PM Superpower: Fish Eye View

Throw a stone, and it will hit somebody saying the word ‘Strategy’.

As cringe and blurry it may sound, it is tough to nail down definition of ‘Strategy’ specially when it has its own functional flavors too (Operations Strategy vs Sales Strategy..) but even tougher is building the ability to think strategic. Today we are going to focus on the latter, the much more tougher part.

Those interested in knowing how to build a Product Strategy, I wrote a detailed newsletter on this. But today’s post is really about building strategic thinking, specially focusing on Product Managers.

Before we go in…

What is really happening today?

Most of the Product Managers come to a point in their career (in need of growth/promotions/visibility) where they feel they should start thinking more strategic. But they often miss the guidance required in the organization to really learn and practice that.

Instead, PMs are asked to do ‘strategy theatre’ in the name of strategic thinking. Here are some examples:

1. Product Managers are asked to build a 3 year long roadmap and term it ‘strategy’

2. Product Managers are asked to do market study/research and add user personas or user needs into their roadmap planning

3. Product Managers are asked to create strategy deck for their own area.

4. PMs are asked to do ‘one year planning’ and talk to all stakeholders to get all requirements

While all of the above is important in specific context but none of the above can help PMs build strategic thinking (am I overusing this word already?) even if they did above steps 10 times over.

How most PMs learn strategic thinking?

Simple answer: Throw the PMs into water and they would learn swimming to avoid drowning. This is how most PMs grow into leaders.

Thanks to ‘empowered’ cultures where PMs own everything, including sometimes their own destiny.. PMs continue to drive initiatives, projects and features against all odds. The PMs who do this successfully a few times (and are not hated by their peers) often get the opportunity to grow within their organization, but without any formal knowledge of how to think strategically.

So, the PMs who grow into leaders often figure out the strategic part on their own, or by getting influenced by techniques of fellow leaders. But more often than not, it is self-learned.

Fenced Strategic Thinking

Even when some PMs do exhibit strategic thinking as they grow in their roles, they successfully learn their own domain and hence are able to zoom in or out as needed. I call this ‘fenced strategic thinking’ - i.e PMs getting good at strategy in their own domain and company.

A good way to figure out if a PM has built fenced strategic thinking is by knowing their ability to think long-term and critically about domains and company’s not their own. If they are not able to bring the same level of length and depth about other domains (as they do for their own), it is a sign of fenced strategic thinking.

…which brings me another term: Open-Loop Strategic Thinking

This is the whole idea behind today’s newsletter. How can PMs truly build strategic thinking that helps them problem solve in a way that builds long-term competitive edge for any business (and not just the domain/company they know) and solves problems for their users in sustained but differentiated manner. This is what open-loop strategic thinking is.

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Featured: Product Café by Zeda.io is a weekly newsletter consisting of freshly curated content and the latest news around product management, startups, UX and more. Started by Prashant Mahajan, Zeda.io is an end-to-end product management software with a mission to power PMs around the world to build better and smarter products.

Here are some Product Café newsletters that might interest you:

1. The idea behind WhatsApp Pay, DALL-E 2 and more

2. How Amazon was born using user feedback

3. The history of Product Management 

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Learning from business-schools

No matter how controversial the topic of doing MBA is… one thing that business schools have been successfully able to do is inculcate the ‘case study method’ of cracking business problems by looking at mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive approaches.

Business school students (specially those preparing for consulting interview) could practice up-to 100+ case studies from different industries by applying common case study frameworks on profitability, operational value chain, pricing framework and so on.

In parallel, PMs traditionally have not been exposed to critical thinking and problem solving methodologies (that now have been coined as Product Sense and Product Execution) early in their careers. A lot of PM roles just do some basic project management with JIRA as a placeholder or a proxy for doing product management. (Yes we do epics, stories and storypoints)

So, what exactly is real strategic thinking?

I thought of many terms and could come up with two ‘Fish Eye View’ or ‘Zoom In Zoom Out’ - you could choose any. But the main takeaway is that PMs need to be able to elastically have both the views in mind - the short term and how it affects the long-term, and also the long-term view and how does short-term fit into that.

Just like in a fish-eye view, you could see the subject of the image, but also so much more around the subject - similarly a PM should look at the task/feature/initiative at hand plus also see its viability and usefulness for the long-term.

I want to clarify it once more. It does mean sequentially. It means that a PM, in parallel, can think of the helicopter view and also the ground reality. And this ability does not come with God’s blessings, but with practice.

Now, let me take that narrative and extend it to the context of customers and business. Strategic thinking allows product managers to continuously unearth fundamental determinants that build and sustain user value in a way it also creates business value.

Example of a Fish-Eye View Approach

Product Managers need to think across certain dimensions by answering few important questions continuously and persistently:

• How does this feature/initiative map to organizational mission and strategy?

• Does the feature/initiative I am leading utilize and leverage organization’s strengths (and hence opportunities)?

• Does the feature/initiative I am leading mitigate organization’s weaknesses (and hence threats?)

• How do I measure if my feature/initiative will move the needle in the right direction (aligned to overall product goals)?

• What is the positioning of my feature/initiative with the product and of the product within the organization, and of the organization in the market?

These are just some examples of questions that should always keep running in your mind to be answered while working on any Product Management related work… ‘Zoom In and Zoom Out’ or keep a ‘Fish Eye View’. I have been creating more details view into what questions need to be answered…and that brings me to a small announcement”

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The O’Reilly Partnership :Build Strategic Thinking in PMs

In order to exactly further deep dive into ‘Fish Eye View’ concept …or how to build strategic thinking for product managers.. I am partnering with O’Reilly platform to start a live instructor led course. You can find all the details at the below link.

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How to build the right mindset? What are the frameworks ? And how to practice strategic thinking? … I would continue to write more on this topic of strategic thinking in next posts…stay tuned.

In meanwhile if you’re interested, I recently wrote about The Strategy to Execution Gap.

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