S4 Ep. 1: Setting the stage: How do you create a foundation for effective resource allocation?
Are you a product leader feeling that uncomfortable feeling that there just aren’t enough people and time to go around?
Did you inherit a team or portfolio of products and initiatives, and you're not sure who is working on what or how much?
Are you being asked to reorganize your team to support new company priorities?
Are you unsure how to make the case for the incremental budget required to hire new teams to staff products and initiatives?
If so, you're not alone.
In the 1st episode in 7-part Resource Allocation mini-series, we answer the question: How do you create a foundation for effective resource allocation?
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.
In this first episode, we'll tackle three key questions about setting the stage for resource allocation decisions:
When is it time to reconsider how people and time are dedicated to products and initiatives?
How do you identify which products and initiatives deserve resources?
Who should create the initial view of the product portfolio and allocated resources?
Answering these questions will help you make better resource allocation decisions and achieve your product goals.
Product leaders often start to question their current resource allocation when they experience a change or realization that makes them doubt whether their current structure is a strong foundation to achieve their company’s goals. This doubt is often triggered by a number of factors, including:
Reduced revenue leading to budget cuts and team reductions
New strategic objectives requiring teams with different skills
New leadership asking questions about resource allocation
A desire to drive growth through innovation or expanding the product portfolio
Embarking on a transformation from project-orientation to a product operating model
If you find yourself in any of these situations, odds are it's time to reconsider your resource allocation.
First Jonathan Bertfield of Lean Startup Co shares when he most often sees leaders reconsidering their resource allocation:
Jonathan Bertfield: So there's no common pattern, I would say, other than certainly with organizations that are focused on innovation, they're often the first to feel the pinch because they're not yet generating revenues. So it's very easy for an organization to say, “let's just pull back a little bit on some of that adventurous stuff that's a little bit out there and maybe it's two to three years to revenue. Let's cut some of that expense.” So that often is the first place to feel it. Certainly, the usual market downturns affect a lot of the kind of companies that we're dealing with. But I must say, we see it also in government agencies that we work with, we see change in cycles coming that force a little bit less severe, but certainly the same kind of cycles: Strategy has changed, new leadership in place. Let's just cut back and reallocate resources based on kind of current reality that we hadn't anticipated.
Hope Gurion: Next up is an excerpt from my discussion with Barry O'Reilly He’s the author of Lean Enterprise and Unlearn. He has written extensively about product portfolio management, including one of my favorite posts: Lean PMO: Managing The Innovation Portfolio. Barry shares what he’s found triggers revisiting the way a company has allocated its people and time to various products and initiatives.
Barry, I'm super excited to get your perspective on this. I often refer people to your writings on how to think about products at different stages of their life cycles. And I think there's not enough out there about it, enough content. So I'm hoping maybe this discussion will help create a little bit more information to help people navigate these decisions. You've worked with very large companies, you're obviously trying to innovate and create a lot of new companies now. But when you're thinking back to companies that exist, already have some products in their portfolio, aren't like startups just trying to get their idea off the ground, what do you think triggers a leader or an executive team to reconsider how they are allocating people, time, budget towards different products in the portfolio?
Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, I think there comes a time in many companies where they often start off with one great product that establishes them as a business, right? They might find it a customer, a set of features that work for them and that can grow into great products and really help businesses grow. But at some point it hits like a local maximum, right? They realize that they've maybe got most of their addressable market, that the platform is maturing, that their growth rate is slowing, and they need to start looking at alternative ways to go to adjacencies or find new customers or value propositions they can offer. Right? That often becomes I think one of these inflection moments or an aha moment where they're like, “Okay, we've got so good at just building this one product, turning it into a platform and be massively successful. We've almost like lost the muscle involved in like exploring new ideas and figuring out what works, what doesn't, that could be future businesses.” And I think that's one of the things that often I find strikes, especially the executive team, CEOs, product leaders and technology leaders in the company. And I think that's a big moment.
