When I started my business four years ago, I did everything myself, including scheduling meetings, sales, marketing, strategy, coffee, and of course, providing consulting and mentoring services to my customers. At some point, I felt this was too much, and realized I needed help. I approached Terry to help me with the marketing back-office work, but being the CMO that she is, she also took my entire marketing to the next level.
Specifically, the next level of marketing means writing much more content on a variety of platforms. Unfortunately, that meant I still needed to spend a lot of time writing (more) content.
As the number of marketing materials I needed to write grew, I asked Terry to take a more active role in shaping them, and at some point, also create drafts for me to review and refine. Initially, it didn’t work so smoothly, and I needed to rewrite almost everything she had written. Nowadays, I make little to no changes to her drafts, but even when I needed to rewrite the whole thing, I realized it was much easier for me to do it that way than to do it from scratch myself.
It is weird, but this is how our brains work. It’s much harder to design something completely new than to design after getting inspiration or seeing examples. That is true in art – music, paintings, etc., and it works the same way in other domains, more similar to ours. For example, when you want someone to recommend you on social media, it is much easier for them if you give them the suggested post text to start with. Creating a product from scratch is much more complex than reshaping an existing one, even if reshaping it means rewriting it altogether.
That is also true with strategy.
A Good Strategy Is Hard to Come Up With
Strategic thinking is challenging, as it usually involves learning about a complex world, dealing with unknowns, and a lot of abstract thinking. Another reason that strategy is so hard is that each product is a unique creation, with its own challenges, market characteristics, and often team dynamics that lead to different results.
That’s why even for experienced leaders, serial entrepreneurs for example, the fact that they have succeeded once doesn’t guarantee that they will succeed again.
When it comes to the company’s strategy, the person who needs to create it is the CEO, along with the rest of the management team, but many CEOs find this challenging. Sometimes, they lack a good understanding of what the strategy should look like and have a hard time even starting. In other cases, they have never practiced or developed the kind of thinking required to build the company’s strategy, or they simply do not have time to do it.
The outcome in these cases is that despite the CEO’s best efforts to create a strategy for the company, many companies are left with a general, high-level goal, instead of a detailed, clear strategy. And without a strategy to guide you, it is very hard to succeed.
You need to have a strategy. A product strategy, to be exact.
Product Strategy Is the Foundation of the Company Strategy
The role of the product strategy is to take the company strategy to the next level of detail. But as it does so, it also helps, in turn, define the company strategy as a whole. It’s a bidirectional relationship, as both strategies impact each other until finally, all the pieces are in place.
Since the company strategy is the starting point for the product strategy, and on the other hand, the product strategy helps shape the company strategy, it has to be a shared creation between you and the CEO.
The CEO wouldn’t always know how, or even what, to ask for, but since creating the company strategy is an extremely hard job, most CEOs I have worked with welcome the product leader’s help in this area. In fact, that’s the #1 complaint I get from CEOs about their product leaders – that they are not strategic enough.
The best way to help your CEO is to see yourself not only as a partner but also as a ghostwriter – the one who writes the company strategy draft for the CEO to discuss, review and refine. It also means that you, as the product leader, need to do the heavy lifting for them, but that’s the whole point. I have been giving this advice to my consulting customers and CPO Bootcamp participants for quite a few years now, and I can assure you that the results are not limited to the product strategy, but also have a dramatic positive impact on the relationship between the product leader and the CEO.
Here are the steps to get it done, just like a professional ghostwriter:
- Interview the CEO, try to get into their head, and understand what they think.
- Tell them what you understood and allow them to correct you where you did not comprehend fully. While listening and talking about things, different parts of the brain work, which might help them understand they actually meant something else when they originally spoke to you. Note that it could happen even if you genuinely repeated them as is. It doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t understand them, it’s just how the process works.
- Put it in writing, or in our case – a slide deck, and present them with the overall story as you see it. This phase might already include some more details and your own interpretation of what you agreed on in step 2 above. Again, this would lead to their feedback and further review.
- Repeat steps 1-3 until you are both happy with the result.
This process allows you to help the CEO lead the way through real partnership. Most importantly, this will make sure that you – and the entire company management team, if needed – discuss all the crucial points and address them head-on. That is the only way to truly crack both the product and the company strategy.
Being a Ghostwriter Can Be Challenging
A few years ago, S., the Director of Product in one of my customer companies, presented to the CEO the product strategy for a new product they were working on. Prior to this presentation, S. followed my guidance and operated as a ghostwriter for the strategy just as described above. After many interviews with the CEO (who wasn’t very chatty, by the way, so S. needed to close many of the gaps on his own), when S. finally presented it to him, his response was: “well, I heard nothing new here.”
Think about it – S. had put so much effort into making sense out of what the CEO said initially. He spent the time to find the answers to all the crucial and non-trivial product questions, in alignment with what the CEO had said, but without getting further guidance from him. He took the CEO’s general guidelines and formed a clear strategy around them. From the product perspective, there was a lot of “new stuff” in there.
But the CEO couldn’t see it.
Still, after the meeting, S. told me that the fact that he got the CEO’s blessing on the strategy – even if the CEO himself didn’t see anything new in it and thought it was obvious – meant the world to him.
In a perfect world, it could be the CEO’s job to outline their ideas more clearly, explain why they make sense, take them to the next level of detail, and enroll their team into why this is the right thing to do.
But in the real world, most CEOs can’t do that – but product leaders can. In many cases, however, product leaders don’t see it as their job – and that’s a fundamental mistake.
Without doing it, product leaders are left in limbo – on the one hand, they are expected to move forward with the product as dictated by the CEO, but as product professionals, they don’t (yet) agree with this direction or even understand it. They feel frustrated, lack real decision power, and most of all – don’t know how to proceed to the next steps.
So partnering with the CEO in the creation of the company strategy isn’t only good for them, it’s also crucial for your ability to succeed in your own role.
Your job is to help the CEO see things they cannot. When they sit in front of a blank page, it is difficult to identify where to start, and it can also be time-consuming. This task is closer to product methodology than general management, so as the product leader, you are better positioned to help the CEO fill that blank page. You can bring suggestions to the CEO, help them think about what they need, and assist them in organizing their ideas. In fact, not only can you do it, but you must. This is the real job of the product leader.
