#155 - Build What Matters With Vision-Led Product Management - Ben Foster

[00:01:06] Episode Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello again, my friends and my listeners. You’re listening to the Tech Lead Journal podcast, the podcast where you can learn about technical leadership and excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If you haven’t, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified for future episodes. Also subscribe to Tech Lead Journal’s various other contents on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. And consider supporting this podcast by either buying me a coffee at techleadjournal.dev/tip or becoming a patron at techleadjournal.dev/patron.

My guest for today’s episode is Ben Foster. Ben is the co-founder of Prodify and the co-author of “Build What Matters”. In this episode, we discussed how product driven and vision-led product management helps organizations deliver key customer outcomes and achieve business goals. Ben first began by describing the product management paradox and some of the common product management dysfunctions. He then dived deep into the three important aspects of a vision-led product management, which are key customer outcomes, customer journey vision, and product strategy.

I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and also learn many great insights about being vision-led and product driven in your organization to build what actually matters. And if you enjoy listening to this episode, please share it with your colleagues, your friends, and communities, and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your small help will help me a lot in getting more people to discover and listen to this podcast. And I really appreciate it. So let’s now go to my conversation with Ben after quick words from our sponsor.

[00:03:17] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I have with me Ben Foster. He’s the author of “Build What Matters”, a book about product management. So really excited to have you in the show and talk about product management, Ben.

Ben Foster: All right. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:31] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: Ben, I always love to ask my guests to first share about yourself, right? So maybe if you can share any highlights or turning points in your career that we all can learn from.

Ben Foster: Yeah, it sounds great. So anybody who’s been doing product for as long as I have, which has been 25 years now, they always have some story of how they got into it. You know, some sort of part of their journey. And for me, I accidentally got into product management as well. I started by doing QA work on this product that we had bought that was sort of like half baked. This was back in 1998 when I was just starting my very early parts of my career. And one thing led to another, you know, I started filing bug reports, and bug reports started to turn more into feature requests, and feature requests started to turn more into directions we can take with the product. And literally, one day at my desk, somebody came by and said, you know, “Hey, are you Ben? Are you the one who’s been filing all these kinds of things? Like, we want to talk to you about product management. Do you want a job in this function?”

And so I guess, I sort of like won my way in, to some extent. So I ended up kind of doing product management at a couple of different companies early on, did some consulting early. And then I was picked up by eBay, which in the Bay Area in 2001 was one of the only companies that was hiring. And eBay was really doing, you know, quite well during that time period. So I really got to like learn and work with one of the best people that were out there from 2001 to 2005 and that’s really where I kind of like cut my teeth. I took that show on the road and worked with a variety of startups, eventually moving myself over to the DC area to work for a startup that we then took public about four years later. That was a nice success.

But following that exit, I really had this interesting kind of turning point. This kind of like, you know, pivot, as you described in my career, which took me to do a combination of advisory type work, consulting, where I’m sort of like helping companies to think through how they can do product best. And then also going back and forth between doing that and also taking on these operational roles again. So most recently, just up until about a year ago, I was the Chief Product Officer at a company called WHOOP, which makes this wearable device and really enjoyed that. I was actually an advisor to the company prior to that for several years as well. And now I’m back into doing full time advisory and coaching of CEOs and product leaders with my consulting practice called Prodify.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, thank you for sharing such an interesting story, how you got into all this product management, right? Like wasn’t expected that you started as a QA, right? Then maybe because of your passion filing bug and explaining why this bug is important and blah, blah, blah, right, and so it led you into this journey into product management, yeah.

[00:05:59] Product Management Paradox

Henry Suryawirawan: So we are going to discuss about product management today, specifically topics from your book, Build What Matters. The subtitle is Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management. You started the book by sharing this statement, which I find really interesting, right? You said that product management is a paradox. I wasn’t expecting that actually, but when I read those statements, yeah, it sounds really true. Maybe if you can elaborate a little bit more, why product management is a paradox?

Ben Foster: Yeah, you know, there’s so many countervailing pressures on product managers and on product leaders. Now, are you supposed to deliver results for the customer? Yes. You know, are you supposed to deliver results for the business? Yes. Are you supposed to have immediate measurable impact? Yes. And are you supposed to have long term more qualitative results as well and make sure that the company is poised in the right position, you know, several years down the line? Yes.

So, the more you think about it, you realize that there are all these different kinds of things that are supposed to happen through product managers. As product managers, we’re supposed to provide these things to a business, and the reality is they’re all sometimes making you need to think about things in different ways simultaneously. And so I think what happens is a lot of companies or a lot of product managers really feel like they’re trapped. You know, they feel like they’ve got too many pressures on, you know, the roadmap from stakeholders, but they don’t know which ones are supposed to work on. Are they supposed to pay attention to the internal customers versus the external customers?

And what it really is about what that statement is saying with product management as a paradox is that it’s essentially an impossible position, if you’re just thinking about it as being reactive to everything else that you’re hearing. Really what makes you successful as a product manager or as a product leader is kind of getting rid of all of that noise. And instead of trying to play defense against that, trying to say no to the right things and yes to the right things, etc. You’re not that gatekeeper. You’re actually like a creator of a solution. You’re a creator of a concept and you’re the one pitching it to everybody else and getting them on board. And once you can stop playing defense and start playing more offense, then you find that there is actually a winnable solution here, but it requires thinking about it in a little bit of a different way than many people do.

[00:08:10] The Role of Product Manager

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I’m actually interested when you say that playing defense, right? Like in the beginning of my career, obviously now I have worked in many different startups and all that where product managers are there, right? But in the beginning of my career, I always imagined product manager is the one taking the decision. You know, thinking about what we should build and taking the decision.

But in practice, most of the times I think I can see the patterns where product managers become like a proxy, right? Someone else is thinking the vision and just hand it over to the product manager and product manager works with the engineering team to build it. What’s your view on this? Like, what’s your experience in the industry, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about the role of product manager actually?

Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. You know, I think you almost have to separate the role of product manager from the function of product management. Because when you get in these larger kind of organizations, sometimes, it’s product management that’s still making those decisions, even though the product manager, who’s working with the engineering team, might be sort of, you know, aligned with the rest of the product management team and saying, “Hey, here’s our puzzle piece. Here’s what we need to create, here’s why we need to create it.” And that’s going to work fine, but yes, it may be coming from some sort of a top down decision about what the prioritization is going to be.

So there’s sometimes like a little bit of a mixed bag in that. But I think where it works best is when you can define what the metrics are that really need to be moved and say this is the kind of outcome that we’re looking for for customers. This is the kind of outcome that we’re looking for for the business. And as long as you can work within these guardrails, now I can create an opportunity for creativity within the team, including both the product manager, the designer, the engineering lead, etc, to kind of come together and formulate what those solutions would end up being to solve that particular problem that they’re charged with. That’s the kind of like ideal approach, I would say.

