When relationships are established and maintained purely through technology, employees have an easier time moving on to alternative organizations.Organizations are failing to adapt their approach to maintaining organizational culture by failing to create and facilitate emotional, identity-based bonds with virtual employees.

Virtual Employees Are Feeling Less Committed to Their Organizations

<ul><li>Face-to-face onboarding</li><li>Quarterly on-sites</li><li>Familiarity through technology</li><li>Professional familiarity: understanding colleagues' tendencies, strengths, values, and work-related preferences</li><li>Employ HR-tech that facilitates professional familiarity</li><li>Create an on-site experience that is enjoyable and useful</li></ul>

Think Outside The Box

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

communication

Communication

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Effective commitment is missing in remote work relationships

A strategy is a plan to create value. Value for customers, value for employees, value for suppliers. It is planning for the future. Strategy doesn't begin with a focus on profit. Financials, profitability, return on investor capital is the result of strategy. It is not the starting point.

Strategy is simple

Value is the difference between a willingness to pay and a willingness to sell. This can be shown with a value stick. <ul><li>At the top, we have a willingness to pay.</li><li>At the bottom,  we have a willingness to sell.</li></ul>The difference between the two is the value the company creates. The value is split in three ways:<ul><li>Some go to customers. (The difference between willingness to pay and price.)</li><li>Some go to employees (the difference between willingness to sell and compensation.)</li><li>The middle wedge is the margin of the company.</li></ul>

Value explained

We can create more value in two ways.<ol><li>By increasing the willingness to pay. It describes the customers. It's the most a customer would ever pay for a product or service. Value can be created by focusing on "customer delight".</li><li>By decreasing the willingness to sell. It is the least amount of compensation an employee would accept and still work for this particular company. ]t is a measure of the quality between what someone is looking for in work and what a company can offer.</li></ol>

How to create more value

<ul><li>Product quality. The higher the quality, the more appealing the service, the higher the willingness to pay.</li><li>Product complements. A compliment is a product or service that supports willingness to pay. For example, razor and razor blades, or printer and printer cartridges.</li><li>Network effects. The more popular the product, the more widespread its adoption, the greater my willingness to pay.</li></ul>

Ways to raise willingness to pay

Two ways to be more attractive in the market for talent:<ol><li>Pay more money. When you pay more money, you will be more competitive in the marketplace for talent.</li><li>Make the job a better job. Create more attractive working conditions, for example, better training plan, more generous promotion rules, working some days from home.</li></ol>

How to lower willingness to sell

To many people, strategy is a total mystery. But it’s really not complicated, says Harvard Business School’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee. 00:00 To many people, strategy is a mystery. 00:25 Strategy does not start with a focus on profit. 00:52 It's about creating value. 01:00 There's a simple tool to help visualize the value you create: the value stick. 01:30 What is willingness-to-pay? 02:30 What is willingness-to-sell? 03:14 Remind me: Where does profit come in again? 03:48 How do I raise willingness-to-pay? 05:00 And how do I lower willingness-to-sell? 06:18 Real world example: Best Buy's dramatic turnaround Companies should simplify and focus on two value drivers, he argues: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. By aligning strategic initiatives on these alone, leaders make their workers’ jobs less complicated and improve customer experiences. Oberholzer-Gee is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Eliminate Strategic Overload” (https://hbr.org/2021/05/eliminate-strategic-overload) as well as the book “Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance” (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Simpler-Strategy-Value-Based-Exceptional/dp/1633699692/). Produced and edited by Scott LaPierre Video by Dave Di Iulio and Elie Honan Animation by Alex Belser Follow Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/harvard-business-review/ https://www.facebook.com/HBR/ https://twitter.com/HarvardBiz https://www.instagram.com/harvard_business_review Sign up for Newsletters: https://hbr.org/email-newsletters #HarvardBusinessReview #Strategy #WhatIsStrategy Copyright © 2022 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved.

strategy

Strategy

business

Business

videos

Videos

product

Product & Design

To many people, strategy is a total mystery. But it’s really not complicated, says Harvard Business School’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee, author of "Better, Simpler Strategy". 

00:00 To many people, strategy is a mystery.
00:25 Strategy does not start with a focus on profit.
00:52 It's about creating value.
01:00 There's a simple tool to help visualize the value you create: the value stick.
01:30 What is willingness-to-pay?
02:30 What is willingness-to-sell?
03:14 Remind me: Where does profit come in again?
03:48 How do I raise willingness-to-pay?
05:00 And how do I lower willingness-to-sell?
06:18 Real world example: Best Buy's dramatic turnaround 

Companies should simplify and focus on two value drivers, he argues: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. By aligning strategic initiatives on these alone, leaders make their workers’ jobs less complicated and improve customer experiences. 

