Nacho Bassino: How to build your first product strategy

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:33]:

Welcome to the show, Nacho. How are you today?

Nacho Bassino [00:01:37]:

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:39]:

Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you. I'm such a fan of you and your work, and we've been getting to know each other over these last few months, and I'm looking forward to all the ground we're going to cover in this conversation. So for the listener, you're in for a good one, especially on all things strategy. Nacho is my main man on strategy, so it's going to be fun. But, Nacho, just in terms of the listener getting to know you a little bit better, I know you're doing a lot of this strategy focused work now, but tell us a little bit about how did you get here?

Nacho Bassino [00:02:06]:

Two decades story almost.

Andrew Skotzko [00:02:09]:

Give me the 1 minute version.

Nacho Bassino [00:02:12]:

Basically, I said as a software engineer, eventually this is kind of many years ago, as I said. So eventually I realized that I was spending my time on things that someone was deciding I needed to build. And I started asking, okay, why are we building this? I was not satisfied with the question. At the same time, this role of product owner was coming to life through the kind of azure manifesto and the azure guides and things like that. So I gave it a try and I convinced my boss in my company that I should convert into this product owner at the time in our scrum team. And it was successful. But of course that was kind of inside the software factory model, so it was not very real product ownership. But that gave me a chance to jump to another company in which there were real product managers who really coached me how to at least be a bit more real about product management, which kept me growing.

Nacho Bassino [00:03:03]:

And I jumped to kind of different companies, different industries. I spent a great deal of time in the travel industry, almost eight years kind of climbing the ladder of product leadership in there until it was, in my experience in Mexico, I was a chief product and technology officer. The company called Best Day, which is kind of the last of the company in Mexico. Very transformative experience for me. But then I decided to move to Europe and I joined kind of my last company as a product leader here in Barcelona, where I'm currently living, before jumping finally to full time product consulting and coaching, which is what I'm doing now.

Andrew Skotzko [00:03:41]:

No, I love that. Thank you for the quick context there. So one of the things that I love asking someone with your kind of background about is how they've experienced product differently in different contexts. Right? So I feel like a lot of people we approach, at least those of us who spend all of our time thinking about product, we approach it as if it's sort of the same thing everywhere, right? Like, we know what product is and let's do it. But you've obviously seen that that's not the case. Like, you've worked in different industries, you've worked in different countries and all kinds of contexts. So I'm curious, how have you found this discipline know, I'm doing air quotes here of product. How have you seen it to be different when you move, for example, from the Americas to Europe and started working there or in these different industries?

Nacho Bassino [00:04:23]:

Yeah, that's super interesting. I feel that the first problem we have to deal with is that product is different from company to company. It doesn't matter if it's across the.

Andrew Skotzko [00:04:33]:

Street, it's just kind of different.

Nacho Bassino [00:04:34]:

So that's one problem. I would say that I felt some particular culture differences from when moving through countries that are interesting but are not necessarily internal to product, are more about the working culture of those countries. Just to give you two examples, when I was moving from Argentina to Mexico, the big deal is that Mexican culture is much more hierarchical. So, you know, in product we need to brainstorm and we need to be upfront about the results. And people were not it was not their natural way of thinking. What's interesting anyways is that not all people of a country are the same. So you can actually find people even when the normal work ethics or protocols are one way, you can easily find people who had a more, let's say, product mindset in their bones. So that was kind of one interesting difference.

Nacho Bassino [00:05:28]:

And also when moving from America to Europe, I think that, for example, the rhythm of working and how fast you're expected to move is quite different. So I was working for a German company, it was much more structured, much more planning and yeah, things were, I would say slower because it was probably not the right way to say, but changing the direction, for example, felt a bit more difficult or required much more conversations than in, for example, Mexico.

Andrew Skotzko [00:05:57]:

That's really interesting. So I have two questions about that, that I'd love you to take in whatever way feels right for you. But I guess my first question is how have you found it? Like what has helped you to adjust to those different contexts? Because I imagine it's not that easy necessarily to just unplug from one context and change your whole way of working when you switch countries or continents or companies. So how have you adjusted to that?

Nacho Bassino [00:06:19]:

Yeah, that's a very good question because the real first problem is that you realize that's the problem because following my example, from Argentina to Mexico, being in Argentina and with central working protocols much more closer to the US. You expect people to be upfront of what's going on. So when someone came from a different culture and tell you, hey, things are this way, you assume that's the truth. But in Mexico you need to dig a bit deeper. Again, I'm generalizing here, sorry for if many Mexicans hearing it's not we're the same. But that's the thing that I realized that I first of all need to be aware of the difference and many leaders crossing borders may not be that way. So one thing that a resource that helped me a lot in this context was a book called The Culture Map.

Andrew Skotzko [00:07:06]:

Yeah, I was just going to ask if you would use yeah, yeah, I.

Nacho Bassino [00:07:11]:

Did use it and also I also had peers who were in the company coming from different companies. There was a lot of people from Spain, from Argentina and from different countries. So they help in kind of raising this awareness quick. So I suggest if you are kind of coming as an external to these companies, just getting to know the culture of the company from perspective of people that are from different cultures will help you understand what difference on how you typically think.

Andrew Skotzko [00:07:41]:

Yeah, no, I love that and The Culture Map is such a great resource. It absolutely saved my sanity a few years ago when I was working like building this big international team and I couldn't figure out what was going on. And it was almost like somebody gave me this decoder ring for international culture in a working team and I was like, oh, thank you. So let's flip it though, in your role as a product leader though, especially now that teams are getting more distributed, that's much more normal now than it used to be. So I feel like more and more every product leader needs to build a competency around essentially cross cultural collaboration. So how do you see that, this lens of cross cultural norms, how does that change things when you're leading a team, building a team or an organization?

Nacho Bassino [00:08:25]:

Yeah, so one of the topics I'm also passionate about besides leadership is this topic about, let's call it product led excellence or product led culture. So that's something I'm actually currently working on that and essentially why I'm calling this out is because this is the design you want to have for your product organization. So beyond kind of particular ways of communicating that may feel more natural to one culture than another, you want to build your own way of thinking, behaving and collaborating in your product organization. And that needs to be cross borders. And maybe reflecting back to what I was saying before, we all need to generalize. It's not that Mexicans are the same or Argentina are the same or Germans are the same. That's not the case. So probably there will be people that will naturally fit into your organization better than others and that you need to kind of have that lens, especially when hiding.

