In the last ProductX conference, the giveaway that the participants got at the end of the day was a potted plant. I chose Mint and took a lovely red pot home. It made me very happy for two reasons: first, it was a beautiful decoration for my kitchen. And second, I recently started drinking every morning a yummy fruit shake which included Mint, and I needed a supply.
The plant pot stands on my kitchen table and serves the first purpose quite well. It adds color to my kitchen, it made me clear the table from other stuff so that it stands out, and every time I look at it I’m filled with joy. The second purpose though turned out to be more tricky. It was a very young plant, with not too many leaves. At first, I took just a few leaves for my shake every day, but soon enough I realized there aren’t too many left. You see, I needed more leaves – and more frequently – than the plant could yield. I realized I’m taking fewer and fewer leaves every day, to leave some for the next day. Then, I switched to drinking the shake every other day, to let more leaves grow before I use them. Now, I moved to another tactic: I’m not drinking this specific shake at all until the Mint grows significantly. When the entire pot would be filled with thriving Mint, I assume I could go back to nearly daily harvest. Or not, this is yet to be seen.
As you can probably guess, I really want the Mint to grow faster. I need it to grow faster. But unfortunately for me, it doesn’t, and there is not much I can do about it. Wait, I can actually – take it outside to get direct sunlight or put it in a bigger pot so that it can spread faster, but this would not work with the other goals that I wanted to accomplish: a decoration for the kitchen and a handy Mint supply. So effectively, I can’t do anything and I simply need to wait.
This little gardening exercise and the patience it required led me to think about the things in our daily work as product leaders that simply take time, and there is nothing we can do to speed up the process. Unlike in gardening, where it’s relatively easy to understand (and ultimately accept) the fact that plants have their own pace, at work, it often doesn’t seem so. There are always things that you can do differently, and since you work with people and not with plants there are often also things that they can do differently. It’s usually the latter by the way that causes most frustration – if only X would have seen it the way I do, or do their job faster, we would be in a different place right now. Sounds familiar?
You’re not alone, it is very natural to feel this way, and you should absolutely do and get others to do whatever you possibly can to get to results faster. But given that you do that, some things still take a long time to yield results, and the only thing you can do is practice your patience and wait. Here are 3 such examples.
Creating a Solid Product Strategy
One of the CEOs that I work with as part of my consulting services recently reflected with me on the process we went through for creating their new product strategy. It was a lengthy process, with quite a few trials and errors, until we found the right strategy. He said that his only regret is that we didn’t do it faster.
This is, however, a common mistake to believe that we could have done it faster. Of course, if we could, we should have, but the reason it took so long wasn’t that we didn’t work fast enough or because we did the wrong things. The reason it took so long is that finding the right product strategy is a bidirectional dance with the market, and we need to take the new strategy attempts to the market and see our potential customers’ feedback before we can get any insight on how it works and go back to the drawing board to make it better and more precise.
These rounds take time. I shared with the CEO my perspective on the process we went through: we actually moved in two dimensions simultaneously – we had our strategic, analytical discussions in the office, and we took the raw ideas we had there to practice – implemented them and took them to the market. I named at least 3 such attempts, and the CEO then saw and agreed that each such attempt was a step in the right direction. It is true even though these attempts themselves never matured to the right direction in and of themselves and were eventually abandoned in favor of the new direction that we eventually found and are happy with.
The thing to remember is that the right product strategy is not a binary outcome that you either have or not. These small steps that you are making can take you in the right direction, even if you don’t know what that direction is yet. The fact that you don’t see the roots of the Mint plant growing doesn’t mean that they aren’t.
Seeing Revenue From a New Product
This is one of the mistakes that I see very often in my work with startup founders: you launch a new product and you put revenue goals for a few months down the road, typically a quarter. No matter how many times I tell people that it’s unrealistic, their desire (and sometimes need) to see results quickly causes them to tell me that they feel this is doable. It is very natural to do that. Some of the startups absolutely must have these results soon enough in order to be able to raise the next round. Sometimes it relates to the overall culture that says that anything is possible if you want it enough and are willing to work hard for it. While this is indeed a must-have mindset for a startup to succeed, don’t confuse working hard to achieve the impossible with achieving it whenever you want to.
Specifically for revenue from a new product, two forces cause it to take longer than you typically think. The first is that even if your product is mature and fully optimized, some sale cycles simply take time. If your customers need to hear about you, then understand what you do and whether or not it is relevant for them, then sign up for your product, understand how to get started, play with it for a while to understand if they’re happy, understand your pricing plans, consider if they want to pay you, get budget approval, and then get the payment going – the actual revenue would take time, no matter what you do. If you start the quarter with 3 leads that have only just heard of you, the odds that by the end of the quarter you will have 20 paying customers are very low to nonexistent.
The other force that makes it even worse is the fact that a new product is far from being fully optimized for your customers’ needs. In fact, it might not even be the right product altogether. You are out for a discovery journey, and discovery takes time.
Changing People’s Mind
One of the topics that come up a lot in the CPO Bootcamp coaching sessions is conflicts with other company executives. They don’t get it, if only they understood that they are making mistakes, etc. One thing that I always tell the participants is that it’s on them to make the other side “see the light”, they can’t just expect it to miraculously happen without effort.
The approach that you need to take to get this done is untangling a delicate piece of thread that you want to keep whole. Think about a thin gold necklace that got tied around itself many times. You want to keep the necklace intact, but you need to open the knot. This is delicate work that requires patience and persistence.
Convincing someone else to see things the way you do takes a similar amount of patience and persistence. You might need to try multiple angles, explain yourself in many different ways, scare them of a possible bad outcome or enroll them into a bright shiny future. You can’t always know in advance what will work, and you might need to repeat yourself many times until the message sinks in.
No matter how much you want it to move faster, the other person has their own pace. In fact, in some cases, if you push too hard you might find yourself causing more harm than good.
Here, too, just because they don’t tell you directly doesn’t mean that the message doesn’t go through. I remember an example when I tried to convince an executive to change the goals they set for the team. The executive vocally opposed and explained to me fiercely why I’m wrong. I put it aside – I thought it was important but not urgent to change now. In our next meeting, the executive started by saying “we took your advice and amended the goal as you suggested”. They needed to do it at their own pace, and there was nothing I could do about it.
When you reach such a point, you need to take a deep breath. You can try, like a professional judoka, to take a step back, tie your uniform tighter, and plan your next attempt. But remember that in some cases, you just need to wait and let the good things come to you.