And the other one, I think as well as when companies maybe have tried to do too much, you know, they've just tried to do projects after project after project. And, and realize that they're actually the types of projects they're doing. First of all, they should be thinking of as products, but it's a bit of a like sort of spray and pray approach, right? Where they're just doing activity. And they're not realizing that there's different sort of modes to manage these types of products or initiatives. Some of them, when they're coming, starting off the ground and there's, there's new customers to find, there's new features to figure out, to get a product market fit needs to be managed very differently than when they already have a set of customers that they're just sort of incrementally offering and more sort of value to or more features to. And yet the company has the same unilateral approach to managing all this work. And they're struggling like, “why are we not getting the results we're getting when we're just optimizing something versus trying to start something new?” So I think those are like the two classic moments for me where the a ha or the penny drops for the leadership team and they're like, we may need different strategies and measures of success. team structures, incentives to manage each of these types of initiatives differently. And I think that's a great moment then to start saying, right, we actually have a portfolio here of products or we're aspiring to have a portfolio. And I think that's the moment to start applying some of these techniques.
Hope Gurion: Next Adrian Howard of Quietstars shares that he finds the question of “do we have the right amount of people working on the right things?” isn’t actually asked often enough.
Adrian Howard: It's interesting you say that because a problem I see often is people not questioning it. They've just been running on business as usual for a bit, or have a standard team or a standard breakdown. They're not even questioning it. So I think an interesting failure mode that people have is just carrying on as usual. A thing that trigger that question is often an absence of necessary skills. They're trying to do a “thing” and don't know how to do the “thing”, or don't have enough people to do the “thing”.
I worked with a client who had been fairly stable for a while in a particular market, and was entering a new space with a slightly different market and a slightly different problem. And they really didn't have user research as a “thing” in the organization. They were both trying to find that skill set in existing people (like product people), and also going “Okay, do we need to create a new bit of the organization? Do we need to grow?” Did they need to change their design group, which was very UI focused, to be more a UX/User Research group that had those skills in it as well.
Hope Gurion: Got it. Yeah. So sometimes it's recognizing we have a skills gap. We don't even have the right people. And we might need to figure out ways to solve that in our current organization structure and maybe budget allocation or creating budget to form that. Is that typically what they did to approach it when they recognize that skills gap, or was there a different approach, like a retraining, they used to tackle that?
Adrian Howard: A bit of both. And I think identifying the skill gap is a really tricky thing. Some people see the problem: “We are shipping things that our customers don't like” or whatever, but they don't identify the source of the problem. They're thinking it's “okay, we just need to do QA work or testing better than we're doing right now”, rather than “okay, maybe we're not solving the real problem for them.” So I think there's definitely a period of helping people spot the right gap. Content is another area where I work with a client here. They were having lots of problems with inconsistent communication across the product portfolio — and they were seeing that as a UX and design issue. They eventually figured out — with a little bit of help, and a little bit of talking to peer organizations that had similar issues — that they needed a content group and a set of skills that weren't in the organization. Some of that they did with cross-training, and some of that they did with hiring. Some of that they did with taking people and just showing them what those people did in other organizations to help — raising awareness of that skill set in the org that had never experienced that before.
Hope Gurion: Finally, we hear from Troy Anderson, who has served as Chief Product & Technology officer at many companies leading many transformations. He shares that having a hypothesis to drive your resource allocation choices is often the first step in recognizing where you may be over or under resourced.
Troy Anderson: The point of view I have is the organization needs to have a hypothesis, right? And that's one of the things that I think companies do a really poor job of, which is what is your hypothesis for your model of the world? What is going to change and why? And it doesn't have to be right. One of the fun parts about it is your hypothesis can absolutely be wrong, and then you update it. But if you don't start with a hypothesis, you're not even like taking a guess at what you're trying to do. For me, there's kind of a formula for how to come up with a good hypothesis. One is you verbalize what you're trying to do. You visualize it if you can, and then the most important step is mathematize. So this comes from a professor that I had at Northwestern called Scott McKeon, and he was all about verbalize, visualize, and mathematize. And I still use it to this day, because if you have a mathematized hypothesis for the world, for your organization, then it's very easy to make resource decisions based on that hypothesis. If you don't, then you're shooting in the dark to begin with. it's very easy to use those decisions based on hypothesis. If you don't, then you're shooting it without thinking.
