Cultivating a Strategic Product Team: Part 2

Welcome & Webinar Overview

Rina Alexin | 00:00:00–00:01:00

hello everyone welcome and good morning my name is reena elekson and i’m the CEO of Productside thank you so much for joining us this morning today we’ll be discussing part two of our webinar series on cultivating a strategic product team we’ll be talking about how to elevate your executive gate reviews and i’m so excited to introduce ken feehan our principal consultant trainer activity group ken why don’t you tell our listeners a little about yourself

Ken Feehan | 00:01:00–00:02:00

hello good morning good afternoon good evening my name is Ken Feehan i’m a principal consultant with the Productside that means i do training and consulting i have 25 years of product management and product marketing experience at companies like apple intuit and dolby and a countless group of startups

Rina Alexin | 00:02:00–00:03:00

thank you ken so much for being here today i’m so excited to be doing this webinar with you we’re gonna be doing things a little differently and we used to do something like this on the road didn’t we

yeah and i’m so excited to be bringing this gate review workshop to our listeners but first before we get into the heart of the presentation let’s go over a few housekeeping items after this webinar continue to stay engaged with your peers by joining our product leader linkedin group we’ll be pasting a link for you to do so shortly in the chat use this as a forum to share best practices and tips with your peers activity group we love interacting with you and during this webinar we really encourage you to ask questions and give us feedback you can use the questions box on the right of your screen to type in questions or comments at any time we will of course leave time for q&a at the end of the webinar and first i’d like to answer our most popular question which is can i watch this later and yes of course you can all attendees will be receiving a link to the recording after the webinar has ended

About Productside & Mission

Rina Alexin | 00:03:00–00:04:30

before we begin i’ll take a minute just to introduce what Productside is all about out to 80 group our mission is to empower product professionals with the knowledge and tools to build products that matter and unlike other companies we’re focused on the needs of all product professionals so whether you need help as an individual growing your skills and knowledge to advance your career or you’re a product leader interested in improving the success of your product team we’re really here to help including from our flagship training courses and curriculum two custom workshops like the gate review check us out at Productside.com now ken let’s get into the meat of the webinar take it away

Recap of Part 1: Strategy, Roadmaps & One-Pagers

Ken Feehan | 00:06:00–00:08:00

fantastic rina thank you very very much here this is the second of two of a two-part series of things that i’ve worked on the internet in terms of a gate review and one pagers in may of 2020 we did an exercise where we built one pagers and built roadmaps for product lines we will provide a link to that webinar in case you would like to go back and review that review that later but we’ll quickly summarize what’s happened today before we jump into part two which is today’s content the idea behind this gate review process was first exposed to me when i worked at a company called elo no not the band a company a touchscreen company out of out of silicon valley they were a hardware and software company and the ceo came to to the organization with a strong executive leadership product management function that they called gate review and it was executive friendly and it put product managers on the spot and we made great products from it this gate review process is not exactly the gate review process that we used at elo although we’ve made some great improvements upon it it was a great process early on so got to give some credit to that finding that in into the situations here this gate review process as we covered quickly in the in the webinar in may focused upon product managements that are driving outcomes of their particular business not necessarily just outputs so we’re driving towards how you can use your product strategy to grow business and revenues in the situations here so we’ll talk about outcomes and use that in this example to see what’s happening here we want to potentially use this outcome process because not only does it drive us to do good business but it also involves the other organizations in the projects of actually increasing this revenue you can’t grow a business without marketing participating you can’t grow a 10 million dollar business without the sales or the finance organization we want to spread the role of product management from just being a development mouthpiece to being a structure where the product management team is running cross-functional strategic relationships and organizations of what’s happening at the company and that’s covered very clearly inside of the first webinar here

Outcomes vs Outputs & Poll Discussion

Ken Feehan | 00:10:00–00:11:30

but first up we have a poll that we would like you to take on here in just one second you will get a chance to answer this particular poll here and i’d like a personal question to you in your job that you’re working on today are you measured are you are you promoted are you reviewed based upon outcomes strategically growing the business or outputs shipping a product on time i’ve got an opportunity for an outcome answer an output question or maybe this topic isn’t that familiar with you and you want to know more about it so we’ve got three answers for this particular one we’ve got those answers rolling in here

Rina Alexin | 00:11:30–00:13:00

yeah thanks ken so the poll is now launched so if you can quickly vote so that we can we can find out whether or not you are being judged on being strategic or on shipping the next thing and this is something that we have polled many leaders for to get a sense of how are leaders thinking about their teams right how are you measuring the success of your product management team so votes are coming in i’ll leave this open just for a few more seconds all right excellent reena do you mind if i proceed or i’m sorry yeah no please proceed and do you want me to share the results of the poll

oh sure that would be great i’m sorry yes so this is actually very very in line with other data that we’ve seen unfortunately so a little bit because we have only 53 percent of votes coming in for outcomes 43 are on output and four percent still need more info

Ken Feehan | 00:13:00–00:14:00

excellent fantastic we’re going to help in this webinar we’re going to help drive you more towards the outcome so that’s that’s fantastic and it’s good to hear that as many people are driving towards outcomes this is a big trend a big advancement for product management

Executive Goals, Product Strategy & Roadmaps

Ken Feehan | 00:14:00–00:17:00

okay quickly want to get back on schedule here want to get back to i’m just going to go over a couple of slides about the foundation for this particular exercise and to make a long story short in may we introduced the idea that product management should be looking towards the leadership team or the executive team for what what’s the organization trying to accomplish in the year and at this point the lt team has stated that they’re trying to grow revenues by 25 reduce churn expand in the european marketplace and make the products easier to sell this is this is the important input for product management this is this is the thing that we want to structure the product management strategy around we take those high level goals from the executives and we turn them into product features and we organize those features into releases all of this is covered in the previous webinar which we’ll provide you with a link on but we’ve got a formula for helping you do that and then we help take a road map of the annual purpose of the year and if you’re agile you have sprint releases that are happening regularly in that particular process and we talk about how important it is as a product manager to bundle up multiple work that’s happening in different sprints and to make news about them so to to take the work that’s being done in sprints 14 15 16 17 and 18 and create a newsworthy press release and go to market strategy around the collection of those items and calling it a product release such as unicorn 1.2 again this is covered well in the initial webinar and it is the foundation for the things that we’re talking about today

