Strategy, Roadmaps, OKRs, All at Once with Sebastien Prioris - Productized 24 TalkInTen

Productized 2024 is our third conference of the year, and we’re excited to bring you exclusive bonus episodes straight from this vibrant event!

In this special series from the Productized Conference, we continue our TalkInTen format, featuring concise and impactful conversations with top industry leaders. This year’s event is filled with fresh insights, cutting-edge frameworks, and real-world stories aimed at helping teams and organizations thrive. Whether you're looking to enhance your product management skills or increase agility in your teams, these episodes are packed with actionable tips to elevate your expertise.

Sebastien Prioris explores the balance between strategy and chaos in his workshop, "Strategy or Chaos: Roadmaps Everywhere, All at Once." He explains how to effectively align product strategy, OKRs, and roadmaps, offering practical frameworks to help teams set goals and create a clear path for execution.

Sebastien on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebprioris/

Here is the synopsis of Sebastien's Workshop:

Every day, product folks are expected to deliver a winning strategy for their product. Yet, a lack of understanding, practice and support is making this harder despite methodologies, tools and resources being more available than ever. In this workshop, you will learn how to handle this.

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Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadat, creator of radical product thinking and rich Moronov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here, and we're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is the company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment, or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talking 10. To lift everyone out of that post-lunch roll that productise, we are here with Sebastian, I'm going to say it like the English person. I may be, I'm not. Maybe I'm not. I may not get a Prius, I was going to say. Close enough. You know. I try. I try. Sebastian, he's worked shop this morning, I guess was a resounding success because you have a little memento that I'm looking at on the table as well. Maybe we'll take a photo of that and use it on our socials. Yes, you're free. Yes, people will follow the LinkedIn for the podcast. You better see this and Sebastian. So it's a question that many people have warned, Green, is what on earth was your workshop about Sebastian? So the title of the workshop itself was strategy or chaos roadmap everywhere all at once, which kind of talks about the craziness of having to do all these things together. But the heart of it was really, how do you think about strategy? How do you bring people closer together and ultimately, how do you create alignments around your strategy and ultimately deliver success for the company? So how are you in a good position to talk about this to us? So I spent the last 20, 25 years in tech, mostly in sales companies across a variety of different industries. More recently, you know, doing translation with AI and satellite constellations and in leadership roles for the last 10, 12 years, right? So I like to say that I've spent the last 20 years at the heart of both the problem and the solution, right? So mostly at the heart of the problem in terms of experiencing the difficulty of aligning people around the strategy, you know, at all levels of the organization, and more recently as part of the leadership teams, making sure that you can actually give the right kind of direction. But yet with a lot of, you know, not necessarily lack of success, but you know, like a lot of inefficiencies and, you know, with dire consequences when you don't do it right. So that's kind of like that experience, you know, on the ground that has led me to with my geeky brain, you know, come up with a new framework that kind of evolves on the OQRs and then the sort of traditional way to think about what maps. So I guess there's a nice image which kind of talks about the interlinking of these three elements. Correct. If you were to try and describe that, how would you describe it? I think, you know, when I say OQRs, by the way, I mean Objectives and Key Results, which is at Mesodology for strategic goal setting in a way. And I think there are the main way that people would represent it is sort of cascade as it goes through the organization. But fundamentally, you know, feeding high-level OQRs with low-level OQRs. And I think the thing that is missing in between is the strategy. Right. And so the first representation of it is just simply to say, okay, where does the strategy fit into all of that? So that's one part of the triangle. The other part is the OQRs themselves as the Objectives and how you measure your success. And ultimately, the roadmap, excuse me, you know, way to say, how do you go from where you are today to where you will be in the future, right? This simple A to B. And so it's all about, you know, having that triangle and how you find your way around the triangle. And say in your workshop, was it just giving people a triangle? No, it's like more details of the scene. And it's like tricky to necessarily explain without the slide, although it's just the one slide by opposition to having, you know, you know, hundreds of different slides, hundreds of different tools and all these kind of things. But the idea was just to basically provide them with a set of boxes that, you know, facilitate their thinking about the strategy and how to come up with a good strategy, but also more importantly, not just in the heads, but like how they interact with other people as a way to drive better conversations, right? Because the first step is just understanding yourself. But then it's all about engaging with the rest of the organization, right? So it's all about people at the end of the day. And the strategic framework is just here to support this high-quality conversation that will ultimately lead to the better decisions for the company. And say, where have you used this framework? So I started using it in my second to last job at Enbabel, that company during translation with AI here in Lisbon. And, you know, but mostly as sort of evolution of the OKRs. And also more recently in the last few years at this company called Satyologik, building the Satilites where, you know, we actually went beyond just attention of OKRs, but really went back to the heart of what is strategy, how do you think about your business, what is your market, and basically putting in place the fundamental breaks of what allows you to, you know, do good strategy, which is you have a business model, and your strategy is a way to change your business model in the hope that it delivers better results on the market. So you need to have those three components as well. Okay. So if people listen to this, and I think this all sounds great, and you can kind of understand some of the linkages between it, what would be a way for them to get started using this framework? I think the easiest way I find is, you know, if you have some sort of fluency with the OKR methodology, well, if I need to have the key results are chosen as just being what I would call benefits, right? So it's just, you