100 Product Strategies

#2: Managing strategic tensions - with Marc Abraham from Intercom

Mar 29, 2022

Marc Abraham, Product Leader at Intercom, discusses how to approach product strategy by establishing a concrete vision and working backwards. They explore the use of the Kano model for sorting opportunities and the challenge of selecting which hurdles to tackle first. Tension arises from involving different perspectives and beliefs about strategy. The podcast also highlights the role of product in facilitating strategic conversations and the importance of explicit trade-offs.

37:17

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Episode guests

Marc Abraham

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Having a concrete vision and working backwards helps in developing a product strategy.

Explicitly addressing trade-offs and using decision frameworks can navigate tensions and facilitate strategic discussions.

Deep dives

Mark Abraham's Background and Experience

Mark Abraham is an experienced product leader who has worked in various industries and companies, including music streaming, TV hardware, e-commerce, and online fashion. He is currently focusing on automated self-serve support for customers at Intercom. Mark has also authored books and is part of the Mind the Product community.

Introduction

3min

Approaching Strategy Projects

5min

Understanding Customer Needs and Competitive Landscape with Kano Analysis

2min

Selecting Hurdles and Achieving the Vision

2min

Managing Strategic Tensions in the Decision-Making Process

19min

Metrics and Strategy

7min

In this episode we spoke with Marc Abraham, Product Leader at Intercom and author of Managing Product = Managing Tension and My Product Management Toolkit.

We explored where are the biggest tensions when creating a product strategy, and discussed how to deal with them and the role of the product leader in navigating the different tradeoffs.

We talked about:

How Marc approaches the strategy problem: having a concrete vision, establishing where you are now, and working backward identifying the problems and opportunities you need to overcome and in what order (with a nice hurdle race analogy).
Sorting opportunities with the Kano model.
The challenge of finding criteria to select which hurdles to take first: Marc believes that ultimately you need to take a stake in the ground
How tension increases as you involve more people from different perspectives.
To tackle the tension that arises when discussing how “valuable” each opportunity is, clearly expose the facts or expectations for each initiative.
Tension arises not only from discussing the strategy topics but also from the different beliefs that people have about what strategy is (and the role of the product leader in clarifying it).
Where are we going to play, how do we think we can win, and what choices are we going to make.
Why product is in a very good position to facilitate the strategic conversation.
The importance of being very explicit in calling out the necessary trade-offs. How to apply decision frameworks to drive a decision among different stakeholders.
How the time horizon of the strategy can affect how much time and effort we invest creating it.
Align everyone before the meeting by having them express their one goal. Not everyone would have it clear!
When to go for sessions with multiple participants versus discussing in 1-on-1 sessions. The impact of the size and politicness of the organization.
How to effectively ask stakeholders to disccuss and make a decsion when the strategy hits a roadblock.
Marc’s recommendation of Never Split the Difference