One-Pager Structure & Role in Gate Reviews

Ken Feehan | 00:19:00–00:21:30

next up is when you have a product release on your on your roadmap here we like to have you build a product one pager around what you’re trying to accomplish with that particular structure here we cover this in may lots of detail on here on the left side of your slide is the problem we capture the problem that we’re trying to address on the right side are project boundaries and the strategic aspect of what it is that we’re going on here this one page strategy replaces lots of long complex documents and really articulates the vision for what it is that you’re trying to accomplish from a product strategy so that is what we’ve covered so far that is available in the previous webinar let’s now take our roadmaps and let’s take our product one pagers and actually put them through the process of doing a gate review

What Is an Executive Gate Review?

Ken Feehan | 00:23:00–00:26:00

an executive gate review is typically it’s a twice monthly meeting that’s that runs about 60 minutes inside of a company longer gate review meetings are not better than shorter gate review meetings you want them to be highly highly structured and highly quick your audience here is executives you want the executives to be satisfied and look forward to this particular meeting when your gate review processes are working well you’re driving towards outcomes not outputs it’s not a status meeting about how project 1.3 is doing it’s it’s the how are we doing generating 10 million dollars from that new initiative here and lastly the consensus the gate review process naturally builds unity among the organization to make sure that everyone is working towards the eventual goal it’s a consensus builder to make sure the marketing team is doing the right things the digital marketing team is doing the right things the product team is doing the right things et cetera we build consensus around that and get everyone involved

Rina Alexin | 00:26:00–00:28:00

and ken when we are on the road and we’re talking to executives and we’re bringing forth this concept this is really about adding this governance layer that helps you know that your team is aligned to the most important strategic goals in your company so that’s really at the core of what we are trying to accomplish here i know

exactly it’s well well said thank you very much reena

Roles: Executives, Product Managers, Gatekeeper & Audience

Ken Feehan | 00:28:00–00:31:30

there’s four constituents that we’ll talk about here one of which is there’s an executive board there’s a role for product management and the presenters of this particular process there’s the gatekeeper and there’s the audience let’s talk a little bit about what each of those teams do we want the executives to be representative of the organizations of the company that are involved in accomplishing the outcome so we’re going to potentially propose that marketing is there sales vps are there finance vps are there product people and development people we need a cross-functional organization if they’re involved in accomplishing the outcome of this of generating 10 million or signing up this many leads we want them to have a vote in the strategy so we want them involved in the executive review board next up is we bring the product manager in the product manager generally speaking is the person who does the presentation at these meetings and prepares the one pagers and is on the hot seat for this and because we want to make sure that that product manager is operating within the boundaries of the organization we actually ask the product manager’s next line manager to sit next to them and to answer questions at this particular structure here making sure that the product manager is in sync with his management structures is a best practice next up we’ve got a role for something called a gatekeeper the gatekeeper is a senior non-involved individual who is meticulous about running this meeting efficiently having a gate review process without a strategic and well-informed gatekeeper is a very challenging process because the process tends to fall apart but with a gatekeeper doing the rules that we’ll explain in just one minute here this meeting becomes very efficient and effective and then lastly we have an audience for the gate review meeting and the audience generally is comprised of product managers from the organization who are likely to go in front of the gate at some future point we like to get product managers and the direct reports of the vps into the audience of this particular meeting because what we want to have happen is that the lessons learned the questions that the executives ask are things that we want the executives to only have to do once and then they become common knowledge about what’s expected of them in the future so if if a product manager learns a lesson at a gate review meeting we want to make sure that there’s lots of eyes on that particular process so that that mistake is only made once and that the executives don’t have to sit through those particular problems on a regular basis at elo this was the meeting to be in if you wanted to be seen if you wanted to be involved in the strategy you were fighting your way to get inside of this particular gateway

Rina Alexin | 00:31:30–00:33:00

so ken for the clients that we’ve worked with where they really adopted this process it really required the vps to be present at every meeting if they miss one of course they could send their director or proxy but how do you if you are working at an organization that currently does not run this as a process does not have a really strong governance model how do you make the case to have all this time from executives

well first of all i explain that it’s not like any other meeting that the vp of sales or the vp of marketing has been to this is not a status update meeting where each project owner or product manager comes up and explains what’s happening in the particular business we explain to those vice presidents the structure in the organization around the product one pager and how this is a this is a meeting where the product manager comes in and only communicates deep information upon questioning but that the one pager does most of the lifting secondly is we go back to those vps of sales vps of marketing people that are not used to working generally with the development process and we say this isn’t about development this is about a commitment by the company to make a product successful in the marketplace in the next year and getting marketing getting sales getting finance involved in those meetings is a natural part because we need to work together as a team in order to accomplish these hard goals

Gates, Phases & Out-of-Bounds Projects

Ken Feehan | 00:33:00–00:36:30

this gate review process is done multiple times during the development of a particular product the Productside uses something called the optimal product process which has seven phases to it conceive plan develop qualify launch maximize and retire and we would recommend that a product manager present their one pager or present their status at each gate review process as they’re looking to move from plan to develop they would have a gate review presentation as they were looking from launch sorry from qualify to launch they would present to the staff meeting here and if you’re thinking this is a long and drawn out meeting here i promise you that these gate review processes for the product manager should take no more than five minutes a piece we’ll do four of them in this particular hour process to see what’s happening here but we want to do that there is an exception conceive is unique conceive does not require a one pager it is not a normal process there’s a lighter process for conceive but for plan develop qualify launch maximize and retire it’s a full-fledged gate review process and one pager process we’ll talk about conceive as we do the example sometimes projects are not linear sometimes they don’t progress smoothly sometimes things change during them if your project goes quote unquote out of bounds if it bumps into some kinds of the market changed or the development team ran into some obstacle that’s going to be on out here from time to time you’re going to be out of bounds the things that you’ve committed in previous gate review processes will need to change there’s a process where if you are out of bounds on your project you will go to and get into get an agenda item on the next gate review meeting here so there is a process for projects that are non-linear in nature in order to in order to come happen here we also have an example of an out-of-bounds example that we’ll do for you in just a minute and then again you know we live in an uncertain world this is not about product managers succeeding or failing being out of bounds is not something for a product manager or product team to be embarrassed about it is about being truthful being honest and being a truth teller which we’ll also talk about

