Providing Directional Clarity to the People Around You — Product at Heart 2023
Providing Directional Clarity to the People Around You was one of the themed sessions during Product at Heart 2023 (the others were Finding Clarity of Thought for Yourself, Exploring Product Operations, and Knowledge Exchange for PMs).
Each themed session featured three 20-minute talks and a quick roundup hosted by moderator Tobias Freudenreich. During the Directional Clarity session, we heard from:
Emily Tate, Managing Director of Mind the Product
Francesca Cortesi, Chief Product Officer at Hemnet
Simon Cross, Chief Product Officer at Native Instruments
In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into each individual talk. If you’d like to explore the topics in even more detail, make sure you check out the session recordings.
Emily’s talk: 🎥 From Chaos to Clarity (and Back Again)
Francesca’s talk: 🎥 Leading with Clarity: Learnings from Our Journey Towards an Empowered Product Organization
Simon’s talk: 🎥 Extreme Clarity: Why It Matters and How to Practice It
Emily Tate: From Chaos to Clarity (and Back Again)
Clarity is a tricky topic, said Emily. No one wants to talk about it because no one feels like they’re getting it right. But it’s for this exact reason that it’s so important to share the struggle—so everyone can see that it’s a common challenge and consider different strategies.
Emily distilled her observations from going through several phases of clarity (and lack thereof) at Mind the Product into four lessons:
Lesson 1: Alignment is a spectrum
Lesson 2: Clarity is not just a vision
Lesson 3: Clarity can be easier in (or right after) hard times
Lesson 4: Clarity is not a destination
Let’s look at each in a bit more detail.
Lesson 1: Alignment is a spectrum
There’s no such thing as reaching a spot of perfect alignment—you’re always somewhere on a spectrum. To illustrate this point, Emily shared this 2x2 with axes representing the team’s level of understanding and the team’s actions.
Lesson 2: Clarity is not just a vision
Defining your vision is a helpful exercise in moving closer to alignment, but Emily warns that if your strategy is too broad, you can make nearly any decision align with it. Clarity requires anchors for decision-making (or frameworks to help you evaluate decision A vs. decision B). You might also find it helpful to try out a framework like Teresa Torres’s opportunity solution tree or Martin Eriksson’s decision stack.
“Your principles are a framework for your decisions. They’re specific and actionable rules which are a manifestation of your vision.” – Martin Eriksson
Lesson 3: Clarity can be easier in (or right after) hard times
Good times can bring a lot of opportunities. But in hard times, you have to force focus: What is the most important thing we can be doing?
Lesson 4: Clarity is not a destination
If you don’t intentionally maintain clarity, you will lose it. And the more stressed you get, the more you revert to bad habits. Actively ask: What is the new normal? What are the new constraints?
Francesca Cortesi: Leading with Clarity
To kick off her talk, Francesca shared a quote from Bill Campbell that highlights why clarity is so important to her: “Your job as a product leader is to create the right conditions for greatness to emerge.”
In her presentation, Francesca shared some specific examples from her experience as CPO at Hemnet, one of Sweden’s most popular apps. Francesca’s examples illustrate how she met her organization where it was to create empowered teams.
Francesca explored three moments when there was a lack of clarity at Hemnet:
We did not have a shared understanding of what was important
We did not have a shared understanding of the value we wanted to deliver
We do not have a shared view on how to best provide value
Let’s dig into each one a little more.
1: We did not have a shared understanding of what was important
When Hemnet experienced this lack of clarity, everyone was running around doing many things without accomplishing anything.
To overcome this challenge, Francesca found that a common prioritized backlog was the appropriate solution.
2: We did not have a shared understanding of the value we wanted to deliver
The next scenario, a lack of clarity on value creation, meant there was a lot of time spent on planning and teams weren’t able to prioritize on their own, so they escalated decisions to the CPO.
To overcome this challenge, Francesca found that formulating a product strategy was the right approach. The strategy defines what is important to deliver and why and helps teams make prioritization decisions independently.
3: We do not have a shared view on how to best provide value
Francesca admitted that Hemnet is in this situation right now, so she’s aware of the symptoms but not yet confident in her solution. At the moment, she’s seeing some differing opinions and friction about what is bringing the best value and cross-departmental frustration.
Francesca is optimistic about using an opportunity-based roadmap to help overcome this current challenge.
We look forward to hearing from Francesca in the future to see how her theory turned out and how she’s approaching any new clarity-related challenges that have come her way!
Simon Cross: Extreme Clarity
“When you communicate clearly, good things happen, and when you don’t communicate clearly, bad things happen — especially when you’re operating at scale, speed, and when the stakes are high,” said Simon.
If you’ve ever doubted the importance of clear communication, you’ll definitely want to hear the story Simon shared at the beginning of his presentation. To give you just a quick overview, it involved around $330 million (in 1990s money, which is probably double that amount today!), a failed Mars probe, and a very basic communication error.
What is extreme clarity? Simon provided this definition: communicating something in a way that leaves no ambiguity in the mind of the reader such that they all leave with the same understanding.
Simon then considered three areas where clarity really matters and where people often go wrong:
Data
Goals
Decisions
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Data: percentages vs. percentage points
We’ll often see language like, “We increased click-through rate by 10%.” But this language is unclear and ambiguous—especially because people often confuse percentage increase and percentage point increase. Simon pointed out that increasing click-through rate from 13% to 23% isn’t a 10% increase. It’s a 10 percentage point increase—and those are very, very, very different.
2. Metrics-based goals
When teams share their goals dashboards, they’ll often send a chart that looks like this.
The problem is that it’s ambiguous—you don’t know what the baseline was or what they were striving for.
Simon recommends making two simple changes: Extend the X axis to the end of the current period (e.g. if the goal is to finish by the first half of the year, extend until June) and bring the goal line down to meet the metric on the day they began.
Now you have data and a goal line that tells you when they started, when they’re going to finish, how long they have left, and the fact that they’re behind.
Just looking at the chart gives you all the information you need so you can skip over questions to get to clarity and go straight to: How can we help and what needs to change?
3. Decisions
Making decisions is hard, which is why it can be helpful to have a consistent framework that everyone uses to guide their decision-making. Simon shared the example of the traffic light framework, where you define your options, the criteria you’re considering, and color code your decisions.
Since Simon was the final presenter before the lunch break, he walked us through the framework to make the pressing decision of: “What should I have for lunch?”
You can also add in who made a specific recommendation as well as who made the final decision, what they decided, and when.
This makes it easy for anyone to come in and see it at a later date. At a glance, they’ll understand the entire decision-making process and it will be easy for them to apply it to their own decision-making.
Hungry for even more content from Product at Heart? Make sure you check out our blog and video archive!