[On-demand] Product Management Webinar: How to Avoid the Agency Trap

Janna Bastow [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome. Come on in. Hello. Come on in. Get yourself settled and we’re gonna begin in just a moment. I can see people are just, landing in Zoom now. Getting settled in. Come on in and say hello. Find that chat, say hello. Let us know where you’re calling in from and, would love to chat to you in there.

Myself, I’m coming in from Brighton, UK. Where’s everybody else? All right, I can see Jim first up with , the chat fast fingers there from, Charleston. Welcome, welcome. I can see now some, messages coming in thick and fast. Now we’ve got people coming in from all over Indianapolis, from somebody from Reading, somebody from California, Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, we’ve got somebody from Minneapolis.

So we’ve got a good mix of people. Hello, some friendly faces from Portugal, from Florida. Hi David. Good to see you. Glad to see you back here today. Thanks very much. Yeah, so I can see we’ve got people coming in from all over the place. We’re gonna give people just a minute or so to get settled and all that.

And then we will kick off. And we’ll go [00:01:00] from there. If you want to feel free to drop your LinkedIn or any other chats in the chat today. You wanna connect with your fellow product people. We’re all product nerds here, so get in, say hello. Let us know where you’re calling from and let us know who you are.

I can see a couple of friendly faces from London. Hey Barry. Hey Stewart. Good to see you here again. Great! We’re getting a good group here today. I guess everybody’s interested about how to avoid the agency trap. And I’m actually really curious to find out if anybody here feels like they’re in the agency trap or if this is a new term to people.

It could very well be a new term. I’ve made it up, but it is something that’s a real phenomena that I’ve seen in so many companies around the world, so that’s why we’re gonna be talking about it today. Right. So I can see we’ve got a really good group here and everyone has figured out how to use the chat.

Today is going to be recorded, so if you, don’t take any notes, that’s fine. You’ll be able to get a copy of this recording to share around with people later. You’ll, you’re able to use the chat, which obviously you all know how to use the chat. You’re doing a great job there. Hi [00:02:00] everybody. And also feel free to use the Q and A.

So drop questions into the Q and A. Other people can vote them up, and that way we know which questions are the most burning of all the questions. And we’ll do our best to get through all of them today. But drop ’em in as I’m chatting today. I will pick them up either as I go or at the end, see how we go from there. Right,

so we good to go? All right, we’re gonna kick off. So hey everybody, and big welcome. Glad to see you back here. A lot of friendly faces, a lot of new faces as well. That’s great. This is a series of webinars that we run here at ProdPad. You might already know some of our, previous, versions of this.

They’re all recorded and they’re all available on our site at prodpad.com/webinars. So go catch ’em there. And they’re all a focus on learning and sharing and the expertise that we’ve picked up in the product management world. Some are presentations like this from myself or other industry experts, and others are more like fireside chats that we’ve had with, smart product people from around the world.

My name is Jana Bastow. I am [00:03:00] the co-founder of ProdPad, and today I’m gonna be talking about how to balance the discovery and delivery side of your business without falling into the agency trap. I gonna explain what I mean by agency trap. Before I jump into that, I just wanna share a little bit about what we do here at ProdPad.

So ProdPad is a tool that myself and my co-founder, a fellow product person named Simon, we built when we were product managers ourselves. You might know me and Simon from our past work with Mind the Product. And so we’ve always been surrounded by lots and lots of really smart product people and we needed a tool to help us keep track of our product decisions, keep track of all the experiments and ideas we had, all the feedback we were hearing, to help us make roadmaps that people would actually pay attention to.

And nothing existed. And so we built ProdPad as a way to gain some control and some organization and provide some transparency into what was going on in the product world for the rest of our team. So it created this single source of truth for all of our product decisions. Nowadays, it’s being used by thousands of product people around the world.

So, big thank you [00:04:00] to all of our supporters. Anybody who hasn’t tried it yet, you can jump in and try for free. We even have a sandbox version of ProdPad, which is preloaded with example data like lean roadmaps and OKRs and other pieces. So you can see how it all sort of fits together into one space.

We also have a brilliant AI, our Co-pilot PM which is given all the context of your product in the background. So as you talk to it, it can give you advice on what direction you might wanna go in or help you spot any blind spots or sometimes just help you summarize that big pile of feedback you just got and how it might connect to your roadmap.

So give it a try and let us know what you think. We’re all product people here and we live and, die by your feedback. Well, let’s dive into this agency trap problem, right? So, you know, the biggest indicator of your ability to scale as a business is to look at what it is that you actually sell as a business.

And so this determines this, whether you’re more of a product company or more of an agency. [00:05:00] And so think of this way, agencies sell their time in exchange for money, right? And this usually takes the form of custom client contracts and projects, stuff that they pick up from individual clients. Whereas product companies on the other hand, they sell this value that they created.

It’s a little bit less tangible. Now, the problem with selling time is that time is the one thing that we can’t create more of. It’s the ultimate limited resource. And so agency style businesses can really only scale with more human resources. They need more people providing more of their time to the business.

And so product companies, well, they’re able to create value kind of outta nothing, right? Code and bits and whatnot. They invest time upfront into r and d and into this mix of products and services that can be resold time and time again without needing lots more humans to scale. Right? And this is why product companies can scale to such enormous tech giants.

But fundamentally, you don’t see [00:06:00] agencies, in the trillion dollar valuations. So there’s absolutely no shame in building and running an agency. It’s actually a brilliant way to make yourself some money, create purpose, solve problems, get paid, but agencies don’t change the world. Product companies do, right?

And so, hands up, who here wants to make a dent in the world? Who here wants to be working for a product company making a big shift? Yeah, I could see some hands going up. Love that. Yes. So product people unite. We’re gonna talk about how product companies change the world. First a story, because I’ve been caught in what I call the agency trap.

Now you all know that I’m a product person at heart. You might know me as, one of the founders of Mind, the Product, or of course here at ProdPad. But before all this, I was a product person. This is about maybe 15 years ago. I was a product person for a company in London and I moved over and was meant to join the team as a product manager.

