Goal, Strategy, and Metrics — Inspirations from a Game
As year-end is approaching, it is time for most of the product teams to prepare next year’s plan/roadmap/metrics. To be honest, it is never an easy job. I struggled to set up product metrics, create roadmaps, and prioritise among different business and product initiatives before the light dawned on me from a game I was recently playing.
Some Unfortunate Facts
About Strategy
Strategy, the term itself, always sounds too vague to me. It gives me a feeling whatever strategy we are talking about. It should be something from C-level people or the management team in a top-down approach. When it comes to the product strategy, you may never find such expectations from a PO job but more from PM or Product Lead. However, according to my limited observations, no matter whether your product team has a product strategy, it barely affects how you work as a PO/PM in most companies (I will elaborate below). Even when one claims that they do have a product strategy, however, if you ask them, they may not provide you with anything, or they may give you something big, more like a vision or a principle, or something small with details more like a goal or metric.
About Goal and Roadmap
Most common in the job description of PO is developing or updating the product roadmap. What ironic to me is that I’ve seen so many times that product roadmaps are asked to be created without a goal (or a destination). If you happen to be in this situation, just forget about all the product management skills or tactics. The most needed one here is the capability to estimate how much your development team can deliver in a certain period :) This also partially explains why with or without a product strategy, those can still do their job very well because the team is just simply delivering features as a feature factory. (I am neutral to this type of team. Even though it is against what Marty Cagan advocates in his books, it still exists for practical reasons in real life.)
About Metrics
Frankly speaking, it is not hard to just determine and announce random numbers as product metrics that still look relevant to your product performance. In one of my previous articles, I introduce a framework presenting how to focus on the right metrics as a PM. This approach may work fine when your product is so simple that it only serves a particular target audience. However, when managing a complex product, this approach seems hard to fit as a complicated product may serve different user segments in different ways, which may result in your focus varying based on each segment.
Dive into the Sea
What struggled me most was how to connect goals, strategy and metrics together. What are the mindsets behind them?
The game Raft
Raft, a survival game I recently played, inspired me on how I should interpret metrics, goals and strategy.
It is a typical survival game where you are alone, and there is no land as far as the eye can see. When the game started, I was trapped on a small raft with nothing but a hook made of old plastic—surrounded by a blue ocean totally alone and with no land in sight! I was floating on the sea with my raft without knowing where I was going, but just gathering materials and trying to survive. Sometimes I spotted some random islands, anchored there, and repeated the gather-craft-survive cycle. I don’t know the point of doing these things, but I know if I don’t eat or drink, I will die. (Does it sound similar to you as building a 0–1 product, and the only crucial thing is to stay alive?)
Goal, Strategy and Metrics
Everything changed when I accidentally discovered the first story island and the game storyline afterwards, which left me a hint and led me to the next island. I have a clear goal now:
Follow the story to reveal more hints and get to the following islands till the last one. (Does each story island sound like a milestone of a roadmap?)
But how can I know I am sailing in the right direction? I realise that I can build a radar after the first island. It can detect story islands as blue dots. In addition, on the radar, it shows how far I am to the next one and the correct direction. So I have two meaningful metrics now:
Keep following the direction (the angle difference between my direction and the island) and the distance on the radar. (Do they sound like metrics to your goal?)
Then the next challenge came: how can I sail there safely? There are monsters and puzzles I need to tackle or solve, which require me to gather more stuff and craft better tools. I need a strategy that is feasible and sustainable. Here is what came up to my mind:
Before I continue my main story, I need to visit more islands and gather more stuff to craft better gears, tools and supplements that can help me defeat monsters and dive longer in the sea to solve puzzles.
Hold on a second. Does it sound like a strategy? Yes, it is my (game) strategy to reach my goal. Is this strategy still vague?
After the strategy was made, I also realised that besides those two main metrics mentioned above, I also needed to monitor some other things to ensure I was doing the right things. For example, my hunger and health, how well my animals and plants grew and how many materials I should keep in stock, whether something was running low, etc.
Inspirations from Raft
Am I still playing a game? Much more than that! The game just inspired me how to interpret product metrics, company goals and product strategy in a very simple and straightforward way:
The company goal is the destination. Without a proper strategy and the necessary tools. You may never reach your destination.
Product metric, like the radar in this game, is a powerful tool, but without the destination (your goal), it is pointless.
Product strategy should not be vague, but it should be clear enough that anyone who onboards the raft can follow it to reach the final destination. What metrics to be chasing relate to what the product strategy is and what the company goals are.
End game
After the last island, I reached the goal and defeated the final boss. However, the game has an end but not your product development:). There is also a significant difference between the game world and the real world: prioritisation. In the former one, you don’t really need to prioritise anything as you can always modify them at any time because you have unlimited resources (time); however, as a PO/PM, prioritisation in the latter one is always a headache because the resources (time and money) are limited.
In my next article, I will give an example of implementing this in my practice.