So there's a variety of different reasons to reconsider things. First, right, is your hypothesis up to date? If your hypothesis is still good and you still understand it, then great. But oftentimes I'm joining in an organization midstream. And the... products and teams are already in place and everyone just assumes whatever that inertia is, is going to move forward. Usually wrong. If you're really trying to focus, if you're really trying to drive the most value, usually the shotgun approach to dispersing resources all over the place is just always a bad idea. You really want to be able to focus in order to focus. You have to be able to prioritize. In order to prioritize, you need to have a hypothesis. So again, it comes down to having a hypothesis. That said, the last thing you want to do is disrupt everybody for no reason, right? Without a good narrative, without good rationale for why you're doing what you're doing. So you need to have that kind of in hand. And if you have like, you know, 16 different teams doing 16 different things, you know, maybe they're all necessary. Unlikely. More likely is you have kind of like the top four things that you need to get done. And maybe it's better to consolidate those 16 teams into eight teams or 16 teams into four teams or, you know, otherwise. The point is you can't say yes until you say no. And the only way you can say no is by really understanding the situation. But then when you go to say no, now you have to take people into consideration. You just can't like change and everyone's gonna be cool with it. You essentially are moving people's cheese. And when you're moving people's cheese, you need to be very, very careful when you do that. Because people have a lot tied up in their work and as, as hopefully they do. And you, the last thing you want to do is just say, “Hey, what you've been working on hasn't been a priority.” You, want to tell the story of why the change is necessary. You want to tell the story of why this had been important. But you also want to make the case for why it's not important.
Hope Gurion: Once you have a good reason to reevaluate your resource allocation, the next step is to take stock of your products, initiatives, and people. Next you’ll hear how leaders set the stage for resource allocation decisions by tackling 3 key questions:
How do you conduct an audit of your products and initiatives to create an initial portfolio view?
Who is best suited to creating this initial product portfolio view?
How do you make the case for incremental headcount when you realize you need it?
Barry and I compare approaches for creating an initial view of the product portfolio:
Hope Gurion: Yeah, I've worked with some leaders where they're like, I actually don't know what products we have, like, because they're like, there've been so many projects over the years, or they're new to the organization. They're like, well, what is a product? Like, how do I know if I have a product in the portfolio? What are the boundaries? How are we going to define these things so that we can figure out who is responsible? Who's one of the measures of success for these things that we've created over the years, these sort of orphans or projects, whatever they are. If you're a leader in that situation, how do you think about putting together at least a first cut, a draft at what should we be considering knowing that we've got a bunch of things that might be a product and knowing that they have different sort of value potential for the organization, what do you, how do you advise determining what should be the right amount of investment or resource allocation to support the continuation or evolution of these products?
Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think you were answering some of it yourself, right? First of all, most companies, especially leadership teams, have no idea of all the work that's happening in the company. And often it's very hard if you're in a massive Fortune 500, like there could be thousands of projects going on, never mind thinking about how many products you're actually offering to the market. So I always think step one is, first of all, like recognizing that, just saying there's a lot of work happening here optimize how we manage it. And step two for me then is starting to coalesce around a framework about how you could start to think about categorizing the different types of work you want to do. So, you know, a very early sort of example of this, I think was written by Michael Tushman (see (see Exploring and Exploiting Your Way to Growth from Harvard Business Review). They talked about companies that explore and exploit, right? There were two different modes of operation, exploring new product ideas versus exploiting what you got. And I think that's again some of his work, but for big companies, it's still too simple, right? Because you're not just doing two modes of operation. There's actually more, right? So some of the frameworks I'd often advocate for companies is that they would still think about explore. You're always going to be doing new things, exploit, optimizing things. But there's also parts of your business that just sort of run that are BAU, that they're They're at a level of maturity and they're just operating. You're not trying to do more there. It's just like, that's great. It runs, it operates, could be a CRM system, could be. your HR systems, but it's sort of in a sustain mode. And then the stuff people don't like to talk about is actually like killing or removing items from your portfolio. So initiatives that are designed around sun setting, legacy technology or products that you don't want to have anymore. Right, so even just sort of talking through those as a team, I often find, just like you are, go, “yeah, like that's the type of work we're trying to manage.” It's exploring stuff. It's... scaling things, it's just letting stuff run and then stuff we wanna get out of the portfolio and simplify so we can innovate faster. And then across the board, when things aren't working, you just wanna stop them, right? And that is a very simple framework often I start with exec teams. And then the fun and games after you sort of create just that basic model is to do as you were suggesting like an audit, like let's go around the company and find out what work is happening. And if we can sort of frame, if you will, the intent of that work around, is it something new? Is it something we're trying to scale? Something we just want to run? or even remove from the portfolio? Can we actually map it? You know, and believe me, I've run these exercises for startups where they have no idea what's going on and there's only like 50 people in the company right up to fortune 500s where you're talking of like, you know, thousands. But again, it's, it's one of these things which sort of turns the lights on to the situation and invariably you have people going like, “wow, I didn't know we were building that product” or “wow, is that thing still operating? Like who manages that? Does anyone know how to write COBOL anymore?”