[00:09:50] Product Dysfunctions

Henry Suryawirawan: And in your book, you actually mentioned like 10 different product dysfunctions, right? Like things where you see, like a sign or signals that product management is not working. Maybe we can share some of your favorites here for us to, you know, think about our product management function,

Ben Foster: Yeah, totally. You know, we can try to go through all 10, but it would take the entire episode. So I like the idea of focusing on just a few of these. But yeah, you know, it’s interesting because I did all this work with so many different companies as an advisor, you know, I’ve had a chance to look really in depth at, I would say at this point, maybe 60 companies. And across my advisory practice, now we’ve worked with 150 different companies, so you start to see these really emergent patterns that kind of come out. And there’s a lot of them that have been talked about through other books like The Hamster Wheel is sort of like focusing on output instead of focusing on outcomes, and I think that there’s a lot of companies that are guilty of that. But I think it’s also a reasonably well established kind of like anti pattern at this point. So I’ll focus on a couple other ones.

I think that the ones that are kind of like my favorites and the ones that I see happening a lot, one of them is The Feature Factory. That’s where companies are sort of focused really, you know, I guess as a form of output over outcomes, but really what it is, is they keep thinking that if they build that one next feature that that one customer or that prospective customer is asking for, somehow, if they just do that, then they’re going to be in a better position. And what happens is, as you continue to add more capabilities into the product, you’re also taking away something from the product, which is you’re making it harder and harder for new customers to get started, because there’s just so much there.

And it’s kind of like that first time, I don’t know if you’ve ever used like Illustrator or Photoshop, where it has these incredible capabilities, but you see all these buttons kind of like around this big blank canvas. And it’s really intimidating for getting started at the same time. And I think that sometimes that way of thinking about products of, if I just add this feature, takes you down this hole of actually building for your power customers. And all it does is actually alienate a lot of the new customers that you’re trying to capture. So I’ve seen that kind of thing happen quite a bit. And that’s because they’re really taking more direction from their customers than they should be about the priorities. It’s helpful to understand from your customers what the problems are that need to be solved, but you don’t want to outsource your innovation to your customers at the same time.

And then the second one that might be my favorite would probably be The Negotiating Table. And that’s where, kind of like what we talked about, product management gets relegated to being this gatekeeper where they have, you know, 10 times as many requests on them as there is engineering capacity to get things done. And typically what ends up happening or what it devolves into is product management basically trying to make the most vocal stakeholder the least unhappy. And that’s not a great sort of way to operate as product management either.

So there are these ways you sort of like need to work to get around these issues. Personally, my very favorite though, and I’ll kind of like end with this one, is what I call The Roller Coaster. And I think this is what happens when companies are so quick to try to experiment and try new things that they don’t really give anything a good enough chance. Let’s say that you, you know, wanted to do an experiment with a new feature and you create something and you put it out there. But you want it to change the world or move this metric in like two weeks. And the reality is this is not really going to happen in that amount of time. It’s going to require more investment than that.

And so what they essentially do is force themselves into a situation where they’re building a bunch of code or, or even sometimes a lightweight amount of code, but what they’re doing is they’re kind of like assuring themselves a false negative. Where they’re going to put something out there, it’s going to be minor. And because it’s such a short sighted kind of like thing it’s not going to influence the metrics that much. And then they’re gonna say, okay, great. Well, we learned that that’s not gonna work. So then they pivot to the next thing and they did basically just keep pivoting over and over and over.

And it’s kind of like that concept of fail fast. But just doing that over and over and over again, and you can go like fail fast, you know, countless times. And that’s just going to result ultimately in a failure for yourself as a company either. So you have to be willing to kind of take some bets and understand where your investment really needs to go beyond just saying, we’re going to experiment and that’s going to be it. If you have no sort of like direction, no sort of aim for where you’re going to go, then just like a roller coaster, you’re going to end up exactly right back where you started.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So when I heard you saying some of these dysfunctions, I can also relate to some of my previous experience, right? My personal favorite, since I come from engineering background, is actually the bridge to nowhere, which is basically over engineering for future unknowns or future plans, right? But it’s like way beyond.

[00:14:25] Product Driven

Henry Suryawirawan: So the antidotes to all these dysfunctions, you mentioned is for the company to become product driven, right? I think most of the startups these days, I would say, they self identify themselves as a product driven company. But I think in your book, right, you mentioned this may not be true. So tell us more, what does it mean to actually be product driven?

Ben Foster: Yeah. So there’s a little bit of a confusion that I think exists out there. One of them is that people confuse what’s meant when they talk about being customer driven. So let’s first talk about that term. Every company should be customer driven. You look at the success of Amazon, who, you know, really claims to be the world’s most customer driven company, etc, right. But at the same time, they have countless examples of things that they built that customers weren’t clamoring for, that they weren’t sort of like, you know, banging their their fist on the table, saying, I need this, you know.

And Jeff Bezos is famous for saying if I ask people if they want their Pringles size can sitting on their kitchen counter, like, you know, you know. Nobody was saying that they wanted that and we go ahead and build it anyway, right. Or, you know, his own category managers were not looking for this sort of like stores solution, easy stores of the time where other sellers could kind of come in and compete with them on price for the same exact commodity item. And yet they did it anyway, right? So there’s all these kind of situations where you need to build things that are beyond what your customers are necessarily asking for.

But it’s not to say that you disregard what your customers are looking for. It’s that you focus on the right parts of it. So when you interview customers, you speak with them, what you realize is that your customers are really good at telling you, although they’re going to use different language around, is the problems that they’re facing. You know, like you could say, I don’t like a cord that I have to like, you know, it gets tangled and I have to wrap it around. If you can make it easier for me to wrap the cord, that would be great. And what you really should be hearing with that is your customers hate cords, right? So how do we make something like a completely cordless solution, right? And then you get into mobile and you get into, you know, wireless charging and you get into AirPods and, you know, things like that, right? That takes you down a path that makes your customers even more happy than they even knew that they could be, right?

So that’s kind of like what product driven means, is it means you understand what your customers' problems are through the interviews and the conversations that you’re having with them. You realize that there’s a big market opportunity to go create something that’s novel, something that’s really exciting, but then you sort of like, don’t let yourself get held back by what your customers are saying. Because you’re not building your product for a customer that you’re already working with. You’re building a product for a customer that you haven’t yet met. That might be a future version of your existing customer. Or it might be a customer that you haven’t yet acquired, right?

And I think that a sales driven company, by contrast, a sales driven company is like a consultancy, where they meet the customer, they respond to an RFP, the customer says, you know, here’s this thing that I’m looking for, and then they go and build the technology to go support that one-off customer need. You see a lot of that in the area that I live in, Washington DC, right? Cause there’s a lot of things that are being built for the federal government or for contractors, the federal government. And sometimes they have literally exactly one customer for the things that they’re building. That’s sales driven because you’re trying to find a way to get to yes, to go meet what your existing kind of like target customer is looking for. But in a product driven company, you’re trying to make sure that the right product is sitting on the shelf, waiting for your customer when they’re ready to come buy it.