Nacho Bassino [00:09:23]:

That's the way I'm thinking about. And the other thing that you need to kind of be flexible about is, okay, if I'm having in mind this particular practice, ceremony or way of communicating, how does it feel to others? And this is true for any leadership role, not only product leadership, but you as a leader are the one who needs to adapt to how the people working in your team better, for example, communicate. So I have one typical example that happens to me yes, please. Is that I think to myself, so I think internally and then talk. But there are people who are much better kind of being in this session, talking out loud their thoughts. And this is something, again, as a leader, you need to adapt to their context and help them do it. And you can actually request this from your boss if you have a luxury. But what I'm trying to say is that at the end of the day, you are the one who needs to make them, I won't say feel comfortable, but maybe the more proper term is perform well.

Nacho Bassino [00:10:19]:

That's your job. Give them the environment to perform well. So having this adaptability is super important and that's cross culture is more personal one on one related.

Andrew Skotzko [00:10:28]:

Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. This is an interesting place to pivot into strategy because in the same way that working norms and cultures are different in different places, it feels a little bit to me like everybody has a different definition of strategy. And so I guess maybe an interesting place to start opening up the strategy conversation is from your perspective, what is strategy?

Nacho Bassino [00:10:50]:

So maybe going back to what you just said, I will say that the strategy is a particular kind of framework, which also means in some way, it's not a particular definition. But I will tell you what I believe should be in a strategy to be a coherent set of problems we need to solve, usually in some particular order with a good explanation of why they are the harder problems to solve to get to the product vision we are trying to get. So essentially, if you think about what questions fundamentally strategy needs to answer needs to be what are the problems we need to solve? In what order to get closer to our vision? Which of course had a lot of underlying things. Like for example, when we answer the why question, hopefully it's because you are the best one positioned to solve this problem in this particular way. Or for example, when we think about is this getting closer to our vision? Okay, does this strategy serve the undermet needs of my customer? So there are a lot of underlying questions, but fundamentally those are the two that are the big blocks.

Andrew Skotzko [00:11:53]:

No, I love that. Thank you for that in laying that foundation. So one of the things I wanted to ask you is I've had, I don't know, maybe ten conversations just in the last two weeks with different product leaders where you can see that everybody has some sense of strategy, but there's maybe lacking a coherent or certainly shared definition like you just offered there. One of the things that I've been looking for, and I'm curious if you have a take on this is so if I'm a leader listening to this right, I think we have a strategy, right? Everybody thinks they have a strategy. What would be a good sort of self check? What are a couple of questions I could ask myself or kind of as I look around my team to know however we got there, how do we know? How do I, as a leader know if we actually have a strategy? How do I know if know doing it right? Nacho, that's my real question. How do I know if I'm doing this right?

Nacho Bassino [00:12:41]:

That's a very difficult question. Probably needs to have. So I want to use the typical independence card. So I will try to shy away from that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:12:49]:

Okay, we made it eight minutes without an independence card. That's pretty good for product.

Nacho Bassino [00:12:52]:

Exactly.

Andrew Skotzko [00:12:53]:

All right, so now that we've established that, it all depends back to you.

Nacho Bassino [00:12:59]:

Yeah, so maybe reflecting back on what I was just saying, the real questions are kind of those two. I mean, you need to make sure that that's the case. But one thing that I usually this is my hot take. It's different from others.

Andrew Skotzko [00:13:16]:

Beautiful.

Nacho Bassino [00:13:16]:

I'm actually looking for an artifact. I'm looking that have you written down somehow your strategy? If you don't have that, probably you don't have a strategy. Why? Because even if you have clear thoughts in your head, it's very, very hard if there is no artifact that people will get the same strategy that you are thinking on their heads. So unless you are a very tiny startup or a very good communicator in some magical way that I haven't seen anywhere, it's very hard. That's the case. So real artifact, one point, the artifact I'm super flexible can be the written narrative can be PowerPoint presentation can be I always love the one chart showing kind of the big blocks and why, but that's what I'm looking for. And then going back to checking, okay, this is good. I think that there are kind of the two questions just ask is do you have real problems to solve? Do you explain why in a way that positions you to be the winner, or you can be the winner by solving these problems because you have unique strengths that help you get there.

Nacho Bassino [00:14:17]:

And third, it is getting closer to your vision of the future.

Andrew Skotzko [00:14:21]:

Yeah, I really like that. One of the things that I've noticed, I'm curious if you've seen this as well. So I've met several companies in the recent past, let's call it this year, that were very sure they had a strategy. But when you looked at it from the outside, if you're looking at it fresh, it really wasn't customer centric. And it was really sort of almost like the business projecting its own desires onto the world. For example, it's like, oh, we're going to become a subscription based business model instead of transactional that doesn't say anything about your customer. Your customer might not want that. That might be bad for them.

Andrew Skotzko [00:14:58]:

That's just one example. There could be many, many of these. So I guess my question here is what are some of the common pitfalls you see and how can a leader kind of catch it before they go too far down the road with something that's not going to work?

Nacho Bassino [00:15:13]:

Yeah, so the one you just mentioned is kind of one of them. It's not even that you are not customer centric. It's just kind of you are stating a business decision or business desire for the future. And to be honest, I think that from product leadership perspective, it's normal to expect that especially some CEOs that might be more sales driven or may be there for other reasons, don't have this product thinking that makes them do this. Jump to, okay, what that means for the product. So that's where your job comes in and you need to really kind of put that in place so that's, okay, we want to make change for subscription model. Is this going to be good for the customers? How it's going to be cooks? What value are we adding? What needs? Why are we the ones who can build this thing. And then if you find that that's not right, as she was saying, hey, this is not good for the customers.

Nacho Bassino [00:16:08]:

It's your shop to go back to the CEO and say, hey, sorry, this strategy we don't believe will fit with the product we need to build and of course, don't go with the problem. Good. With another proposal and a good strategy might be the second common pitfall is granularity. So I see all these kind of yes, our strategy is to expand into this country. So this is probably too high level. And going back, if you reflect on the questions we just said, it doesn't tell you what problems you need to address, why this country and why you are the one who can win the market in this country. So I guess that easily reflecting back on the questions can give you this sense of, okay, this is the common people, but I will describe it as granularity being a very common one.

Andrew Skotzko [00:16:53]:

No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm recalling right now a conversation you and I had probably like a month ago where you were helping me think through one of these for a situation I was working on. And the three questions we kind of landed on as like, checkpoints were what are the customer problems we need to solve? And some of those were translated from the business things like, oh, you want a recurring business model? Okay, great. What customer problem are you going to solve that will enable you to solve your business problem? So that was thing one. Thing two was why those and not the others? And that included like, in what order? And number three was how do we know if we're doing it right? Like what are the outcome measures? Were those the three? Remind me here.