It is an interesting and enlightening experience to tell you the truth. But like even just getting to that space, um, is a massive advantage for companies. Because now, as you say, they have context, right? They can see a map of their organization and start going, “okay, right, this is all the work or the initiatives that are happening and what ones matter? and what do we care about?” And I think that's when, for me, it gets fun to start layering on more of your, if you will, like strategy of the company where you put the whole portfolio map and I often ask them next is like, right, “well, What are your stated strategic goals for the year? Is it like, obviously they always have, make more money and happier customers and retain people, but more of the sort of niche definition, like we want to get into a new market. We want to open up in a new geography. We want to reduce our cost of operations for back office processing systems like 50%. Like more of the specific outcomes. And again, that's the super lens when you almost map a portfolio, when you put those outcomes at the top of that map, and then people really start panicking because then they start going like, “how should the work over here be aligned to that?” And “what are these people doing here?” No, but and I know you do a lot of this work with companies and teams. And but again, the lights go on and it's a great way to. get people asking questions like how does this portfolio now start to make sense? Right. We've set some goals for the business. We're doing all these initiatives. Like where's the sort of I'm hesitant to say like everything has to link directly to another. But it should be coherent. Right. It should make sense as initiatives are happening. And even if you get that far at this stage, like companies are suddenly like. in this place now where they're like, “whoa, but we can deprioritize half of this work” or, and “we shouldn't be doing that.” Or, “oh, we said we were trying to grow in a new markets, but we've no products that are focused around growth. Like why aren't we doing that?” And you get into these great conversations. Well, yeah, like I've had the pleasure and the joy and the pain, if you will, of like running these types of events with teams that have big banks like Capital One and Wells Fargo right through to American Airlines and it's been really fascinating to the point where you know companies when they do these exercises can really get focused and make better investments, have better governance really overall and happier teams. Because you know the teams aren't constantly jumping around on all these different projects and struggling to understand what they should be working on. And then it's a great alignment tool because you sit there as an executive team and say, “these are our stated goals for the year. Here's how we categorize the types of initiatives that we're doing. Here's the ones we're exploring for the next quarter. Here's the ones we're trying to scale for the next quarter.” And you can see how that becomes a very powerful alignment tool and also helps people understand how their work is linked to often sort of lofty and far reaching goals of the company. How does my work help. So yeah, that's just a little, a taster maybe of how I would do that.
Hope Gurion: Well, I appreciate that because I like starting with the categorization, and I use very similar life cycle stages, categorizations. Obviously, if you come in as a consultant, an outsider, you can be sort of an objective facilitator. In your experience, do you see there being a natural person in the organization to suggest and facilitate that type of an exercise? Like, do you think it falls to a particular role or could it be anybody who initiates that exercise?
Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. That's a great question, right? So at the moment, I obviously co-founded a venture studio, which is running a portfolio of startups at different stages, right? So in that company, the lucky sucker to get that job was me. So that was kind of fun, right? But my role is in essentially looking after incubation, right, or the portfolio. Now inside, I would say, let's just call it a classic sort of enterprise or scaled up organization. The people I would be looking for are a “coalition of the willing,” if we call them that. Right, certainly your product leader, whether that's the CPO or, and a technical leader, right? Because again, their roadmap is driven from the initiatives. And if you're at a stage where somebody is providing like the project management or the portfolio management or a PMO type character. You know, often in those companies, I think there's always like this magical person who is the glue for so much of work getting done and knows what the initiatives that are happening and that person you absolutely want involved in this. You know, and then that that's a good sort of group of three, if you will, to go to an executive team and say, “right, like we're responsible for the delivery of all the initiatives really in this business from a product design point of view and the technology delivery with the CTO.” And then if you have program or project or portfolio management, like the person who represents that, that group. That's a great team to work on this, I would always argue, because they know the roadmaps, they know what needs to be built, right? And they have the sense and contribute to actually the goals that the companies are setting. Now, even if you're in a massive company and you're not necessarily the Chief Product Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, but if you are responsible for those, let's call them disciplines, in the segment of the company you're in, maybe it's a department, maybe it's a... you know, a group of, or it could even be a large program of work that's happening. I think those are the people who are playing those roles and are key to managing that portfolio of work or program of work. So yeah, I often try to target those folks. And yeah, because it's, you know, it's a good, the ultimate trifecta, right? So it's good to have three brains to sort of work through this stuff, especially a technical, product and a delivery person, I find.
Hope Gurion: Next Troy Anderson and I discuss how to take inventory of the product and project portfolio to inform those resource allocation choices.
And when you have come into an organization that recognizes however they had allocated people to products maybe wasn't going to drive whatever the clarified priorities are. How have you thought about categorizing those products in a way that makes it high priority, not a priority? Is it lifecycle stage? What's your approach for taking an inventory of what people are allocated to, to be able to drive that decision.
Troy Anderson: Right. So, you know, I have a very usual yardstick for organizations that I join. One is, you know, what is the quality situation around people, right? So are people well skilled to do what they need to do? Are people well supported? Is there psychological safety on the team? That's one. The other is, did they actually go and validate this with the customer? Boy, is that one that's not there most of the time. The other thing I talked about before is the hypothesis, right, so that's part of the strategy. What is the vision for this? What's the strategy? Why is it going to work? Why are we the best to do it? You know, all the kind of why considerations. Then... From a process standpoint, are you doing things the right way? Are you doing your work the right way? Are you agile? Are you waterfall? What is your process here? And then finally, it's the product itself. Is it the right quality levers for what's needed? Or are you trying to solve for too much quality? Are you trying to solve for too little quality? Are you trying to solve for security when you don't need as much security? Or? the opposite, which is usually always the case that you need more security and there's not a budget or allocation for security. But that's kind of my general rubric for looking at things from a product organization standpoint.
Hope Gurion: Got it. OK, so that sounds like it's taking into account the people, the product health, team health, product health, and then the state products themselves.
Troy Anderson: Strategy health.
Hope Gurion: OK, got it. And do you categorize further than that? When you're deciding, OK, product A deserves a team of X, why, how are you sort of grouping or categorizing those products to determine the size, types of people, you know, what type of mission or measure of success they might have.
Troy Anderson: I can give you a hypothetical example that's very true to the truth.
Hope Gurion: Okay.
Troy Anderson: A really good example is, let's say there's a company who I'm joining and everyone's very excited about this new product that they've been working on. And this new product is going to be responsible for 50% of the growth of the revenue. It's going to be the... You know, the thing that aligns with a brand change, it's, it's really, it's, it's everything to the company. Um, this, this product and, you know, maybe half the team is, is allocated to working on it. Um, if I go into that sort of hypothetical situation and I find there's been no validation with the customer. it's not aligned to the strategy, and the process has been completely terrible, I might pull the plug on it. Now, is that gonna make me super popular? No, but it is absolutely the right thing to do. So the question is “how does how does Troy do that in a political maelstrom?” Very carefully, hopefully.
But you know, the reality is sometimes that's what happens right?
You know, everyone's familiar with the concept of HIPPO with regard to the highest most important person type thing, having an idea and then allocating a bunch of team to it, that that didn't go through the process of customer. It may not have gone through the process of, you know, a process. It may not come through any sort of process other than being someone's pet project that gets funded.
That's just way too common an occurrence. Right? So projects that have a life of their own, that became this pet project that that never got reined in. You know, that's like one of the first things I do when I go into an organization was like, Yeah, this, this has never been validated by a customer. And what, you know, it would be great if if everything were true about it, that that's not the process you used.