And that’s how you’re going to get these kind of like really phenomenal returns, because especially when it comes to software, the cost of building becomes R&D. And then you get to replicate it thousands, millions of times for this very cheap price of delivery. Once you’ve built it one time the right way, that’s going to satisfy a million different customer’s needs. But in the world of sales driven, you can almost think of your development costs not as being R&D, but as really being cost of goods sold. And that’s why it just doesn’t really scale the same way. And all the world’s top companies are all product companies.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think when I read this part of your book, you mentioned that the product that you build should cater for a broader market, right? It should not be tailored just for some few specific customers, which most likely the one you interview, the one you listen to, right? But actually you should aim to try to target for a broader, bigger market, right, where you can replicate this kind of software or system that you have built, such that you don’t have to tailor made everything to different customers, right.

[00:18:40] Vision-Led Product Management

Henry Suryawirawan: Which I think comes to the whole gist of your book. You call this a vision-led product management. We know the term vision, right? But what’s specifically different about this vision-led product management?

Ben Foster: Yeah, great question. You know, the real nugget of this vision-led product management concept is that the reason companies that are trying to be product companies, and for what it’s worth, some companies shouldn’t be. For example, my own consultancy, Prodify, is a consultancy. It’s sales driven. I want to meet the customer first, find out the ways in which they want to work, find out the areas in which they need help, and then provide that to them. But I’m not trying to replicate this to provide this to a million people either, right? You know, I’m trying to do it with a small, you know, handful at a time, and that’s perfectly fine for me. So, we’re a services based company, a sales based kind of like company, whereas, you know, the companies that we tend to work with are actually trying to be more product driven.

So if you’re a product driven company, and I always want to caveat that it is appropriate for them, it’s really critical that you have a vision for where you want to go. Because otherwise what’s going to happen is you’re going to get dragged into these discussions. The stakeholders, you know, in marketing is going to say, I need the following thing, or you’re going to get somebody in operation saying, I need the following thing, or you’re going to get a prospective customer who says, I’ll only sign if you commit to building this thing into your product, right? So now you build it. Now you’ve got to maintain it. Now the product becomes that much more cumbersome. It’s that much harder for engineering to build on top of. And eventually what happens is your product, your original kind of like product becomes so burdensome to build on that you really can’t at some point. And that’s where you see a lot of these legacy software systems and things like that sort of, like you know, ultimately ending up.

So if you have a vision for where you want to go and what problems you want to be able to solve for your customers, you’re finally in a position to play offense, as we had talked about, where you can say, okay, these are the parts of that vision that are so important to get done. These are the strategic imperatives over the next 6 months, 12 months, etc, that we really need to nail. And let’s not let ourselves get distracted by these other things. Now, I’ll separate two different kinds of customer requests, for example, that might come in. And we certainly faced this at a company that I was working at previously called Opower.

At Opower, we were building for these utility companies, they were our customers. But it was a B2B2C solution where we’re trying to help consumers save energy in their homes. And it turns out that utilities have an incentive for that to be the case as well. So we were selling this as an energy efficiency solution to utilities. And sometimes we were asked for something from a customer that we could commit to in the next couple of years, because we have these very long term contracts with them. And that could be a complete distraction and something that was going to take away from our ability to then build on top of the product and the direction we want to go. But there were other ones that were actually perfectly aligned with the direction that we wanted to go.

And so sales could be confused. Well, how come sometimes you say yes, and sometimes you say no? But if I can say here’s the vision. Here’s where we’re headed. Here’s what we want the product to be able to do. Now, if somebody wants to pay us extra money now to do development, which is the development we were already intending to do anyway, hey, that’s even better. That’s fantastic. Yes. I’ll go ahead and say yes to that, right? If you’re going to fund our sort of like R&D efforts, that’s fantastic. But every time that we do it, we’re going to build it in a way that we believe doesn’t just work for that particular customer, but that will work for countless numbers of customers that we haven’t yet started to work with. And that’s that sort of like product mindset.

But how do you make that statement to say, here’s what we’re going to build for somebody else that we haven’t yet met unless you have a vision that says what you want that product to be. Now that should be informed from the customers you’ve talked to. It’s informed from the market research that you do, etc. It’s informed in the experiments that you run. But you can’t have it just be, if you remove that from the equation, then all you’re doing is being reactive to all these forces that are sort of like around you. I come back to that initial thing that we talked about where product management is this unsolvable game, this sort of like paradox, that otherwise is really hard to break through.

Henry Suryawirawan: I think I’m going to put this question on hold first, right? So many times in a startup where funding is limited, resource is limited, I think that the challenge for product managers, the next customer that comes that promise they want to buy the solution, right, but it goes against the vision, probably it’s going to be something tricky for them to decide.

[00:22:52] Key Outcomes

Henry Suryawirawan: But let’s go first into what does it mean to be vision-led product management. So there are three key things that you mentioned in your book. The first one is about key outcome, knowing the key outcome of your product. And then building the customer journey vision. And the last one is building strategic plan based on that. So let’s go maybe to the key outcomes. What does it mean by key outcomes? How should we build key outcomes? How should we identify key outcomes for our product?

Ben Foster: Yeah, absolutely. It tends to be pretty obvious what your key outcome is internally. And a lot of companies will say that’s revenue, you know, what, that’s what we’re trying to drive. But sometimes depending on the product, it’s actually not revenue, right? So let’s say you’re working on a major part of the the LinkedIn product, right? Maybe it’s data acquisition. It’s the number of profiles and the richness of those profiles. If you’re working at an AI company, it might be the data that you can acquire for the sake of learning algorithms, right? So, you know, that it has some value to you internally as a company. And that value is something that allows you to then parlay that into even better kind of like financial outcomes for yourself down the road or to create even more customer value down the road, etc.

So what it really is all about with the key outcomes is understanding the flywheel of success. This is about the success that your customers interacting with your product will give to you. Often that actually is just sort of like subscription revenue or something along those lines. And then the other part, and this is the part that most companies are missing is understanding the key outcome of what success means for your customer. So they’ll think about it, for example, as, oh, you know, the indication that my customer is getting value from the product is they’re spending a lot of time in it, right? Or the indication that they’re getting value from the product is the fact that they renew their subscription or the idea that they have a high NPS score or something like that, right.

And I think that all of those are actually kind of like wrong. If you ask a customer, would they say that the reason they’re using the product is so that they can refer it to their friends? Would they say that the reason that they’re using this product is so that they could use this particular feature? No. Like the reason they’re using the product like in a business to business context is because they think that they’re going to get high ROI from it. Or they think that they’re going to provide better support for their customers. Or they think that it’s going to help them as a consumer to be healthier, right? Those are the reasons that they’re trying to use it.

