear making mistakes along the way. Cagan and Jones write that product leaders should encourage their teams to test new ideas—including risky ones—and then analyze their failures together to find out what can be learned. Rigorous testing and analyzing failures leads to ideas being further refined while also sparking new ones. In this setting, learning from failure isn’t just about finding out what doesn’t work—it’s about understanding how every misstep lays the groundwork for improvement.
(Shortform note: Not every failure is equal—some cause risks to life and limb, as would be the case if a car’s design flaw isn’t found until it’s already in use. However, most mistakes are a normal part of life we can learn from. In Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Ozan Varol discusses how scientists, for example, approach their failures with disinterested curiosity. Allowing yourself emotional distance from failure provides the psychological safety that Cagan and Jones advocate. Varol also says that to reframe failure, you should shift your perspective away from short-term goals to the larger outcomes you’re working for. Therefore, when mistakes happen, your big-picture view lets you look beyond the “obvious” to see if there are deeper, underlying causes.)
Therefore, since failure is a tool, when teams fail to meet their objectives, don’t turn to blame as your initial reaction. Cagan and Jones point out that if your team’s expectations were already high, then failure to meet them is largely expected. However, if a team’s expectations were conservative and their efforts still led to disappointing results, then something may have gone wrong with their efforts or how they conceived of the problem to begin with. In either case, gather the product team and their colleagues, let them discuss the root causes of their setback, and ask them to explore what alternative steps they could have taken. With this approach, empowered teams are self-correcting and can produce better results in the long run.
(Shortform note: In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim dubs the kind of meeting Cagan and Jones describe as a “blameless post-mortem” in which the person responsible for an error or a failure is free to admit their mistakes without fear. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull recounts holding similar diagnostic sessions at Pixar Animation Studios so that lessons can be learned after projects are complete, bringing about a beneficial cycle in which the mistakes of one project lead to success and improvements in the next. Ideally, admitting a mistake should be rewarded, since mistakes can make the whole company stronger when they’re treated as learning experiences.)
