One gets a small team up to speed quickly and turns on a dime, the other needs space and time to get going or change direction, but smashes through ocean swells and moves tons of goods.
They are different boats for doing different work.

Which do you need to get the job done?

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Momentum Matters

“Occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage”

~ Charlie Munger

Big impact sometimes requires a big complex program, but not always. Products live and die by momentum.

Physics terms get casually tossed about when discussing projects: team velocity, friction, resistance to adoption, escape velocity. Momentum, however, is one concept from physics which aptly applies to leading a product program and troubleshooting when it’s not working well. Have you ever…

• Increased the size of a team, only to have a program grind to a halt?

• Needed to change direction, and sometimes found it quick and other times laborious (or impossible)?

• Made feature or scope cuts to a Product and felt progress accelerate?

A quick rehash on the physics of Momentum from Wikipedia:

In Newtonian mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If m is an object's mass and v is its velocity (also a vector quantity), then the object's momentum p (from Latin pellere "push, drive") is:

Physics of Product

• m: mass. Scope and scale of the product and its team. Leaders sense this. It’s resources allocated, features specified, promises made, dreams yet unshattered.

• v: velocity. Directional speed at which things are completed. Everybody feels this. It’s milestones hit or missed, schedule brought in or pushed out, a work item that never quite leaves the standup, or the Executive who’s either happily surprised at progress or pissed he’ll get roasted at the board meeting. Direction matters; lots of speed pointed the wrong way makes momentum a problem.

• p: momentum. Resiliency to obstacles, increasing intensity, and a sense of inevitability. This is tougher to pin down, but the Product Leader benefits from attuning to it. Increasing momentum feels good, as you can blast through challenges. Decreasing momentum feels like losing pace of progress, little obstacles causing big disruptions, or resources getting pulled away. Vectors matter.

Increasing momentum

• Boost speed. Optimize communication and resources, and the team gets more done faster.

• Add resources. Inject capital and put it to work. Sometimes things can slow down in transient, but this is OK because you can increase velocity once work is allocated to that new resource set.

• Cut complexity. Kill features and scope to better use your team, or cut teamwork overhead.

Losing momentum

• Too much complexity. Team is avoiding cuts to Product or scope creep has not been dealt with.

• Communications are overloaded. Too many meetings and updates, not enough work getting done.

• Insufficient resources to overcome momentum loss. Undercapitalized, or the right people are not working on your project. Lots of losses happen when the wrong people are involved.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

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So how do we use momentum?

This might sound complicated, but it’s not. That doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes difficult, but we can make it easier. It comes down to two things:

• Adjusting momentum to suit the situation

• Directing the momentum you have to work for you not against you

Let’s dig into some practical ways to approach these.

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Constraints focus efforts. Writing clarifies thinking. One page does both.

A solid one-pager converts abstract intentions into shared understanding. Used well, a strong brief can help a team explore new territory, create shared commitments, and deliver on strategy.

Brevity, origins, and applications

Churchill sent a memo to his War Cabinet in 1940, entitled Brevity. Reports were to be written in “short, crisp paragraphs” and no longer than a single page. He was tired of jargon, and wasted time “spent looking for the essential points.”

It worked so well it became a staple of the Western military. However, that’s not actually where my journey started.

Advertising arrived in a golden age during the 1960s. Marketing, media, and manufacturing converged into a creative revolution where now an industry catering to the Consumer learned to sell emotions, brands, and ideals. Creative Briefs were born to bridge the client’s business goals to the eccentric art department without anything getting lost in translation.

In the early 2010s, I was building technology for clients in the advertising industry, and that’s where I learned the brief. Later, while leading a Product team at a consumer electronics company, a brief became a necessary prerequisite to any meaningful work; some were like Churchill’s, others more like Madison Avenue’s. Product briefs, strategy briefs, phase briefs, design briefs… the list goes on.

One page, broad applications. Constraints, clarity, communication.