And what I really try to convince teams of this the importance of understanding what success means from the lens of the customer. What is the problem that they really want to have solved? And I think jobs to be done is like a good framework for thinking through some of these kinds of things. But then make a dashboard around it, right? So it’s amazing, the contrast. The level of sophistication of dashboards that exist internally, where they see every click and every single thing that, you know, that a customer does interacting with their product to try to drive value for the business. But if you ask them, what’s the customer value dashboard that you have?

So let’s say, you know, go back to Whoop, this wearable device that’s really around fitness and health for the customers that are using it. Okay. Are they actually getting healthier? Is their HRV getting higher? Is their sleep getting better? Are they working out more? Are they, you know, that’s what that looks like for them, right? And if a company measures those types of things as well, then what you can do is you can finally understand the connective tissue between these, and this is such an important part of that sort of like vision-led product management. That is why we start there.

Because the role of product management is not to just move these metrics for the company in the right direction. Look, sales is also doing that. Marketing is also doing that. Operations is also doing that, right? Why do you need a product team to do that as well? And it’s because we’re doing it in a different way and we’re doing it with a different time horizon. The way in which we’re doing it is we’re saying we’re not going to help you grab more value from our customers given the value for customers that’s already been created.

The role of product is instead to say, how do we make it so it’s possible for you in sales or you in marketing to be able to sign up for even higher numbers than you even can today, at some future date that might be even a couple of years out, right? And if you can say, here’s how we’re going to interact with you. We’re responsible for the same metrics. Yes, at the end of the day, we’re going to try to drive the business forward. We’re going to try to propel it forward. But in product, we’re going to do that by amplifying the value to the customer in such a way that there’s now more room for us to go get more value for ourselves.

And an analogy that I didn’t include in the book, but I really wish that I had is this farming analogy. You know, you could sort of like reap the grain from this field, right. And you can say, well, how do we get more grain? I want to get even more yield from this farm. And you can think about how you can make an even more efficient combine, or you could manage like sort of address spoilage and things like that, that might happen in what you harvest. But the metrics that you probably want to be paying attention to, that if you didn’t pay attention to, you’re probably not a very good farmer. How healthy are the plants themselves, right? Like how rich is the soil? Are they getting enough sunlight? Are they getting enough water? Are we kind of like making sure that they’re not going to get eaten out by pests and things like that, right? These are the kinds of things that you would also focus on. So it’s like, if you’re growing great plants, then you’re going to have a better harvest.

And it’s the same kind of thing when it comes to thinking about the customer key outcome as opposed to just the business key outcome. So you understand the relation between them and then you can start to describe to everybody else, here’s what we’re building. Here’s why we’re building it. Here’s what the vision is for what we’re going to sort of like deliver for our customers. And that’s going to put us in a position to be able to harvest that much more afterwards.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I find your explanation really, really insightful. The first thing is actually to focus to what your customer value is, right? So like, what really they care about, the problems that they are dealing with. Not some fancy internal metrics that a lot of companies are building in terms of dashboard, right? So when you mentioned that it’s actually one of the dysfunction as well, I think it’s like the counting house, if I’m not wrong, right? So you focus too much on the internal metrics versus…

Ben Foster: Yeah, you got it.

Henry Suryawirawan: What you produce for the customer. And then I think when you mention about dashboard of customer value, yeah, I think it’s pretty rare to see companies building this, right. So maybe it will also be a good learning for everyone. Try to build a dashboard of your customer value, and try to make it in an increasing uptrend, right. I think that’s really, really key.

[00:28:52] Key Outcomes Pyramid

Henry Suryawirawan: And the other thing that you mentioned about this key outcome, in your book, you advise people to build some kind of like a pyramid, like outcome pyramid. So why do you think that is actually a good idea? And how can we actually build this pyramid?

Ben Foster: Yeah. So the idea of the pyramid is really just kind of understanding what rolls up to those key metrics. So if your customers are trying to be healthier, well, what does healthier mean to them? And maybe that, you know, descends into things like sleep or, you know, fitness or cardiovascular fitness or strength, you know, etc. So there’s a variety of things that can mean, and it may even mean different things to different people. So you might realize that there’s some customer segmentation that’s built into that. But really it’s a matter of breaking down what that key metric is. And what you might start to realize is that there are, and I hate to use this word as a consultant, but like these synergies that exist between the kinds of things that your customers are looking for and what success looks like for them. And these things that you’re looking for as well, that is, success for you as a business.

For a lot of subscription companies, that comes down to things like renewal or to net revenue retention, right? So if your customers are getting a lot of value, they’re going to continue to want to buy your product. And their willingness to purchase it again is a good indication that they’re actually getting the value from it, right. And for you, it’s a good indication that you’ve got a successful business because you’re increasing the value of the customers that you’re getting. It allows you to pay more when it comes to customer acquisition, etc, right. So those are the kinds of places where you really want to focus your energy.

You also might find out that there are ways that you can grow your own business, but at the expense of your customers, and you probably want to limit the number of those things that you do. Now, some business models are built on that, right, where you develop content, and then you have advertising, and your whole monetization strategy is around advertising. But advertising is coming at it like, kind of like an almost absolute negative to the customer experience. So you’re just kind of like taking a little bit off of that. eBay and a lot of marketplaces will operate off of that model as well, right? So they’re providing all these capabilities to facilitate transactions and to connect buyers and sellers and things like that. And then they’re essentially taking a tax off of those transactions, the same way that an economy works, as opposed to the way that a business works. And that’s okay. Like they’re providing a value that they’re kind of like taking that. But if all they did was just sort of say, hey, we’re going to hike fees, but we’re not going to provide anything else for that, then they’re growing as a business, but they’re doing so at the expense of their customers.

So what’s helpful is as you break down what your own success means into its constituent parts. And usually the best way of doing that is to write down the profit formula for your own company. You know, how does customer acquisition cost fit into it? How does, you know, net revenue retention fit into it? How does overall percentage retention rates of your existing customers fit into it, right? You can list all these things out and you realize these are actually the points of leverage that are highest. So if we in product can move the needle on this one or we can change the dial on this one, that’s going to have the most pronounced effect for our business. So a lot of, you know, if you’re working with a CFO, they’ll have some spreadsheets and you can plug in different numbers and you can see where you’re going to get those points of leverage.

My recommendation is you do the exact same thing on the customer side, right? Maybe it’s not a formula. Maybe it’s something that’s a little bit more qualitative. Maybe it’s something that it’s a little bit harder to kind of like decipher. But you can generally do the kind of research and things like that to figure out what the breakdown is of the value proposition of your product for your customers. And you can say, here are the points of leverage, where if I could really improve these things, that’s where I could actually get better kind of outcomes.

