5 Steps to Product Strategy Powered by Stakeholders

 

As product management evolves into a critical strategic function in organisations, its effectiveness in driving both customer and business value will increasingly depend on
– and be influenced by – people outside the product team.

No wonder the bar keeps getting higher and higher for product managers to be brilliant at cross-functional collaboration!

However, most organisations focus purely on the day-to-day delivery aspect of product management as the key area for cross-functional collaboration.

Don’t get me wrong, working effectively across teams is essential at all levels, but if done only at the delivery level (no matter how effective an individual product manager is), misalignment with and poor collaboration from other teams will continue to be a recurring issue.

Like any problem, this must be fixed right at the source.

For product teams to continually focus on the most pressing customer problems, the entire organisation must understand and support them.

This is where a well-defined product strategy comes in handy.

But having a product strategy is only half the battle. Ensuring key senior stakeholders support the strategy is the other half.

This is important at two levels. The first is that senior stakeholder support streamlines funding, capacity, and prioritisation. The second is that it ensures product managers spend most of their time identifying, validating, and solving customer problems. Without such support, product managers typically spend their time fighting prioritisation battles – which they often lose!

Bringing stakeholders along on the product strategy journey is a crucial responsibility of product leaders. Achieving strategic alignment and buy-in from stakeholders eliminates several downstream challenges experienced by product teams.

This may seem easy, but most product leaders find it hard to do – especially in large complex organisations. But with an ongoing structured approach, it becomes much easier to achieve.

Here are five steps that product leaders can take to get strategic alignment from senior stakeholders:

1. Build Trusted Relationships with Individual Stakeholders

Product leaders must invest time and effort in building trusting relationships with key stakeholders individually. Not many do.

When it comes to planning or alignment, stakeholders are usually managed as a group, which leaves gaps. Product leaders must know what drives each senior stakeholder and should have clarity about their expectations from the product team.

A significant part of a product leader’s time should be spent with key stakeholders discussing, reviewing, and analysing the business, market and competitive insights and ensuring a collective understanding of product performance.

Product leaders can build robust relationships by doing the following:

• Create a stakeholder map and identify the role you expect them to play
• Be crystal clear about ‘what’s in it for them’
• Set up regular 1-to-1 time with each key stakeholder
• Ensure alignment before key operational and planning meetings

2. Share Context Early & Frequently

Most non-product leaders – whether engineering, sales or marketing – find it hard to understand product and customer context. This primarily happens because they are drip-fed information, resulting in them not getting the full context.

Product leaders must regularly share information and insights that help build a common understanding of customer problems. This includes product performance metrics, competitive analysis, and market and UX research insights.

Stakeholders should never hear about a problem or an area of opportunity for the first time in a planning meeting. The product leader’s job is to ensure key stakeholders are primed with context continuously and that it is not a one-off exercise.

Some steps product leaders can take to build customer context with stakeholders are:

• Invite stakeholders to research meetings (customer interviews, usability sessions, metric analysis, etc.)
• Provide access for stakeholders to performance dashboards and research reports
• Present insights and findings from research to stakeholders and their teams
• Publish insight reports for the entire organisation to read

3. Co-Create Strategy

One of the most effective ways to get alignment on product strategy is to involve key stakeholders in strategy formation. When stakeholders can contribute to the direction, they will naturally be more supportive of it.

An added benefit to this approach is that your product strategy will be more holistic, giving due consideration to inputs from different parts of the organisation.

A product strategy considering input from engineering, marketing, sales and customer support will deliver better customer and business outcomes.

A few things product leaders can do to co-create product strategy include:

• Create and socialise a structured planning process
• Align your planning and strategy cadence to that of your stakeholders – organising your planning meetings and sessions at the same time as the rest of the business
• Invite key stakeholders to planning sessions and make them an integral part of strategy creation with a clearly defined role and expectation
• Play back your strategy to close the loop with agreement from the stakeholder

4. Align Goals and Outcomes

Your product strategy will find support and be successful only if it is aligned with the business strategy.

Product leaders must know & understand what is important to the broader business. Business strategy and goals are critical inputs for product strategy.

Without a business strategy, the product team will only be making up a wish list of things to do rather than defining a strategic direction for the product.

To align your goals and outcomes, try to:

• Get clarity on business priorities and goals, and why they are in place
• Share with your team and make sure they understand
• Know exactly which business priorities and goals product will influence
• Ensure business priorities and goals cascade down to the team

5. Position as Shared Strategy

Once your product strategy is ready, make sure you take the time to share it with the rest of the organisation. And although it is a product strategy, make sure to position it as a collective strategy that represents thinking from different teams.