Oberholzer-Gee is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Eliminate Strategic Overload” (https://hbr.org/2021/05/eliminate-strategic-overload) as well as the book “Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance” (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Simpler-Strategy-Value-Based-Exceptional/dp/1633699692/).

Produced and edited by Scott LaPierre
Video by Dave Di Iulio and Elie Honein
Animation by Alex Belser

Follow Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/harvard-business-review/
https://www.facebook.com/HBR/
https://twitter.com/HarvardBiz
https://www.instagram.com/harvard_business_review

Sign up for Newsletters: https://hbr.org/email-newsletters

#HarvardBusinessReview #Strategy #WhatIsStrategy

Copyright © 2022 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved.

At Harvard Business Review, we believe in management. If the world’s organizations and institutions were run more effectively, if our leaders made better decisions, if people worked more productively, we believe that all of us — employees, bosses, customers, our families, and the people our businesses affect — would be better off. We try to arm our readers with ideas that help them become smarter, more creative, and more courageous in their work. 

We encourage comments, critiques, and questions. We expect our community to be a safe space for respectful, constructive, and thought-provoking discussion. We reserve the right to remove or turn off comments at our discretion. We do not tolerate bullying, name-calling, or abusive language related to identity, including race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, or region; spam; copyright violation; extreme profanity; or pornography. We may also remove content that is overly promotional or off topic.


Harvard Business Review

What Is Strategy? It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

What is Strategy? It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

Product management is often at the intersection of user experience, technology and business. The skills required for a designer, developer, and business leader are very different from those needed to create alignment between designers, developers, and business leaders. While UX, tech, and business are areas of subject matter knowledge that are relevant to some product managers, they are not the skills needed to be a great product manager.

Skill Set vs. Subject Matter

Product managers must be able to communicate between customers and stakeholders. A great product manager can listen openly and empathetically to customer needs, align those needs with the company's goals, and articulate a plan to internal stakeholders. Great product managers enjoy the challenge of alignment and understanding between different roles and perspectives. Since they seldom have direct authority, they have the skills to manage through influence.

Communication skills

Product managers must organize their teams to work together. Where communication skills are about managing one-on-one interactions, organization is about scaling and operationalizing these interactions. Not all people that are great individual communicators are great organizers. When product managers lack organization skills, they often become bottlenecks for their team.

Organization skills

Product managers who lack execution skills may reorganize and optimize internal processes and lose sight of what they're working towards.  Non-technical people can make great PMs. They may find it challenging to have technical conversations, but the PM that focuses on execution will keep the conversation grounded in goals and results.

Execution skills

Collection of stellar videos and articles to keep in your back pocket.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

productivity

Productivity

Product Management Starter Kit

The traditional profile of a Product Manager can be frustratingly narrow. However, when organisations look beyond superficial subject knowledge, they are more open to considering the core skills that make a great Product Manager.

UPDATE: Based largely on the feedback I received from this piece (thanks to everyone who commented!), this model has evolved into the CORE Connective Skills Model (Communication, Organization…

A New Skill Model for Product Managers

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information. Graphs, charts, maps, and tables are powerful communication tools, helping to make data more accessible.Good data visualization helps you to unlock new insights, monitor your KPIs, understand user behavior, and effectively communicate data with non-tech teammates. It’s also a very powerful tool for sales, marketing, and for sharing information with stakeholders.

What is Data Visualization?

While you don’t have to be a Data Scientist to be a Product Manager, you have to be comfortable with data. In a smaller startup or for your own side project, you’ll be the person picking the platform!

Why is Data Visualization important for Product Managers?

<ul><li>If you’re choosing a platform for your team, it needs to be something that matches their skillset.</li><li>How easy a tool is to learn is also key. You don’t want teams spending months just to gain proficiency with a data visualization tool.</li><li>You need to find a platform that is best suited for the amount of data you have.</li><li>You need to weigh up the price of the tool against your budget.</li><li>If you teach yourself data visualization in order to be a more attractive job candidate, pick the software which is asked for most commonly by the companies you’re applying to.</li></ul>

Choosing the Right Data Visualization Tool

<ul><li>Tableau is the biggest data visualization tool out there. It has a very intuitive design and is very easy to learn for beginners.</li><li>Chartio is an excellent choice for businesses seeking a more seamless way to share data across multiple teams. Popular with Product Managers, this platform lets you see real-time user behavior and feature performance.</li><li>Plotly’s Dash platform is designed for data science teams who want to build analytic apps without relying on developers.</li><li>MicroStrategy helps when you think big. Featuring a drag and drop interface, teams can easily build data discovery dossiers.</li></ul>

Platforms for Data Visualization

Python, R, and SAS can create awesome visualizations and can be a great addition to any platform.With programming languages, you can also make some very specific visualizations. On the other hand, the more complex the visualization, the more complex the programming! It’s both a time and effort-heavy endeavor, and could be overkill if you’re only working with a small/medium amount of data.

