S4 Ep. 7: Resource Allocation Antipatterns: What can go wrong?

Are you a product leader who believes in the old adage that anything that can go wrong, usually will?

Do you believe that knowing what could go wrong can help you prepare for more things to go right?

You’re not alone.

In this seventh and final episode of our Resource Allocation mini-series, we're answering the question that's always on our minds, even when we're making the best decisions we can with limited information, time, and people: what else could go wrong?

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 episode, we’ll discuss the many factors that can impact your company’s ability to effectively allocate resources and achieve its most important objectives.

Our innovation and product development experts that you’ve heard throughout this series include Jonathan Bertfield, Troy Anderson, and Barry O'Reilly. 

They'll share their perspectives on the following questions:

• What decisions can impede a mature company's ability to innovate?

• What challenges do companies face when transitioning from a project-oriented model to a product-operating model?

• What goes wrong when companies decide which initiatives to pursue and how to staff them?
  

Jonathan will start us off by discussing two common innovation antipatterns: scaling a specific innovation process too wide too soon and copying another company's innovation playbook without considering the differences in organizational context.

Hope Gurion: You work with a lot of companies seeking to improve their ability to innovate. What have you seen slow down or stop momentum on innovation or accelerate a company's ability to really be innovative in their industry, especially for a mature company?

Jonathan Bertfield: Yes, I think one of the key elements is essentially treating the change that you're trying to drive in the same way that we treat our products. So we want to, for example, when we're building a product, we want to identify a small group of early adopters and we want to learn from them before we go out to the mass market. We want to try things out in an experimental context with key measures for what we're trying to learn. We're focused on outcomes, and we're assessing what worked and what didn't work. So the same thing when it comes to building a process, we want to start with an area that's strategically important, but small enough for us to be able to grapple with and understand the dynamics of, and learn from that as quickly as possible before we start deploying more broadly cohort of teams through a new process and learning what were some of the team structure dynamics that we've been talking about, what worked and what didn't, who needed to be in the room but wasn't available. What were the key questions that we were asking teams to use as their guideposts as they mature and as they move through the lifecycle? How did the leaders react? Well, let's get them to learn new ways of operating with a small group of teams before we say this is the new process and it's enshrined in stone. Similarly, we want to avoid taking on too many tools and too many structures before we really understand what tools might work to actually add value rather than just get in the way. So treating the process change around our innovation capacity and around our desire to grow that capacity in the same way that we treat our product development process, really important and I've seen over and over again how that plays out as being a recipe The counter-example of “we're going all in, we're getting a big consulting group to design a process and it's going to be buttoned down from A to Z and then we're going to roll that out across everybody in the company.” That's a recipe for problems and for seeing the innovation process as just another white horse coming in and being in a continuous learning mode with our organization so we can develop it over time.

Hope Gurion: Yeah, I love that example because it is always fighting that desire for certainty. There's a perfect process. There's a right team. There's a perfect idea. And really applying those same principles to exploration, to developing the innovation process that's going to serve your company the best, which is a great reminder.

Jonathan Bertfield: Right. Yeah. And it's like the worst possible thing a company can do is, is tell their team or tell consultants coming in, um, “Oh, that company over there, I want what they have. Let's do like what Procter & Gamble have done or, American Express or whatever, because we're in a similar space.” And it's like, yeah, well, we don't know the journey that they went on, the trials that they went through to get to where they are. And a lot of their internal dynamics are different than yours. So like it's not a shift and drop in place here. We've got to learn what works for you and iterate as we go.

Hope Gurion: Next Troy Anderson shares a number of common antipatterns plaguing organizations that product leaders should expect to encounter and plan to address:

Hope Gurion: You covered many of the things that can go awry throughout these resource allocation decisions. But are there any other risks or challenges or anti-patterns that you've personally had to navigate or walked into organizations who've maybe not had the best approach to figuring out who's working on what and how many people are working on what? Tell me some of the ones that stand out to you.

Troy Anderson: I mean, the ones that stand out are, you know, someone's favorite person is being shepherded onto a product because they're the favorite person. Not necessarily the right person.

Likewise, a product could be worked on because it's the CEO's pet product.

You know, there's people's ideas that oh, well, you know, “are you going to validate this with a customer?”
“You know, I know the market. This is good, we should do it.” Like, you know, all of these are really, really bad reasons to do anything.

So those are the things I encounter a lot. The other thing that I count on all the time is not having a hypothesis, not having a good understanding of why we make a decision or a priority decision one way or another.

And the thing that I see time and again, is, this organization hasn't even decided what is solving, right? Are we solving for revenue? Oh, yes, of course, we're solving for revenue. Are we solving for profit? Of course, we're solving for profit. Are we solving for valuation? Of course, we're solving for valuation. Guess what? That's three different products. So could you pick one? Yeah, no, those are the ones who want. yeah, you're not telling me anything.

So when you have a situation like that, sometimes you have to decide for yourself you know what the right route is and what will ultimately be the right thing at the end of the day.

Much better is, you get to a point where the hypothesis drives the OKRs. The OKRs drive the resource allocation.

That's, that's a mythical fairyland, though, I think because that doesn't ever happen.