But after like a week or so there, it became [00:07:00] pretty clear that I was actually lined up to do a lot more project management than I’d expected, than I’d been sold on. And the company hadn’t knowingly mis-sold me on the job. They’d just gotten stuck in this trap that I now know is really common, and I see it all the time amongst other product teams that I spend time with.

So I’m here to warn you about it and hopefully keep you from falling in that same trap, or if you’re in it, help get you out. So today’s talk is gonna be a bit of a journey. I’m gonna be talking about the power of product in terms of discovery versus delivery work. I’m gonna be talking about the reasons why companies end up getting pulled off track from their product-led goals.

I’m gonna give you some clear signs to watch for when you know that you’re veering into agency territory, no longer acting like a scalable product company. And I’m gonna give you some actionable tips on how to get out, including how to think about structuring your team and setting your pricing and formatting a roadmap so you don’t get stuck in this trap in the first place.

So, are we ready? Let’s dive in. [00:08:00] So why is discovery so powerful? We talk about discovery, as if it’s a given, but think of it this way. Discovery is like the heart of what product people do or what us product teams do. You know, the very nature of discovery and, the nature of our work is to cast a wide research net to identify problems and hold back from committing to a solution.

You know, the product team has a process of essentially it’s guessing and checking to optimize to find the best solution, right? We wanna find a solution that’s cost effective and desirable for the market and feasible to build and valuable for the business, right? And it’s a process that can take years, really months, if not years.

And it’s messy and it doesn’t guarantee success by any stretch, but when it is successful, it pays off in spades. So contrast this with how, an agency work. In an agency, it’s kind of like the client identifies the problem for you and enlists your team to tackle that problem, and then you and your team get paid for that piece of work seems pretty [00:09:00] straightforward right now.

The thing is, as a product person, you should cherish every moment that you get to spend in discovery mode. This is where those big juicy problems of the world are found incorrect and where real value is discovered. You know, delivery is something that we all have to do, right? Delivery is when you’re honing in on the problem that you’ve identified, and it’s really more of a means to an end.

You gotta get something out there so you can learn from it and, iterate on it. You know, you have to have delivery. It pays the bills, but it’s not the earth moving disruptive activity that discovery has the potential to be. And you have to have balance, of course, right? You have to have enough time to spend time in, in discovery to discover problems.

And of course, enough time actually delivering on those problems. But what happens if it gets thrown off balance? If you’re like me back at that previous role, you end up with great intentions, but you know, you’re, you’re trying to discover problems and finding interesting ways to solve them.

But before you know it, you’ve got your hands tied with, client work. You know, just delivery [00:10:00] commitments that stop you from actually spending time in discovery. So a lot of companies aspire to be product companies. We see product manager hirings on the up again. There’s so much support and knowledge out there on how to build a product company.

You know, we’re all saying we’re all gonna go and build these product companies, and yet a lot of them go in and end up in the same trap. They act like an agency and they sort of sputter and don’t take off. They take on client jobs and commitments that carve into their time that would otherwise be spent in discovery.

So, what’s going on here, what’s causing them to sort of sputter and fail? Let’s look at the reasons why companies are getting pulled off track. And a lot of these, you’ll realize are just real human reasons, right? Like, for example, building a product company takes time. You know, it takes months or years before your company’s generating enough revenue to cover the cost of the team.

And so naturally the companies try to find ways to bridge that gap, bridge that cash gap, right? They, they resort to hiring out their time in [00:11:00] exchange for cash. In the short term, right? And it’s actually a fair trade, right? Cash is king, it keeps the lights on. I don’t blame anybody for taking on some work for this reason.

But it can cause you to veer away from spending time in discovery. And of course, you see the companies that are addicted to features, anybody, part of companies that their feature factory is full up and running. But, it’s, it’s not adding value. You know, sales and marketing convince you that one more feature is gonna be the thing that wins that client.

And yet I can tell you from experience, it’s never just one more feature to win that client. And of course, we’re drawn to the big, deep pockets and the allure of recognizable logos that we can slap on our website, right? Big enterprise clients, it’s really easy to get distracted and build something that suits one big customer in hopes that it’ll help you attract all the rest of the big customers.

I mean, I’ve seen this one. This is the story from my previous company. You’ve taken in funding and you’ve made big promises to those investors about where are you meant to [00:12:00] be by now, and how fast you’re gonna get there. And sometimes you’re just making up for gaps in the bottom line. And actually, John Cutler captured it really interestingly here.

Every company starts off with great intentions of following some scientific methodology of measuring, learning and iterating until they’ve found and solved the most valuable problems in the world. But these go out in times of stress. Sometimes when your neck is on the line, it’s just whatever we need to do to get to the next round becomes, you know, selling time for money just to bridge those gaps.

And the problem is that it’s easy to get stuck in these traps because, let’s admit it, making money and cashing checks is addictive. Who doesn’t love that? But every minute of time that a client buys from you to have you work on their problems is a minute that you can’t spend discovering and solving problems in the world.

The bigger problems in the world now, so there’s a chance that the client that you brought on happens to identify a problem that’s just right for you, right? It’s [00:13:00] big enough to apply to a wider market, and you can easily resell it to this wider market and use their discovery work, right? Their, requirements as your ladder to get up.

But I’m telling you from experience that those chances are slim. It’s more often than not, you’re actually just moving into delivery mode and you haven’t just magically leapfrogged months or years of discovery, right? Some people luck out that way, but most don’t. So let’s have a look at signs that we’re, veering into this agency mode.

I’ve been there and I’ve seen countless companies end up down this path. And there’s one clear sign that companies are moving into agency mode. Let’s look at your roadmap. Now, I’ve seen a lot of roadmaps and I can tell you that a roadmap is an incredible diagnostic tool for the state of any business, right?

Show me your roadmap and I’ll tell you how your company might be dysfunctional. So some examples of this. You know, you say that you don’t have a roadmap or you don’t have a clear vision or anything tied back to company level objectives. If something’s just [00:14:00] missing there, it tells me that your team is probably lacking alignment or your roadmap is filled with features and solutions instead of problems to be solved.