Nacho Bassino [00:17:31]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I did mention in my previous questions of what good strategies I did mention objectives I should have. So that's another good one. But it's not about the strategy. It's about you being able to execute on the strategy. So it's a very important one. And what I will add to that is that on the why question is not only kind of yes, we select what problems we want to solve, but also explain why us? So it's not only why this problem, it's also why us are the best position to solve this problem.

Andrew Skotzko [00:17:57]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of the things I've noticed related to this is that very often I find that some of the product leaders I'm working with, when we first get going and we're just opening up the strategy topic, it's very common, I find, to confuse aspiration with strategy.

Nacho Bassino [00:18:14]:

No, I was saying it reflects back to the clarity thing. So when you are too high level, usually it's because you haven't thought through the problems, hey, we want to expand there, but why and how? It's kind of missing in the missing point.

Andrew Skotzko [00:18:25]:

Yeah, I'm reminded of what's the book is. The book, I think it's where to playing to win. That's the book, right? Where it's like kind of the heart of it is where to play and how to win. Where are you doing this thing and how are you going to win there? So let's zoom in here a little bit more. So you mentioned just a second ago that what you really look for, that's your hot take is an artifact, right? That there's something condensed. This has been somehow distilled into something that can be transmitted easily to other people. But I guess my question is here, from your perspective, what does the cadence look like? First off, how long does this take? Because I think a lot of people think this takes a really long time. Is that true?

Nacho Bassino [00:19:06]:

It depends. No making it real. I think that there is a huge context to be considered in terms of the size of organization. If you're a public organization, the impact on the budget, there are tons of things to consider there. So I will split this in two. So if you are on the kind of bigger, larger side of organization, you are probably tying this to some sort of annual planning which is involving budget, usually takes two or three months. Usually you have a lot of painful phases of that process. That is not necessarily the strategy itself, but the strategy is part of that.

Nacho Bassino [00:19:44]:

So it can feel painful because it's kind of related to all this mess. So that's typical, I would say it's even. Okay. The other thing that I'm doing now currently, for example, when jumping to organizations that are having this problem saying hey, we know the strategy is doing the usual backward exercise or even if they don't have a strategy. So if you don't have a strategy, you are at least executing something. So let's fake it and let's make this your three months of strategy. Kind of putting into paper what you are currently doing and you will start kind of finding, okay, what's your reasoning for doing the things you are doing? You find a weak spot. Okay, what did we bet on that we didn't have an idea about? And we need to kind of go and figure it a bit more and explore the problem space so you can do it.

Nacho Bassino [00:20:30]:

And what I'm trying to say is that you can do it in a very short period of time just putting into paper what you are already doing. If you have two months, it's two months. If you have six, it's six. So maybe based on your roadmap or whatever you have there and then from there you can start building the muscle of making the strategy more robust. So that's another way to say, hey, we value of putting a strategy out there immediately. And then what we are doing is constantly evolving the strategy and making it better.

Andrew Skotzko [00:20:58]:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I found to be I don't know if people think about this explicitly, but it seems to be in the background for many folks is that strategy? Is this sort of we have to put so much time and effort into it because, like, oh, we're stuck with it for a year or two years, rather than treating it as like a living document, a living thing, that it's going to be continually updated. So talk to me a little bit about that. So if we suddenly take the pressure off, if we change it that hey, this is not a forever decision. Right. This is our best guess right now based on everything we can understand for the next, whatever, six months, twelve months. What does that ongoing process of evolving a strategy look like when it's done well, what should that look like?

Nacho Bassino [00:21:42]:

Yeah, to me the most critical part is what usually is in all companies, some sort of quarterly review. So in one form or another, the least form that is usually most say moderately ranked companies or not. So but at least they are faking it is the OKRs. So they have some sort of OKRs. OKRs. Hopefully they are tied to your strategy so they will help you know if the high level objectives that your strategy have are moving forward or not. And what we learn from that can be reflecting on the strategy. So one very typical example going back to the Granularity Pitfall I was mentioning before, it might not even be a pitfall, but you selected one metric that will be kind of hey, the North Star metric for this strategic pillar.

Nacho Bassino [00:22:27]:

But then along the way you start refining the execution and you start kind of doing things a bit more concrete and you start gathering all metrics that are maybe part of a KPI tree evolving from that and you decide that the metric needs to change in the strategy and that's totally fine. I mean it's not that everything was wrong, it's just kind of you are understanding more about the context which helps you put something in the strategy that reflects better what you are trying to achieve. So that's a very good outcome of evolving the strategy. Same is true for discovery practices or when, for example, we're measuring about the why. Maybe the initial why is a high level hey, this market is super big and has all these opportunities and then when you start narrowing down, you say, hey, this market was this big, but this is the real opportunity we have because the other ones, we will not be able to serve those customers. So again, this is about evolving your understanding and should be reflected in whatever strategy artifact you still have.

Andrew Skotzko [00:23:21]:

Right. So if I'm hearing you right, it sounds like if we give ourselves permission to learn and update the strategy right? Like the strategy should be different in whatever, three months, six months, because we will hopefully have learned a bunch in three or six months that we will have learned some of the areas that what we were doing wasn't going to work and we can make it better. Is that what you're saying?

Nacho Bassino [00:23:42]:

Absolutely. I like the way you put it because first of all, we have permission to learn. So if we are not learning, we are not doing any meaningful product work. So when you learn, you want to update the strategy, and maybe I should phrase it in a ways of refining the strategy, but let's say that let's go to the extreme example. If you find out that some strategy policy was completely wrong, you must change that strategy. So that's what you are doing it for. I mean, you are executing in a lean way to learn more things in order to polish your strategy or change it soon if you find out that the path was not right.

Andrew Skotzko [00:24:20]:

Yeah, that makes sense, right? So I think it's a useful distinction you're making there between the sort of ongoing evolution and updating of the strategy versus like a revolution of the strategy where we say, no, this thing's wrong and we need a new one. So let me just ask you this, because I can hear some of the product leaders I work with just in the back of my mind right now, they're going, okay, so let's assume that everybody thinks they have a strategy. Whether that's true or not is different. But let's assume they're doing their first real cut at a strategy, like the first big lift, where they're like, okay, no, I buy in. You sold me nacho. Let's do this. How long does it take and how many people does it take? Is it just the head of product? Is it their whole product team? If I was a VP of product and I said, all right, I'm in, what's this going to take to do the first big lift and then the ongoing updates? How would you answer each of those? Again, it all depends, but just take the general case.