There's not there's no hypothesis driving OKRs. It's like, well, we're gonna have six OKRs and you know, one's gonna be revenue, one's gonna be valuation one's gonna be exploratory, one's gonna be, you know, diversity, one's going to be people, one's going to be, you know, whatever. And there's no rhyme or reason. There's no hypothesis. It's just like, we're gonna throw a bunch of things at the board, see what sticks. It's like that's not helping me at all from a product leadership standpoint, to make yes or no decisions.

And so sometimes when it's like that, you just do the best you can.

Hope Gurion: Barry O'Reilly closes out this episode and our series by discussing antipatterns that can stress an organization during its transformation from a project-oriented model to a product-operating model. He also explains the role that senior leadership plays in combating these stressors.

Hope Gurion: What do you most often see going wrong when companies are navigating these decisions? And I hate calling it resource allocation because these are people, there's people, you know, people have different skills and interests, but like, these are hard choices because there's never enough people and time and money. And there's always more ambition than we're going be able to achieve. So what have you seen go wrong that you think people should watch out for as they're navigating these decisions?

Barry O'Reilly: Just the work management and the expectation that people will behave as they did in a project world where they're constantly context-switching in what you're trying to move to a product world, which is more focused, I think, as you were saying, I think that's really important. The other thing is actually just the behavior of the leadership team and even the teams themselves, right? They're so used to like firefighting and fire drills and jumping from one thing to another or just adding work and finding people to do it. Right? Like it's the hardest behavior is moving from a world where you're constantly jumping from one thing to the next, like three or four times in a week to sort of committing to the, if you will, and trusting the process of letting a team focus on something for like three weeks or four weeks when one week into that, whatever three- or four-week cycle, the CRM system breaks or the customer complaints channel is not working, right? When you actually get into like the those seminal moments of when failures happen that are outside anyone's control, like what happens? Or the sales team come in and say “we're only going to get this customer if we add this feature that our customers million dollars”, you know, “we don't get this deal, we're losing our number top five client”, like, right? like, so, because these are the stressors that you put onto the team and the philosophy you're trying to move towards, right, and I think that's the moments where, you know, as a team, as especially as a senior leadership team, you've got to stay your ground. You've got to hold on to the approach that you think you want to go for the long term and stick with it. And people will get angry. People will get upset. They'll be like, they'll try to go around back door avenues and orchestrate and say, “come on Hope, you and me have worked together for like 5 years.” You know, all the stuff starts. And I think that’s the bit, that's the behavior change that needs to happen, right? Is that people have to trust in the system of work that you're trying to create and like give it a chance to sort of flourish and. because the natural behavior probably before that was just “I'll go to Hope. she'll get that thing done for me, you know, and she'll find a way to get it done.” Right. And that sort of circumvents what you're trying to create, you know, and it, and it's like all these things, you know, you have to commit to often the harder initially, both behavioral approach, to get to where you want to go, rather than the quick fix of just, all right, we'll just do this feature this time. or we'll just read the theme. Again, it's not like you take that totally off the table, but you have to be very explicit about trying to always make the choice towards the long-term system of work that you want. And I think if you can get to that, that's where, again, the behavior changes over time.

And I know this because I, you know, that is the bit I often find when I'm working with the companies, right? We can design these beautiful portfolios, great categorizations, great measures of success, funding modules. But what happens is if the human behavior stays true to that, you know, and that's often actually where I find more of the coaching is, is that you're like telling people, “hang on, it looks like you're trying to add a new piece of work here. And what we agreed was that we would do that in our prioritization meeting, whatever it is, once every two weeks or every quarter, whatever, we need to bring that conversation there.” Don't go over to a person's desk and tap them on the shoulder and ask them to do that ticket for you. Because, you know, that this is a million dollar deal on the table. And, you know, that's, I think, where again, the coaching happens. And, you know, it's It's hard, but the rewards are there. Like a lot of the companies I've worked with, whether it's setting up the venture group for British Airways or spending time with, you know, great companies like Spotify, as they figure out how they build a strategy to grow their business and retain customers and find new customers and offer new product offerings, like helping them go through that process is massive. And a lot of it is a behavior change. and the design of the system of work is easy. That's sort of the fun part. It's like how you show up and commit to it.

Hope Gurion: Yeah, I often say “All you have is your time.” And so if you're intentional about your people and their time towards these measures of success, it CAN yield great results. But the minute you start chipping away at that time with, “oh, we're just gonna do this one thing,” or I'm just gonna, “oh, it's okay, we can explore these things.” Then the odds of you achieving those measures of success are gonna deteriorate quickly. And so it's, yeah, it's as a leader, it's, you know, keeping aware and trying to, you know, prevent and keep people on the path that you intend. So yeah, not easy, but worth it. 

So I loved having this conversation with you. I really appreciate it. Because there are not many people I think have as informed a point of view as you do on these decisions.

And that's a wrap! Thanks for listening to the perspectives and advice we shared in this series. I hope it will help you and other product leaders be better prepared to anticipate and lead your teams through the fog and discomfort of resource allocation decisions.

If you're facing these choices and have a question we didn't answer, please reach out to me for an introductory call. I'd be happy to discuss it with you.

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.

- - -

Feedback is a gift! Share what was most useful to you by leaving a review. Contact me on Linkedin or at https://www.fearless-product.com/contact.