Gatekeeper Rules & Meeting Mechanics

Ken Feehan | 00:38:00–00:41:00

gate review processes are simple the gatekeeper introduces the product they ship out an agenda and then they introduce a particular product the product manager does a brief presentation and asks for something from the team i ask to move to the next gate i ask to get to have these new boundaries set up there’s always a specific ask for product managers and then we’ll let the executives do a q&a process at the end of the q&a process in under five minutes generally the gatekeeper will ask for a yes or no vote and projects that are voted on unanimously as yes will proceed a couple of last minute gate review notes before we get into our exercise here is vps have an incentive to attend if they don’t attend it’s difficult for them to vote on a particular process so we promise we’ll make the meeting efficient we’ll make it brief we’ll we’ll work hard to make it work and in exchange for them we’ll count their vote voting must be unanimous in order for your product to be approved this sometimes sounds interesting and funny to all companies that we work with but imagine the situations where you’re spending five million dollars developing a new project and you want to turn that into revenue and the finance person agrees to it the marketing agrees to it development agrees to it product agrees to it and the ceo agrees to it but the vp of sales won’t put resources behind it the gate review process is meant to capture that and to make sure that there’s unanimous support for that particular project otherwise you’re going to spend all of this money and not get reward from it so we’ve got we’ve got a process voting must be unanimous if it’s not the executives have to go into the coffee room and figure it out but we have to get unanimous support for these particular projects it’s it’s it’s one of the most interesting aspects of the gate review process the product one pagers have boundaries on it product managers can’t laxly change these boundaries the process of changing a forecast or changing an intro date is a formal review process if you change anything on your gateway process you need to go back to the gate review process and ask for permission and we don’t encourage that that’s not a good thing stay on board the gate review process is made to cover the majority of the development resources and the development resources at a company it’s not meant to cover all of them there will always be a budget for maintenance projects and for emergency kinds of projects here we’re not trying to put 100 of the projects under gate review but we are looking to put something along the lines of 80 so again this is around getting strategic alignment for your most important priorities i know we’re going quickly through a lot of content here but at the core of it your vps need to be committed because they’re committing resources and they need to be there so that they can really move your product along

Live Simulation Setup: Unicorn, Big Dog, Blue MVP & Database Upgrade

Ken Feehan | 00:42:00–00:44:00

fantastic thank you tips for your executives before we get into this particular review process if you are if you’re if you’re getting ready to present and you’re worried about the executives the executives are very likely going to ask you how your product that you’re presenting is directly related back to corporate priorities so how if your corporate priorities are to raise revenues by 25 and reduce churn et cetera they’re going to ask questions how does the product in front of me accomplish the kinds of goals that we’re going for and if it’s not strong enough why not so just recognize you’ll be hit with that on a regular basis understand what understand what you are committing to your team if you’re vp of sales and you’re voting yes on a particular project it means that you are going to support the sales aspect of that product in the particular marketplace if you’re marketing it means you’re probably allocating budget dollars and people in order to accomplish this particular goal this is not just voting to develop something this is voting to make this happen inside the marketplace you’re not just getting anything from the product team it’s it’s vp of sales frequently inside of gate reviews stand up and say this this is all i’m getting next year i’m supposed to raise revenues 25 and this is all i’m getting that’s a normal process here the vp of sales is supposed to pound on the tables from now and then and ask for more this is healthy to see what’s happening here but recognize that if they’re voting on something it means that this is it this is all they’re getting they’re not getting anything else there’s no there’s no projects around the corner that are going to come and help make the forecast here lastly is executives should not tolerate unprepared product managers or timid gatekeepers if you are not ready to be inside of this meeting you can expect an executive curling we want that to happen we want product managers that are on top of their games we want executives expecting fast brief presentations to see what’s happening

Rina Alexin | 00:44:00–00:46:00

and ken in the previous slide you noticed you made a point around needing to be unanimous and that the executives need to be aligned what do you tell product managers who have maybe an issue where there’s an executive playing a lot of politics really trying to move only things that affect sales across the finish line

well so so here we do we set up responsible products we we work to it we fund it and the ceo goes golfing with two buddies and comes in and whispers to the development manager to do something else and then and then suddenly the company starts moving in that direction my best advice to a lot of clients and to the work that i’ve done individually is what you have to do is you have to do post-mortems on these things getting the ceo to speak to the development manager isn’t something that you’re going to be able to stop they’re going to be able to do that but what you can do is determine whether or not the batting average for that is positive or negative if the development team works on something for six months because it was it was highlighted as a priority and then it doesn’t sell we need that to be the data that proposes this governance process in the future to make it work here ceos are brilliant and bright people they speak to interesting people all the time they need to put that feedback into the product process and to make that system work here but all too often these ideas are quick they’re brief they’re not they’re not well thought out and they are distracting to the company if you don’t debrief them if you don’t understand if you don’t do a retrospective on these ideas and understand where the failure point was then you’re going to encourage this to happen more in the future so do a retrospective do debriefs on these things and and talk about the fact that that this isn’t leading towards bigger business