Nacho Bassino [00:25:14]:

No, the real question there is how much knowledge do you have on your opportunity space? So if you need to go to figure out your opportunity space, that will take a lot of time. And this is I mean, it sounds stupid, but if you're a leader coming to an organization which, for example, is not used to having solid production or even some solid discovery practice, can be the case that you don't have a lot of opportunity space mapped out and this can take a lot of time. I will excuse myself saying this is not a statistic work, but yeah, in the end of the day, you need to do that exercise of mapping the space. But let's assume that the positive scenario in which you have some opportunities really.

Andrew Skotzko [00:25:53]:

Quick, by the way, if somebody doesn't have that, that sounds like. Just fundamental product discovery work. Would you just recommend they do like an opportunity solution tree or if somebody does find themselves, let's say they jump into a new company, they don't know the context, they were hired because the company thinks they can basically help the company figure it out but they don't know and they got to do this. How would you suggest they do that?

Nacho Bassino [00:26:12]:

Yeah, absolutely. So mapping the opportunity space, use whatever tool you like, opportunities and trees are very good. So yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about and maybe it's just to complement that doesn't mean that you need to know all the branches of the trees with perfect accuracy. It's just kind of putting out what they usually I mean if they say if you're a new leader what the organization already knows. So there probably is a bunch of people that you can interact with to put this together, say quickly, don't want to say quickly, but you know what I mean, it's kind of in a couple of weeks probably you can have a lot of ground covered.

Andrew Skotzko [00:26:43]:

That makes sense. Okay, great. So now let's assume we've got the fundamental sort of opportunity space at least roughly mapped out. Then what?

Nacho Bassino [00:26:49]:

Yeah, so then it's a matter of selecting the right opportunities, which usually takes refining the assessment you have of those opportunities and having conversations with the relevant stakeholders and the relevant people from your team. So this can usually take the form of these typical kind of retreats but long term workshop in which you kind of spend a good deal of time reviewing these opportunities and discussing which ones are the most relevant and why. Or you can do it in more asynchronous way which will take longer for sure. But we are talking about a couple of weeks here. It's not kind of super hard. I mean depends again on the size of the organization and how many stakeholders you need to talk with and whatnot. But assuming you're a VP of a kind of normal size mid sized organization, that would probably take a couple of weeks. And once you select, the real work is about refining.

Nacho Bassino [00:27:44]:

So you will need to, for example, agree on targets. Usually I recommend doing that after agree on the opportunities because it requires a bit more of deep down and digging data and whatnot. So that again can take one or two weeks and then the final phase is okay, let's put that together and have some communication around it. That's again something that you can do pretty easily if you had done the previous steps. The first big step is kind of mapping out the opportunity space. If you don't have that, that can take months or more but then the rest of the phases can take probably in the number of weeks.

Andrew Skotzko [00:28:17]:

So it sounds like assuming you have the opportunity space already decently mapped, we're talking probably a couple of weeks for the opportunity sort of ranking and selection and focusing and then potentially a few more weeks, like one or two more weeks for digging into the data to figure out the target setting. And then there's maybe a few more weeks of basically all the work to communicate this very effectively. So altogether that sounds like something on the order of about two months, maybe for your first big list.

Nacho Bassino [00:28:45]:

Yeah. And it can be shorter. Again, going back to the size of organization can be shorter. I have seen done it in a month easily. By the way, that depends on the size of organization and how much time you are putting into it because I've seen a lot of leaders complaining about how much work does it take or how long does it take, and then you go review their agendas and they are spending 1 hour per week in strategy. Well, sorry dude, that's just not going to do it.

Andrew Skotzko [00:29:09]:

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, that makes a lot of sense just for putting a rough parameter on it. Because I think one of the reasons people let's imagine a VP who doesn't really have a strategy and they're only putting an hour a week into it. I think my hypothesis is that a lot of people don't buckle down and really do the work because they don't actually know what it takes. And so they think they're signing up for this like, oh, it's going to take me a year. It's like, no, this could be a month if you do it right. So I think it's good just to kind of make that a little bit more concrete. So I appreciate that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:29:41]:

So once they've got one and now we're into the like, okay, we have a strategy. Now we actually have a strategy. We're working on it, we're learning, we're updating, we're refining. So then walk me through. Let's assume it is now we're about to go into Q Three of the year, right? As we're recording this, it's about to go into Q Three. So let's assume that I have had a strategy for all of Q Two and I did this big lift back in January and February and now I'm finishing my first quarter with an actual product strategy. So what should I be doing right now as a leader to update my strategy? Communicate it like how much work, how much time is this going to take to keep this thing alive and make it even better?

Nacho Bassino [00:30:17]:

Yeah. So there are three big things that I like to see reviewed in a quarterly basis or this quarterly sensitivity review or however you want to call it. The first one will be quite obvious is OKRs, so we have some OKRs, as I was saying before, if you did it correctly, you derive some kind of high level objectives. I was okay, if these are my high level ELD objectives or something like that, you will see something more narrow down for the quarter that will give you some feedback on how on point your execution was. The second thing is usually I like to work with strategic roadmaps that again, not organizations have them, but can be high level artifact that tells you the strategy we mentioned. Okay, these are the big problems we want to solve. The roadmap express that in maybe in a more organic way or more divided way still keeping them as outcomes you want to achieve or problems you want to solve. So this is a very helpful tool to say okay, did we solve these problems or did we not? Based on how well we solve it or what we learn on the way, do we need to change our roadmaps? And that's where the third element comes into play, which is the Opportunity Solution tree.

Nacho Bassino [00:31:21]:

So again, opportunity Tree we might imagine is not one big uplift. Hopefully it's a living document that you are constantly evolving because you are learning more from the customers and this should be true, if you are not doing this, you are not doing kind of very solid product management. So the opportunity increase what will happen is two things. The first one is that you will have updated opportunities saying hey, this is more valuable or less valuable than what we've lived or you have add new opportunities, say hey, this is something new, we discovered customers. So this is where going back to a strategy and saying okay, these were our pillars, where our pillars still hold true. Do we learn something new that needs to update it or if they are still true, maybe we need to go down to the other artifacts of the roadmap and OKRs to say, okay, we have this learning now that this opportunity needs to come into place and then we shift the things. Because at the end of the day I usually mentioned this, but I call these three artifacts part of direction. So strategy roadmap and OKRs.