And so, you know, go back to that farming analogy, right? Like, you know, you want to get these healthy plants. But given the amount of water that they already have, should I be giving them even more water? Maybe that’s good, and maybe that’s actually bad for them, right? Like, I want them to be healthy, and so you need to kind of understand where you’re currently at. And understand how your product is getting used and where the value is coming from these different kinds of like factors. And then go invest in those ones that will have the most pronounced overall effect for the health of the customers that you’re working with.

Henry Suryawirawan: I think that perfectly makes sense, right? Try to break your key outcomes into different areas. Sometimes it could mean different market segmentation, customer segmentation, right? It could also mean different parts of your business, right? And I think another key insight for me when I read the book is about figuring out the leading indicators, right? So most likely if you have the ultimate key outcomes, it’s like the lagging indicator, right? It’s pretty hard to track. But when you break it down, right, you find in such a way that it becomes like the leading indicator that you can work on directly and hopefully it will translate to a better key outcome.

[00:33:12] Customer Journey Vision

Henry Suryawirawan: So now that we have probably the key outcomes, we have figured it out. So we have the pyramid. Next is about identifying the customer journey vision. So what do you mean by this customer journey vision?

Ben Foster: Yeah. You know, the reason that we use that phrase versus just saying your vision is that we wanted to emphasize the fact that a vision really does need to be grounded in that customer experience, right. So I have, in countless situations, gone to work with a new company as an advisor or a mentor for the CEO and they invite me to their office. We get to the whiteboard and they say, show me your vision. You know, I’d love to just see the vision for the company and the vision for the product. And they’re like, oh, I can nail it. I got it for you right here. We’re going to get to a 100 million dollars of annual recurring revenue in the next five years. I’m like, no, no, no, no. That’s not a vision. Like that’s a byproduct of you delivering something that’s successful for your customers, right?

Or they say something like our vision is to disrupt this industry. And I’m like, wait, nobody just disrupts an industry directly. How does an industry get disrupted? It gets disrupted because somebody solves a problem for a customer so well and in such a novel way that it actually changes customers' expectations going forward, so that all the incumbent solutions are now all a step behind. Okay, that’s what it means to disrupt an industry.

And so, in both of these cases, whether you’re talking about how much money you want to make, or what kind of impact you want to have, it always has to get rooted back into what is the customer experience that you’re going to be able to deliver. And I don’t mean that you need to define these things in terms of individual features or, UX elements that are going to live on some specific screen or, you know, something like that. It’s more about what are the metrics that you’re going to be able to move for your customers? How are you going to be able to do it in a novel way? What’s going to make it so that nobody else can kind of like, you know, replicate what you’ve built, etc?

And if you can establish what that customer experience would be, and you can define it and you can say, that’s something that’s achievable, that’s what we’re going to go do. Then as long as you can achieve it, you’re in your own driver’s seat for success as a business. So that customer journey vision is really all about looking at things, saying, you know, how does your customer get a better experience. Something that they can’t even get today. And if you can deliver on that, your business success is really a function of your customer’s success.

[00:35:36] Customer Experience Stages

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I was laughing when you mentioned about, yeah, company’s vision in terms of ARR, number of users, you know, these kinds of things, right? So I think most companies do that. But I think it’s pretty rare to have them break it down in such a way that you mentioned in the book, right? So there are a few things that I want to cover. Like first of all, in your book, you kind of like advise people to really analyze deeper in terms of customer experience stages, right? You mentioned a few times about customer experience just now, right? So like, how do we actually break it down into different stages? Do we actually need to go like low level? In fact, like inviting customer to actually see the mock up and things like that. How do you advise us to do so?

Ben Foster: So I apologize. I always use a bunch of analogies, and I’m going to go ahead and do that again here. So the analogy that I’ll use is, you ever wake up and you had this dream, and it seems like it all makes sense in your head. You’re like, it’s very detailed, it’s very thorough. And then you talk to, I don’t know, your partner, your spouse or whatever about this dream that you had, and you’re describing it. And as you’re describing it, you’re like, wait, actually, I don’t know how I got from this point to this point, but don’t worry about that. And then you kind of move on and you realize, as you’re describing it, that is actually riddled with holes and it doesn’t really make sense in different places and things like that.

Well, the same kind of thing is true when it comes to describing that customer journey, what that customer experience is going to be of using your future product. So the reason that we advocate for being pretty articulate and pretty detailed about what that could look like, is not because we’re trying to be anti Agile in some way, or saying that, you know, you have to define everything you know years in advance or something like that. It’s because if you can’t define at least one way in which that can happen, then the whole thing is going to unravel because the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

So what are all these different elements of the product vision? You know, I think that there’s this initial point of a trigger. If they’re using an existing solution today or they’re not even seeing it as a problem, so what’s going to trigger them to like, look for a new solution in the first place? And when they do, how are they going to discover your solution? So discovery is sort of like this second piece of it. There’s this question of what does it look like to trial the product? What are they looking for at the moment of, like, why are they going to download my app if they look for it in the app store, right? What are the kinds of things they’re looking for? Then there’s this point of evaluation. Maybe they’re using it during some sort of a freemium period or something like that. And what are the criteria that they’re using to evaluate this product? Then there’s engagement and whether they’re actually like using it and really getting value from it as they’re paying for it and so on. And then there’s this concept of like, let’s say renewal, which is, okay, I love this so much, I’m either gonna pay for it again. Or maybe I’m gonna establish brand loyalty. Like maybe it’s a one time purchase, like a car. But I’m like, wow, that Toyota was really fantastic. I’m like locked in. I’m gonna go buy a Toyota next time as well, right. That’s a form of renewal as well.

So those are sort of like different stages. And you might have a different combination of stages depending on the nature of the product. Maybe it has a viral loop kind of thing built into it, or maybe you have two different types of customers in a B2B2C environment. Or a marketplace has both buyers and sellers and they each have their own journey as well. So it might even be more complex than what I just described. But what you got to to indicate is how your product is going to be successful at each of these different stages. Because usually what happens is there’s too much focus on the later parts of that journey without enough focus on the beginning, right?

So you’ll get these products that are feature rich and they’re built for power users and they’re fantastic once you use them. And you build enough data that it starts to have these AI suggestions for you and things like that. It’s all great. But like, how did you get there? Like, how did they even learn that your product existed? And, you know, we see across Silicon Valley a graveyard of companies where the headstones all read, you know, here lieth some company that had a great product, but was terrible with go to market. And that’s because they didn’t really think about what the customer experience was going to be in those earlier stages: trigger, discovery, trial, right? And if you can nail those kinds of things really well, then even sometimes the lesser product will sometimes really be successful because they’re the one who kind of gets out in front.

So you have to have some answers to those kinds of questions. And if you don’t have answers to those questions, then that just indicates that’s a hole in your product strategy. You need to go figure out what that’s going to look like. So that’s why we kind of advocate for that detail is it forces you to think through it so that when you’re recounting this to somebody else, like an employee of the company, and they’re like, hey, wait, how did you get from point A to point B? You actually have an answer for that question.