Sharpening the stylus

It was later that I refined the practice of quickly drafting a brief, using it to gather input, refine it, and set direction. While leading a team building a little consumer device for a Silicon Valley cloud storage startup, briefs became a foundation for creating shared language for direction, scope, and success. This practice persists now, across all the teams I’ve built and led, people I’ve helped grow, and programs I’ve run. It’s simple, fast, and effective. Our teams use briefs to chase out ambiguity, communicate vision, and get everyone pointed in the same direction. Briefs are clear sketches for bold concepts.

Communication not documentation

Please take just one key point away from this:

Briefs are an artifact of thinking and discussion.

Documents don’t matter. Thinking - alone, together, and distributed - is what gets the work done. Writing a brief and cutting it down to a page forces a person to think through what they’re getting at. Taking that page and letting others read it and then discussing it rounds out the thinking of the group and surfaces the hidden factors and drives agreement. Integrating the thinking of the group, then cutting it back down to a single page, reshapes the thinking to be collective and compresses it and forces prioritization. Revising it so anyone attached to the work can quickly understand it and their relationship to it means clear thinking propagates. Work accelerates.

Louder, for the people in the back

• One page is a useful constraint that forces clarity of thinking and prioritization.

• Briefs are an artifact of thinking and discussion.

• Drafting, discussing, integrating, revising, and distributing is what makes an effective brief.

Don’t be too clever.

The methods you’ll find in Product, Briefly are all built upon this concept. Below you’ll find the brief I share with teams new to the concept. To make it easy to jump start your own team, you can download a .pdf version and discuss it with your people, and take the whole concept for an easy test-drive.

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Briefs, Briefly

“Give me the freedom of a tight brief.”

~David Ogilvy

Briefs are for establishing shared context for work done together, or getting clarity for work done alone. A brief says “this has been given thought and is worthy of consideration.”

Creating a brief drives out ambiguity and forces collaboration. It's not a magic document, but rather the significance lies in what happens in order to arrive at that artifact. Setting a common target before you start, and accountability for getting it done. A good brief contains at least what we're after and how we know we've achieved it, who's important to include, and when it's due.

There are many different types of briefs:

• Exploratory: how we'll think about the right questions to ask, and how we'll know when we've reached the right questions to answer.

• Strategy: our plan, where we'll play (and won't), and what winning looks like.

• Assignment: what we intend to do and why it’s significant.

• Product: outlining some value you hope to create in the world, that the world will compensate you for.

• Creative: any guardrails and inspiration for new types of exploration.

No template, no secrets, no style points. Simply put in the work to be concisely on the same single page, and be accountable for what you said you were going to do. Briefs are to keep the reference point visible.

Some thoughts on the creative brief from the ad-agency world:

What is the creative brief? It is a blueprint, a guide, even a source of inspiration. It details our objectives, audience/community, message or utility, the context in which we’ll engage, timing and budget. In short, the what, who, where, when.

The brief is the what we are doing. The creative is the how.

Where can you put briefs to work today?

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Start today

Lead by example - pick one pressing topic together, and volunteer to draft the first one-pager.
You can jump-start thing with Briefs, Briefly and use it to activate your discussion; it’s a one-page .pdf so you can load it into Slack and chat asynchronously, attach it to a calendar item and talk over video, or print it to pass around the boardroom.

Download Briefs, Briefly

Visit productbriefly.com where you can find a library of Briefs about product work, focused around Fundamentals, Teamwork, and Performance.
It’s the whole toolkit, including samples and examples. Paid members get access keys.

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This is the dream, right?

Too often it ends up a nightmare.
Stuff that took countless hours and dollars to make goes unsold. Perhaps it sells fast, but customers return it and never come back, sucking money away with that grinding churning sound. Maybe customers love it, but it seems like the ends never meet and more customers means more work - but no money comes out the other end to keep things afloat. Worst, nobody cares.
These are Product problems, and so many are avoidable.
All stem from people working on something that wasn’t the Right Product.

As a salesperson, builder, Founder, educator, advisor, consultant, and Executive, I’ve seen and experienced a thousand ways this gets mucked up, and pulled many out of the mire. Standing on something strong and pulling things back on track is what the brief below gets used for. Frequently.