Nacho Bassino [00:32:23]:

So what you are updating at the day is the direction. So direction may need a change in strategy, hopefully not, but for sure in the other two we will have them.

Andrew Skotzko [00:32:32]:

No, that's great. Yeah, we have these three components that also are kind of the process you have to go through, right? First you have to create a strategy, then you have to convert it into a high level plan, which is the roadmap, which is really I think we're both a fan of the book product roadmaps relaunched and I love the way they talk about a roadmap in theirs. It's not a delivery plan, it's a communications artifact that communicates intent. Like strategic intent. Exactly, which for me was the big takeaway of that book. And then we have to turn that into some OKRs. And then the underlying Opportunity Solution Tree do you find, by the way, when you're mapping at that there's the Opportunity Solution Tree very much down at the tactical level, at the product, discovery and delivery level with the team itself? With a product team, do you also use it at a higher level, at a more strategic level, or do you kind of reserve that for a lower level artifact?

Nacho Bassino [00:33:21]:

That's a good question. I have used it at strategic level, but not building different risks. So what I'm trying to say is that usually the teams and I have seen this play out in many different ways, so I will call it the way I like it the most is when teams usually have many levels in the opportunity breakdown. So you start with the set outcome, but then you say, hey, this is a big chunk of opportunities, then these are small opportunities ready to this one, and this is even smaller opportunities ready to this one. So it's kind of this hierarchy. I'm making a lot of hands movement, sorry to one listening, but essentially you are having this big hierarchy and when you are doing a strategy work and you are kind of rolling up to higher levels, you are looking at the top part saying, okay, where are the big chunks that we can work on? And actually, this is where the input from the product teams is most helpful for leaders is because they probably have this since they explore the lower levels of the tree, they can give you more precise information about the higher levels of this opportunity.

Andrew Skotzko [00:34:24]:

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of that process turns on outcome setting, right. And the choice of the outcomes that we make. And this seems like a place where we need to zoom back out to the relationship between the product leader and the rest of the leadership of the company. So talk to me a little bit more about that, especially if we have the all too common case where we have, let's say a CEO, just to make this totally stereotypical. Let's say we have a CEO who's very sales led and is really driving revenue, revenue, revenue. That's the classic one you hear all the time.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:00]:

That's probably not going to translate into a strategy so well. So talk to me a little bit about how we convert the metrics and the outcomes that we are seeking from sort of the business level down to what we actually need with the product teams. How do you approach that?

Nacho Bassino [00:35:14]:

Yeah, so by the way, just to mention it loud and clear, that's fine. I mean, that's the role. That's why they hire Bps of products.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:23]:

It's kind of the job.

Nacho Bassino [00:35:24]:

You shouldn't be expecting your CEO to be the product guy. If not, you're in trouble.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:30]:

This is kind of your job. Exactly.

Nacho Bassino [00:35:33]:

So the way I like it is the way that Josh Saban, for example, explains this connection. I think that Chef Fatten also mentioned is the connection between impact, which is what the revenues, what the company expects, then the outcomes, which is, okay, what customers behavior I need to change in order to drive those impacts. And then of course the initiatives and the work we do. So the way I expect product leaders to take this problem is exactly that thinking the way we operate or the things we change in our product change customer behavior in a way that generates more revenue in this case. And just to mention one tool I like to use about that is kind of any sort of product modeling in which you are saying hey, this is how the customers are behaving in the product and which levers I can trigger. The typical example is if you are thinking about the ecommerce, this is a funnel. But if you are thinking about the software as a service, can be more about the actions they are doing and how successful they are doing in the things they are going to your product to do. So all these kind of flows that will explain the behavior of your users.

Andrew Skotzko [00:36:39]:

Yeah, I like that and I want to say yes and build on that. One of the things that I found to be really helpful about this sort of we're speaking a lot in the language of trees here and sort of hierarchical way of thinking. One of the things that I find helpful about that is we can prioritize at each level relative to that level. So we can say, okay, at an impact metric level, at the business level, what's the most important? Is it revenue? It's almost always revenue, but okay, fine. Then revenue is a lagging indicator basically of everything. So inside that, what are the big levers in there? Is it conversion rate? Is it churn? Is it AOV? Is it whatever it is? Right. And then we just keep breaking it down and all along the way we can prioritize within each level and eventually we get to a place where we have something quite focused. One exercise.

Andrew Skotzko [00:37:23]:

It's funny you mentioned Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf. There's an exercise and we'll link to this in the show notes that I've done a lot. It's essentially like an impact mapping or a KPI tree starting at the impact metric level. I think the blog post is something like Execs care about revenue, how do we get them to care about outcomes? Something like that. I'll link to it in the show notes, but I'm curious if that's similar to what you mean.

Nacho Bassino [00:37:44]:

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I use KPI trees all the time. It's interesting because you are doing exactly that. So, for example, let's say I will take the ecommerce example because it's super simple. Say, hey, we want to hit revenue. So what we need to do is to have either more users converting better or having bigger kind of bigger items.

Andrew Skotzko [00:38:03]:

In their carts or more items traffic conversion rate, AOV. That's it exactly.

Nacho Bassino [00:38:07]:

Yeah. So what you can influence, let's say we want to influence the conversion rate. So how we can influence the conversion rate and then you have the sub conversions for the steps. So there are kind of this logic that you can identify things that are more kind of business driven. For example, you probably do not affect the marching or the price you are putting to the items in the ecommerce, but you for sure influence the funnel and how users convert. So this helps separate for product teams, helps separate what they can actually influence to get to this business level metric.

Andrew Skotzko [00:38:38]:

One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, just to make this very tactical and concrete and then we're going to start to shift gears here a little bit. I think I pulled this from your book, which by the way, if anyone's listening to this, you should absolutely go get Nacho's book. It's fantastic. It's become one of my go to strategy books. And I'm not just saying that because you're on the show. That was true before you came on the show, which is why I reached out to but the I think this is from your book, but you gave an example of some objectives, I think, in your book. And if I'm getting this wrong, please correct me, but it's this sort of idea of if we compared three ways of articulating an objective. One was automate the fulfillment of 99% of sales versus reduce the cost per transaction versus reduce 20% of information calls by increasing available data in the purchase flow.

Andrew Skotzko [00:39:26]:

And so I guess I have a two part question about that, which is a what do you want to highlight about the difference between those articulations? Let's just start there. What's important about those different versions?