Live Simulation: Gatekeeper, Cast & Agenda

Ken Feehan | 00:46:00–00:47:30

okay kind of a couple of last tips before we go into the simulation here this is the role of the gatekeeper the gatekeeper is critical to making this successful no one presents to the executives unless they do a rehearsal with slides with one pagers 72 hours before the meeting to the gatekeeper there’s no exceptions if you miss this window you will be put on the agenda for the next executive review process for the first couple of meetings this seems really brutal but if the product team begins to abide by these particular plans begins to think in advance about what has to happen this becomes key to having efficient executive friendly meetings here so again it’s hard at first but eventually it becomes kind of a given to see what’s happening here okay so the gatekeeper knows what’s coming they’ve seen the presentation 72 hours in advance they’ve received updated one pagers 24 hours before the meeting they post the agenda for the meeting and publish all appropriate documents that usually means that they publish the updated one pagers they update exactly what kinds of processes will be in front of this this means the executives have access to the printed materials 24 hours before the meeting and can read them next up after the meeting the gatekeeper publishes meeting minutes the gatekeeper publishes a table that we’ll show in a few minutes they publish the new updated meeting minutes and they make a new plan of record for the company at the end of each particular meeting and then lastly is gatekeepers aren’t terribly accommodating to product managers that are not following these particular rules here the gatekeeper is not your friend the gatekeeper is not here to accommodate your lateness if we run this kind of tactic strategically this actually changes our behaviors as product managers makes us more responsible to executives which will get us promoted over time

Ken Feehan | 00:47:30–00:50:00

okay we are about to sit and do a simulation of four projects put through a gate review process in this particular process we are going to make this a little bit fun and a little bit different and that is we are going to put projects through and have an executive review board on the executive review board will be our acting vp of sales which is rina and our vp of marketing which happens to be roger roger is very good at this role ken lan ben and zen will be the people who do the presentations and act the role of the product managers and nicole from our office will be our gatekeeper and then lastly it will be helpful for you to hear a couple of different voices so we’ve asked jake to be our narrator narrator narrator jake will set this particular up to see what’s happening here we have four items on the agenda and this is a good time to hand the slide over to our narrator right

Live Simulation: Unicorn 1.3 Gate Review

Jake (Narrator) | 00:50:00–00:51:00

thanks ken i’ll be your gate review guide today and i’d like to kick off today’s mock gate review as ken described earlier there are four groups of attendees today so group one we’ve got executives from around the company here rina is playing the role of vp of sales and roger’s playing the role of vp of marketing these are the two active roles that we’ll focus on today there are four product managers here their names all sound very similar and hopefully that won’t be too confusing but they’ll they’ll discuss our products and initiatives our gatekeeper nicole is here to run the meeting and be meticulous about it as ken described and then we’ve got other partner pms from around the company here in the audience as i mentioned ken len ben and zen will present four unique products at today’s gate review again they all might sound like ken but these projects these products are unique in their own way and so when i say action we start the mock gate review right action

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 00:51:00–00:51:30

okay team i’m nicole your gatekeeper and i welcome you to the gate review meeting for august 12 2021 we have four projects to review on the agenda today unicorn version 1.3 big dog version 1.1 blue mvp and database upgrade i would like to remind everyone that the one pagers and roadmaps for the agenda items were emailed to you at noon yesterday you have had a chance to review the materials provided product managers please keep in mind that the executives are familiar with your content so you must keep your presentation brief first up is product manager ken presenting unicorn version 1.3 ken the floor is yours

Ken (as PM for Unicorn 1.3) | 00:51:30–00:52:30

thank you very much gatekeeper good morning i’m here today representing a project called unicorn version 1.3 and i’m looking to advance this project from the develop phase into the launch phase before you is the product one pager for unicorn specifically on the right hand side are the boundaries for this particular project this project is inbounds for these four strategic metrics and the introduction date and the kprs are all stated and they are all consistent with what you’ve seen before we’ve received solid feedback from the field and from our beta customers and i ask that we proceed into the launch phase of this particular project

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 00:52:30–00:52:50

okay the product manager has presented the project and has asked to proceed before you vote i ask if there are any questions about unicorn version 1.3

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 00:52:50–00:53:20

yeah i have a question where is the sales forecast for this i mean this is just a little feature it’s not going to help us achieve our revenue goals for fiscal year 2022

Ken (as PM for Unicorn 1.3) | 00:53:20–00:53:50

thank you for your question vp of sales i’d like to point out that we’ve been consistent with the goals for project unicorn version 1.3 and version 1.3 is specifically designed to address churn so it’s specifically addressed towards reducing the number of signed customers who renew this particular product this is not about increase in sales and that has been the case since we’ve done conceive versions for this particular product so this product is about reducing churn it’s not about increasing sales

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 00:53:50–00:54:20

all right ken so it’s going to reduce churn which i interpret to mean we’re going to keep customers more effectively as a result of this release is that right

Ken (as PM for Unicorn 1.3) | 00:54:20–00:54:40

yeah we are forecasting to hold on to a thousand more users than would have been forecasted without project unicorn

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 00:54:40–00:55:10

okay all right that’s pretty good how are we to get the word out to our current customers

Ken (as PM for Unicorn 1.3) | 00:55:10–00:55:40

excellent thank you very much vp of marketing roger i have been working with just a fantastic team member her name is nadia and she is your director of marketing and together she has built up a plan about going to marketplace and we have this entire plan going on here we had planned to meet with you yesterday we were on your agenda for yesterday to go over this particular plan so that you could have final say but you asked us to move the meeting so i understand your question today that you haven’t seen the plans but we are scheduled nadia and i will meet with you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning as per the agenda item and we will go over the plan and i think that you will like what you see it was developed by someone on your team

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 00:55:40–00:56:00

okay very good yeah i look forward to that meeting then thanks

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 00:56:00–00:56:20

all right any more questions if not let’s move forward with the vote sales how do you vote

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 00:56:20–00:56:30

it’s a yes for me

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 00:56:30–00:56:40

marketing yes

Ken (as Development / Product) | 00:56:40–00:57:00

development yes finance yes product vp yes

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 00:57:00–00:58:00

okay i see that we have six yes votes project unicorn version 1.1 is advanced through the launch gate that completes the first item on our agenda let’s move to the second the next item is product manager len presenting big dog version 1.1 this is an out-of-bound review len the floor is yours

