Why is it difficult to go from discovering a product opportunity to making it a widely accepted and recited vision within an organization?
Influence, not authority, is one of the significant challenges for SaaS product managers. There is no better example than when building alignment for a product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
But to truly scale your impact, you'll need to tie your roadmap to quantifiable business and customer outcomes gracefully. This is where data storytelling comes in.
This article provides four actionable tips to communicate your strategic plan to executives and gain organizational buy-in.
- Don’t be too specific
- Paint a vivid picture
- Connect the dots
- Set long-term, ambitious goals
Quick note: Most companies have a platform for product managers (PMs) to review quarterly roadmaps with the leadership team to seek their input and gain buy-in on their plan. This is an excellent opportunity for PMs to sell their vision and strategy and communicate a compelling vision that people can rally behind.
#1. Don’t be too specific
While it’s tempting to go into overly specific details about your team’s roadmap and the exact scope of features, an overly concrete plan doesn’t leave room for flexibility in your execution and insights from the discovery that might change the concrete solutions the team might come up with.
Nor does being in the weeds inspire the executive-level audience.
As a product leader, creating enough space for your team to not commit to concrete solutions and encourage problem and solution discovery is important. That’s why communicating a strategic plan at a higher altitude will help with this.
#2. Paint a Vivid Picture
Paint a picture of how big the opportunity size is for the problem area – not just for the specific feature or experiment you’re working on.
PMs often estimate how much lift you can expect from an experiment, or they come up with a rough sizing for a feature rollout to gauge its success.
But very often, PMs forget to zoom out and assess how big the overall opportunity is for the larger problem area.
This is important, especially in your communication to the executive audience.
Make sure you convey the high-level opportunity to justify your short-term bets. It’s important to communicate how these bets build up to a larger vision.
For example, our growth team at Amplitude recently localized the product into Japanese. For the first time, the company translated the product into another non-English language. Whenever I talk about this bet internally, I don't just talk about the potential demand generation impact on the Japanese market this initiative would have in the short run.
Instead, I pointed out how localizing the product into the first non-English language lays the foundation for us to easily grow into five or more languages when the company is ready to invest in a more aggressive international expansion strategy. I emphasized how this bet will help us expand and acquire customers that otherwise would not come into the pipeline in many international markets.
Quantitative opportunity sizing is the key to building confidence among team members and having your message resonate.
In addition, convey the ROI for the company – quantify its potential opportunity.
Quantifying potential opportunities is important in both the planning phase when deciding what to work on, as well as the post-delivery phase when you review its impact and report on it.
Once you're confident you're working on the highest-impact problem areas, start experimenting with different solutions. This allows you to capture movement in the product metrics your team is responsible for.
#3. Connect the dots
One way to ensure your audience understands how much impact you generated is by translating the impact of the product metrics to its impact on company-level KPIs.
Depending on what product you own (and how big your ownership area is), you may be responsible for driving the one metric your company cares the most about: that North Star.
But first, what’s the “North Star?”
A North Star metric is the key measure of success for your product and represents the value you're delivering to your customers.
If you succeed in improving this metric, you should also see an improvement in the concrete business outcomes.
For example, the North Star metric for Airbnb might be the number of nights booked. That’s because they care about connecting people looking for a place to stay with people who can host them. This metric reflects their user growth, retention, depth of engagement and directly leads to revenue growth.
Another example is Medium, a platform that helps people share ideas. Their North Star metric might be the total time users spend reading content.
How do you break down this North Star metric to figure out input metrics?
The North Star Formula
There’s a widely applicable formula to help you break down your North Star into metrics that represent the breadth, depth, and frequency of your users' engagement with your product, and in some cases, efficiency as well.
For a product like Spotify, their North Star metric might be the number of times users listen to music.
The more they see this metric grow, the more they can gauge whether users are getting value from their product. This also directly indicates that their revenue is growing.
For Spotify, the formula may look like this:
- Breadth: The number of trial users and premium subscribers to measure how many active or returning users perform their value action.
- Depth of Engagement: The number of hours per session to see how much engagement each user has.
- Frequency: The number of sessions that an average user performs per week.
If product teams can move these metrics individually, it will increase the top-level KPI, which is the time users spend listening to music.
With a solid understanding of the North Star metric and how to think about input metrics, let's think about how you can connect the dots between your areas of product ownership to the company’s North Star.
Make sure you understand how the metric you own impacts the North Star and its relationship with the other input metrics.
This helps you:
- Identify dependencies with other teams.
- Develop a framework to think about potential trade-offs.
- Prioritize the highest-impact bets for the company.
Whenever you present to executives about your team’s achievements, try to take it a step further beyond saying, "we increased activation rate by 5%."
Figure out what activation rate means to the increased number of active users, then to long-term retention rate and how much those retained users mean to the business.
This helps the company understand your actual impact, especially if you are working on the part of the product executives are unfamiliar with.
#4. Set long-term, ambitious goals
After you have a solid grasp of how your product metrics impact the top-level company metrics, it's time to set long-term, ambitious goals for your team, along with short-term success metrics. This helps you decide whether to double down on certain product areas.
To set the right goals for your team, think far beyond the next quarter or even the following year.
Given the company goals for the next three to five years, where do your team's metrics need to be to drive those objectives?
Working backward, find an appropriate goal for the following year.
The goal should be ambitious, inspiring, and directly tied to outcomes, not features or the number of launches. It should encourage your team to come up with step-function improvements, not just minor optimizations.
Think about:
- What does success look like for the team in a year?
- What do you need to see with each bet to make the hard decisions, e.g., sunset a feature?
Having a rough sense of success before you start building can create more transparency internally around your framework, so it’s apparent if it’s not working. Often, teams spend too much effort on things that aren’t working (and don’t want to admit it).
Building a foundation of transparency inspires trust and provides the information to make hard decisions, providing insight into when to double down or change the approach.
These strategies take conscious practice and some prep work. But they create alignment with senior stakeholders and make you come across as an inspirational product leader – and a more strategic thinker.
Long-term, it will also make it more likely to scale your impact and influence within the company to accelerate your career.