It’s telling me that your team might be lacking autonomy to figure out the path ahead for themselves, right? They’re getting this stuff dictated to them from somewhere and it’s not product. And what about your roadmap is completely dictated from above. It’s just a plan to execute, given to you by your execs.

There’s no room for questions or experimentation, and it suggests that there might be a lack of psychological safety in the team. Now, of course, you need alignment and autonomy and psychological safety. These are the three, uh, tenets really of, um, of a good product culture. But the biggest defender of them all, the one that breaks all of these, um, the one that tells me that you’re in an agency trap already is the sales led roadmap.

You know, as again, the sales led roadmap is a telling feature, [00:15:00] right? In a discovery led roadmap and discovery led company. The roadmap should be a series of problems to solve and should facilitate a discussion about what could be solved and in what order, in order to reach that product vision in a sales led organization, a roadmap looks more like this.

You wanna see one of the worst roadmaps I’ve ever seen? This is actually my roadmap from years ago at that company that was in the agency trap. So the gray areas represented, discovery led work where we were building for the wider market and trying to find the biggest juiciest problems and the best ways to solve them.

But unfortunately, our time was being dominated by work in that green strip, what we called enterprise and partner launches. And actually, David, you just asked in the Q&A, how does partnerships fit into this? You know, the stuff in the green strip here, stuff we’re doing for partnerships and enterprise, and there were the things that we’re doing, they all required to close on specific

dates in order to land specific deals. Sales was leading the way of course, that’s what led us to get [00:16:00] there. And, you know, it got us paid that month. But look at what the cost was. So for the preceding quarter, that blue line is the present day at that point in time, we basically did nothing to further the vision of our core product.

All of our work was tied up in partner work. Now, you know, it looked like the partner work kind of cleared up in the future, but it never did. Right? Our salespeople were always coming back with a big grin on their face to tell us about the next thing they’d sold only for us to find out it required more work on the roadmap to make it fit.

And so this green area kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The rest of it had to be thinned out. You know, ultimately the stuff ahead beyond that present day, I can tell you now in the future, we didn’t do a fraction of the discovery work that this roadmap suggests we were gonna do in the future.

And ultimately this business failed. It didn’t make it. Some of you might be interviewing right now. And again, you wanna find out how or whether the company you’re interviewing with is in the agency trap. Ask them to see their roadmap. Ask them how certain things [00:17:00] got on the roadmap and who manages the roadmap.

Ask about how flexible it is based on feedback and new learnings and which things are fixed in place. Ask how you’re gonna be able to impact the roadmap or whether this is something that’s already been dictated and you’re just there to fulfill the roadmap. I wish I’d asked this before I joined that company, but it brought with me some good stories.

So, hey. Alright, so let’s imagine we can back up and I could have escaped that agency trap ’cause I know how to do it now, but back then I lacked the vocabulary and the understanding as to what was really happening in order to get outta there. But I don’t want any of you to get stuck in the agency trap.

So let’s talk about this.

And Jao asks in the chat just now, he says, can we ask that in an interview? Can we ask to see the roadmap and ask our flexibilities? Yes, I hope so. And if the company grimaces at that, it might be a sign that you’re walking into a company that doesn’t have flexibility in that roadmap and, is it gonna provide that psychological safety to question things?

So you should be able to [00:18:00] ask questions like that in an interview. As to what percentage of companies would tell you that, don’t know. If you guys go out and start asking this question, let me know what the response is. I would love to hear. Right. So, how do escape the agency trap? You know, if you recognize that you’ve been sacrificing discovery time for delivery work, you need to bring it up and make sure that it’s acknowledged at the exec level.

You know, it’s often a tough conversation because it means admitting that sacrifice sacrifices have been made. But it’s important to everyone in key roles knows what’s happening and how it impacts the outlook of the company, right? If you’re not having these conversations, then you’re not gonna be able to do something about them.

So bring it up and chat about the fact that you think discovery time is being eaten by delivery time. And as part of that question, ask and answer this question and make sure that you’ve got exec level buy-in on this Is what kind of company do you wanna be? Like, you know, had I really [00:19:00] asked this question and dug in years ago, I probably would’ve discovered that the company wanted to be a product company, but was actually acting like an agency accidentally.

They didn’t realize that. But in some companies, perhaps taking on lots of client work is part of the plan, right? Maybe they do wanna operate more as an agency in the future. That’s okay. That’s their prerogative. And it’s better that, you know now, so you can adjust your roles and your expectations accordingly, right?

Not everyone who’s a product manager wants to work as a project manager. For some people it might be a great fit. And perhaps the aspiration is to be a giant tech company, right? They’re taking in funding so they can grow and scale, but these short term delivery commitments are just a means to an end, right?

So that they don’t have to take in as much external funding and they can grow on their own steam. Right? And that’s okay too, right? I’ve seen lots of companies be go there and pull out the other end. It’s completely okay to take on some work like that as long as it means it’s doing it for a good reason, right?

It means that you don’t have to go for a risky round of funding or if it enables you to grow the team to the next stage. But it’s really important that you [00:20:00] have these tough conversations to align everyone in the team on what the ultimate goal of your company is so that the best strategic decisions are made, right?

These are strategic decisions at the company level. You know, how much time are we dedicating to discovery work versus delivery work? How much agency sales led stuff are we taking on to keep the lights on, and why are we doing that? So, you can then start thinking about separating your agency work into a different business unit, right?

A different way of managing it. You know, along with its own space for custom work. For some companies, it still is necessary to have this separate work. But you should charge separately for this and charge well. Remember that time is the most limited resource that you have. You know, someone’s asking for custom development.

Do not be afraid to ask for eye watering fees for that honor, right? Because you are investing time that you’re otherwise not able to invest in building your rocket ship. This really valuable time, [00:21:00] especially if your plan is to 10 x your company in the next three years. And put it this way, their alternative might be, they could go ask any other development team out there, right?

They could go vibe code it if they wanted to. Is it really right? There’s a reason they’re asking you for this custom visa development. You have built something special and proprietary in the first place. You’ve already got the platform or the thing that they want to adjust. You might be the only team in the world who’s actually able to give them specifically what they want.