But you know, that's the process I use. So, you know, me as as Head of Product and Technology, we're not going to do that. And super unpopular, I can assure you now, a whole bunch of people have been working on it for a long time, let's say years without a release because you know, no customer wants it and it’s certainly not done yet.
And, you know, now, now you're going to kill it? That doesn't make any sense. Right? Okay. Well, that's the fallacy of sunk costs. Sorry. But the hard part about this job is saying no to make room for the right things.
Hope Gurion: Let's say you're in one of those situations where the hard choices on priorities and goals for the company aren't fully clarified. And yet, you have to decide who's working on what and to what degree and how many people who do you think should primarily drive those? like it'll be imperfect because we don't know what we're working towards. But if you have to, you know, decide if these many people have this type of role towards this product or project if it's still early stage, who do you think is the right person or persons to make that initial cut at the resource allocation?
Troy Anderson: Well, if if you're new, right, so you're coming into a situation new it's, it's probably not you.
That said, you know, if it were me coming into a new situation, and I was trying to make a resource decision, you know, I haven't put a framework in place I haven't put the time and energy into understanding what the hypothesis should be. I haven't understood, you know, customer validation. I haven't understood teams.
You know, I would leave things alone, frankly, right? So the desire to act is something that you have to guard against, right. So I'm, I'm a big fan of the “measure twice, cut once.” I'm happy to measure four times before I cut. Because I think the desire for action is misleading. And oftentimes, when you're new in a role, you want, you want to have small wins. But if you're having to make big decisions like this, and you don't have the information, make the small wins somewhere else.
Hope Gurion:Fair.
Troy Anderson: But obviously, it should the person who's in charge of, of the product roadmap should be the person that ultimately is responsible for for this decision. But if the person who's responsible for that doesn't have the information, again, don't act.
Hope Gurion: Personally, I’ve had to take inventory and create an initial product portfolio twice, once when my role expanded and I became CPO of a global product portfolio and another time when I was brought in to transform from a project to product operating model. At that company who needed to transform, I remember shortly after I joined asking the CTO if there was a list of all of the products in the organization to which I received a pretty hearty laugh in response. “That’s what you have to figure out” So not long after I gathered a mix of engineers and product managers into a conference room and asked them to write down on sticky notes anything that might be a “product” with the guidance “if it stops working, will someone call around to figure out who is fixing it?” We surfaced more than 100 internally and externally built products and services in our portfolio, some for internal users, some revenue generating, some 3rd party software being licensed, some without anyone in place with knowledge of how the product worked/who was managing the code. That exercise helped me create the initial view of what products were in our portfolio, which would be maintained, sunsetted, and which required further investigation before we determined a resource allocation baseline.
Once you understand what you’ve got that is expected to continue to operate, inevitably you’ll find yourself with more products than people, not to mention all of the new initiatives and product ideas that are waiting in the wings. This bring us to the final question that sets the stage for resource allocation:
What do you do when there aren’t enough resources to sufficiently allocate to all the products and initiatives? One approach is to make the case for additional headcount. But what is the best way to make that case for incremental headcount?
You’ll hear advice from Jonathan Bertfield and Adrian Howard next. First here’s an excerpt from Jonathan Bertfield and I discussing that very question.
Hope Gurion: And I imagine in the work that you're doing that there's often the case for needing to create budget or free up headcount to focus on these innovation pursuits. How have you seen leaders sort of navigate that decision of, where are we going to find the people or the money for people to be able to really explore these innovation ideas that we have?
