I facilitated a ‘hot seat’ session in our CEO Mastermind on Thursday. 

The topic was dear to my heart: Product strategy.

Here’s the problem the founder in the hot seat struggled with:

Five major stories—Four with high expectations from the customer base and one critical to scale the business faster. Deadline: December 31st, 2022

What’s the problem: 

• Not enough capacity to do everything: “Something has to give.”

What’s at stake? 

• One of the stories comes from a customer about to become a $1M investor in the business. 

Here’s the thing

Dealing with these dilemmas, it’s easy to take an inside-out mindset. We can’t think straight anymore because emotions mix with facts. The clear picture we had of what’s required to achieve our goals is suddenly side-tracked with customer demands. 

So how do you avoid making the wrong decision? Here are some of the valuable points made:

• “Articulate for each project whether dropping it will result in a ‘good’ problem or a ‘bad’ problem to have.” Then, prioritize avoiding the bad problems.
• “Use a framework like described in Radical Product Thinking to see (without emotion) which projects move the needle most.”
• “Make strategic customers part of the decision-making. Often, their view becomes nuanced once they see the other ‘competing’ projects to their requirements.”

A question for you to reflect upon:

Imagine you need to drop critical projects from your product strategy due to time or resource constraints: What can you do differently next time to keep an ‘outside-in’ perspective?

Be Remarkable