Nacho Bassino [00:39:39]:

Yeah, no, it goes back to again, to the tree logic and then the KPIs. What we're trying to say, hey, if we want to kind of reduce cost, which is the high level objective, these are the three paths we can take. And when we're thinking about the strategy, going back to the typical, hey, you want to be focused about what you're doing, probably those are kind of big three different routes you can take and you need to assess which is the most interesting one to achieve this cost reduction. That is the impact that you're trying to achieve.

Andrew Skotzko [00:40:11]:

One of the questions I wanted to get your take on is I'm coming at this conversation. My current thinking is that we've talked a lot in our industry and our discipline about the need for empowered teams. And if we really boil down, like, what does that mean? And that's something that I've gone deep on elsewhere and have given talks on. For me, it's this fundamental trait of accountability for empowerment. Sorry, accountability for autonomy. That's like what I think empowerment means is the teams get bounded autonomy to invent the solutions. We're not going to be prescriptive about the tactical level solutions but in exchange, whatever they come up with, they are accountable that it drives the objectives that we need which is everything we've been talking about here. And so my question is, we've spent so much time as an industry harping on this and really hammering in this idea of, like, we shouldn't be prescriptive, and that's good at a certain point, but I feel like we might be getting on the edge of going too far with that as an industry.

Andrew Skotzko [00:41:04]:

And so my current take that's all of that build up is to say my current take is that the leadership level should be prescriptive in terms of strategy, and they should not be prescriptive in terms of how to deliver on the strategy other than guardrails. What's your take there? And I guess my question would be if I'm a leader trying to set my OKRs for the next quarter, where do I draw the line of prescriptiveness?

Nacho Bassino [00:41:28]:

That's a very difficult question trying to see the context of all product lists out there but essentially I agree with what you said. I mean your job as a leader is to make teams go in the right direction. So going back to these three topics that we mentioned so essentially, for example, let's take the easy one is a strategy. For a strategy we want to be a bit more top downish because we have bigger strategic context and we know what the company needs to place its bets. If you go down one level to the roadmap that's a bit more arguable because you will have or not even have you need input from the teams because you are breaking these things up. But at the end of the day, if you know this, if we play with the frame of delegation options from zero to seven, I think that the management. 300 and zero logic for roadmaps. You want to be more? Probably more in the middle.

Nacho Bassino [00:42:23]:

But then for OKRs, you want to be more flexible because that at the end of the day is what you are saying, is what teams will be accountable for. So they will be signing up for objectives that they will be responsible to take. Actually, I think I have this phrase in the book literally is if you are afraid that you are not setting the teams OKRs, and then the teams come back with OKRs that are completely different from what you are expected. You fail as a leader to give them proper strategic context so that's the way you can think about it. You want to bring more autonomy and you will be accountable. If you want to say that about giving them strategic context to make the.

Andrew Skotzko [00:43:03]:

Right decisions, that makes total sense. One of the things that I love that you said that because one of the reasons I harp on this so much with the leaders I work with is that one of the jobs of strategy is to enable high quality decisions in a highly autonomous way. Right. If you want to give people autonomy, what you need to do is build trust as a leader that if you're not around and you're not in the room or in the conversation, they're still going to make a decision you're pretty happy about. And that's kind of the job of strategy. Right? It's supposed to, at the end of the day, help people make good decisions that align with where we want this whole thing to go.

Nacho Bassino [00:43:38]:

Exactly. Yeah. I think going back to what we said almost at the very beginning, if you are saying, hey, this is a problem we need to solve, you shouldn't care that much about how they solve the problem as long as they solve the problem. Yeah.

Andrew Skotzko [00:43:50]:

So is it too prescriptive if we took an example of like, reduce 20% of information calls by increasing available data in the purchase flow? So the first part of that sentence reduced 20% of information calls? That seems great. I wonder, I worry, is that too prescriptive, the second part about like by doing X, if we do that, are we being too prescriptive or is that okay?

Nacho Bassino [00:44:11]:

I think again, it depends on the size of organization, the scope of the team, but making it more concrete, if you are looking at very different I'm trying to stick to the example, but it's a very narrow example. So that example, if you want to make it a bit bigger, may be complex. But if you're saying that, for example, all the problems you're having around information and then you have detected this is a problem, it's totally fine to be prescriptive in saying, hey, this is the problem we want to solve now. And in the example of the book, this is a one quarter problem. So it's going back to the OKRs. So this is a level in which you want to have this clarity on what you are trying to solve. But for example, if you're talking about the roadmap and you're seeing it a bit more longer term, probably your problem to solve will be more about, okay, we need to reduce incoming calls. So that's the way to see the closer you get to execution.

Nacho Bassino [00:45:07]:

In this case, it's next quarter you want to have this clarity on, okay, what are we betting on besides the it depends question? You want to have this level of alignment with the teams. And usually it's not that you as a leader are dictating these to the teams. You are having conversations with the team saying, hey, which opportunities we have? Which are the biggest one? Why would we be in this one, which evidence we have? So this selection usually is something that is combined by the end of the day, as a leader, you are accountable for that decision. So if, let's say that team moved this needle and they achieved they detect if this problem solved didn't hit the company impact expected you as a leader are accountable for that. So that's the big difference in which you can and should be prescriptive because you are the one who will be accountable for making the leap from this thing that the team solved to the impact we have for the customer or the company.

Andrew Skotzko [00:46:08]:

Exactly. So just to make sure I'm understanding this right, so I think what you're saying, it sounds like the more short term we are setting a goal for, the more prescriptive we want to be. So if we're talking about like one quarter's, OKRs, we might say something like reduce 20% of calls by doing XYZ, like by increasing the data and the purchase flow. But then if we zoom up a level to a higher level roadmap, not an OKR and let's say now we're talking over the next couple of quarters or maybe the year, it would be automate the fulfillment of 99% of sales. You could see that being like a high level outcome for the year. And then if we zoom way out to the strategy itself, it might be reduce the cost per transaction. Am I understanding that right?

Nacho Bassino [00:46:49]:

Yes, I would say two more things to that. The first one is again in the prescription. If you think about being prescriptive probably for these short term decisions, you are having much closer conversations with the team. So maybe I'm falling back to the strategy roadmaps. OKR, discussion. Maybe the strategy you are a bit more, say lonely making a decision when you are done at the OKRs level, even though it doesn't matter if the leader is making a decision or not because you should be having a lot of conversations. So yes, you maybe as a leader or you have the beach of power to say hey, we really need to go in this direction because of such and such reason from the company. But usually these are kind of agreed upon things that you discuss with the teams because they need your strategic context and you need their kind of very tactical level input.