When a strategy is viewed as a collective effort, people will be more likely to buy into it than if it were presented as something created in isolation.

Some steps product leaders can take to position product strategy as a shared direction between key stakeholders includes:

• Organise a strategy roadshow and ensure key stakeholders present relevant parts of the strategy (primarily alignment with business strategy).
• Create strategy on a page artefact and ensure it is displayed across team locations
• Prep and empower stakeholders to represent product thinking and respond to questions from the rest of the organisation

Using the five steps above, product leaders can create a holistic product strategy and ensure the entire organisation backs it, resulting in successful execution. A strategy supported by key stakeholders will empower product managers to focus on solving real-world customer problems with the backing of the entire organisation.

Now, who wouldn’t like to work in such a team?

By SANDEEP GONDEKAR

https://tinyurl.com/27uhh7zw

How to build great products

Adam Waxman

 

Build at the intersection

The best products are created at the intersection of product, design, and engineering. Successful teams start, build, and finish together. Fewer handoffs, and more multidisciplinary debates and considerations.

Decide at the intersection

The best product decisions are made at the intersection of data, empathy, and instincts. Using a variety of inputs helps balance the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches.

Embrace healthy tension

There should be healthy tension between product, engineering, and design. Each team brings unique perspectives and will create a checks and balance system that ensures the end result is viable, desirable, and feasible.

Be data-informed, not driven

Measure what you can, but recognize the limitations of data and that many important things cannot be measured. If you’re interested in this topic check out my related post.

Make time horizon appropriate goals

Orient short-term goals around inputs, medium-term goals around outputs, and long-term goals around outcomes. Make sure they all connect. Deciding appropriate goals and time horizons depends on the maturity of the product (new vs existing), the type of behavior you’re hoping to drive near term (engagement, transactions), and the type of behavior you’re hoping to drive long term (loyalty, retention). The devil is in the details.

Zoom out to recognize true tradeoffs

Short term vs long term business value is a more appropriate and useful framing for many business vs user tradeoff discussions. Focusing on consistently delivering value will create more long term value than using dark patterns to boost near term conversion rates.

Think big, start small

Break down large ideas into iterative experiments that stand on their own but build towards a long term goal. Learn more from the guy who popularized this here.

What heuristics do you use to build great products?

https://bit.ly/3sytVRw

Five 'Big Idea' Biotech Trends To Watch In 2017

Luke Timmerman , CONTRIBUTOR

Different types of stories cross my radar as a biotech journalist every day.

There are partnerships between established drugmakers that need new products and the little aspiring companies that need cash to develop their thing. Stories about clinical trial results that move markets. Regulatory actions that make or break companies and investors.

But for me, there’s something especially fun about talking with scientific entrepreneurs who raised their first big wad of investment cash. They’re latching onto some kernel of insight from a discovery. Or maybe they have a vision for stitching together a set of technologies. Either way, they are venturing into a great unknown to see if they can make a big step ahead in medicine. They often have insights that put them years ahead of the lumbering drug giants.

The odds are stacked against the creators. But even in failure, startups can sometimes offer clues on where medicine is heading. Sometimes outside groups will see what's wrong and fix it. And yes, sometimes the startups will succeed, going public or getting acquired.

Here were a few trends I observed from covering startups that will remain relevant in the year ahead.

New Ideas For The Treatment Of Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s disease is a demographic iceberg. As the baby boomers get older, the national healthcare bills for dealing with it are astronomical—with one analysis estimating Alzheimer’s will gobble up one-fourth of Medicare spending in 2040. The pharmaceutical industry has had no effective response yet. Billions of dollars have been invested in targeted antibody drugs that are supposed to help clear out the buildup of amyloid-beta protein plaques that are thought to gum up memory and cognition as we age. But we’re beginning to see some signs of support for alternative scientific approaches. Cambridge, Mass.-based Yumanity Therapeutics raised $45 million to create a new drug discovery engine for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. South San Francisco-based Annexon Biosciences, a Stanford University spinout, raised $44 million to build on research that suggests you can fight Alzheimer’s by stopping the immune system from from removing synapses we need for neuronal functioning. And earlier this month, a bootstrap startup I wrote about in Timmerman Report, EIP Pharma, showed that an old anti-inflammatory drug improved cognition and memory in a small set of patients with mild Alzheimer’s. Given the urgent need, the enormous market, and the string of failures with anti-amyloid antibodies like Eli Lilly’s solanezumab, I suspect we’ll see pharma spread its eggs around into multiple baskets.

