As a product director or product manager, one of your most leveraged decisions -besides hiring-, is making allocation decisions around the product. These are critical to success. What do I mean by this?

At the highest level, one chooses themes to invest behind. There’s what I would call meta-themes, such as growth, engagement, churn, and revenue. These are your KPIs often and you tend to drive your product to maximize these; be it growth, engagement, etc.

But underneath these meta-themes / KPIs are proper themes which you probably used to organise your roadmap. Themes like:

• ease of use,
• security,
• privacy,
• fast / speed,
• pricing,
• richer feature set,
• mobile first,
• social / collaboration,
• open source,
• cloud-based, etc.

Your product strategy often revolves around winning with a user segment. Yo can achieve that by being stronger in a set of themes where your competitors are weaker.

Strategic Leadership in Product Allocation decisions

If you work in a larger organization, these allocation decisions tend to get made at a VP or director level. So if you’re a product manager reporting up to a VP, by the time you have to craft the roadmap, you already know that product is expected to win by being strong in say ease of use and cheaper pricing. Your job as a PM is to execute on these themes / product strategy.

If you’re at VP or director, it’s your job to figure out a product strategy and get it approved by senior leadership. In a sense, your VP/Director job is to make those allocation decisions and supervise them as roadmaps get put into shape. Then, launches happen.

Let me see if I can illustrate a bit with examples. We’re currently seeing a large migration in enterprise to the cloud. So if you’re competing in a particular enterprise application market, your themes could be cloud native, security, and cheap. You’re aiming to win the “price-sensitive” users, who need a cloud native solution. You might be banking that either this is a segment that will grow and get bigger, or that it’s a beachhead from which you can expand your offering. So the strategy is clear; you are not necessarily pursuing a richer feature set than competitors, Instead, you’ll be searching for lower costs and ease of use on cloud.

The allocation decision then is

• protect other themes from intruding on this strategy,
• how much of your engineering capacity do you allocate to each of these themes.

Should it be 33%, 33%, 33% to each of your preferred themes? Should you invest say 50% to cloud native, 20% security, and 30% cost savings (making it more cost efficient)?

I would get rough numbers on your allocation and then make choices based on the potential features / investments you can make. Don’t over process this one. It doesn’t make sense to be too regimented on these numbers but focus on the holistic release, what would be flagship features for this release, what can you package sooner, etc. Drive your user value.

You might find that there’s great security features worth pursuing right now, and not much you can drive costs down. So you might invest a bit more in this release on security than on cost savings. That’s ok. You might compensate this in another release. The goal is not to paint yourself into a corner but rather to put in a process that reminds you of what matters to customers / users and drive your product in that direction.

What I’m trying to give you with a product allocation framework is:

• A framework to help you roadmap (and prevent distraction themes)
• A framework to help you socialize your path with your leaders and get useful feedback.
• A framework to scaffold the tough conversations with other leaders forcing a choice (greater investment in x means lower investment in y)
• If you’re in a startup as VP product, a framework to help your board make useful decisions on where you should be focusing

If you like posts about this topic (product leadership and allocation), please comment or like this, so I know what to focus on in these posts.