Henry Suryawirawan: When you mentioned about the dream analogy, I think it’s not really an analogy. Sometimes, you know, some founders have this kind of like dream in their mind, right? And when they explain it…

Ben Foster: That’s true. That’s…

[00:40:04] Product Vision

Henry Suryawirawan: There’s a lot of holes inside there, right? Another key question that I’m sure every product manager gets asked, right? How long the vision is going to be, right? You know, like, is it one year, two years, three years? So is there any kind of tips from you? Like how long should we build the vision for and how frequent should we update it?

Ben Foster: Yeah. It’s a great question. And I think that the answer, in reality, does vary from company to company. So I hate to say, you know, it depends. But in a way, it kind of does depend. However, I will say that for almost all companies that I work with, it’s probably something in the three to five year range. You know, if you have a 30 year vision, the world’s going to change so much between now and then. I mean, you could have a vision. Let’s rewind the clock 30 years ago, right, and you could have a vision for this desktop software that was going to be totally amazing and game changing and things like that. And at that time, you only had feature phones, no actual kind of like iPhone or anything along those lines that had even been invented yet. And so, you would have had this vision devoid of this recognition of the world having, you know, switched in a lot of ways to mobile, right? So that would be a disaster if you had something that was that long that you weren’t revising within the timeframe.

And let’s take the other end of the spectrum, which is, you know, you have a six month vision. I’m going to argue that’s not really a vision. Like, you don’t actually have enough time to be able to change things dramatically enough to really go create customer value, unless you’re on the precipice of having launched something that you already envisioned a couple of years ago anyway, right? It’s not really going to be that game changing. You can iterate in that timeframe. And you can build new kind of capabilities for sure, right? And you should be doing that kind of thing. But that’s probably not as much of a vision as as much as it is like a roadmap.

In that kind of sweet spot, in the middle of three to five years, I think it’s enough time to guide the decisions that you’re going to make. To say, here are the metrics that we’re going to be able to focus on. To give the team enough flexibility and opportunity to be creative and thinking about how they solve these problems. To invest enough into it to go acquire data or all the kinds of things that you need to be able to do. But not so long that the world is likely to change dramatically within that timeframe.

So that’s why I say it varies because it depends on the nature of let’s say the industry, right? So when I was at Opower and we were solving problems for utility companies, things are changing with regard to like electric vehicles getting charged at different times and, you know, stuff like that. There are changes that are happening, but those changes are still really, really slow. But let’s look at the world of AI right now. I mean, hey, you know, that’s changed so dramatically, so quickly. If you know, there, you should probably shorten the length of the vision, because if you have a five year vision, it’s almost certainly going to be something that’s obsolete before you even get there at this stage. So I might shorten it in that case and lengthen it in some other case. And in fact, I’ve actually talked to utility companies when I was at Opower, who, and I’m not kidding, had a 100 year vision for their company. You know, amazing, right.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! 100 years. I can’t even imagine that.

Ben Foster: I know. Like nobody, nobody who works there, like their children won’t be alive by the time that gets realized.

Henry Suryawirawan: It’s like multi generational kind of vision, right?

Ben Foster: Yeah. Right. It’s, it’s nuts. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think in your book, you mentioned a few other tips for doing this vision. People have to write it, make it bold, right? And I think the other key parts that I find really interesting and important is actually to communicate it early. And in fact, in your book, you advocate different kind of ways of communicating. You have like comic strips. So building your vision in comics so that maybe people can relate and understand better. Instead of just writing a, you know, like, how many page of long document, right, where people just read word and word and word and word. So I think I advise people to go to the book and read about this part, because I think that is really, really important for building your vision right.

[00:43:43] Product Strategy

Henry Suryawirawan: After we have the key outcomes, we have the customer journey vision or the product vision. The next is to build strategy, because all those two will not matter if you don’t have a strategy to execute for your product, right? So, tell us how can we build our strategy effectively?

Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. You know, a lot of people will equate their product vision and strategy, and you often hear these terms thrown around interchangeably. And the reality is they’re two very different things, right? A vision is saying, I’m planting a flag at point B and saying that’s where we’re headed, right? And currently we’re standing at point A. And then the strategy is the general path that you plan to take to get there. And let’s take an example of a company that was going to use AI to solve some sort of a problem or, you know, as we disrupt an industry, right? Okay, well, what’s the strategy behind doing that?

Well, first, you might say we need to get a customer base. And once we get a customer base, then we’re going to acquire a bunch of data by providing them a product that is going to be freemium in nature or it’s going to be very lightweight and very easy for them to get started. And that’s what’s going to give us, you know, this very large volume of customers very early, because it’s going to be a great deal for them. And through the data acquisition that we do, we’re going to then be able to put machine learning, you know, layered on top of that. And we’re going to be able to generate insights and we’re going to use those insights and we’re going to couple them with this other capability, and we’re going to take that to market through a partnership. And then that’s going to displace this other kind of like incumbent solution. And we’re going to, you know, go beat their quality of the experience and do it at half the cost. Okay. So like that could be a strategy for how you go about realizing this customer vision. And I describe that as just one example, and obviously different companies have different ones, you know, if you’re a marketplace, your strategy is kind of complicated because do you go get buyers first or do you go get sellers first? Neither one has value until the other one is there, right? So that can be sort of like a complicated thing.

So what is important is that you detail overall what your playbook looks like for that so that you’re building the right things in the right sequence. And ideally every time you build the next thing you make the next step of the sequence easier. Or maybe it’s even make it possible, right? So it’s like you’re starting up at a sheer cliff and you’re saying, how do I get up there? Well, you’re going to have to build some sort of a pathway that makes it possible. And a lot of times you might do these switchbacks or, you know, whatever, as you’re kind of like iterating along to get there, that’s all fine. But that’s really what a strategy is all about is detailing that.

And this is where if you take the contrast of vision and strategy, the vision should be pie in the sky, it should be big, it should be a dream, you know, like I was saying, in all these ways, and that’s great. But this is where you need to make it practical. This is how we’re going to do it within the time frame, this is how we’re going to do it with the funding limitations that we have. Here’s how we’re going to do it with the customer base that we currently have. And so you have to describe it, you know, hey, we’re just going to use machine learning, we’re going to apply it on all this data. Well, you have to answer the question, where are you going to get the data from?

And for that reason, a lot of times it’s actually easier to think backwards. It’s kind of like solving a maze in reverse, right? Where you start with the end point and you say, okay, what would be the last thing that I could build in order to achieve this? Okay. Well, that means I need all the other things before it. Okay. Well, what’s the thing that I would need to be able to get there? And you can kind of keep going backward and back and back until you finally say, okay, here’s back to the starting point. And that’s really helpful. Because then you understand the relationship between all these kind of like stages that you need to get to.

