You already know what the problem feels like. What you do not have is somebody from outside who will find out whether the thing you have named is the thing that is wrong.
Chief Product Officer four times · one engagement at a time
Six times a company has hired me, and six times the brief described something next to the actual problem. Not through carelessness. A brief describes the symptom, because the symptom is the part you can feel.
Six weeks is the shortest read I would put my name to.
People ask for a two-week version, and I understand why. The trouble is that nobody takes a partial read and makes a partial decision. They take a partial read and commit the year.
Six weeks gives you real signals, and it is the minimum at which I would put my name to a conclusion. Eight if the portfolio is wide.
Every read says which conclusions are firm and which need longer. A large organization takes longer than six weeks to actually turn, and the read says how much longer. I would rather tell you that before you pay me than after.
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By the end of it your company can say what it is in one line, and you know whether it can be built. Four parts.
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I meet everyone. Not to collect opinions, but to find out whether each person can tell me what the strategy is and how their own work connects to it.
Where the grievances are. Where the trust is, and where it has gone.
You find out how much of your strategy actually survived the trip down the org chart. It is usually less than you think, and that gap is cheaper to close than anything you were about to build.
My own read. Whether it is easy to use. Whether there is a gap between what marketing promises before someone signs up and what the product delivers afterwards.
You get the first outside look at your product since the people who built it stopped being able to see it.
The financials, and whether anyone can state the objectives out loud.
Then your support team, where I expect to find the same thing I always find: they are asked for things that do not get built, and nobody has told them why.
The problem is almost never the backlog. It is the missing reason.
Fixing that costs nothing and buys back a support team who stop apologizing for you.
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I do not look at the technical estate yet, and that is deliberate.
In an agency, if you let the producer into the room early, the work shrinks to what is convenient. The same thing happens in software. Ask what is possible before you have asked what is worth doing and you will get a smaller answer, confidently.
So the constraints come second. Not because they do not matter, but because they are very good at arriving first.
Nobody in the building could have proposed it, because everybody in the building already knows what is hard.
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Then we name it.
Most companies I walk into are circling the drain on their own strategy. Everybody is having the conversation. Nobody is finishing it.
Ask a leadership team what it wants and you get four different things: an idea, a symptom, a problem and an outcome, usually in the same sentence. The first job is sorting them out loud.
So we build the thing out loud, with your team rather than at them, until the business can be said in one line. One company arrived at trusted decision making. Another at a competitive system for someone who knows nothing about search.
It reads obvious afterwards. That is the tell that it is right, and the reason it has to come from the room rather than from me.
After this your team stops relitigating the strategy in every meeting, and you stop being the only person who can explain the company.
Ask a leadership team to imagine the future cold and you get a stale answer.
So it starts with a warm-up: Propagation of Trends or a game-design exercise. Then the future you want, with outcomes beyond the financial, what you want to be and what you do not, a nine-frame story, and each leader telling the others what they need from them.
It is the only kind they defend in meetings I am not in.
A future your leaders drew themselves.
From someone who worked alongside me.
It's rare to meet someone as passionate about putting smart people in a room with the right tools to solve hard problems.Ryan ClevenGame DirectorBigPark (Microsoft) · 2009
Halfway, you and I sit down and I tell you what is working, what is not, and what has to change.
You hear it from the one person in the room with nothing riding on being invited back, and you hear it with three weeks still left to act on it.
I coach whoever will own the answer as we go, usually your product leader and one or two others. Not a separate service: it is how the work gets done.
By the time I hand it over, the person who carries the decision has already practised it.
Then we find out whether it can be built.
Now the technical read. The stack, the debt, whether it is being serviced, and whether it can carry what we just described.
And an hour with whoever runs engineering, explaining why. It is often the most useful hour of the engagement. The ambition rarely survives the journey to the people building it, so what arrives is is this possible rather than how might we.
I also read your leaders, inside product and outside it, because a strategy problem is very often a communication problem wearing a disguise. That includes you, one to one, in a few coaching sessions inside the six weeks. And I will tell you plainly where the structure is dividing your organization rather than adding to it.
You leave knowing whether your stack can carry the plan, whether your engineering leadership is bought in, and whose leadership the plan depends on.
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The step most plans skip.
A company wants to be more innovative, but cannot prototype and has no way to generate or judge ideas, so every experiment quietly stops.
Some of it is structure. An idea starts alone, in the shower. It gets better only when the people who dream and design meet often enough to build on it, which a team that never meets rarely does. Others are builders, happy being builders. The design has to work for both.
So I map the capabilities the plan needs against the ones you have, then hand your team a real problem to work through the alternatives. One experiment if it is possible; it is not always.
You leave knowing which capabilities to build before the bet, with the choice made by the people who will build it.
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Then it leaves the building.
Your company moves on Monday, and you can act on what cannot be said in the open.
The vision, the creative work, the pillars, the roadmap, in something built to be circulated. You stop being the only person who can explain where this is going, and the people who have to build it want to.
The read on structure and on individuals, for you and your leadership only. The things that would do damage in the open, written down plainly somewhere you can use them.
Most consulting produces a single document that has to be both, so it ends up neither: too political to circulate, too careful to act on. It gets read once and filed.
Separating them is what lets both of them be candid.
The roadmap is not the deliverable.
Whether you can change it is.
You will want three years, precise, and something a board will approve. If I hand you that after six weeks, most of it is invented, and we will both know.
So the roadmap I give you is deliberately high level. What I am really assessing is whether this company can change its plan when the research says it has to. That is the thing that decides the next five years. Not the plan.
Set it against the year you are about to commit, not against the calendar.
We talk about it in the second conversation, once we both know whether this is the right work. It is a fixed fee, agreed before we start. There is no discovery fee and no scoping phase.
A year of engineering, a hiring plan and an opportunity cost all get committed on the strength of a document written by people who are too close to it.
For earlier companies I will take part of the fee in equity. I would rather be wrong alongside you than right and paid.
This is the last cheap moment in that sequence.
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What comes next depends on what the read finds. We decide it together, once we both know what your team can carry.
A few hours a week with you and your product leader. Often the best outcome, because the people who have to live with the decision are the ones making it.
Your product leader, about two days' worth a week. That is twelve to sixteen hours spread from Monday to Thursday, not Tuesday and Wednesday. If something breaks on Thursday, you call me on Thursday.
Part-time is the design. I am there enough to know the people and what the company is trying to do, and away enough that the team makes decisions without waiting for me. That is how a team learns to carry a plan.
For a set period while you hire, or for good if the fit is right. Three of my four Chief Product Officer roles were full time.
Entirely fine. It is what every version is built toward.
Somewhere around week five, most chief executives ask whether I would stay on if the fit were right.
Sometimes the right ending is that I do, part-time or full time. It is one of the endings above. I will not decide it during the six weeks. If the fit is there, I will say so at the end, not during.
I cannot read your company clearly while I am auditioning for you.
What keeps you up at night?
Chances are I have sat with something like it myself. Start there. We can spend the whole first conversation on it.