Programming Languages for Data Visualization

More than just making numbers look pretty, data visualization is the graphical representation of information. Graphs, charts, maps, and tables are powerful communication tools, helping to make data…

Data Visualization Platforms for Product Managers

Managing stakeholders and roadmaps / OKRs is more of an art than a science. First and foremost, you must know your audience when communicating. Some questions to ask for better understanding: Does this person need to feel a part of the decision? Must they develop it and feel that it was their idea in the first place? What are they motivated by? Numbers? Visuals? UX? UI? Quality? Once you have an understanding of the main players, you need to then figure out how to address at least the most important 2–3 sets of people.Finally, you must know what is your desired outcome and address it.

Product Advice by Google Product Manager

<ul><li>Clarity of purpose and outcomes. Having clarity of purpose makes it possible to know when you are making progress, whether you have achieved the goal, or whether you should completely re-evaluate your endeavor and efforts.</li><li>Clarity of decision-making, ideally with autonomy in the right person’s hands.</li><li>A strong, competent cross-functional team. A team that brings together the necessary skills to launch and evolve the product is essential.</li></ul>

Themes for Building Successful Products Include

This week Product School hosted Jocelyn Miller, former Product Manager at Google and Amazon for an #AskMeAnything session. She explored relevant topics and offered useful advice for the Product…

How to Build a Successful Product by Former Google PM

Crowdfunding is a powerful tool for social good, allowing people all over the world to donate to crisis relief charities, political causes, and to pay struggling individuals’medical bills. There are others that are geared towards backers of physical and digital products. Crowdfunding democratizes the process, allowing those who don’t have a substantial amount of capital to get their projects off the ground.

Crowdfunding

There are pros and cons to the most common payment models, and they will affect how you Crowdfund your product.<ul><li>Subscriptions: You can modify your subscription model to best suit your product.</li><li>Freemium: You provide everyone with a free basic level of service, with certain features locked behind a paywall.</li><li>Advertising: Users can pay for an ad-free experience.</li><li>One-time download/licence fee.</li></ul>

How to Monetize Your Crowdfunded Product

<ul><li>If you’re building a digital product, consider Kickstarter.</li><li> Patreon is well suited to ongoing creative projects and is the better choice if your side project isn’t an app or a piece of software.</li></ul>

Crowdfunding Platforms

<ul><li>Choose Your Platform and Set Your Goals: First, you need to set your funding goals. Work out how much money overall product development is going to cost. You also need to decide how much of your own money, or teammate’s money, you’re willing to put into the venture.</li><li>Gather Your Marketing Resources.</li><li>Share Your Story. Treat your side project as you would a product. Think about who you are creating for, how the project will solve their problem.</li><li>Treat your side project as you would a product. Be open to feedback and iterations, especially from your backers.</li><li>Invest in good visual design.</li></ul>

How to Get Funded

Being a Product Manager means helping great people to build awesome things…but what happens when you want to flex your tech muscles and build something yourself? Plenty of product people have started…

Side Project Success: How to Crowdfund Your Product

Product ideas are easy to be born with but hard to get validated. A lot of products fail because of a lack of proper market research.Secondary Market Research is essential to

Steps to Consider When Validating Your Product Idea

Secondary market research is the research that has been compiled for you. Examples include studies and reports by government agencies, media sources, labour unions, chambers of commerce etc. You can easily access them online without the need to pay for anything.

Secondary Market Research

Primary market research gives you the information that comes directly from your potential customers. There are a few solid methods of doing primary market research such as interviews, surveys, focus groups etc. Primary market research allows gathering two main types of data: exploratory or specific. If you are really serious into doing primary market research on your own, then make sure you read about the different methods of conducting it. You can find plenty of useful stuff by Surfing the web, too.

Primary Market Research

Unlike market research, user research focuses on understanding the user’s behavioural aspects. Some of the methods of user research include user interviews, Contextual interviews, parallel design, Prototyping, usability testing, use cases and more. Observational research can be much more objective and can provide better results than interviews and In-Person conversations.

User Research

Usually paying customers are more serious about your product and their feedback is thus more objective. If you have both free and paying users, make sure you do not get overexcited by the feedback of the first group. Instead, focus on learning as much as possible from those who pay you money.