And if their alternative, if they don’t buy your product with the little add-on, or they don’t wanna pay for the fee for the custom work that they’re asking to add on. You know, their alternative is to spend years rebuilding your whole product and then building that one thing on top that they wanted.

It’s probably not likely to happen, right? So remember, you’re holding some chips in this conversation. It’s important that you don’t just price it as if you know, they’re going to spend one extra month fee on you. They’re going to pay for your time as a delivery company if that’s what you’re doing.

And they might go with a [00:22:00] competitor of course, but there’s a reason they’re asking you. And of course you might lose some deals this way. You might not get all of your customers if you’re not able to do all the custom development they’ve asked for. But remember, you are trying to build a product company.

You’re selling a product that you’ve created. You’re not an agency at heart selling your time, otherwise it’s not worth your time. So charge way more for any custom work that you wanna keep and get rid of any time wasters. And that’s a totally fine and actually really good way of running things. So you’ve gotta separate that agency work and charge accordingly.

And then if the aspiration is to move towards being a product focused, discovery focused company as opposed to an agency is you’ve got to start decreasing your dependency on project delivery cash. You know, I’m not gonna say to you like, you know what, say no to all your clients and just focus on building the one thing that you think is the right thing that’s useful for the entire market and not this individual stuff.

Because some companies need these deals to keep the lights on. Some of these companies need these deals for certain reasons, and that’s fine. But you could think about, you know, measuring how [00:23:00] much you’re spending in each one and then shifting it, right? So let’s say today you’re spending 80% of your time in delivery and 20% in discovery.

Well, could you move that to like a 70 30 split by the end of the next month? Can you move that to a 50-50 split? Can you split that to 20-80 the other way for yourself? So you spend a lot more time in discovery and that 20% is just icing on top that you’ve got your, your team charging for extra.

So plan out steps in your strategy that look at how you’re gonna build up your core product so that it will sell more and more people will buy the product that you already have today. So you’re less dependent on external funding and external deals, you know, clients and custom work. So that you can actually free up more of your time to solve problems in the core product itself.

Which then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So it starts making it easier to sell to the wider market if you’re building for the wider market. So it’s not gonna happen overnight, it’s not gonna happen by itself. It take, it’s gonna take you and your team to sort of gather around [00:24:00] and first of all, admit there’s a dependency on this agency mode work, build a vocabulary around talking about it like this, and then making a concerted effort to get away from it, to build towards this product-led future that you’re envisioning for your company.

And finally, let’s ditch that sales-led roadmap, right? You don’t have to wait until you’re fully product-led, but changing the format of your roadmap is gonna change the habits of your team and set you on a healthier course, because this is a sales-led roadmap, and it’s ultimately driven by features and client deliverables.

And ultimately it’s more like a project Gantt chart than what a roadmap should look like. So ditch this format and move to something that’s a more of a discovery-led roadmap. You know, discovery led roadmap looks entirely different. It’s centered around the business objectives to meet- like revenue or user targets and, and customer problems to solve.

And the product manager, the team here, is going to use the roadmap to make sure that things are prioritized, to make the most out of the resources they have. Where they have time to do discovery. It’s spending it in the most [00:25:00] valuable and interesting problem areas first, and it’s not overrun by client commitments.

You can still show client commitments on here, but it’s not the first and foremost version of the roadmap that you’re to share. And one thing to remember is when you’re building a product company, you’re building into the great unknown, right? You’re building into uncharted territory.

There’s no blueprint to follow. There’s no right way to do this. You know, it’s like landing on a new unknown shore and knowing that you need to get to that gold topped mountain in the distance and having to pick out the best path along the way. And you’ve got certain resources with you now, and you’re gonna pick up resources and knowledge as you sort of trek forward.

And it’s up to you and your team to survey your surroundings, to look around, decide what it is you have today, what resources you have on hand, and what problems you need to solve as you go. Every product is a unique journey. Like everyone here is building a different product. There’s no one who can just pull out Google Maps and follow the existing path to building your product.

This is uncharted territory. So this is [00:26:00] where the concept of horizons come in, right? So you’re standing here in the present time, or what we’d call now, and you can see what’s keeping your team busy right now and what problems are right in front of you. So it’s like you landed on this new shore and immediately saw there was like a bear in front of you, like that’s your first problem to solve, it’s crystal clear.

Unless someone sees a different, bigger problem, you better start thinking of ways to solve that problem. And in this case, the bear might be a bad bug or an immediate market problem, or it might even be a client commitment that’s been made. Like sometimes you just gotta get something outta the way so that you actually have time to look ahead and figure out what those next paths are.

And you can also see way off into the distance. You can see that mountaintop that you aspire to conquer. And there’s probably problems to solve. There probably problems along the way that you’re gonna find. You know, maybe something like, keeping warm or getting ice climbing gear, but that’s too specific right now, right?

You can figure that out when you get closer, you’re a long way off and there’s a lot of things you can do before you get there to gather resources and knowledge. But if there’s big [00:27:00] known chunky problems, like we wanna get up that mountain, then note that down for you and your team to keep an eye out for ways to how they’re gonna break down and solve that problem.

Getting up the mountain. And that might be over the course of the months or even years ahead. But you wanna keep your eye on the big picture, which mountaintop you’re going for. You can also see off into the middle distance, you know, in various directions to various degrees.

Some teams can see more, some teams can see less. It depends on how well equipped you are, what your starting position is right now, you know how far down this path you’ve already gone. You might spot opportunities to take advantage of that will help you along the way to reach your ultimate goals or problems that you’re gonna need to overcome and or avoid.

Right? You know, maybe there’s a glistening city full of money and resources that you could reach, but in order to get there, there’s a bog you need to get over, right? And there’s almost certainly multiple paths that you could take through this journey. And from where you’re standing, you don’t really know which one’s the best one.

You know, the further are things off in the distance, the less certainly about them. They’re gonna get fuzzy out there. It [00:28:00] might be faster to build the bridge, but it means you miss the uplift in that resources from visiting that city. But from here, it might actually just be a mirage in the desert.