And hopefully, this isn’t like, you know, a hundred chess moves. Maybe it’s more like five, you know, something like that, right? But just like if you’re playing chess, you’re not going to just randomly make individual moves or say, I like this move, it’s moved my pawn forward. But is that actually helping you to achieve the goal, given the strategy that you have? And when you think about it in that way, you start to realize that all these chess moves are part of like a larger kind of like strategy for how you’re going to get from where you are right now into finally achieving checkmate. The same kind of thing really applies here.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. You mentioned about working backwards, right? So, I think you are referring to the book written from the people who build Amazon, right, “Working Backwards”. So I think I haven’t really dealt a lot with working backwards kind of like exercise. But I think it’s going to be fun, interesting exercise for people to think, okay, here’s your vision. How do you work backwards to where you are at the moment? How can you build the step by step into that vision, right? So to speak, the direction.

[00:47:49] Product Roadmap

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think building this strategy is the first thing is about practicality, right? So you have to look at your current situation, your funding, your resource, your capability, and things like that. And that translates into this thing where people always refer to, product roadmap, right? So what’s your view about product roadmap? Some people say it’s useless. Some people, it’s the most important thing. So maybe give us a stab on what you think about it.

Ben Foster: Yeah, you know, I think the reason that that kind of response is happening in the market today where people are starting to say it’s useless is because there’s so many bad roadmaps that are out there. And when you do roadmapping well, it’s great. And when you do it poorly, yeah, you get bad roadmaps and you might say, hey, why do we even have roadmaps at all? Well, I would say the question should be reframed as, instead of why do we have roadmaps at all, it’s how do we have a better roadmap? One that is actually a valuable, like, what is a roadmap supposed to be? A communication tool internally within your company that puts everyone on the same page so that we can coordinate what we’re planning on, what we’re actually going to do, right?

So that engineering has clarity of as to where we’re headed so that they can build the right foundations and not build that bridge to nowhere, you know, that we were describing earlier. But also that they do build the right infrastructure to support the kinds of things that we are going to be working on, right? At the same time, an equally bad problem is one where you don’t build any infrastructure and now the whole thing falls over under its own weight. So you want the right kinds of decisions to be made by engineering. You want the right kinds of decisions to be made by marketing. You know, should you be changing the target market that we’re going after, advertising to a different type of person once this feature launches, etc.

And if you’re completely not having a roadmap, then what you’re essentially saying is that product management is going to go do whatever they’re going to do, and every other department is going to be completely flat footed. And they’re only going to see it in that moment. And from that point, they can start to think about how maybe they should even coordinate with this. So if marketing should have a different message about what the value proposition is, they’re not going to learn about that until we have them deliver the feature. That’s just stupid. Like, I’m sorry. That’s bad management, right? And that’s bad operations as a company. And so if your roadmap can be a helpful communication tool, great!

Now, when roadmapping goes wrong, that’s when, let’s say, for example, they give a bunch of various precise dates with very precise functionality. And then they completely miss the mark on all of those things, right? It’s not what marketing expected. It happens, you know, in twice the timeframe, etc. Now all those plans are all like blown to smithereens and it makes no sense. And now marketing’s got the wrong pitch at the wrong time. That’s bad road mapping, right? So I’d say fix the roadmap. Don’t remove the whole concept entirely of kind of like coordinating across groups.

So how do you get a good roadmap? Well, I think that there are a number of pieces of that. So far, we’ve talked about this idea of how vision leads to strategy and how strategy now can lead to roadmap. And what that really means is your roadmap in many ways, at least for the visionary parts of it, it is really pretty straightforward. It’s whatever that next stage of your strategy is. All legs in that basket, go do it. Right? Like go make that thing happen. Now, in reality, we don’t get the benefit, I think, is product people of just getting to choose to do those things. Because maybe the vision doesn’t get any sort of like monetary improvement or gains for the company for another two years.

Okay, well, that’s your longterm work that you’re doing that’s going to get 10 X outcomes, you know, two years from now. Okay, that’s great. But I guarantee you, you’re going to get fired between now and then if you’re the product leader, and you have no ROI to present within that time. So what else are you doing to also deliver business value along the way? And there are two other buckets. So that’s kind of the innovation bucket that we talked about. Now these two other buckets, one of them is what I call iteration and the other one is operation.

So iteration would be all the kind of like improvements to your existing product. As you have a product out there, you’ve got paying customers that are using it, they’re having problems with it. Either they’re usability issues, there are bugs that need to be fixed, there are new features that could be added that would be really valuable for them, etc. The competition is changing their expectations constantly. There’s just a bunch of stuff that’s out there that you should be thinking about how you can improve upon your existing value proposition for your customers, in addition to creating new value for your customers. And that’s really kind of that vision and strategy piece that we talked about.

And then that last part is operation. And that’s things like, what are you doing with the infrastructure underneath this stuff? Are there new security holes that need to be kind of like addressed? Are there new operating systems that the product needs to be able to function on top of, etc, right? So there’s a variety of things that are sort of like happening that are kind of like maintenance. And rebuilding of things to make sure that they’re modern and they can continue to be built on. And that’s a real kind of like challenge and a real problem as well.

So each of these three categories - innovation, iteration, and operation - all deserve some fraction of development to go against them, right? And depending on what stage you’re in as a company or what stage you’re in as a product, it’s going to change what percentage allocation makes the most sense. But where I see a lot of companies getting into problems is where they, and this is like, we’re going back to the dysfunctions. There was one called the business case where you just overanalyze everything, you know, you spend forever in spreadsheets instead of actually like building stuff. And that’s what happens when you try to do like, let’s say some sort of like NPV analysis or think about what the ROI is going to look like for every little nitpicky improvement you could make. You spend the whole time doing that analysis instead of just building stuff and shipping it to customers. And that happens when you’re trying to compare things that are across these categories.

So how do you compare something that’s like this big bet on some new future customer value they’re going to create that is a stepping stone in your product strategy to arrive at your multi year destination for a vision? How do you compare something that you would develop there to something that’s a usability improvement for a joint flow to something else, which is like an internal reporting mechanism to have more data analytics. Like you don’t even know what you’re going to learn from those analytics once they’re available, right? It’s almost impossible to compare these things across.

And so usually what I think is best when it comes to roadmapping is to simply make a top down decision about what the percentage allocation should be within each of these buckets. And then to only prioritize things. So you can prioritize innovative items against other innovative items. You can prioritize iteration against other iterations. So do I wanna improve this joint flow or do I wanna improve the exit flow to try to get people to not abandon, right? Or if I have an e-commerce site, do I try to get more people to, you know, add the item to their cart or do I try to get more people to check out the cart once the items are already in there, you know? And those things are pretty easy to analyze and compare to one another, right, because they’re just sort of iterative improvements.

And then on the operations side, that’s where engineering leadership can really step in and help. Because if they understand where that vision is headed, they understand the kinds of things that you’re going to be building and the kind of investments you’re going to make, then they’re in the power position to say, okay, I understand how these things all fit together. Here is the infrastructure that’s actually needed. Here’s what would be too much. Here’s what would be too little. Here’s exactly where we need to focus. We need to resolve technical debt in this particular arena. That’s where we’re going to do it, etc, right?

