The aforementioned is one of my absolute favorite quotes from the cult 1983 movie War Games. There are few quotes that I think of that apply more to product leadership, as it is widely agreed that the art of product management is identifying what doesn’t get done…
When defining long-term roadmap as outlined in the previous section, a significant disparity often arises between resourcing, time, and authoritatively winning in the market. This disparity is especially prevalent in multi-product companies.
When this occurs, the right answer is to cut roadmap items to authoritatively win in a reasonable amount of time. This is painful and there are no great answers as to how to do it.
Some strategies include:
- For multi-product companies, end-of-life poorly performing products to free up resources to double down on the absolute biggest opportunity. Factors to be considered include market opportunity, growth, revenue, retention, and cost of development. In general, candidates for this category are products that are in decline or those that will be perpetually flat from a revenue standpoint without substantial additional investment. An alternative lens to consider if there are material capabilities missing that will ultimately lead to massive customer dissatisfaction (and therefore decline) or a simply non-competitive position in the market (e.g. being cannibalized by free tools or having the proverbial lunch eaten by a competitor).
- Also for multi-product companies, the other option is to put things on ice or life support. The same factors for end-of-life should be examined to find the right candidates. However, because, there will be an ongoing cost of development – one must look at this carefully and also consider if there are any roadmap items needed to at least keep revenue and retention flat.
- If it is logistically possible, a third option is to partner with engineering to lower R&D costs to obtain the needed number of resources, though this rarely materializes to be an easy-to-implement strategy.
Some examples of managing this correctly in a multi-product company:
- I once worked for a company that had a product that was being usurped by free tools from technology partners. Revenue was in decline unless significant product and paid user acquisition efforts were expended. This became an easy cut candidate and the resources were freed up to build a new product that ended up achieving 30% enterprise adoption in its first quarter.
- I once worked for another company that was in the midst of moving from on-premise to the cloud. There were several products that were not going to be migrated to the cloud. These were put on life support but continued to be available to on-premise customers, freeing up some extremely talented resources. The products continued to deliver value to on-premise customers and still brought in millions of dollars in revenue until they were later replaced by a SaaS-based acquisition.
And, for a contrast, here is an anti-pattern where I would have gone back and done things extremely differently if I could rewrite history:
- I worked for another company that had multiple products serving multiple disparate customer segments. Material investments were required to play-to-win from both a product and go-to-market perspective to fully address the needs of all customer segments and products. When expected funding did not materialize, the guidance from the CEO, CFO, and board/investors was to continue evolving the entire portfolio, but do so with current resourcing. This resulted in a “peanut-butter” approach where everything received a tertiary investment and progress was made, but no needles were materially moved resulting in no major wins in the market. In retrospect, this was the worse possible outcome.
- If being requisitely hardcore, a very different outcome would have ensued. Instead of taking the peanut-butter approach, a focus segment would have been chosen along with the requisite products (a focused subset of the total portfolio). The other products would have been put on life support, non-focus segments de-prioritized, and a double-down, play-to-win strategy executed on the core segment and products. (Epilogue – this eventually happened after several changes in leadership.)
This scenario gets far harder for single product companies, as there are no other products to end-of-life or put on ice. The first and easiest lever to pull is customer segment focus. Double down on the segments with the highest potential and put the rest on ice. Barring that, ruthless prioritization on what will make the most impact and being extremely overt about product gaps and what is not getting done becomes the order of the day, with communications and stakeholder management finesse being absolutely critical.