know, I'm going to deliver that new feature, and I'm going to get a whole bunch of benefits. But that's pretty much it, right? It doesn't talk about anything else, and it's really helped you understand how those benefits should be linked together. So I think, you know, have this little like, you know, trick in a way to think about it as ABCs, activities, benefits, and constraints. And that's a way to say that basically a strategy is to solve a problem, which means that you have to solve that optimization problem. And you cannot solve the optimization problem correctly if you don't have all the components of that optimization problem. And the reality is that most people live in the world of actions. So if you just take a benefit driven or outcome driven kind of approach, you negate the fact that people live in that world, right? So I'm always of the opinion that, you know, if there's an elephant in the room, introduce the elephant, right? So at least have the actions as a way to connect it to people. Now that you have the actions, think about the benefit that you want to bring. Right. But here, what's really important about the benefits is also build it as a value chain, because yes, the actions will just be product producing something like, you know, a new feature, but you don't know that feature brings value unless you have user adoption, unless you generate revenue on the back of it, unless that increases your market share. Right. So you need to think about the benefits of sort of value chain that goes from the action and convert those actions into benefits of increasing importance, right? And that's what ultimately leads it to connecting to the company objectives and to the company, you know, health in that sense. And I think the last component is constraints, because we tend to forget that you don't do all these things, you know, nearly really, you have to think about the constraints that you're under. And constraints are typically around resources, right? It could be the headcount, in a way, it could be your budget, it could be time, right? But it could be other constraints like compliance, for instance. So if you now think about your key results as being those ABCs, and you think about creating a value chain and representing the optimization problem, then you can really use the OCR as a way to have a very healthy conversation around how you're going to create value over time through the action of your team as a way to deliver, you know, higher level outcomes. And with that, then there is an assumption that there is an objective which is clear and understandable. So regarding the objective, I think that the main challenge is that a lot of people hear from best practices, you know, videos on YouTube and podcasts alike, you know, your objectives just need to be outcome driven. Yes, so you have this relationship between objectives and key results as almost being words versus numbers, all right? But it doesn't tell you that much about what the objective really is. And I think there's a few core components to doing good objective. The first thing is if it's outcome driven, it means two things. One is that it's a change in behavior that you're supposed to describe, all right? And that change in behavior is the behavior of someone, your user, a system, a customer, typically in the market. And that change in behavior has to be beneficial, right? So now if you're describing the change of behavior, you realize that necessarily, because it's one step further down the line of the value chain, you're not in control of it. All right, so for example, I would typically say as an objective, you know, launch a product. That's a bad product because it does not actually reflect the reality of what you really want to achieve, which is you want your users to adopt your solution as a way to get more revenue, more market share and so on. And so by forcing yourself to really think about this objective as being a behavior, a change in behavior, and in something that you can't control, it's an easy test for you to check if your objective is written the right way. And then where do roadmaps come into all of this? I mean, we've only got a couple of minutes left, but briefly, how do roadmaps and factor into this? Because strategy, we've got a strategy that said, okay, I was great. That's another element of it. But then the roadmap, what are you thinking there? Yeah, I think, I mean, I'd like to think about, you know, first of all, like, just to be very clear, it feels like these days, we talk about, we use the same word for two different things. What we call a roadmap and the other one would be more like an execution plan, right? I think at the heart of those two things is the fact that, you know, once you have set an objective, again, you have set, you know, the end state that you want to achieve. But you need to understand how you're going to get there. And typically, that has multiple phases, right? It's a bit like a battle. I'm going to first move my troops here and then my cavalry here. And so, you have these stepping stones that ultimately lead you to that, you know, that outcome that you want. So the first thing is like, there is a split, you know, of different phases. And I think this is what I mean by the roadmap, which is here, you're just talking about the logical evolution between those different stages, different phases. But you don't necessarily need or have actually at that point a notion of time. Because the moment you go into like a timed roadmap, which I would call more like an execution plan, you actually have to look at your resources in order to address the feasibility of your plan. Right? So for me, the roadmap very clearly is the different stepping stones in phases that, you know, sort of illustrate how you will create value. But without necessarily dates, it's just time in the wider sense of the term when you get to the existing plan, then this is when you have actual dates and resources committed against that plan, with the built-in uncertainty that always comes from the fact that this is real life. And, you know, you can't, you can't plan everything. Wow, John. So much information. Yes. My head spinning. Like, you're doing a fantastic job of kind of just giving us some great tips and some good advice says, and there's so much there to pick apart. I'm sure that people are listening, if they haven't been making notes, we're going back and kind of taking some time to dissect this a little bit. So thank you so much for making the time. I think you can probably hear some background noise. I'm not sure that there's a workshop that's going to be starting up here soon. So it seems like a good time to be draw this episode to our close. Sebastian, if people wanted to find out more about you, where should they go? The easiest way personally is on LinkedIn. The big news is that I'm starting my company called Stretify.me. So you can find me online at Stretify.me. And the goal is to basically productize the framework. So a lot of exciting news to follow as well. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your conference. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to stay tuned and follow us on your podcast platform with choice because we're back again soon. Thank you very much. Cheers. Bye-bye.