Set foundations

Right Product is the idea of shaping the thing such that people want it, that it can actually get delivered, and that it supports the business in a way that earns the right to keep after it until things click with the Market to launch success. Everything else is built on top: who works on it, how it’s messaged (and to whom), how it’s made, and what it costs. All of it falls down if the foundation isn’t stable.

Countless conversations with businesspeople that want to launch something new, students that see potential for a project to become their job, aspiring Founders that want to make the leap, and scientists that envision their lab innovation out among the stars or changing an industry all had the same shape: they had pieces of the Product puzzle, but not the whole picture roughed out.

So, that’s what this brief is for; after writing it up in 2020 to help an R&D team understand what a Product looks like, it’s been used over and over again. It’s the thing to stand on and get heads above the quicksand.

Worried the team’s great idea may not be the Right Product, and need a little backup for the discussion? Is someone’s invention totally detached from actually fitting a Market? Is the beautiful concept completely unbuildable given your resources? Is the expectation of what a customer will pay totally unhinged from what it will cost to get the thing in their hands?

Product, Simplified

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
~ Marc Andreessen, (2007)

Products are a good or service offered to a Market at a chosen price, delivered repeatably at manageable costs the business can sustain.
Right Product is a way to aim for building something fits a good Market, fills a hole in the universe, and supports the business through creating something desirable, feasible, and viable.

• Desirable products solve an unmet need in a way that works for the User and creates the value that a Customer is willing to pay for.

• Feasible products can be reliably delivered with high quality by the organization, within the constraints of available resources and in time to meet the Market demands.

• Viable products have value for a sufficiently large base of Customers willing to pay, so a business thrives.

Value is how the Customer decides the Product is “worth it.” Does buying the Product improve the life of the Customer enough to justify the price? Get it right and they tell friends; get it wrong and they also tell friends.

Growing a business demands healthy margins; these are the result of a price that creates satisfying Customer value with costs that are well-managed to deliver the Right Product.

• Price is what the Customer pays for a Product, and is set and controlled by the business. Price is also a story; it shapes how customers perceive value, fits with their identity, and signals who the product is meant for. Pricing set too low leaves money on the table or targets the wrong user, while setting it too high leaves customers feeling like they got a bad deal.

• Cost is what the business spends to deliver a Product. Costs are managed through choices the Product team makes during development and path to market. Creating customer value has a cost, and though choices are made on where to allocate and reduce it, it’s never fully controlled because there are always extrinsic factors that impact it. Cut costs too much and your product feels cheap, don’t cut enough and survival is a struggle.

• Margin is Price minus Cost; it’s what the business makes by selling a Product. Note that it’s a residual. Margin applied across all the Products sold is what funds the business, covering the people, the overhead, innovation, and ultimately profitability.

Who a Product is for and why it’s a good value determines price. Only from here can the Right Product and its subsequent costs and tradeoffs get defined. Conversely, starting from the product you want to build locks in costs, and then trying to figure out price as an afterthought is a recipe for margins that don’t pencil out.

When the Market responds with growth momentum, this is the signal of Product-Market-Fit (PMF), the true validation of the Right Product. It rarely happens with the first version, but rather from cycles of feedback from the Market and iterative improvements. Before the Market response, it’s unknowable whether the product hit the mark - so this is where teams can apply rigor in research, strategy, planning, and execution to ensure efforts are aimed as close to the Right Product as possible, minimizing wasted resources and maximizing chances of success.

Plan accordingly: start simple, move fast, learn lots.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Got Product?

Use this brief to get your team started with Product thinking. Challenge assumptions about Right Product. Find the pieces you could ship sooner to start finding your way to Product Market Fit. Untangle which Product roles might be muddled.

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Next moves

This brief is on productbriefly.com linked to related briefs and suggested additional reading. To quickly use with your team as an email or calendar attachment, there’s a pdf version for you, and also a read-only Google Doc if you want to iterate on it. There’s also subscriber chat if you want to discuss the nuances or need some help.

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The student up front was a bit confused at the question. We all were.

