In the room were the CEO and his executive team. All eyes were on me. Everyone wanted to hear about a new analytics product that my team was building.
I felt confident. I started the meeting by sharing the product designs and conveying all the great insights that we were going to deliver to customers.
As I walked through my presentation, I didn’t pay attention to the CEO’s body language. People told me afterward that he was becoming agitated. After about 15 minutes, he suddenly blurted out: “I use Google Analytics to drill down on data all the time, and I don’t see powerful drill-down tools in what you’re building.”
This question caught me off guard. I tried to explain that our customers didn’t want to drill down on data, but my CEO was hearing none of it. Later, I found out that he had spent a lot of time using Google Analytics to drill down on data when the company was still a start-up. As a result, he believed that customers wanted to do the same thing. Instead, user research showed that many of our customers didn’t have time to drill down on data after a long day at
work. The goal of the new analytics product was to “give customers a list of actions that they can take to grow their business at a glance.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t start the meeting by explaining this goal and sharing the supporting user research. Since I didn’t align with my CEO on the customer problem before diving into the solution, it was now very difficult for him to listen to my explanation. I could have avoided a lot of confusion by aligning on the why (the goal) with him first.
The majority
of disagreements happen when people are not aligned on the why. Aligning on the why can help you avoid:
- Building a product when your team doesn’t know why they’re building it.
- Sharing data with executives when they don’t know why the data matters.
- Arguing about a product design when no one knows why the product matters to the customer.
Always get aligned on the why early, it’s one of the best time investments that you can make.
Principle
#3
: Start with Why.
Obsess Over the Customer Problem
As a product manager, your most important why is the customer problem that your product is trying to solve. Include your team and other stakeholders in understanding the customer problem and selecting the right goal metric to grow. This way, everyone can
contribute, feel ownership, and stay motivated to solve the problem even if the product changes.
Communicate Why Constantly
Once you’ve aligned on the why with your team, you need to communicate it regularly to everyone. It may seem redundant to remind people about the customer problem and goal all the time, but this constant communication achieves two objectives. First, it helps everyone internalize the why so they can make decisions with the same goal in mind. Second, if people are not aligned on the why, they’re more likely to bring up objections if you talk about it constantly.
Keep It Simple
When communicating with others, the most critical question that you need to answer is, “Do people understand?” If people don’t understand the why, they won’t be able to execute.
Keep your communication simple, short, and specific. Check to see if people understand your message by asking them to explain it back to you. Encourage them to ask questions if they’re not aligned so that you can discover the truth together.