Live Simulation: Big Dog 1.1 Out-of-Bounds Review

Len (as PM for Big Dog 1.1) | 00:58:00–00:59:00

thank you very much i’m here today to report that project big dog version 1.1 has gone out of bounds we were here only four weeks ago and we advanced from the develop phase and since that time it has become obvious that we’ll be missing the launch date due to some unexpected issues related to the development of this particular process the team and i have studied the issue and we proposed a solution we ask that you accept the following changes to the project boundaries we ask that you move the intro date from march 1st to june 1st of 2022 and that we increase the marketing budget by two hundred thousand dollars to help us generate sales faster in order to stay inbounds on the forecast for fy22 for this particular product based upon this work where we considered many alternatives and came up with this best option i ask that you accept these new boundaries and bring the project back in bounds

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 00:59:00–00:59:30

all right so so everybody knows len and my direct reports have been working on this issue and we did find 200 000 to add to this particular project from our other marketing funds but i gotta say i’m still worried about this project i mean big dog 1.1 never had a big forecast its kill stop was kind of small forecast and we’ve also heard some new priorities from our customers so this this might not make sense for us to advance at this point

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 00:59:30–01:00:00

vp of sales we can’t hear you run away on so 30 days ago you stood in front of us and you said that this was going to be in bounds and now we’re slipping by 90 days what the heck is going on

Len (as PM for Big Dog 1.1) | 01:00:00–01:01:00

can len looking at his shoes sheepishly yes i i did report in the last gate review project that we were on schedule and this was the best information that i had and the development team had at the time but once the team started developing we saw that the estimates were too low specifically in the area of developing private apis they’re giving us a little bit more trouble than we expected and also security has become a big issue with the company lately and we have additional requirements for security i’m very sorry that we did this but i would like to remind you that we did this on good faith estimates to see what’s happening here and we are being honest and open about this and we believe that this is the best way to get big dog back on schedule in process and i ask for your vote

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:01:00–01:01:20

if there are no more questions let’s vote on accepting the new boundaries for big dog 1.1 vp of sales how do you vote

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 01:01:20–01:01:30

it’s a no

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:01:30–01:01:40

marketing no i gotta say based on the fact that we have to pump another 200 000 into the budget and we’re not getting any more out of the revenue forecast with a lower roi i vote no

Ken (as Development / Product) | 01:01:40–01:02:00

development yeah on behalf of development finance and product i’m a yes

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:02:00–01:03:00

okay with two no votes big dog 1.1 is no longer a priority please reallocate the teams by monday

Live Simulation: Blue MVP Conceive Gate

Jake (Narrator) | 01:03:00–01:03:30

right so despite the outcome this is likely to be a good thing for a company like ours we need to re-prioritize and reallocate these front-end and back-end engineers for some more new recently approved higher-priority projects okay the next item on the agenda is ben presenting blue mvp as a conceived item remember conceive ideas require only a well-formed hypothesis ben you have the floor

Ben (as PM for Blue MVP) | 01:03:30–01:04:30

thank you very much i’m here today to present an idea that several of us have been kicking around we believe strongly that we can generate a hundred thousand dollars in incremental revenue in fy 22 and have 10 000 daily users if we develop a mobile app that’s attached with product line b i ask today that you accept this conceive idea and allow us to progress into the plan phase

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 01:04:30–01:04:50

okay ben so basically you want to develop a mobile app i mean how does that help us

Ben (as PM for Blue MVP) | 01:04:50–01:05:30

thank you very much vp of sales we believe that this mobile application will drive us towards two items which are strategically important to the company number one is this will drive additional revenue for the company we’re looking to raise revenues by 25 percent in fy 22 and this produces additional incremental revenue secondly is that the leadership team highlighted the fact that they wanted to make this product easier to sell and we have a theory that getting the mobile product into the hands of many users will actually increase sales on this and we look forward to proving and working on that research in the plan phase we ask that we push forward on that

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:05:30–01:05:50

so how will you get this app onto users phones

Ben (as PM for Blue MVP) | 01:05:50–01:06:20

excellent thank you very much vp of marketing i’ve spoken to your director of marketing marta nadia she’s really good she’s working with you on several things here and we think that we’re proposing banner ads on our portal to promote the particular application here we think that that will very effectively get the application message into users’ hands and it will be relatively affordable we think that will be our primary mode to do this but this is work that would need to get done in the plan phase we have some ideas but if you push us into plan phase we’ll actually develop some plans around that

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:06:20–01:06:40

okay so i can see how that won’t be very expensive to do that’s good but i’m still concerned about this 100k of revenue it just doesn’t seem like very much

Ben (as PM for Blue MVP) | 01:06:40–01:07:00

yes in plan we’ll study that if it can be more it can be not but i wanted to set the goals to be reasonable so that i didn’t disappoint you

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:07:00–01:07:20

okay okay if there are no more questions let’s vote on accepting blue mvp as a conceived idea it’s time to vote sales

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 01:07:20–01:07:30

yeah i’m with roger on this one i don’t see the revenue from this it’s a no for me

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:07:30–01:07:40

marketing i’d have to say no i’d like to see higher revenue

Ken (as Development / Product) | 01:07:40–01:08:00

development yeah on behalf of development finance and product i’m a yes

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:08:00–01:09:00

based on the vote blue mvp is not approved workers are to stop on the blue mvp concept without first returning to the gate review and getting approval let’s move on to the last item on our agenda today

01:02:00 — Live Simulation: Database Upgrade Plan-to-Develop Gate

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:09:00–01:09:20

next up we have director of development zen presenting database upgrades to pass from plan to develop zen the floor is yours