So you’re gonna have to get closer to determine. And again, you can’t just whip out your phone and pull up Google Maps and it’ll tell you where to go. This is uncharted territory. There is no right answer, but some answers are gonna be better than others. And the best answers come from teams who work together.

They lay out what they can see in the road ahead, and they regularly regroup to make sure they’re still on the best path. And so these horizons translate to a product roadmap. Instead of a single line that’s always marching forward this date driven timeline. Think of these in terms of these three buckets.

The first bucket, you’re very granular about your focus and your scope. That’s the stuff being prototyped and tested and built right now. And the later column is less about specific initiatives, but more around outlining the rough shape of the problems that you think need to be solved in order to fulfill the vision that you set.

Now it’s easy to [00:29:00] get sucked into the agency trap if you don’t have aligned goals either. You know, this is where frameworks like OKRs come in to help, and I don’t care whether we’re talking about them in terms of OKRs or whatever you call them these days. But, what we’re looking for is the concept of having a high level quantitative goal.

We’re gonna call those our objectives and our key results, right? The specific time-bound measures, which needles you’re expecting to move. And what I really like about OKRs is that the company sets the top level objectives, and then the team works together to decide how they can contribute to that goal.

It’s vastly different than the old school way of doing management, where you think of management setting goals for each team and micromanaging the progress. With this structure of OKRs where the team’s collaborating, it means that it’s using the knowledge of the whole team to set goals, which means gaps are more naturally

spotted and filled. You know, they kind of shuffle things around and they till they say, well, I’ll do this part, and you do this part, and we can do this part. And now we know that we’ve actually done enough to, ladder up to that main objective. And it [00:30:00] allows the team to work more autonomously.

They’re not held up by limitations in knowledge or time by middle or taught management. But OKRs aren’t perfect. One of the big complaints I often hear about OKRs relates to OKR Drift, and it’s what happens when you set up your objectives and your measures in one place, and then you go off and do your day-to-day product work in another place.

And what tends to happen is the OKRs get forgotten about. And when the team goes back to update them at the end of the month, the OKRs aren’t as relevant anymore. The team’s been learning and iterating over in their product space and wasn’t looking in the tracking space.

You know, kind of a surprise at the end of OKR season or the end of the quarter that they’ve got to go back and look at the OKR spreadsheet that they started and never looked at. You know, it’s one of the reasons OKRs often fail in teams. I regularly hear people saying things like, ” OKRs don’t represent the stuff I work on every day”, or “we move so fast, OKRs can’t keep up”.

And I like to see OKRs and roadmaps connected much more deeply, like the one side being the flip side of the other [00:31:00] so that the two live in the same space and they inform each other and a way to help fix that. You know, there’s a term that you need to know in the OKR world it’s initiatives.

And for some reason it’s like the forgotten middle child. Everyone always talks about the objectives and key results. No one talks about the initiatives, I guess, ’cause OIKRs doesn’t have a good ring to it? Dunno. But an initiative describes the specific activities or projects the team’s working on in order to influence the success of the objectives and the key results.

So even if you identify what you need to achieve based on the company strategy and determine what good looks like, you’re not gonna get very far if you’re not able to outline the actions you plan to take in order to get there. So let’s use this as an example. Let’s say you want to increase user engagement on your SaaS platform.

That’s your objective. And you might have a couple of key results that go with it. You are measuring progress by something like getting a 20% increase in monthly active users, and a 15% increase in average session [00:32:00] duration by the end of the quarter. Now, in order to hit these key results, you’re not gonna be able to do it by just willing it to happen.

You’re gonna have to take action. And so your initiative might be something like, uh, address the top three pain points, identify and user feedback, or, um, you know, simplify the experience in your app around the core jobs to be done. And chances are, you’re gonna need to make progress around both of these initiatives to hit your goal.

And within each initiative, there’s probably a number of things that you can try, all of which you’ll see some results from. You know, those things you’ll try are what we call experiments. And so put this all together again, you want OKRs and roadmaps to be the flip side of the same coin. So you can tie it all together into a lean roadmap where each of these blocks are initiatives or problems to be solved.

And each one is linked to a specific objective to ensure alignment and they’re also linked to experiments to ensure the team’s trying different approaches to solve the problems, right? So here’s one popular configuration that sort of ties together the Now- Next- Later, the the initiatives, the objectives, and the [00:33:00] experiments.

Another layout that’s similar, but groups initiatives by objectives might look like this right now. The key thing is it’s not about what it looks like, it’s the value of the roadmap when it’s paired with objectives in that way, it takes the focus off of building features and hitting delivery dates for the sake of it, and helps your team strive towards solving problems.

Oh, and I can see some questions coming in, so I look forward to getting to those in a minute. Now I know that this whole ditching the timeline roadmap can be pretty controversial, I know some of you already done it. Some of you’re still working on this one. So I’ve actually written a course on how to make that transition, including an outline of how to handle objections from different stakeholders who, are kind of holding on tightly to the notion that you need to keep these sales led delivery commitments to clients.

So we’ve been there, we’ve talked to thousands of companies now, and we’ve outlined specifically what to say when sales says this, when marketing says [00:34:00] this, when whoever says whatever. So we’ve got your back on that. Another small piece for you is we’ve got this, presentation deck that you can take and shape into your own, which

helps you sell your company on the idea of using Now-Next- Later instead of a sales-led roadmap. So you can grab that download. We’ll also email this to you afterwards, so you’ve got a copy of that. But also you might find it useful to play in the ProdPad Sandbox where we have example roadmaps and OKRs and other stuff that’s all sort of connected together in a freely editable space.

So you can ping the link to your colleagues, show them what it is that you’d like to do with it, try it out yourself with your own data, and then pick it up from there. Now, I do have a secret for you because you don’t have to go product, right? There’s a big world out there, lots of ways of providing value.

But if you’re going to go the agency route, then you’ve gotta acknowledge it, own it, price for it, hire for it, do it properly, right? Including setting pricing and setting expectations properly. Just [00:35:00] don’t fall prey to the most common killer of product companies. They get sucked into the allure of agency work because.