Scientists At The Movies

Much of drug discovery is based on static images of a molecular target. Chemists want to make compounds that can bind with the specific target. But many of these targets are fluid in real life, and their shape-shifting dynamics make them especially hard targets. What if instead of looking at a still photograph, you could watch a series of images, a “movie” to see how the protein targets folds in different configurations? Could you gather deeper insight into the particular toeholds that a drug could bind with? Two companies in the Boston area, Relay Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutic, each raised more than $50 million in their Series A venture financings to see if they can better capture the fluidity of protein targets and use that knowledge to discover drugs. This is a big idea that big organizations are watching closely–Morphic is backed by Pfizer, GSK and AbbVie, while Relay Therapeutics was started by Third Rock Ventures and D.E. Shaw Research.

Solving the Problem, Not Just Pushing Drugs

One reason so many people hate the drug companies is not only because of the high prices. It’s because while they get rich off selling their products, many people aren’t getting their health problems solved. Smoking is one good example. A doctor can prescribe a smoking-cessation product like Pfizer’s varenicline tartrate (Chantix) or GlaxoSmithKline's bupropion hydrochloride (Zyban). Clinical trials will tell you that only goes so far for most smokers. While the big companies bring single-minded focus to pushing their products, researchers and health insurers know that an integrated combination of drug therapy and behavioral therapy is more effective at helping people kick the habit. One San Francisco Bay Area startup, Chrono Therapeutics, told me about a clever way of stitching together drugs, digital sensors and human coaching into an integrated approach. If they can put the puzzle pieces together, Chrono should do a better job of helping a person quit than just writing them a prescription, sending them home and hoping for the best.

Drugs For Us (and Our Bugs)

The science of the microbiome has taken biology by storm the past few years. This is thanks in large part to DNA sequencing tools that are yielding an increasingly vivid understanding of how we as humans coexist with the trillions of bacteria in our guts, and on our skin. When we get along well with the bugs, we’re usually what people would consider healthy. But when something goes off-kilter with a certain kind of bug or bugs, our immune systems can go haywire, attacking healthy tissue, causing autoimmune disease. Some research suggests gut bacterial composition affects our mood, opening up interesting new ideas for treatment of depression and other forms of central nervous system disorders and mental illnesses. Exactly how biotech and pharma companies can wrestle this science to the ground and figure out how make elegant drugs based on it, is very much an open question. Cambridge, Mass.-based Seres Therapeutics, a first-mover in the field, crashed this year with a microbiome-based treatment for C. difficileinfections. But money continued to flow toward a variety of microbiome-based drug discovery efforts that are quite different. A few examples I wrote about in FORBES are Vendanta Biosciences, Synlogic, and Second Genome. Timmerman Report subscribers may also see this recent story on Axial Biotherapeutics, a Caltech spinout that seeks to exploit “the gut-brain axis” for the treatment of autism and Parkinson’s.

Shifting Power Dynamics At The Nexus Of Academia And Industry

We as taxpayers invest in basic biomedical research, largely through the National Institutes of Health. When a discovery gets made, universities sometimes get a patent, and businesses sometimes license these inventions for further development. Traditionally, these raw discoveries need an enormous amount of investment and labor before they can be made into a practical product, like a pill in a bottle. Knowing this, businesses have often obtained intellectual property from universities as if it’s roughly on the 10-yard-line and needs a successfully sustained 90-yard drive from industry to reach the end zone with a marketable product. Businesses have usually paid peanuts to obtain these licenses. But as universities have gotten more skilled at some of the basic blocking and tackling that industry does well (things like basic manufacturing of biologic drugs, viral delivery vectors for gene therapy and more), the universities have been able to drive their assets further downfield. No surprise, that has allowed academics to drive a harder bargain with industry.

Harvard notably extracted a $20 million upfront payment from Merck in March for the right to develop a set of small molecule drugs for acute myeloid leukemia that fit this bill. Juno Therapeutics and Spark Therapeutics, prominent cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy players, respectively, had to pay through the nose to get ahold of foundational intellectual property for their companies (subscribers may read my previous coverage at Timmerman Report). The potential for conflicts of interest, and abuse of taxpayer resources, is always here in such deals. It’s also common to see oversimplified critiques of any and all academic-industry deals in the mass media. But I’d argue that universities have gotten more savvy at the tricky balance of technology transfer since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 encouraged them to quit letting inventions sit on the shelf. Academia will continue to strike more financially advantageous deals for themselves in the year ahead, and it will cause continued teeth-gnashing in industry and in the press.

