Examples of strategic choices in product development

Leaders coach teams to focus on users and test ideas to achieve the intended effects. When strategic choices suggest some users needs are prioritised over others it can feel like dissonance.

The idea of applying short feedback loops to test discrete bits of value with users is a powerful one. This concept underpins agile software development, lean management and various design approaches. This publication regularly advocates this approach to work.

While this idea can support incredible value creation in many contexts, it may also:

1. support value being created in areas that don’t help the organisation’s strategy

2. or it contributes to value creation at a pace that’s inadequate to match the competition.

Most guidance on agile development does not provide guidance on how the organisation’s strategy might interact with agile prioritisation ideas. Some may argue, nor should it, after all, neither do most other approaches to project management. Worse, some will argue that agile prioritisation is sufficient whilst neglecting to even hint that strategy might even be an input.

Interestingly, most approaches to strategy are also inadequate in guiding how strategy should translate into action so it’s no wonder there is often such a gulf between strategy and execution. So we can say that the failure is in all directions; both in strategy frameworks and in product development methods. But we can focus on that other side of the equation in another post.

Let’s examine some scenarios where agile product development alone might be insufficient without an intentional approach to incorporate the organisation’s strategy.

A Lack of Focus

Whether you are working in a startup business, a low-margin business, a business facing tough competition or a myriad of other possible scenarios it’s common to have finite resources and many opportunities to choose from.

Strategy can provide a way to select opportunities which will serve the organisation’s theory of winning strategically in its market.

It’s not uncommon for friction to exist between strategy teams and product teams; it can be confronting to be told not to focus on some opportunities, especially when it may be in a way which lacks the context for why (as I mentioned above, approaches to strategy often lack guidance on how the strategy translates to execution).

The strategic choice to be made is where to focus.

The Folly of Incrementalism

When there is only the context of users’ needs guiding prioritisation, especially in the case of an organisation with different teams focusing on addressing the needs of different user personas, it’s possible to find teams which may have moved past addressing the most valuable priorities. They may have moved into incremental improvement that is of diminishing value.

Confusingly it may even be creating significant value for a subset of users but not in a way that serves the organisation’s purpose or its chosen strategy for competing. Put another way, you can be drawn into winning certain battles which will lose you the war (that of competing in the market).

It can feel great to be solving problems and providing improvements. It’s an overused example in the field of strategy but imagine the satisfaction teams at Kodak film division may have felt shipping great quality film cameras whilst the market shifted inevitably to digital. The vicious irony of that story was that Kodak had entered the digital market early but never shifted its investment adequately from film to digital until it was too late. In the Kodak example, it was a failure of leadership. If there’s not a deliberate approach to link the organisation’s strategy to how prioritisation is managed the same pattern in a micros-scale can occur at the team level.

This might seem a redundant concern for many organisations which are still struggling to focus on delivering value for any of their users. For organisations that have conquered that first challenge and continue to improve and deliver value, it is a challenge they will inevitably arrive at.

The strategic choice to be made is when to stop and focus on a different opportunity.

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These issues suggest that more specific approaches to integrating strategy and other approaches to prioritising development work are needed in order for organisations to ensure there is the maximisation of impact and realisation of its strategy across the whole organisation. If you’ve approached this challenge before please share how you approached this in the comments.

In a future post, I will cover how strategy can be integrated into product and user-centric thinking.