It solves an immediate problem in the near term, but focus forces them to take their eye off the ball. If done well, it can bridge them to the next stages and onto success. But if done badly, it can doom the company. And I speak from experience. So start acting now to identify if you’re an agency and work towards building the type of company that you want in the future.

And really just ask yourself, what kind of company do you wanna grow up to be?

And so on that note, we’re gonna go to Q and A. I just wanna give you guys the heads up that we’re doing another one of these sessions in about a month’s time. So this is gonna be February 25th. It’s a Wednesday, same time, same place. And we’re gonna be talking about, How to Make Product Decisions when you’re having to trade off between things like creating more tech debt or getting it out on time.

So join me for that. In the meantime, I’m gonna ping over to Q and A and take a look at some of your questions and see what here [00:36:00] resonated with you. Thank you all for your questions and for for jumping in on this. David had the first question he asked about where partnerships fit into this.

He said in one sense they can help us add value to the product and reach new markets, but they often impose upon our time and roadmap in ways that can’t wait. A roadmap has rocks in it, that our value add needs to flow around. And actually David, that’s a really good point. You know, think of them as rocks, that things need to flow around, right?

Sometimes these partnerships are adding value in ways that are intangible or quite very tangible, you know, in terms of monetary gain for the business. And this is strategic reason why the company’s doing that. First of all, have that conversation, right? Check that they are being done for a strategic reason, not just because somebody in your biz dev team likes to say yes to people,

Right? Because if they’re doing that, and it’s imposing on your ability to deliver, it’s slowing you down from getting things out the door, right? And they are rocks that things have to flow around. And so it’s slowing down your ability to build this bigger piece. Now, there could be other things that you’re getting from it, right?

So if you [00:37:00] are gonna take on client commitments or strategic partnerships, then, use them as learning opportunities, right? Don’t just build blindly whenever your partner or your key cluster, your key customer asks for, but actually do discovery of your own. Sense check what it is that they’re doing, see how it might flow with what else you’ve got.

You do have some flexibility in that sometimes. So try to make the most of the opportunity if you’re gonna have a rock that’s in the middle of your, your flow. So thanks for that question, David hopefully that helps. Anna asked, how much does product ownership play a role in falling into the agency trap?

I’ve seen companies where there’s a tug of war over product ownership with commercial teams or in tech driven products. Oh, engineering. Hold on. The thing just moved while I was reading that I seen comes into a tug of war over product ownership with commercial teams or in tech driven products

engineering. Yeah, so when it comes to who’s owning the product, this is where, having clarity around who owns the [00:38:00] product makes a big difference. Because if the sales team or commercial teams are empowered to dictate what’s goes onto that roadmap, then oftentimes you’re driven by what incentivizes them or what’s helpful for that team, right?

And sometimes it is just build this feature because it’s gonna close this client who is right here in front of us. If you’re saying, “actually, we’re gonna empower the product team to drive this roadmap”, instead you’re saying, “well, hey sales, thanks for that feedback. We really wanna get the feedback and the insights from commercial, but we don’t want it to drive what we’re doing.

So we’re going to use that insight in order to help us shape the roadmap in the best way possible for the wider company”. And that’s not just what product wants, but it’s what the whole company wants. What aligns with the business goals. And so when you’ve got that shift in ownership where the product team owns the product, you end up with companies who builds something that reaches the company goals rather than just helps the salespeople or the commercial teams reach their goals, which are almost often quite bonus or commission driven.[00:39:00] 

Ooh, there’s an anonymous one here. ” Would love to hear your strategies for balancing agency versus discovery led when leading a platform or capability team, which can take in requests from across the company for enabling team objectives.” Yeah, platform teams, capability teams are interesting because actually the way that some companies structure these are like agencies, right?

For better or worse, right? And again, there’s nothing wrong with agencies, but sometimes they can cause things to get misaligned in certain ways. But when you’ve got a platform or capability team, you know, I’ve seen it with like having a design team as well, as opposed to designers in each squad.

It means that the, uh, design team or the capability team, the platform team, ends up having to act like an agency taking in bits and pieces of work from different areas so that they can solve their problem. It’s kind of like, enlisting the help of an agency external to your company. Imagine your company didn’t have designers or, you know, was

a buyer of your platform as opposed to the maker of your platform. You would have to put requests in and hope that those [00:40:00] requests get processed in a timely manner. Now in some cases, that’s just how the company works and it’s very difficult to change. But you can think about how you might close those loops a little bit.

You know, can you bring in people who are representatives from those teams into your squad or your sort of area. Can you move towards something that’s a little bit more squad like, where you’ve got individuals from each different area who are able to build something as a whole rather than a capabilities team here who does this thing and waits for this, someone to do this other thing.

So I wish there was like a really straightforward answer. It sort of depends on where the company is right now and what those capability teams look like. But the answer in all of these things is almost always, closer collaboration and aligned incentives between these teams.

We’ve got lots of questions here. I’m gonna keep blasting through. Keep getting ’em in and voting them up and I’ll try to get the ones that are on top. Alright, so anonymous again, asked, in many businesses and industries, seasonal [00:41:00] factors affect delivery. Like school starts in the autumn. Ed tech needs to be ready for that.

Taxes need to be filed in the spring. Similar rhythms apply to many industries. How do you reconcile? Don’t focus on delivery dates with these immovable seasonal rhythms. I love this question because there are some companies where it is strategically important and these dates are externally driven, right?

And it’s important to work towards these dates and have the ability to deliver certain things by these dates. You are familiar with the Iron Triangle of project management, right? The whole thing that says if you fix, you’ve got time, scope and cost. You know, if you fix, two of them, the other one’s gotta give.

If you fix all three of them, then they kind of get squeezed and quality decreases, right? So your answer is either that you fix scope or you fix time. In some companies, you’ve got to fix time, right? Things have to be out by certain times, which means you need to be flexible on scope.

Hopefully you’re not too flexible on quality, but sometimes that quality flex is okay, because you’re talking about getting an MVP out the [00:42:00] door rather than the full fledged version of something, right? So there are ways that you can flex around to work to those dates, but the reality is, is that sometimes there is just a hard fixed date, right?