Zen (as PM/Dev for Database Upgrade) | 01:09:20–01:10:00

thank you good morning i’m here today to ask that the project database upgrade move from the plan phase into the develop phase as i talked about the last time we were here the project is tech debt the one pager summarizes what we are doing and during this time in the plan phase we proved out our assumptions and research and our confidence in completing the project inbounds is very very high based upon what we know today i ask that you vote yes and advance project database into the develop phase where we will actually start developing the particular solution here

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:10:00–01:10:20

do you have any questions for project database upgrade

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:10:20–01:10:40

so zen first of all you have a striking resemblance to ben i must say but will this be the release that finally gives us this exchange of client data with salesforce i’ve been waiting for that feature for a long time

Zen (as PM/Dev for Database Upgrade) | 01:10:40–01:11:00

yes roger that is a that is a key feature requirement that we are committed to developing for this particular product and we look forward to getting it to you

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:11:00–01:11:10

awesome

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:11:10–01:11:30

okay if there are no other questions let’s vote sales

Rina (as VP of Sales) | 01:11:30–01:11:40

yes i’m very excited about this please move forward

Roger (as VP of Marketing) | 01:11:40–01:11:50

marketing at last yes

Ken (as Development / Product) | 01:11:50–01:12:10

development yes yes and yes for development finance and product

Nicole (Gatekeeper) | 01:12:10–01:13:00

all right based on the votes database upgrade is approved to proceed into development okay we have just completed the gate review meeting for august 12 2021 let’s review unicorn 1.3 is approved big dog 1.1 is killed blue mvp is not advanced to plan and database upgrade is approved i will document these changes in an email and i’ll send it out to you before midnight tonight thank you

Jake (Narrator) | 01:13:00–01:14:00

all right so thanks nicole all right so we just wrapped up that mock gate review session hopefully you all got to see some of the inputs and the mechanics of it and how it could be applied at your organization i want to say thanks to all of our participants everyone wins an academy award for their fantastic acting ken i cede the floor back to you

Governance Poll & Adoption in Real Companies

Ken Feehan | 01:14:00–01:15:30

thank you very very much jake excellent terrific i’d love to take a quick break and do another poll here the gate review process that we’ve just described is in a category of something we call a governance process and we would like to know whether or not your company uses something similar to the gate review process or has a governance process overall the poll is open and please vote yes or no

Rina Alexin | 01:15:30–01:16:30

yeah the poll is open so we’re gonna leave it open for just a few more seconds here as we’re getting responses but this is often and i see this at various maturities whether you’re a startup or an enterprise oftentimes we do find that companies do not always have a governance model and it is absolutely crucial to getting all of the stakeholders as we saw today aligned on their commitments so answers are getting in so i’m just gonna close it right now and share that 70 almost 70 percent have said yes that they do use some kind of governance process so that is great news

Ken Feehan | 01:16:30–01:18:00

fantastic thank you very very much hopefully there’s there’s some best practice that we can share during the q&a we’d love to would love to get some feedback on how this compares to others in the q&a section here

Templates, One-Pagers & Career Impact

Ken Feehan | 01:18:00–01:20:00

very very quickly you’re going to receive a follow-up email from this particular webinar in that webinar will be a link to a template for the one pager document that we use during this process here there will also be a link back to the previous may release where we talked about the product one pager and road mapping this is section one of this two-part process and so that will come to you in a follow-up email in this particular process that would be great one of the things that comes out in the process of you using these product one pagers and being a product manager that presents to these kinds of gate review processes is that fundamentally the process of being a product manager moves from being a cheerleader for a particular product to being kind of the orchestra leader of this particular product and it’s critically important that as you make that transition as a product manager that you embrace the process of being a truth teller we want you to work through the process of being square with the executives understanding where the risks are and making this happen here be the person at your company be the product manager who executives look to as being the person who tells the truth be a truth teller

Ken Feehan | 01:20:00–01:22:00

the strategy behind this two-part webinar was to encourage product managers to align product roadmaps to strategy from the particular company second part is to use that product strategy in order to make quarterly news for your major products give your sales team give your marketing team something to sell something to market organize your product releases in ways that are easy for your company to talk about them companies that do frequent product introductions and talk about new innovations and products are the companies that people look to as innovators work at an innovative company chances are your development team is doing fantastic news in an agile environment lean forward get them the recognition that they deserve next up is achieve the plan make big goals and achieve that particular plan here and i promise you that if you align to strategy make news and achieve to plan you will get promoted this is a career path strategy for product managers that we work through here

Q&A: CEO Side Projects, Kill Decisions & Executive Bypass

Rina Alexin | 01:22:00–01:22:40

reena the last poll so we have two more polls so this one is just to get feedback and we want to just know if a process built with product management one pagers and the gate review would be more useful in your company than the process used today so please select one i’ll leave this one open ken how do you feel about going through and answering some of these great questions that we got

Ken Feehan | 01:22:40–01:24:40

i think if you ask the questions together we’ll answer them all right so i’m gonna start and by the way please continue to to put in your questions we’ll get through as many of these as we can we have one here from joe who asks if you have any advice on how we can ensure that the process is not bypassed with the ceo and other executives pushing their own projects through oh i have seen that yeah so so here we do we set up responsible products we we work to it we fund it and the ceo goes golfing with two buddies and comes in and whispers to the development manager to do something else and then and then suddenly the company starts moving in that direction my best advice to a lot of clients and to the work that i’ve done individually is what you have to do is you have to do post-mortems on these things getting the ceo to speak to the development manager isn’t something that you’re going to be able to stop they’re going to be able to do that but what you can do is determine whether or not the batting average for that is positive or negative if the development team works on something for six months because it was highlighted as a priority and then it doesn’t sell we need that to be the data that proposes this governance process in the future to make it work here ceos are brilliant and bright people they speak to interesting people all the time they need to put that feedback into the product process and to make that system work here but all too often these ideas are quick they’re brief they’re not they’re not well thought out and they are distracting to the company if you don’t debrief them if you don’t understand if you don’t do a retrospective on these ideas and understand where the failure point was then you’re going to encourage this to happen more in the future so do a retrospective do debriefs on these things and talk about the fact that this isn’t leading towards bigger business