Nacho Bassino [00:47:43]:

Yeah, so that's one thing. And the other thing sorry, I'm making this too long, but that's great. The other thing that's important is that you as a leader are accountable for if the team achieved their impact or their outcomes, that those outcomes translate into the impact you're expecting for the company. This is super critical because you are making a decision and you are accountable for the decision. So that's I think even more important when thinking about splitting accountability teams accountable for finding a solution that solves the problem that the leader made or decided to work on and the leader is accountable for the result of solving that problem in the overall strategy or the business impact.

Andrew Skotzko [00:48:25]:

Yeah, so it sounds like what you're saying is that what we get to hold a product team accountable for is like hey, we assigned you this outcome, this OKR? And that was a negotiation. We talked about this together and you signed up for this. And so they're accountable for delivering on that outcome. And what we as the leader are accountable for is the translation of the outcome we assign them to do to the business level impact. Right. So if we set them up to go solve this customer problem and it turns out that customer problem does not matter at all for what the business needs, that's on us.

Nacho Bassino [00:48:53]:

Yes. That's a big one.

Andrew Skotzko [00:48:56]:

Yeah, no, I love that because it's good. I think one of the things I spend a lot of time talking with folks about, especially leaders, is the clarity that often the clarity of who is responsible for what is more important than the content of what they are responsible for. So I often see a better more let me say that differently. I often see teams start to work better when they just get really explicit about, hey, you own this part, I own this part. This is what you're accountable for. This is what I'm accountable for. And even if that's not quite right and we change it, the fact that we've created this clarity, suddenly everything just starts working better and we can update it next quarter. It's fine.

Andrew Skotzko [00:49:30]:

All right, so I want to switch gears here and we're going to start to close out and I'd love to ask you about this is what I like to call the hard calls segment. So I want to take a couple of minutes, maybe five minutes or so, maybe ten minutes tops. And I just want to unpack, if you're willing, a hard decision you personally had to make as a product leader. And the goal here is to help the leaders who listen to this basically step into your shoes, right. And to sort of live and learn vicariously through your experience. Because one of my thoughts here is that really what we produce as product leaders, going back to that outcome to impact thing, we produce decisions. Right. And our decisions have impact.

Andrew Skotzko [00:50:05]:

And so I want to give people a chance to step into your shoes and learn from your experience, if you're willing. So I'm curious, do you have a hard call in mind what's a hard decision you had to make as a product leader that we could unpack?

Nacho Bassino [00:50:16]:

Yeah, I'm trying to think about how we can make this without making another 1 hour yeah. Podcast. But maybe I should just change the.

Andrew Skotzko [00:50:22]:

Podcast to just that just hard protocol.

Nacho Bassino [00:50:25]:

The one I have in mind, since we have been talking about strategy and how the leader influences the strategy and decisions you need to make, one of the hazards called is resource allocation. When you are deciding strategy at a, say, higher level, you need to make sure that how you are investing the team's efforts mapped to the things that you need to achieve. I'm just making Rambling here, but my hard call was. Essentially when I had to say, okay, one team that it was kind of previously growing and we were investing large amount of our efforts in. We will put that on hold, reduce it to a minimum, put it in maintenance mode and reallocate resources to other parts of the business who require more attention. It was these situations in which some of part of a strategic pivot I wouldn't call it a strategic pivot but was kind of reallocating to make more efforts on areas that we have stronger need.

Andrew Skotzko [00:51:19]:

Okay, so it sounds like the hard decision you had to end up making was essentially reallocating resources and people and maybe even sunsetting a product. But let's walk it back for a second here. So what was the context, what business was this, what was the situation? How did we get here?

Nacho Bassino [00:51:36]:

Trying to make the story as short as possible, but essentially this was my time in Mexico. So company best day. We had several business units, so we have B two C unit. It's travel market so it's like Eriems or Expedia.com, that sort of ecommerce for travel. We have a B two B business unit selling to others and we have a B, two B two C business unit which is mostly white labels for other companies that want to have a travel site and finally a DMC which is a destination management company receiving passengers and getting them to activities in destination. So how we got there is that we are thinking about how to make the company grow more profitable blah, blah, blah. So strategy work, let's put it away. And at the moment we were say investing similarly in all the areas we were working in and that was quite inefficient because we have different results in all of the areas of the business.

Nacho Bassino [00:52:39]:

And furthermore, we had businesses that were quite similar versus business that were quite different. So maybe going by making this more explicit, b two B was quite different but all of the others were serving passengers and they have some components in common that we were not leveraging. So the hard call was we had these B two B two C business units or white labels and this is a business that is having a good return investment. It's working well, we're investing kind of two or three teams, something like that and they are doing their job and they are improving the business year over year. So it's looking good. We have the B two C business which is in much more trouble. The key problem there is that the strategic context for this B two C business unit is much harder. They have kind of expedia literally one of the player of booking.com, one of the kind of big international players coming at us.

Nacho Bassino [00:53:32]:

So even though it's not as profitable if we don't do anything about it, eventually that business will not work anymore. So the hard call was about reducing resources from this b, two B, two C, business unit investing more on the other and to make it a bit more complex, it was an architectural decision in between because we were trying to make one platform that we can consume from the two business units because they were so similar.

Andrew Skotzko [00:53:58]:

Got it. So what made the decision? What was the hardest part? Like, what did this whole thing turn on?

Nacho Bassino [00:54:02]:

Yeah, so basically we have teams that we have, for example, product manager in there claiming for how good their resources were and how good the things that they had to work on were. They were essentially very profitable things and we were saying, hey, we will work on this that is less profitable from the get go was a bit of a complex thing to understand. And furthermore, we have someone managing the business unit who was kind of my key stakeholder and was kind of at the same level as I was, and I was basically pitching to them. Hey, I will basically kind of stop all the work I'm doing for you because we need to refocus on this one, who belongs to someone completely different. So you would, I mean, completely misaligned to his objectives and there was no way to make that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:54:49]:

Yeah, that sounds like a tough conversation.

Nacho Bassino [00:54:52]:

Yeah, it was. Of course I did have the support of the CEO. It was not me making a decision by my own. I was presenting the strategy and the strategy said, hey, if we need to revamp this other business unit with other source constraint because it's not that we can hire 20 more people to do it. The way we can do this is with this strategy. As I was saying before, the strategy had as an underneath saying, hey, we will build a platform that we can build a two business unit on top of it. So we have some economy of scale sort of thing going on, but for sure that slows things down and all the uncertainty and whatnot.