A new regulatory law that comes in, right? Or there’s certain things that need to be done for the tax year. Each time you have a fixed project, you’re fixing that time and scope and it’s gotta be really precise. You’re trying to get a lot out by a particular date.

You incur what I call the project management penalty. As in, you have to spend more time upfront sussing out what you’re actually gonna do with this thing, right? So are you, is it this big or this big? Are you gonna spend these resources or these resources and what are you gonna tackle things, right?

There’s all this work that can be done to minimize the chance that you miss that date. But it’s a lot of work and that’s why it doesn’t work for a lot of companies. I mean theoretically we could all make timeline roadmaps that explicitly say when everything’s going to be out. If we had 10 x the time to actually plan these things out, right?

And get really, really precise agreements from everybody on when everything’s gonna be done and add lots of buffer, [00:43:00] cool. But that would mean that we’d be moving really slowly. It’s actually because of that project management penalty that you see big companies who are date driven, they move much more slowly than these other companies who just get on and do it, right?

These other companies who get on and do it probably aren’t regulatory driven. They probably don’t care so much. It doesn’t matter so much if they hit certain dates and they’re able to just get in there and do stuff. So there are gonna be times when you have things that have specific dates and you’re going to incur that project management penalty.

That’s a reality, but it doesn’t mean you need to penalize yourself every time you wanna build something, right? The problem with a timeline roadmap is that, think of it as a chart, right? You’ve got this timeline along the top, and then like a list of things to do down the side, right? And time dictates everything.

No matter what you put on that roadmap, it has to have a due date and a delivery date. Now with a, now next, later roadmap, a lean roadmap, you can put a date on something and you can say, this is a rock that we need to flow around, right? This has to be done because tax year, because laws or whatever, but everything else can be flexible around [00:44:00] it.

With a timeline roadmap, it sort of forces everything underneath that roadmap to have a delivery date. Explicitly stated, which means that teams are beholden to those delivery dates because they can’t step away from them. And therefore they’re incurring that project management penalty just by having that format of the roadmap.

So, if you were to switch from a timeline roadmap to a Now-Next- Later roadmap, in ProdPad, for example, you can add dates to cards. You can be as specific or as loose with those dates as needed. Some things have no dates, some things have a very specific day date. Some things are just saying it’s gonna be Q3, which reflects the nature of how we deal with these sort of movable, slightly immovable rocks that we have to flow around.

I hope that helps. I know that was an anonymous one, there were a couple people who voted that up as well. I’m gonna have a sip of water and then I’m gonna move on to the next questions because we still have another 10 minutes.

Talking about roadmaps, what do you think about having multiple lenses of the same roadmap? So a business lens, a feature lens, technology lens, delivery [00:45:00] lens. Yeah. I love this. The reality is, that there’s going to be different variations of the roadmap that you’re gonna wanna publish to different stakeholders, right?

And this is actually why we built it in ProdPad that way, is that you’ve got sort of one underlying set of roadmaps that are sort of like your main view. But then you can carve out different views and sort of pre-save one and be like, this is for the business people.

This is for the salespeople. This is what our customers can see. This is the really detailed one that and the delivery team work on together, right? So you can create these different versions depending on who the stakeholder is.

If anybody would like a demo of that, reach out to us. And I’ll, be happy to show you through how that works, how you can create different roadmaps from the same one. Ooh, we’ve got another anonymous one with a couple of up votes on it. So in a Fortune 100 environment teams are typically operating against fixed delivery timelines with predefined scope.

At the same time, leadership is asking us to create space for innovation and experimentation. Yeah, it’s impossible, right? So what’s the best practice to successfully balance delivery accountability with meaningful [00:46:00] experimentation? What best practices help align stakeholders?

So innovation is seen as de-risking and value add rather than scope creep. I mean, I wish there was like a single really good answer to that, but this is exactly what I think pretty much every major company is grappling with, right? All these Fortune 100 companies are terrified of these small companies who aren’t beholden to regulations and dates and client commitments and all these constraints, and they’re moving faster than them, which is why they’re trying to do stuff like carve out time to spend in innovation and experimentation.

So there’s a few ways of doing that, right? One is like the startup lab, right? You can have a company sort of ring fence a group of people and be like, look, you’re owned by us. You have your own floor. It looks more like a WeWork than the corporate area. And you have remit to go try stuff and build stuff and experiment within these areas.

And you see a lot of big companies having startup sort of incubators or startup spaces, startup lab type things within the business where it’s like you guys do the experimentation. We’ll hold down the fort. And [00:47:00] then of course, that company ideally has the ability to merge in or take over or do something interesting with the startup experiments that work with some success, right?

Not everything that comes out of a startup lab in a big corporate, gets legs, but there again, not everything that comes outta startup world gets legs. There’s the Google, right? So Google- I don’t know whether they still do this, but they were famous for giving 20% time. And so you could spend 20% of your time.

Working on innovative stuff and the other 80% of the time is to be spent on business as usual and stuff like this. Apparently, or rumors have it that things like- I can’t remember all of them, but I think it was like chat and maps and wave, which became Google Docs collaboration, stuff like that all came out of these startup initiatives.

I think there are quite a few things that came out of that. So they just gave people space and time. They carved out that time to do that. The Facebook is another one, right? So Facebook has billions of users, but they don’t launch something to everyone all at the same time, that would be nuts.

What they do is they’re able [00:48:00] to hyper segment, right? Their team is really good at being able to say, we’re gonna ship this feature just to the people listening to that webinar right now. And they could do that probably, right? They can ship something just to like a single company or a single town somewhere and see how people react to it, and then they can open it up wider, right?

So it’s sort of de-risks the innovation, the change without putting everything else at risk, right? And you see other things like Amazon for example, and other companies have like their example, or sorry, their cash cow, right? So apparently there are lots of teams experimenting all the time in Amazon, right?

It’s an e-commerce site, but certain features like things around the prime stuff don’t get touched. Unless you’re with the specialty who gets to touch that other things, there’s apparently lots and lots of experimentations going on at the same time. And so really it’s about acknowledging, first of all, that innovation is value add, but making room for it in whatever sort of shape makes sense for that company and there is no one way of doing it.

