About Focus

Nov 2

Focus is probably one of the most used words in a CPO and PM vocabulary, but what does it actually mean to be focused? I think that one common misconception about focus is that focus means saying no to things that are not aligned with the strategy, do not have a great customer or commercial upside, or are just too vague to point to an actual problem.

Focus is undeniably saying no to these things. But that is the easy part of the job. What I think many fail to grasp, and it took me some time to realize, is that focus is first and foremost saying no to good opportunities that align with the strategy and can have a real potential upside, because we see a greater potential on something else

Focus is about saying no to good opportunities, not to bad ones

Read it again, because that is really what the job is about.

You need to feel comfortable in leaving some opportunities on the table because you really believe in one. The real headache is to DARE to define one outcome and direction as a company and CPO and to dare to pursuit one opportunity that leads to that as a PM and product team. The reason why this is hard is that it is terrifying to just pick one thing to work on and feel the accountability for it. What happens if it goes wrong? Diversifying risks is human nature, it is a way to protect ourselves from risking too big. But with less risk, the rewards are also more limited. To put it in Jim Barksdale’s famous words the secret is to make sure to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Easier said than done, right? To make it less abstract, here is an example of how this could look like in reality, with a company working with OKRs.

The perfect, happy path:

The company, an e-commerce that sells consumers goods, has an objective that goes ”Increase customer NPS score by 10 units, from 60 to 70"

The product team primarily driving that outcome does some research, defines different opportunities that can drive the objective. Some examples might be: customers do not fully recommend our products because:

Shipment times are too long
Access to customer service is not easy
Payment methods are limited
The return experience is not up to industry standards

After gathering some different inputs including customer research, data, stakeholders, and tech constraints the team:

Decide on one opportunity to pursue
Define really clear success factors and timeframe to get there
Anchor it with CPO and other stakeholders
Pay attention, this is the most difficult step of them all: take the leap of faith and forget about all the other opportunities for the timeframe defined in step 2.

This is terrifying and nerve-wracking as time pass, yet the only way to actually see if the bet was right, and to take full ownership of that outcome. As long as the success factors are right, the risk expectations aligned, and the timeframe defined, there are only 2 outcomes to this choice: either you really impact the outcome, or you pivot.

What I see happen more often

The company, an e-commerce that sells consumers goods, has an objective that goes ”Increase customer NPS score by 10 units, from 60 to 70”. For the sake of this post let’s just assume the company has their OKR in order and that part of the flow works well.

The product team primarily driving that outcome does some research, defines different opportunities that can drive to that outcome. After gathering some different inputs including customer research, data, stakeholders, and tech constraints they map many opportunities to pursue and usually go really broad in pursuing them. If we take the examples above what might happen is that under a quarter the team tries to do experiments on showing different shipping times with a subset of users, test a prototype of a return flow with others, and start collecting feedback on payment options with a panel.

As you see what this team doesn’t dare to do is to put its bet on one of the identified pain points.

This might be because:

The team do not have enough confidence that the data is right
The team does not dare to fail, as there is no clear way to pivot
There are not enough directions/constraints from the leadership (I am guilty here of not forcing this choice more often)

This team will surely do good things, as they are working on real user problems, but most likely will not move the objective needle quick enough.

Everyone really wants to be in that happy path scenario, so what do you need to get there? What I think needs to be in place are primarily 3 things:

1- Clear directions and constraints from CPO to product teams

Is it clear where the company wants to put its bets? Are the objectives ambitious but reachable? Is there really a clearly defined priority and is it clear why it looks like that?

2- Clear definition of success and a timeframe to get there

Many times we fail on defining one, or the other. But to be able to dare, you need to have both: metrics to tell you are on the right patch and a constraint in time to force you to both find the quickest way to test your hypothesis and to help to fight the bias that will drive you to work more to prove your thesis

3 -Clear process to pivot

This is essential to a) not spend too much time to actually choose the right bet by over researching and/or building a business case b) do not spend more effort than needed in killing a bet because you are stuck in a quarterly/yearly prioritization cadence

Now that yearly planning is approaching, I think more and more about the first point and I feel terrified myself. So if by reading this you feel scared, I am with you. But the answer to that is not parallelizing