Rina Alexin | 01:24:40–01:25:20

right it’s another opportunity as well for you to build accountability throughout the organization and this is managing up in a lot of ways this is also managing up all right do you have any advice ken on how often these gate reviews should happen and i think the answer kind of changes depending on what size company you are there is a question here from lisa who works in medical devices and the time to market can be years so how does she think about gate reviews and doing that frequently

Q&A: Cadence, Medical Devices & Gatekeeper Value

Ken Feehan | 01:25:20–01:27:20

so first of all i just want to reiterate that these are 30 minutes to 60-minute meetings with product managers presenting and getting votes in five minutes these are not long status update meetings these are very specific kinds of meetings here and i’ve worked at companies that have six products going through development well six products through six gates is relatively speaking a relatively high cadence to see what’s going on here so the companies that i’ve worked at it’s generally a twice monthly meeting that lasts 60 minutes or less the cadence there is as products were taking 12 to 18 months to get to marketplace so we were filling up an agenda every two weeks if you’ve got longer and i understand medical is much longer if that’s the case then maybe it’s a monthly meeting but don’t forget that frequency is tied to how strategic you are about running these meetings as executive friendly if they happen too often and they go hours long your executives will get bored and they won’t come

Rina Alexin | 01:27:20–01:28:00

i have another question here ken did you want to go over a couple more slides because i think we do want to get some more feedback

Ken Feehan | 01:28:00–01:30:00

yes i do one more poll please thank you so please if you could help us know how helpful was this webinar giving you actionable tips to make your executive gate reviews more effective and strategic and we’ll continue with some more questions we actually have a lot from this audience for an engaged audience and there’s a question here from abella and he or she asks how can a gatekeeper add value to the presentation when it’s done 72 hours in advance so how does a gatekeeper add value generally speaking that 72-hour gatekeeper review forces the product manager to not be putting this together on the bus on the way to work on the last day putting a product manager in front of executives to make executive level decisions about million dollar outcomes of the company is not something to be taken lightly and that process of having that 72-hour review early with the gatekeeper means that the product manager has to be thoughtful and strategic in the use of how it is that they work this through it’s just simply a best practice we’ve done gate reviews without the role of gatekeeper and we find that those meetings get longer and the executives get less interested and they become less useful over time and an alternative process to what’s happening here but if the executives see this process see product managers presenting information which is executive ready which is strategic and which is vetted by their bosses then this is a meeting that and it only lasts 30 minutes then this is a product meeting that they will come to so the role of that gatekeeper is just simply to ensure that the product manager is ready to present to executives you know product managers reports to peers reports to vp and sales we’re okay winging that stuff but you can’t wing it when you report to executives about an investment that the company’s making towards revenue for next year so that gatekeeper just simply takes it and makes it executive friendly which i think is incredibly valuable for the product managers

Rina Alexin | 01:30:00–01:31:00

right and that 72 hours really forces the product managers to get ready in advance as we know if you don’t hold on to that then winging it it doesn’t it doesn’t come out well right so we have a question here from richard and it’s a fair one because again we’re talking to companies of all sizes and in his company it’s a small company and so he said well i just don’t see killing a launch so how do you how do you at that stage of that phase what would you do to convert to convert that project

Q&A: Small Companies, Sunsetting & Executive Buy-In

Ken Feehan | 01:31:00–01:33:00

it’s interesting we actually as we did rehearsals on this over the past couple of days there was one person on the team who kept coming back to ken you can’t kill a project as it’s going into the qualify phase you just can’t do it it just doesn’t happen to companies and i feel strongly that you have to be able to do that what quickly becomes apparent through this gate process is that you don’t have enough resources to do all of the things that you want to do so if you lack resources to do the things that are really important those resources have to come from somewhere and the places that they come from are investments that you’ve made which are stalled or not going anywhere or not going to deliver the kinds of results you want and it’s about making a difference it’s about not turning the crank it’s about acting strategically if you have a project which is slipping and going back for multiple out-of-bounds reviews and the work never seems to finish and you have another project here which you know you can turn into five million dollars revenue in 2022 be brave embrace the change so i push back on that one a lot i like the executives that say okay this has been out of bounds two months in a row this isn’t working let’s get those resources on a project that is more important it is not intuitive but until you get to that point you’re not aligning strategy you know we’ve had several breakthrough moments when we do this with our clients and the product managers realize that they are they’re above their product they are not there to fall in love with their product and if the product doesn’t launch for a very good reason they are doing their job right so that’s all you need to do is like what is really your job your job at the core is to make sure your product is successful if you and your executives have identified how it could fail don’t launch it don’t add resources to that pivot direct those elsewhere in the company

Ken Feehan | 01:33:00–01:34:00

yeah exactly and imagine being the product manager that is so confident in the value that you add to the company that even if the product gets kicked out from underneath your feet you know you’re going to get assigned to a more strategically important project to the company do not be afraid of being associated with products that get voted down there’s a million reasons why projects become less important to executives over time higher priority projects coming on board different priorities if you’re great at what it is that you do and your project becomes less important than something else and you get put on the more important thing it’s a winning strategy all around it feels funny but it’s exactly the right thing to have happen

Rina Alexin | 01:34:00–01:35:00

yeah we have found in our research at Productside that directors and vps of product have experienced sun setting products right sunsetting them and this is something that a lot of people starting out in their career they don’t have that practice and they don’t have that built up credibility of being able to say i know i know when this is not the most valuable allocation of the company’s resources so absolutely do it

Rina Alexin | 01:35:00–01:35:40

we have a question here from darsh and i think we kind of answered this one a little bit but any other suggestions on getting buy-in from executives to actually have the gate review process and to do the prereading that’s another thing i’m sorry and to do the previewing to actually prepare it like how do you how do you make it happen

