No Margin = No Mission

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“Put on your Oxygen mask first before helping others”, how many times have you heard this in a preflight safety talk as the attendant wraps the rubber band around their head.

Just a little perspective here, what have folks forgotten about basic math, Money in needs to be greater than money out, period end of story. Sure you can build community and monetize later but bottom line is the longer you live on OTM (Other People’s Money) the less you take away after the work.

There are no free lunches, even if you are an 18month old start-up with 8 employees that hits the Google lottery you are not the first one in the dinner line at the end of the day. Accepting funding is giving away future earnings from an equity event. The only way to offset that is to use that money to add greater value than the money taken in, oh yes value here is market return in Dollars, Euro or Yen.

Every expenditure you ask an executive or investor for you best have an ROI that is above twenty points in less than 2 years. We only read about the long term in so many news stories because it is easy to be right when there is no accountability curve.  99.9% of business is run on a short turn ROI or it fails. Even a young company needs to think 2 year turn on concepts or the bootstrap becomes dilution of equity not increase in value.

Large companies get this, Mid-size companies become successful when they learn to live it and small companies that don’t get it become someone else’s and the founders’ slaves to investors.

Build your business model up front when you are building your product, in Lean approaches we often focus on the service and building the product but honestly the expectation is that the PM is in the background building the model.

Capitalism is bad only to those who cannot compete, the simple goal is add value to someone’s life and they will pay you. That is true for the marketplace up and down the chain. You provide value to the marketplace they pay, your employees’ provide value you pay them, your firm provides value to the financial markets you IPO, your valuation goes up as a company people invest in you, your brand gains promise and proves performance customers pick you first>

Simple Right! Produce value to the system and it returns value to you!

Honesty About Your Work and Product.

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Honesty about launch data is rare, as we all set targets we all map the results based on the target. Lying about data is classic behavior, asking about data sorting, sampling weighting and to see the entire sample is heresy.

Lying starts with simple things that have banal impacts on results and the system and migrates to a level where the results are so skewed that they ring the BS bell of a casual viewer. Once the data issues are uncovered the trail will show what you have been doing, data forensics are fairly easy.

Once you head down that road you have two choices, stop and try to reset a baseline (not Recommended) or come clean, claim an awaking and have a solution. Trying to resent will in almost any case be a path to getting caught. Data is a support for our gut understanding, the main reason you manipulate is to align results with expectations.

A great example is government data now, we hear of growth and lowering unemployment but when we look around the truth is not in alignment with the words so we look deeper for the first time. Foot note after footnote leads to the truth that there is more spin than truth.

The spin may always have been built in but the current owner is the one caught. There is a short period when a CEO or PM who inherits data can call foul and become the savior. BTW saviors in these situations get little accolades, many times they were hired to expose this and it is a test of sorts. You were hired to uncover the issues and take action, do not dwell in the past.

My suggestion, claim insight, tell the story of where things seemed to go wrong and have a plan forward. No one wins when the past is the focus, the Board or hiring manager has already taken action that was painful, move forward or be under suspicion of competence.

Winners who can fix things have no reason to dwell on the past, they have the ability to move in the right direction so do it. Those with no ideas dwell, allowing others to seize the glory. Glory goes to the detective who captures the criminal and makes the streets safe, not the scientist who determined that the victim was killed in the parlor by the maid with a candlestick.

Years ago my wife and I were guests at a preopening seminar of the Holocaust museum in DC given by the curator. The last of the series was on how did this happen not what happened. The class was all baffled on how apparently smart normal people could build a complicated system of transportation, camps, ovens, and burial pits, then process their clothes, and personal items including silver dental fillings. His answer was they only participated in one little part of a greater system of wrong doing and could ignore the reality of the whole system.

This is true for data lies, one sales guy cuts corners, an analyst only pulls the data he is told to, outliers are removed to smooth the data by the review team. Each person somewhere understands they may be participating and are.

The Product Leaders DNA

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Watching the NFL draft, I started thinking about what are the qualities of a great product leader? Through my work and role in the PDMA I get the chance to play a role in placing, sourcing and training product leaders and staff. So I thought I would put in words and share what I look for.

  1. Domain skills – Performance is a base line and includes, marketing, research, technical as needed in the company, meeting leadership, Presentation and basic project management skills, lastly is the cross functional awareness and financial modeling
  2. Energy and positive outlook – Leading teams takes its toll on the strongest of us and you need someone who has a good focus on the big picture who can demonstrate an attitude of connecting the dots, finding the connections. It may be a surprise to some but very few people in this world naturally seek new and enjoy walking without a net.
  3. Comfortable with Chaos – Change is a daily event, those who need rules and status quo do not survive
  4. Analytical – This is in nature not in training. The great product professional is always learning, asking why and has an insatiable need to learn.
  5. Willingness – you can’t ask someone to clean the toilets if you are not willing to at least empty the bucket and put away the cleansers
  6. Respect for others  - if you judge others and think about status or value skills differently you will fail. Like any sport product development takes an all hands/all skills approach. No one is “Non-Essential” (never understood that phrase) If you cannot honestly embrace that mindset get out!
  7. Active listening skills – How do you hear words, intent, sub plots, can you listen for intent or the real issue. This is a developable skill ask your best sales person how they listen and ask questions
  8. Self-awareness – Again a skill, our society is not naturally self-aware, learn who you are and be flexible with boundaries and you interactions with others

Lastly there were two questions that define the spirit of a great Product Professional –

How do we?

What if?

Deal Flow and Chaotic Innovation

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Investors look at leading indicators like the VIX (volatility index) or silicon sales for increases in CE sales. For me two things I look at are the quality of deal flow, right now it is high, and how chaotic innovation is. Deal flow for investors is at impressive levels. The team sand the maturity of the product and team is better than I have ever seen. Yes you can say that is due to lack of funding but the optimist in me sees the world pushing toward a new platform.

More importantly and for Product managers and strategists is the other thing I see, Chaotic Innovation. Innovation is the buzz with new ideas making it to some form of Proof of Concept. More and more of this is non-linear. There are times for controlled chaos (Not an oxymoron) that can yield drastic idea generation and chaotic innovation.

Yes I am a proponent of Innovation as a process, but when a team understands innovation and has learned to capture and sort innovation in to products and features that the market respects there is an additionally gift. That is the gift of being able to establish an innovation container at a moment’s notice, this is what is reflected in productive “Apollo 13” moments.

When and industry or a company is about to hit the hockey stick section of the growth curve moving into just ship mode there is often a moment. Call it the chaos before the storm. Often the early adopters have been working with your product and the feedback is piling up, but which is the trigger feature? When has it hit the value point and ease of operability that anyone can realize the value?

The pieces begin to fall in place and there is a rush to automate and secure for the just ship mode. This was evident last week in our PCAMP Smackdown. The timer was the driver for rapid test, complete, and pray for results. Features jumped in or were yanked, Marketing concepts grabbed out of the air!

Even in these “games” behavior of a team mirrors day to day life. No one had their neck rung or lost their life’s saving, Customers didn’t even call their lawyers, we all just had fun. Fun and Chaos drive incredible ideas, Work on experimenting with Chaos and innovation under pressure it will literally pay dividends.

Many companies are in a Chaos moment time to Innovate!