Professor Brown spoke to everyone in the room, with a note of surprise in his voice. “Wait… nobody told you this yet? How did you all make it this far? OK, I’ll explain:
Every problem has at least five ways you can solve it.
One way is the hardest and has the most steps, highest likelihood of an error, and takes the longest.
By contrast, one way is the easiest, with the fewest steps, making it both the fastest and least error-prone.
Before jumping into the first solution that comes to mind, think of two more; with three possible solutions, you stand a chance of ruling out the awful one and potentially stumbling into the elegant one.
Think of three different ways to solve a problem before starting your work.”

My worldview updated, right then. Like someone hit the refresh button.

There’s more than one way to skin a banana; there’s an easy way and a hard way. Hearing this spelled out so elegantly and practically, though, made it simple to change my approach to every problem.

Unexplored alternatives might have been the silver bullet when faced with an urgent problem. Fast decision making and pressure to deliver results need not compromise our best work.
Rapidly vetting three solutions gives people the chance to avoid disasters, discover elegance, and build confidence.

The brief below anchors a conversation I’ve had countless times over more than a decade with colleagues and friends alike. Use it with folks that need the reminder that elegant fast solutions come from taking a beat for some forethought.

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Choose solutions

The first solution that comes to mind is rarely your best one.

Picture yourself taking a difficult math test, the final exam. You studied, you’re prepared.
Seated at a desk, you look over the test. It’s long: lots of problems, and they’re complicated but feel like they’re in your wheelhouse.
You dig in. At first, things feel obvious, you breeze through the first twenty minutes, checking work as you go. Things get tougher, and you skip past a couple to find and take care of the remaining easy wins.

Now, all that’s left are the tough ones, and there’s half an hour on the clock. You look at each one, think of a way to solve it, and race to finish. Some solutions are short, clean, and clear with only a few steps. Others are long, with each step compounding any mistakes. As you check work, you notice the longer ones contain a rounding error or some other issue, and go back and make fixes.
With a couple minutes to spare, you hand it in.

Rewind. You’re starting the hard problems.
One by one, you quickly think of three different ways to solve, choose the easiest, and chase it down. Now they’re all simple, fewer steps, easier to check, less room for error. More elegant.
With ten minutes to spare, you have a chance to give everything another once-over, and hand it in.

Choice needs options

What if all your solutions were the worst possible approach?
Unless you considered another option, you have no way of knowing.
Nobody comes up with the best, most elegant solution on the first try every time.

Over, under, around, and through: these are the ways to get past an obstacle. If you have a shovel, you don’t always have to dig - you might be able to use it as a lever, or stick it in the ground to get some height and jump over. Your tool is not the shovel, your tool is creativity in ways to use the shovel to get past the obstacle.

Don’t we want to be choosing solutions? To have a choice requires things to choose from. Nobody comes up with the best, most elegant solution on the first try every time, and often not on the second - definitely not me and almost certainly not you. Yet how often do we unthinkingly surrender to the tension to just jump into our first idea?

Getting good at solving problems is about learning how to look for the easy way.

Reacting or responding?

Teams get crunched to move fast, leading to hasty solutions without choices; when faced with a problem under pressure, one solution sounds promising, and we move on it. It’s natural. In reactive mode, formulating two other options feels like time wasted until we miss the mark and have to start over.

Respond to the challenge: pause, zoom out, zoom in.
Give yourself choices, and solve things better faster.

• Backwards. What are the five most recent problems you’ve had to solve, and what options did you consider for each? You’ll quickly get a sense of how often you’re actually exploring options.

• Forwards. Next time you’re vetting a solution, ask what two others were considered.

• Loops. How can you get in the habit of very rapidly thinking of three solutions before choosing one? How can this work on an individual level, a team level, and an organizational level?

One problem. Five solutions.
Think of three, pick one, move forward. Do it fast.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Making choices

How does one build the habit loop that provides better paths to choose?
Likewise, how do we create a team environment dynamic where this feels like it makes us quicker, rather than slower?

When we’re pressed for time, this all needs to move fast in order to move faster.

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Product development is interdisciplinary, with teams spanning design, engineering, marketing, and more. As AI and new technologies add complexity, the cost of miscommunication between experts grows exponentially. Teams that develop a shared language move faster, build better products, and create more value - while those who don't waste time and resources talking past each other.

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