The 3 (and a half) C's of product strategy teamwork
This post is for PMs and product leaders who are trying to determine how to develop product strategy in concert with others.
Assertion: developing a product strategy is an exercise in collaboration.
In my opinion, it’s much more like a group of founding fathers developing a constitution1, and much less like a prophet of yore bringing down a tablet from the mountains. It’s much more like an inspiring a cappella performance, and much less like a stunning solo act. It’s a team sport, not an individual competition.
But it behooves you to ask - if product strategy is a team sport, what game are you playing? Do you need something like a NFL team, with a roster of 53 players and an army of coaches & specialist coordinators? Or is this a basketball game with 5 players on the court and a handful of subs on the bench? Or is it a doubles tennis match with equal partners taking turns? The answer - as is frustratingly common in product work - is “it depends”.
I’ve observed that PMs sometimes treat product strategy as mythical in nature, As if it’s a magic elixir to all your team’s challenges, or a craft that is only bestowed to a few special beings. While I believe a strong product strategy can be a huge unlock, and it requires you to wrangle non-obvious decisions & hard tradeoffs - I do not believe it’s unattainable. However, it does require an intentional process in how you collaborate with others around you. And in my experience, a lack of intentionality when it comes to how to collaborate leads to strategies that frustrate, are diluted or may fail outright.
In this post, I want to share a simple mental model, to be intentional about working with others (team-members, stakeholders, leadership) to develop product strategy. The key to this model is clarifying the roles they are playing, so you can operate with mutually aligned expectations.
Clarifying roles: the 3 ‘C’s
In any product strategy exercise, I visualize the players involved to fall into 3 categories: Creators, Collaborators and Consumers.
Creators: A tight set of individuals that are uniquely accountable for crafting the product strategy. They are partners with equal footing, even if they divvy up responsibilities amongst themselves. They must ensure the quality and effectiveness of the strategy i.e. is it good, does it land and does it ultimately lead to change. Ideally, this is a small inner circle with deep ownership and expertise.
Collaborators: People that provide unique input and valuable feedback to shape the strategy. They are invested in improving the quality of the strategy, and likely benefit from it either directly or indirectly. But are not directly accountable for the strategy. Depending on the culture of the organization, this group may be quite small or quite large; for example, in consensus-oriented cultures, there are often a large number of Collaborators involved in any product strategy exercise.
Consumers: People who are impacted by the product strategy, and need to be brought in and informed at some point in the process. Consumers can either be active or passive in nature, which changes the way you might engage with them. For example, as most PMs already know, leaders or reviewers that you are seeking approval from can be quite active & opinionated Consumers!
If you are interested in applying this mental model to your own product strategy work, I encourage you to consider two simple principles first:
Actively discuss the ‘C’ that your team-members or stakeholders intend or need to play. Feel free to use the same terminology here.
The relative ratios of the 3 concentric circles & how you engage with them is a function of the size of your organization, it’s cultural tendencies and the scope & impact of your product strategy within the org.
Avoiding pitfalls in strategy teamwork
In my experience, this 3C’s model can help you navigate a few pitfalls that product teams commonly run into when developing strategies:
The lure of upward mobility: this is a pattern where people seek to play a role “higher” than they ideally should play. In this case, Consumers want to be Collaborators, and Collaborators want to be Creators. If left uncontrolled, your strategy efforts may be diluted and slow down due to too many cooks in the kitchen. In situations like this, it’s important to establish clear boundaries and have a structured process to incorporate the right inputs at the right time. As an example, you may conduct an internal ‘listening tour’ upfront to solicit a diverse set of early inputs, which can mitigate the need for endless “alignment” meetings later on.
The pulling teeth syndrome: this is when key players are oversubscribed or generally less engaged than they should be. You may find yourself swimming upstream in terms of trying to get valuable teamwork from them. For example, you might want be looking for more feedback and opinions from your busy manager than they are able to give. Or you have a cross-functional partner that is stretched across multiple projects, and can only share sporadic, lightweight inputs. In situations like these, it’s helpful to have active conversations about both what you need, and what is feasible. I’ve found that simply clarifying which ‘C’ role you want them to adopt is sufficient to make appropriate changes and improve collaboration. Sometimes though, their lack of engagement can speak to a deeper underlying concern (ex: a lack of conviction in the current product strategy, unclear expectations from their management, etc.).
The templating/copypasta bias: as product teams, we sometimes have blind spots that lead to us making lazy assumptions of who should be in which concentric circle (ex: the full cross-functional team must all be Co-Creators, or adjacent product teams must always be Collaborators, etc.). I encourage you to approach this model from first principles: who are the optimal people to be Creators, Collaborators and Consumers for this specific product strategy exercise? Asking yourself this question might open you up to new possibilities that weren’t otherwise obvious (ex: elevating an external partner to be a key Collaborator, or including someone from your Ops or Marketing team to act as co-Creators).
For readers: I’d be curious and eager to hear from you if any other scenarios come to mind that the 3C mental model can help clarify! Feel free to comment or share with me directly.
Deepening buy-in: a bonus ‘C’
If what I have shared above resonates for you, I will offer an additional half ‘C’ that could be additionally useful to you. And that is… a Co-Signer.
A Co-signer is someone who shares ownership of both the quality & effectiveness of your product strategy. Despite that, they may not be involved as a direct Creator in the strategy process. They may not even be an active Collaborator in the process either. In fact, I would posit that a Co-Signer might theoretically play any of the 3C roles above - depending on the situation & nature of the delegation they are doing. Regardless, as a Co-Signer, they should ideally feel agency in improving, advancing and sponsoring the product strategy.
An obvious example of a Co-Signer for your product strategy is your manager or folks in your leadership chain. I consider product leaders to implicitly be Co-Signers for any and all product strategies that emerge from their teams. CEOs or founders are implicitly Co-signers for any strategies that emerge from their organizations. It’s why achieving sufficient buy-in from them (particularly on the aspects of the strategy that they most care about) is critical to the ultimate effectiveness of your strategy.
A less obvious example of a Co-Signer may be a direct cross-functional partner on your team. In a previous post, I’ve shared how product teams need to establish strong goal-orientation to thrive (and why that can be complex given other forces at play ex: functional orientation). One way of doing this is to pressure-test with your partners what it would take for them to be Co-Signers of the product strategy in question - irrespective of whether they have the capacity or capability to be Co-Creators. Sometimes they will raise specific questions or concerns that they expect to be addressed in the strategy. Other times, the gap is even deeper - like an absence of mutual trust or a specific expertise. Regardless it’s helpful to push yourselves to surface and address these concerns early. Don’t forget - executing on the outcomes of the product strategy will need sustained buy-in from your partners. And more than just the strategy, it’s realizing those real outcomes that ultimately matters.
If you liken the writing of the US Constitution to a product strategy exercise, you’ll observe that it was pretty wild process!