Jonathan Bertfield: So I'd say there's a spectrum, right? So at one end, and I recall this kind of the more mature organization who are comfortable dealing with innovation, and have got a lot of experience with it, there's a reality that they recognize, which is we need to stop projects that are no longer delivering value and reallocate those resources. So let's identify those. Diana Kander calls that “zombie hunting,” which I love as a phrase. And she talks about Amazon as a great example of that, where it's like projects no longer delivering value. When I was at Pearson a few years ago, we did a portfolio assessment. And one of the things that we saw, there was this very long tail of really low margin initiatives that had just been around forever. And no one had really known what to do with. And there were people there and there were people who are passionate and customers, how do we get out of this? more mature organizations are really good at identifying those and saying, let's free up those people, those dollars, um, that, that mind share and let's reallocate it to the front end. Um, so that's, that's a one on the spectrum. And that's like, great, let's, let's do more of that. Um, I would say, um, the less mature or less comfortable with, uh, understanding the dynamics of innovation. Often what they're doing is they're just piling on to the existing work of product teams and saying, well, just squeeze this in to the work that you're already doing, right? You can find time, right? And that's obviously not very sustainable for the individuals or for the initiatives and inevitably leads to, well, this whole innovation process isn't really working because we're not getting results. And the people are like, ah, we're drowning here, right? So I think those kind of are the two ends of the spectrum. And obviously in the middle, You have folks who are capable of putting people in kind of partial reallocation and they've still got some context shifting going on. Also not ideal, but maybe good enough given the realities of their circumstances. So we're always trying to get people to move more towards that mature end where they're capable of reallocating and capable of moving. dealing with Darwin quads and moving from four to one and that kind of thinking. There's a process there, but it takes a lot of new muscles to be generated to get companies comfortable.
Hope Gurion: Next you’ll hear Adrian Howard of Quietstars share his strategy of using first-hand and second-hand experiences to make the case for incremental headcount investment, and gives an example of when he had to make the case for adding content specialists into the org.
Hope Gurion: I do think for a lot of first-time product leaders, if they've been running business as usual, team structures, skill structures as usual, they may not recognize that there are different ways to organize skills, roles needed in the organization and being able to look outside at similar companies is a great credible inspiration for that to teams and their colleagues, other leaders, see that we may have a gap to pursue our ambitions that needs to be remedied. That often leads to a situation where maybe a leader has to make a case for a significant investment, either in retraining if we feel like we have, it's a gap that can be closed through training, or adding headcount of people that we've never had before, and maybe even adding leaders to manage new functions of roles that haven't previously existed, which is daunting to have to make a case for. Like we have a significant, maybe it's not one or two people, maybe it's multiple people. How have you seen leaders address making the case for incremental headcount? Because that always is a big factor in terms of resourcing decisions.
Adrian Howard: Convincing that the “thing” is valuable, I think, is a big part of that. That was what led to that time I talked about earlier — of Taking bits of the organization and taking them around another org that had that content group because it was helping them. The best way to get that is to get people to experience it directly. And if you can't get them to experience it directly, then getting them to talk to people who've experienced it directly is super valuable. So we were kind of exploring both sides. We were hiring: We hired a content person into the design group, which was under marketing (which was a whole separate thing.) We were also talking to some people in product who were in this org already, who had worked with content people before. So we had their experiences. coming into the leadership to help them — kind of, you know, “we did this thing and we had these experiences”. And also some skills that they could take into the organization. We also looked to take some people who were “content adjacent” and taking them to more of a full time content role. So we could both get the leaders to go out to other orgs and talk to people, and get those experiences directly. We had some new skills coming in to help show that the standalone role was useful. And we had some existing people in the org who had elements of that skill set that we could get to highlight it in their current roles. So we had a three-pronged approach to it.
Hope Gurion: If it’s the first time for you taking over a product organization at a new company or creating a portfolio view, as you heard us discuss in this episode, you’ll need to conduct an audit. Here are some questions to help you identify which products and initiatives potentially deserve to be allocated resources:
Which products and initiatives are most and least aligned with your company's strategic priorities?
Which products and initiatives have the potential to generate the greatest impact for your business?
Which products and initiatives will require the strongest teams?
What are the products or services, that if they stopped working, many people would call in a panic?
What are the products and services, that if they stopped working, would barely be noticed?
When you inevitably discover that have more products and initiatives than teams, you can either ask for incremental budget to hire or contract more people, or you can effectively create incremental people and time by taking people off what they're currently working on. Of course, if you can mitigate the risks of doing so.
Asking for incremental budget is the usual approach and is likely to succeed when a company is growing, healthy, or has recently received significant investment.
However, if you can't get more budget, you can still create incremental people and time by taking people off what they're currently working on. This is where product lifecycle or lifestages come into play.
In the next few episodes of this Resource Allocation miniseries, we'll discuss how the life stage of the products in your portfolio influences your resource allocation choices.
Partnering with product leaders to help them navigate creating a portfolio view or make the case for incremental resources is just one of the many types of coaching engagements I do.
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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