So now you have a good vehicle. You can say we’re going to use strategy and the sort of like sequence of the steps that we want to take strategically to define what’s going to be next within our innovation bucket. We’re going to use some sort of like comparison model, like a RICE framework or something like that, where you’re comparing like the reach and the impact and the confidence and the level of effort and things like that across these kinds of like smaller ticket items that are a little bit easier to analyze and to judge. And you’d have engineering leadership who can really play a very central role in figuring out what you’re going to do with an operation.

Where you get in trouble is trying to compare these things across. And that’s where everybody’s pet ideas comes in. And this over analysis kind of like happens, but if you can kind of just say, hey, I think that we’re at a stage where 20 percent operation, 30 percent iteration, and 50 percent innovation makes the most sense. Now you’re in a really good position to make great decisions within that framework.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I really love those three buckets that you mentioned, right? Innovation, iteration, and also operation, right? So I think for people who build roadmap, think about ratio of these three different categories. And don’t just negotiate or even debate which priority should go first, right?

[00:55:50] Product Roadmap Duration

Henry Suryawirawan: So the next question is the same, just like vision. You mentioned three to five years. How long should a roadmap be? Is it a yearly? Is it quarterly? Six weeks? Monthly?

Ben Foster: So it’s also going to vary depending on the nature of the company, right. So what you’ll see is a lot of these things have a cascading effect, right? If your vision is really, really long, then your strategic steps are going to be pretty long within that as well. And that means that your roadmap should probably be the length of about one major roadmap step.

So I’ll give it what a typical one might be for a standard kind of like, let’s say, series B, series C startup, something along those lines. Maybe they have a four year long vision. And within that, they have five major steps they want to take. Those are about three quarters of a year each, something like that. Their roadmap is about a year long. And, you know, it’s broken up into kind of like, let’s say, quarterly chunks. They do sprint iterations, you know, every two weeks. Maybe they’re doing even more frequent deployments than that. Or maybe they’re just doing it every two weeks. They can be continuous or not, it’s kind of an independent decision, I think. And they’re figuring out their new sprint plans every couple weeks, right? That’s a very typical structure.

But if you’re in one of those really hot markets that’s changing really dynamically right now. Maybe you have a vision that’s one and a half years. And you cut everything else, you know, down in, you know, incrementally as well. Maybe you have a three or four or six month, you know, roadmap and that’s it. Maybe your sprints are shorter at, you know, a week apiece or something along those lines.

So I think that that kind of thing, it is perfectly fine to vary from company to company. But you can’t tell me you have a vision that’s three weeks long and you have a sprint cycle that’s half of a day and, you know, things like that. It just, it doesn’t really like, you know, make sense because there’s just too much overhead associated with all the kind of like ceremonies and things like that that happen in that Agile development framework, that you wouldn’t want to do that frequently. It’s something in the range of like one to two weeks and therefore our roadmap tends to be in that kind of like year long range broken up into chunks.

And for each of these things, you know, you had asked before, how frequently should you update your vision? How frequently should you update your strategy, your roadmap, etc? I kind of like to use this rule of like thirds or fourths. So if you’ve got a four year vision, It’s probably something you want to update on an annual basis. If you have a one year roadmap, it’s probably something you want to update on a quarterly basis. You know, if you’ve got a strategic plan that really has milestones every year and a half or something like that, maybe every half year is about the time frame that you want to revise those things.

Because otherwise, if you only revise them at the same frequency as the whole length of the whole thing, then what that means is you’re getting to those last few days and you have no visibility into the future, you know. It’s just like driving through the fog every time you go forward, hopefully you have more visibility forward as well, right? But if you didn’t know that there was a brick wall right in front of you until right when you got there, that would be a big problem. And, you know, you wouldn’t want to operate that way as a company.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So I think yeah, the answer is like, it depends, right? It also interrelates with your vision, your strategy, your stages. So I think please analyze and assess within your internal company and your team, right? And make sure that you get the right kind of cadence, just like what Ben mentioned about the cadence. Maybe it’s like three quarter of the kind of a length that your vision is, right? So try to update that, not like towards the end.

[00:58:51] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So in the book, Ben also cover a lot of other things like how to build the right process and how to build the right team. So we won’t be covering here because we reached the end of our conversation. Before I let you go, Ben, I have one last question that I always ask my guests, which is to share what I call the three technical leadership wisdom. It doesn’t have to be technical. It can also be product. But yeah, what would be your advice for all of us here?

Ben Foster: Yeah. Sounds good. I did listen to a couple other podcasts. And I realized this is like, this is a question that you like to ask on a regular basis. So I thought about this a little bit. I’m going to make it probably a lot less technical if that’s okay. But I will say the following things.

If you want to be a more successful company, then make your customers more successful using your product. Number two, if you want to be a more successful innovator, then you have to imagine new solutions to solve real, actual customer problems. And to be a successful leader help the people on your team to succeed at both of those, right?

So leadership is really all about not doing this kind of thing yourself, but helping the members of your team to be better at this. And you, yourself, your own measure of success is the measurement of the success of the team members that are part of your group. And if you can always have that mentality, you think about that, you know, as a company with your customers. You can think about that as interacting with your customers on innovation. You can think about it as how you interact with your team members as a leader. It’s all the same kind of system over and over again, make them successful to make yourself successful.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, really, really lovely and beautiful, right? When I hear it, it’s almost like the vision-led product management translated into this wisdom. So thanks for sharing all this.

Ben Foster: Yeah, yeah, that’s, true.

Henry Suryawirawan: So Ben, if people like this conversation, they want to reach out and maybe ask you questions or they want to find more about your resources. Is there a place where they can find you online?

Ben Foster: Absolutely. Two places I would recommend. One of them is I’m on LinkedIn all the time. My handle is very easy to find, just Ben Foster, so go find that. Hopefully that’s something that you can post as well to go along with this. And then the other one is on the website. So Prodify is the name of the consultancy that I created where we share a lot of these kinds of concepts and work very closely with companies on these things. And we are always happy to just have an initial conversation, learn a little bit more about your business, share anything that we can. And if that works out to be something that ultimately yields, like let’s say, a mentorship role or something where we’re, you know, coaching the team, etc, great. But we’re always just happy to have those conversations. And the best way that you can reach us there is to go directly to our website. And that’s prodify.group. P R O D I F Y dot group. So hopefully we’ll see you there. There’s a lot of resources and things like that for you to kind of like poke around and use as well. So hopefully you’ll go check that out.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, we’ll put it also in the show notes later on. So for people who want to check it out. So thank you so much for your time, Ben. I really love this conversation and learn a lot about product management done in a better way.

Ben Foster: Awesome! Well, I love that as well. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

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