I’m seeing lots of different ways that companies are trying [00:49:00] that.

How can so Manoj asks, how can product leaders protect discovery time when sales pressure is already shaping the roadmap? So this comes down to some of those tough conversations, right? Sometimes sales is shaping the roadmap because no one’s told them not to, right? No one’s acknowledged that this company wants to be a product company and therefore should be acting like a product company.

You know, when the sales person comes back and says, “Hey, I just sold this thing.” It’s hard for anybody in the exec team to go, “No, like, we’re not supposed to sell that. You’re supposed to sell the product that we have today.” But sometimes that conversation just needs to be had. So check that that’s not the case, that the company not accidentally being a sales led company, just ’cause no one’s actually saying, we don’t want to work that way, right?

We wanna use sales to do discovery, right? Help us understand what things we might wanna build, but we want to have them sell the product we have today, right? They don’t have the ability to just go sell something and tell the product people. Or maybe they do, right? Maybe they have exec buy-in to do [00:50:00] so, and execs like it that way.

And actually this is where having those tough conversations can be fruitful because you might have the conversation and realize that actually they want to work this way. They like being part agency. Maybe they’re already charging and hiring properly for it. Chances are they’re not. I see a lot of that, but you’ve gotta have that conversation to set expectations, right?

Just like when I joined that company and realized that I wasn’t joining as a project product manager, I was joining as a project manager, I wish I’d had that conversation so I could know what it was that I was expected to do, rather than be bewildered as to why I never seemed to have time to work on anything that was important for our future.

Elijah asked a question here. I am both a product manager and a strategist, and the execs have give me full control of what features we’re building in what order. Great. The buck stops with me because I work in a startup environment. How do I balance having full control as well as having to balance the business decisions versus tech decisions?

Ooh, good question. And actually, Elijah, I’m gonna be talking more about this, next month. [00:51:00] I was gonna say next week. That’s too soon. Next month, February 25th. I’m gonna be talking about, balancing tech and product decisions. So there’s a lot behind that. But it is about understanding those balances and making the decisions that are best for the business itself.

Which isn’t that much different than what we do when we make product decisions. You know, which features we should build. But oftentimes if you’ve got this wider remit around what the nature of your product is, there’s just more that goes behind it. You know, is the company willing to take on tech debt in order to move faster?

Or is it more important that they build the best version first time? Different companies have different criteria depending on what they’re trying to achieve. So come along to the one next month, Elijah, and we’ll dive more into that. I’m gonna use this as a prompt to make sure that I answer that in lots of detail.

Ah. Asked, are roadmaps important for small startups? Yes. Yes, they are. Because even if you’re a small startup, it’s important to make sure that you all agree on what your vision is and what your strategic steps are [00:52:00] to get there, right? Even if your horizon is only six months out, you’re still basically able to say, here’s what’s important to us.

Now, this is what’s gonna help us get to this next stage, which will help us get to this stage right here. Which, you know, that next stage is just getting to funding or getting those first five clients, and you need to plan out or think about what those are. Remember, the value isn’t in the roadmap itself, right?

Your roadmap is gonna get thrown out all the time. The value is in the roadmapping process. It’s in having people in the company discuss what is in front of you and figure out the best steps forward to make sure you’re likely to succeed. And small startups need that as much as anybody else.

Does the Now-Next- Later roadmap work only for discovery or also for feature planning? And somebody gave this a thumbs up so people are interested in this one. It is for both, right? So I actually like using the roadmap to identify the problem areas to solve, and the different features or experiments you might try in order to reach that.

And I like using the term experiments as opposed to features. Now, sometimes an [00:53:00] experiment on your roadmap is let’s build a feature. If we build this feature, we think we’ll solve this problem on the roadmap and reach that goal. But sometimes an experiment on the roadmap is, change a feature or even take away a feature.

Taking away a feature can be a great way to solve certain problems, but not everything on your roadmap should be features, right? Experiments takes the pressure off so that you realize that some things on your roadmap might be an experiment to change pricing or an experiment to change the proposition, to change the way you talk about it in the homepage.

Change your pricing. These are all experiments that could be run that aren’t necessarily new features. They could be changes to features or changes to the way you talk about stuff. So those should all make a an impact.

Hussein asked many organizations position themselves as product companies while in practice they operate as agencies. If such organizations acknowledge this reality and continue operating as agencies while developing products, does this affect how we should evaluate their maturity, sustainability, or competitiveness relative to product led companies?

So, Hussein, I wonder if you’re asking around how we from the [00:54:00] outside would evaluate these companies? This is why I gave some suggestions on how you can tell what’s going on in a company and how you might judge that company based on the roadmapping practices and the propensity to take on delivery work over discovery work.

Right? We can generally see a trend where product led companies move faster and go further with the resources that they have. And so this is something we can use as a gauge to understand which of these companies that we’re looking at are sustainable. Which ones are more mature and their product led ways are working.

So a lot of this stuff comes out in things like the roadmap.

Alright, now I recognize that we’re just about towards the end there. There’s one final question. Humbo asked, where are best practices for now next, later implementation. How about, because we’re outta time, I’m gonna follow up with a guide on how to do so, and that way everyone has it.

’cause it’s more than I can say in a minute. But I’ve got some detailed guides on how to move from timeline to now, next, later. So that you’re able to bring [00:55:00] yourself and the rest of your team on board. So on that note, we’re just about at time. I managed to get blast through all the questions that you put in the Q and A.

I see that there’s some questions that you put in the webinar chat. I appreciate that I wasn’t able to keep up with that. But, feel free to follow up with the webinar itself and drop us any questions and I’ll be happy to try to tackle all those in the meantime, come on back, right? I’m gonna be talking about making hard product decisions while balancing that with long-term debt.

So we’ll be talking about that this time next month. And in the meantime, jump in and start yourself a ProdPad trial. We’d love to hear your feedback on it and chat to you next time we get a chance to chat. So on that note, huge thank you for everyone for coming along. I look forward to seeing you here at the next one.Thank you so much for your questions and we’ll chat to you again soon. Thank you very much and bye for [00:56:00] now.