Andrew Skotzko [00:55:29]:

Right, so that was a sort of architectural angle you're talking about of like, hey, to pull this off, we got to build this platform to support both. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So I want to actually pivot and ask you one more strategy question before we close out here. So one of the things that I've been finding that lately, I've been talking to product leaders from a pretty wide range of companies scales, right. I've been talking everybody from early stage founders, CEO types to large mature company product leaders. One question that's been coming up is kind of at what point in a company's maturity or maybe a product maturity do you actually need product strategy? So I've had pretty wide ranging debates with folks recently about like, do you even need strategy before product market fit? And I'm curious what your take is on that.

Nacho Bassino [00:56:13]:

Yeah, good one. Yeah, so my take is that really what changes is the complexity of the strategy. So strategy will be good at different stages. Pre market fit is a different beast so they are kind of I will say that doesn't make much sense to have a strategy you are trying to find what problem you need to solve. So kind of putting up front what problems you will solve in x time doesn't make any sense. But when you have and actually in my podcast, I have one episode interviewing someone in a very early stage startup and basically saying, hey, my strategy was one line with three bullets of the problems that we need to solve and was one very particular customer was a six month strategy and so not two years of strategy. And that's it. And as you grow the complexity of the strategy grows and the really big problem is kind of cascading and having everyone aligned which is probably what my book is about.

Nacho Bassino [00:57:09]:

When you have this problem of hey, we have five plus teams that's where strategy really becomes super important and you get more complexity or you need more complexity to make it work.

Andrew Skotzko [00:57:20]:

So really you need the more complexity. When you start having about five teams.

Nacho Bassino [00:57:23]:

You said yeah, that's my kind of golden thing. Usually when you have three teams you are still kind of reporting to the CEO and making many calls in between these small rounds. When things start to scale you need to communicate more. Probably you have more stakeholders so there are a lot of things that need to be aligned.

Andrew Skotzko [00:57:40]:

What size headcount overall does that usually happen from what you've seen?

Nacho Bassino [00:57:44]:

That's a good question because it depends on the nature of the business.

Andrew Skotzko [00:57:46]:

Sure.

Nacho Bassino [00:57:46]:

So you will have software service that probably they can hit that scale at 50 headcount but maybe that's too low. But 100 headcounts 5200 but if you have companies like that they are call center intensive or a travel company for example travel Company has a lot of people who are dealing with the service providers so it depends on the nature of the business. Yeah, plus 100 but can easily be 200 to reach that level if this different business.

Andrew Skotzko [00:58:15]:

Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah. I'm glad we got a chance to talk about this because one of the things I agree that strategy as it's usually discussed in most of the business world, which is not startups, most of the business world is bigger companies that are already established. Strategy is more complex because the organization is more complex and the number of people and all of that. But yeah, for early stage companies and especially pre product market fit, I think strategy is a bit of a different beast. And so in that context I basically think strategy is essentially everything the company is doing at that point. At that scale the whole company is just your product strategy because you're just trying to be it's sort of the fundamental clarity about like well, what are we doing here and why and what does that even mean in terms of the customers and the problems? And so that's kind of how I think it's strategy at that early stage.

Nacho Bassino [00:59:02]:

I want to add one more thing that is that the problem space really changes. So when you are just kind of startup pre Market Fit or in Market Fit kind of trying to survive, you are focusing this problem and trying to really solve this problem. When you have the luxury and especially, let's say a bank, let's put one very extreme example. You can solve essentially many, many different problems. You are targeting many, many different user groups. So you have all this. The opportunity space becomes much bigger and requires much more learning. So it's not only about because we take it from the angle of the company size and the complexity that the company size brings, which is quite true, but also the complexity of the opportunity space also requires a lot of strategic decisions that in a small startup you have.

Andrew Skotzko [00:59:46]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because especially this is something I was chatting with a product leader at a company that's just going into kind of hypergrowth right now. And the thing I was trying to warn him about is like, hey, the strategy game is about to change significantly for you because you're about to go from one very, very focused thing of product, market, fit. And everything was about getting to that. And suddenly it's like you've reached a new plateau. And now you have instead of a target, you have a horizon of potential opportunities. And now you have a very different problem, which is like, now I have too many opportunities. Now what?

Nacho Bassino [01:00:15]:

I love the analogy. I mean it's like, hey, when you're a startup mode, you are climbing the mountain, you get on top of a mountain and what the hell from you? Yeah.

Andrew Skotzko [01:00:22]:

Oh wait, it's not a mountain. I just climbed up onto a step, a plateau, and now I have a whole new like oh what? There's a whole horizon?

Nacho Bassino [01:00:29]:

Exactly.

Andrew Skotzko [01:00:29]:

Yeah. You get out of the hole, basically you pop out the other side and you're like, oh wow, now we're not dead. So now what? Yeah, it's great. At what point do you think companies need to go to really having a proper, let's call it like product portfolio strategy?

Nacho Bassino [01:00:44]:

The problem is that to me, the portfolio strategy is kind of also what I call strategy. But essentially I will say an answer that is maybe fairly logical, which is when you have more than one product.

Andrew Skotzko [01:00:57]:

Right.

Nacho Bassino [01:00:57]:

So why I'm saying this is because to me, the artifacts, the process are quite similar. What's more complex is that if you have two product lines that are serving two different customer segments or whatever, you probably need to find the synergies between those two. And that's the added layer of complexity that maybe a portfolio strategy brings into play.

Andrew Skotzko [01:01:16]:

Yeah, that makes sense. That's where know it makes sense that you might actually have a CPO and two VPs for example, or each one running a product. Yeah, that makes total sense. Well Nacho, this has been fantastic. I want to go ahead and close out here and just say first off what a pleasure it is to have you here and I'm so glad we're getting this time together. For the listener. If you can't tell, already a huge fan of Nacho's work, both his book product direction and his podcast. We'll link to all this stuff in the show notes.

Andrew Skotzko [01:01:40]:

But Nacho, again, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. And just what would you like to leave the listener with and where can they find you online?

Nacho Bassino [01:01:46]:

So the easiest way to find me is LinkedIn or my site ProductDirection. Yeah, I publish a lot of content there, so feel free to follow me. And what I want to leave you with is maybe going back to reflecting what we said. Strategy doesn't need to be this scary thing that you feel will take all of your life and effort for a long time. You can start in a lean way, visualizing what you have and building from there and it will help you a lot.

Andrew Skotzko [01:02:14]:

Love it. Awesome. Well Nacho, again, thanks so much for being here and real pleasure.

Nacho Bassino [01:02:18]:

Really love it. Thank you.