Ken Feehan | 01:35:40–01:37:20

it’s interesting usually so first of all when i go in as part of the Productside it generally means that the organization’s looking for something different so sometimes we get pulled but if you are one of the the people inside the company and you’re trying to figure out how to adopt this yourself what i would suggest is you need an executive level sponsor of this idea you need to get the vp of product or the vp of sales or the vp of marketing to say hey i’m really frustrated with the way this happens and it’s never coordinated and it’s never very good and you as a person inside the product organization need to show them this webinar or show them the concept of the one pager or show them the rules that we’ve got for this particular process and show them that there are other ways than the way that we do it here at the company today if you get one level executive sponsor who buys into this particular idea it becomes their job to actually sell it horizontally to the other executives so if you are that person who’s looking to have this change within your organization try to get your senior level product executive plus one other executive to just simply recognize that what we’re doing today isn’t effective and that there are better ways to do it and this gate review process is a great way to do it and there are other ways to do it but if you get that executive level sponsor and you get them to believe that what we’re doing isn’t working and there’s better ways this process can really help keep it simple keep the meeting short and empower the gatekeeper to be great at what it is that they do

Rina Alexin | 01:37:20–01:38:00

that’s right that’s a great answer ken you know we have a couple of common questions here around the process of the gate review and it has to do with well what happens if an executive raises so this one’s from aparna if the executives raise a point that requires one-on-one follow-up right so and i just want to say that the gate review is a meeting when you are a product manager and you are great at aligning stakeholders it’s just one of the many meetings that you’re going to have with all the different stakeholders right it’s not just that you’re there at this meeting for the first time so what would you do do you suggest that the gate review process in this question be repeated if there is some follow-up as a result of this meeting

Ken Feehan | 01:38:00–01:39:20

yes there are times where the executives aren’t willing to vote yes yet maybe they have a question and they say pending the results of a particular answer they can do that at which case you register that with the gatekeeper you say in the meeting minutes it says the product manager needs to get this answer to the vp of sales before midnight on thursday if that doesn’t happen then the answer is no and the project falls into limbo so you can potentially do that there’s also a time where the executives are going to look at each other and say we’re not ready to vote yes on this but we need to go into the coffee room and have a discussion about this and the executives need to go and they need to arm wrestle about this particular project that’s okay you can put a timer on and you can say okay you guys have 24 business hours or 24 hours to vote on this and you can you can talk about this offline that’s just up to the gatekeeper to then follow up and say what was the vote of that particular project on here this is a process that i’d like to talk about it has walls it has rules it has best practices it does bend a little bit here and bending to accommodate executives that want to talk to each other one-on-one is a perfectly acceptable way to do that

Rina Alexin | 01:39:20–01:40:00

and colin asked us about the post-mortem that you mentioned very similar would you invite executives to that

Ken Feehan | 01:40:00–01:41:00

i would i would invite executives to the presentation of the results of the postmortem of the results of the retrospective here to talk about your batting average you know when a project comes in from product management its success rate is 80 when a project comes in from an executive whisperer to the vp it has a success rate of 10 percent i would want to share that information here but i think retrospectives are not exactly executive friendly meetings sometimes but you can do work in the retrospective and then take that to the executives later but if you if you’re a small company rules are completely different bring the executives in i definitely agree with that

Rina Alexin | 01:41:00–01:41:30

all right try to keep try to keep rina out of an executive postmortem here just try go ahead i’ll take the results though

Final Poll, Takeaways & Closing Remarks

Rina Alexin | 01:41:30–01:42:00

all right so we will do one more one more question and you know this one comes from josh yes it has to do with us doing a mock presentation here but he points out that there was an unnaturally high level of trust by the exec in the data presented right and in his experience the executives will want to spend a lot more time in the trust but verify mode so really understanding the 200k marketing spend and so how do you address this need of executives to get more information

Ken Feehan | 01:42:00–01:43:30

you know that’s really interesting and it’s a great question thank you a couple of things here first of all we talked about the fact that the gate review creates consensus among the organizations that are needed to bring this process through so if suddenly the vp of marketing is coming back and saying you know where’d that budget for two hundred thousand dollars come from if i’m doing my job right as the product manager i know nadia and i’ve worked with her and i know what her particular plans are so when i get hit by roger the vp of marketing and he says i don’t believe your forecast i say hey i understand you don’t believe mine talk to nadia so we actually line this up so that we do this i don’t go to a gate review process as a product manager and present information that my peer on that team hasn’t given me as their reported data so just just fyi i’m not representing the product here i’m the orchestra leader there’s a flute player there’s a bass player all of those people have different roles throughout the organization and i call on them to answer the questions from their vps right there are moments in these gate reviews where they’re in the room so they’re you know they’re able to also know what questions are being asked and to be prepared another point is we’re talking about here and boy does that process make the executives wary of asking the wrong question just fyi it trains them really quickly to know that they’re about to get an answer from their own direct report that’s right and this is again this is just the one pager so the data that we’re showing here there’s other data and there’s other information that is gathered for your product or project so it’s not to say that this isn’t necessarily verifiable or verified by the executives in advance either all right

Rina Alexin | 01:43:30–01:44:30

thank you all for your great questions today it’s what really makes these webinars work we really really enjoy all of the engagement that we’ve had today and this was really fun ken

Ken Feehan | 01:44:30–01:45:30

yeah i love doing this i sent an email and said can i turn this into a play on monday and i got a lot of yeses back in a big hurry so this this was this was a lot of fun i hope it was entertaining too and informative

Rina Alexin | 01:45:30–01:46:30

great well thank you again for joining us this morning if you’re interested in transforming your team you can get expert help for your team on these strategic gate reviews again Productside we provide custom solutions we provide custom training curriculum and workshops just like the gate review you saw here today so make your team more effective and contact us again thank you so much ken for this wonderful workshop on gate reviews for the listeners we will have a link to the recording after this has ended thank you all and have a wonderful rest of your day

Ken Feehan | 01:46:30–01:47:00

thank you be safe be well be strategic guys thank you