Product Evaluation Research (gathering customer feedback)

Use the chance to meet your users either in a coffee shop or on a bus. Do not get carried away by positive feedback, instead, make them tell something they hate about your product or feature. Then go talk to your team and start improving! did I Miss anything? make sure to hit a comment below.

At the end

You may have tons of product ideas in your mind. And you may share them with friends or family in hopes of receiving feedback. Or you may skip sharing ideas with anyone in order not to get distracted…

Why do you need to conduct primary market research? Well, in order to:<ul><li>Validate your product idea</li><li>See if people actually need your product/service</li><li>Find out how much potential consumers are ready to pay for your product</li></ul>

Primary Market Research: The Basics

Primary Market Research is basically the data that comes directly from the source i.e. the potential customers. You have two ways of getting this information: either yourself or by hiring someone who can do it for you. We’ll discuss the research methods below.

Exploratory market research helps you define a specific problem. It is all about unstructured interviews where a small group of respondents answers open-ended questions.Specific research is mainly meant to investigate the patterns that exploratory research had brought about. If you compare the prices of these two types of primary market research techniques, you would see that the specific research is way more costly.

The two types of primary market research

There are a lot of types of interviews like telephone interviews or face-to-face interviews. They allow quicker feedback than most surveys. But the downside of telephone interviews is that people sometimes are too busy to give you detailed answers. As for the face-to-face interviews, they can be quite expensive but they are worth the money.

Types Of Primary Market Research: Interviews

This one is becoming one of the most popular methods. And it is relatively affordable, too. I know a few small businesses that use online surveys quite often. Because these are a really good way of capturing the views of existing and potential customers.

Types Of Primary Market Research: Online surveys

It’s when you gather groups of potential customers in one place and ask them open-ended questions to explore their feelings about the market and the product. Focus groups can be a perfect way to gather information about the customers’ preferences, interests, and tastes.

Types Of Primary Market Research: Focus groups

This method involves watching how consumers behave when interacting with a product. The product can be something similar to the one you are intending to create. I like observing people while they are interacting with mobile apps. It’s a damn interesting thing to do, and you get a lot of authentic insights, too.

Types Of Primary Market Research: Observation

I don’t mean to offend anyone but overlooking market research when launching a new product or when starting a business is foolish, the least. And please don’t tell me about your priceless gut feeling…

What is Primary Market Research: The Basics

No matter how good your service is, your product has few chances to succeed without proper market research. It is too dangerous to assume that you already know enough about your target market.You need to carry out market research as soon as you think about that new product or service. Research should be your earliest step. Don’t take it for granted.Who should conduct market research?<ul><li>Product managers</li><li>Startupers/entrepreneurs</li><li>Anyone else who cares enough about the product/service</li></ul>

Data Analysis: The Why and When

Quantitative Data:<ul><li>What is the total size of your market? </li><li>What percent share of the market can you potentially have? </li><li>Demographic picture of your potential B2C customers </li><li>Demographic picture of your potential B2B customers </li><li>Where are your potential leads coming from? </li><li>What’s the age range? </li></ul>Qualitative Data:<ul><li>What is the current demand in your target market?</li><li>Trends in target market — growth trends, trends in consumer preferences, and trends in product development</li><li>Growth potential and opportunity for your product and/or business of your size.</li></ul>

Data Collection

I have talked about all the steps in market research except the last one which is Data Analysis. So, today is finally the day when we will go through data analysis and will thus close this series…

Data Analysis: The Last Step in Market Research

Things have changed for the concept of (MVP Minimum Viable Product). Users don’t just expect a good product, a viable product. They expect something that will surprise them. They want a MAP or an MLP, i.e., either a Minimum Awesome Product or a Minimum Loveable Product.A few years ago, you could enter the market with 3–4 cool features, and you could win people’s hearts. Now, you have to comply with the users’ expectations. They now expect specific integrations, fancier design, better usability.

Is MVP dead?

The formula is pretty simple — the user has to fall in love with your product. <ul><li>Decide on the core function that your product provides. Your product SHOULD, by all means, solve a problem. </li><li>Hire a good designer or create a really cool design yourself. This one contradicts the concept of MVP. An MVP does not have to be carefully designed. But with an MLP or a MAP, the design is paramount (both User Interface and User Experience).</li><li>Act fast. You need to gather user feedback, take it seriously, and act fast when it comes to implementing the changes.</li></ul>

Reconsider your product strategy

This is a simple definition. But a lot of people understand it differently. For some people, MVP is a product with a few features that can be perfected and then sold. For some people, an MVP is a…

Effective commitment is missing in remote work relationships

What is Strategy? It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

A New Skill Model for Product Managers

Data Visualization Platforms for Product Managers

How to Build a Successful Product by Former Google PM

Michael Nelson