S4 Ep. 0: How do you make Resource Allocation decisions for products and teams?
Product leaders: are you feeling overwhelmed by the demands on your teams and their time?
Are your teams juggling a portfolio of existing products while facing a looming avalanche of new initiatives?
Do you feel like some teams and products are being starved, while others are working on low- or no-value investments?
If so, you're not alone.
In this 7-part series of Fearless Product Leadership, we'll tackle the question: How do you make resource allocation decisions for products and teams?
Hope Gurion: Welcome to the Fearless Product Leadership podcast. This is the show for new product leaders seeking to increase their confidence and competence. In every episode, I ask experienced and thoughtful product leaders to share their strategies and tactics that have helped them tackle a tough responsibility of the product leader role. I love helping emerging product leaders shorten their learning curves to expedite their professional success with great products, teams, and stakeholder relationships. I’m your host and CEO of Fearless Product, Hope Gurion.
Do you ever feel like there's not enough time or people to go around?
Do you struggle to know whether you're allocating resources to the right products and initiatives?
If so, this podcast series is for you.
These are the questions we’re tackling in this 7 episode series in the Fearless Product Leadership podcast.
How do you create a foundation for effective resource allocation?
How do product leaders allocate resources to products being sunset, maintained, explored or scaled?
How do you develop your initial Resource Allocation plan?
How do you navigate the people dynamics as you decide "Who goes where?"
What are the antipatterns to avoid so that more of your resource allocation decisions go right?
Join us as I discuss resource allocation with my trusted, long-tenured product and technology leaders, and innovation experts as we share our experiences to help you make better resource allocation decisions, so you can build better products and achieve your product goals.
This is the Fearless Product Leadership podcast, and I'm your host, Hope Gurion.
In this series you’ll hear perspectives from 4 deeply experienced product leaders and advisors to CEOs who have worked with companies that are innovating new products as well as have many mature and even declining products in their portfolios. They’re going to introduce themselves now and how you can get in touch with them.
Here’s Jonathan Bertfield of Lean Startup Co:
Jonathan Bertfield: So my background, 20 plus years in the product space started out in what wasn't called product management in the early 90s, but became product management. Originally, I was in Israel, then moved to Silicon Valley, then moved to New York, and now I'm living in Greece, working remotely. So for the last 10 plus years, I've been consulting in various contexts, mainly with large corporates helping them deploy new product management practices. And for the last seven years, I've been working with Lean Startup Company, where I'm now Senior Director. And we work with large corporates helping them deploy Lean Startup at scale.
Here’s how you can contact Jonathan:
Jonathan Bertfield: Yeah, so obviously I'm on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/bertfield), but if you want to find out about Lean Startup and how we can help you, leanstartup.co is where you'll find out about our services and our team. And you can schedule a call with us to find out more about what we do and see how we can help.
And Barry O'Reilly of Nobody Studios:
Barry O’Reilly: My name is Barry O'Reilly. I'm an entrepreneur, business advisor and author who really focused around business model innovation, product design, organizational and cultural transformation. So I'm a co-founder of Nobody Studios. That's a venture studio where we're trying to create 100 companies over the next five years. I've also done advising for Fortune 500 companies like Slack, Spotify, Wells Fargo, British Airways, American Airlines, a broad remit of different companies and shapes and domains. And then I've had the joy of writing two great books, Lean Enterprise, which was part of Eric Ries' series, and then Unlearn, which is a more recent book. And yeah, it's been a pleasure to get and to work with you Hope over the years too as well. And excited to share some of maybe the mistakes I've made so people can make better ones when they're trying to apply the product thinking in their businesses.
And here’s how you can get in touch with Barry:
Barry O’Reilly: So you can find me on the internet at Barry O'Reilly at all good platforms. You can find me pretty much anywhere. I've managed to secure that handle. But yeah, if you go to the website, it's BarryOReilly.com. You know, I blog there. So if you want to follow on with the lessons I'm learning as I sort of try to tackle this work, absolutely. And if you're interested to learn about how we're doing this in our venture studio, just go to nobody studios.com. And we're also always actively looking for great product leaders, technology leaders who want to build early stage companies and be part of our portfolio as we try to manage the ambiguity of starting startups. So please check that out.
Here’s Adrian Howard of Quietstars:
Adrian Howard: I started off as a developer in the latter half of the last century and wandered over to do more product-y and UX-y things as the years went by. I love playing in the messy spaces where strategy, research and delivery overlap. These days I spend my time coaching senior leaders and practitioners who are dealing with cross-disciplinary issues across product, user research and delivery.
And here’s how you can get in touch with Adrian:
Adrian Howard: Go to quietstars.com and subscribe to our newsletter. It's been running for more than 10 years now, so the archives are worth digging into and that talks about the things that we do and all the ways you can say hello if you want to.
and now Troy Anderson:
Troy Anderson: Hi, yeah, I'm Troy Anderson. I'm a long time chief product and technology officer. I've been doing this job for almost a quarter of a century and I have a lot of feelings about it.
And if you like what Troy has to say, head to Linkedin to get in touch:
Troy Anderson: So my LinkedIn profile is milluk. (http://www.linkedin.com/in/milluk)
Hope Gurion: Resource allocation is one of the most challenging responsibilities for product leaders.
How do you decide which products and initiatives get the most resources? How do you balance the needs of your team with the demands of your business?
In this podcast series, I'll share my perspective on these resource allocation challenges and how to overcome them.
Why did I bring my podcast back to life to address this topic? Because these topics are continually coming up in my coaching discussions with new product leaders due to:
Tech budget contraction: The tech sector has contracted, and product leaders are facing staffing cutbacks while still having aggressive growth goals.
Unclear product portfolios: Most product leaders are leading multiple products or navigating a transformation to product operating models. They need to decide on the optimal org structure and team topologies to support their teams and the company's business ambitions.
Finite resources: Product leaders never have enough people and time to achieve every aspiration their leadership has for the organization. They have to make tradeoffs and choices to achieve success.
My hope is that this series on resource allocation will expand the consideration set of options for product leaders who find themselves paralyzed or constantly battling with their CEO/finance team for more budget.
I’m not sure if this should be considered a trigger warning, but I'm going to use the phrase "resource allocation" a lot in this podcast series. I know that term can be dehumanizing, but I want to clarify that I'm using it to refer to people's time, mindshare, and attention, as well as to people themselves.
Keep listening to learn how to make better resource allocation decisions, so you can build better products and achieve your product goals.
You'll find transcripts for each of these episodes along with the contact info for me and my guests at Fearless-Product.com.
If you’re a product leader seeking to fearlessly lead your product teams through resource allocation decisions, I’d love to be of help. Please reach out on LinkedIn or send me an email to hope@fearless-product.com. I’ll respond with an FAQ about my coaching programs and a link to sign up for a free mini coaching session about a challenge you’re facing.
Fearless Product: confidence through evidence.
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