Luke Timmerman is the founder of Timmerman Reportand the author of "Hood: Trailblazer of the Genomics Age."

Best Selling Oncology Drugs 2016

THE TOP-TEN ONCOLOGY DRUGS ARE IDENTIFIED ON THE BASIS OF REVENUES IN 2015 AND ACCOUNTED FOR 36% OF THE TOTAL ONCOLOGY DRUGS MARKET.

The list is headed by Avastin, an oncology product manufactured by the Swiss giant Roche. The market is consolidated by six companies including Roche, Celgene, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. In terms of revenues the list is topped by Roche with 47% (including three products) in the top-ten list. This is followed by Novartis with four products and 25% share in the list.

Top-ten oncology products:

Avastin:

Used for the treatment of advanced colorectal, breast, lung, kidney, cervical and ovarian cancer, and relapsed glioblastoma. Demand for Avastin was strong, with sales growth in all regions. US sales grew (+8%), Europe sales grew (+4%) due to increasing treatment of ovarian, colorectal, lung and cervical cancer. The US is the largest market for the drug, accounting for approximately 47% of its global sales. The International region growth of 15% was driven mainly by phasing of deliveries to the public sector and approval of new indications.

Herceptin:

Herceptin sales grew 10% with continued strong growth in the US (+15%) resulting in treatment for both early and advanced breast cancer along with gastric cancer. In U.S. Herceptin displayed a positive growth of 15%. In Asia-Pacific, the main drivers of growth of 21% resulted from significant activities to ensure patient access to the medicine in China.

Revlimid:

Sales increased by 16% in 2015 compared to 2014, primarily due to the result of its indication being expanded to newly diagnosed multiple myeloma in the U.S. and Europe. Increases in market penetration, volume increases, primarily driven by increased duration of use and market share gains also contributed to the growth.

MabThera/Rituxan:

It is used for treating non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), follicular lymphoma (FL) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as well as certain types of ANCA-associated vasculitis. The product sales were 5% higher, driven primarily by growth in the U.S. (+7%) and accounts for more than half of the drug’s global sales followed by Europe. The International region grew 4%, driven by growth in the Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa sub-region and public sector sales in Latin America.

Gleevec/Glivec:

It is one of the largest selling oncology drug manufactured by Novartis. It is approved for treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia, a rare form of cancer, and gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST). Gleevac accounts for approximately 24% of the company’s oncology portfolio, and 15% of its pharmaceutical offering. Generic competition in Japan and some EU countries has resulted in declined growth. The company licensed to a subsidiary of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries the right to market a generic version of Gleevec in the U.S. in 2016.

Alimta:

Used in the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) for patients with non-squamous cell histology. The decrease in revenues has resulted from decreased demand with lower realized prices, unfavourable impact of foreign exchange rates and partially offset by increased volume. Its patent expired in Japan and major European countries in December 2015, while the US patent will expire in January 2017. Furthermore the sales are likely to be hampered by the generics from competitors in Europe and Japan.

Zytiga:

The J&J manufactured product is an oral medicine used for treating metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer in men in combination with prednisone. It is also deployed for treating prostate cancer, the second most common male cancer type in the U.S. Zytiga’s sales grew in the U.S. due to market growth and strong growth in Asia and Latin America but was offset by lower sales in Europe due to competition and share decline.

Tasigna:

It is another product for Novartis portfolio used for treatment for chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). The drug is approved in more than 110 countries for treatment of chronic and accelerated phase CML in adult patients resistant or intolerant to at least other older therapies. The drug grew 16% in annual sales in 2015.

Sandostatin:

Sandostatin is used for treating acromegaly, carcinoid tumours and other types of gastrointestinal and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours. It has been approved in 50+ countries for treating patients suffering from advanced neuroendocrine tumours of the mid-gut or unknown primary location.

Afinitor/Votubia:

It is the last drug in the top-ten oncology drug segment list due to lowest revenues. The drug is accounted for 10% annual growth rate. It is used to treat multiple conditions including kidney cancers, pancreatic cancer, rare childhood brain tumors, and benign tumors caused by tuberous sclerosis.

Jan Zachnik