How to execute effectively?

As a product manager, a you're responsible for getting sh*t done. You're responsible for effective execution of the product.

Effective execution means successful delivery of outcomes. A delivery can be considered successful when the product is delivered within the stipulated time and cost.

This requires clarity, alignment, reflection, review and revision.

In this article, I've documented the causes of failure that I personally ran into when leading execution.

Impatience — the primary cause of failing strategies

NOTE: There's a lot to explain about impatience itself, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

Ambitious people have certain expectations of themselves. The problem is that they often attach themselves to their version of "how things should be" when they set a goal. Reality doesn't care about what you think, reality is what it is.

Attachment to goals leads to impatience. This impatience leads to blind execution a.k.a. the "headless chicken syndrome".

For details on the "headless chicken syndrome", refer the following:

It's like a person who has never been in the water, now in a shipwreck, trying to swim by throwing around their limbs hoping that they don't drown.

Hope — for all the good it brings — is a terrible thing to rely on when you have deadlines to meet.

Even when it comes to relatively more patient people, when there's a deadline to meet, even they become prone to this syndrome.

It is a terrible idea to plan and strategize in urgency, no matter how good you are at thinking on your feet, you'll always have a better strategy if you plan with patience.

Plans and strategies created with impatience are always detached from reality. A plan or strategy can only ever be effective when all moving pieces, mapped with reality, are taken into account.

How execute effectively?

Clarity — as opposed to lack of clarity

Clarity on the outcomes and goals of your project is the zeroth step when it comes to execution. You should always have clearly documented outcomes, goals, sub-goals and tasks before you even think about talking to the team about the roadmap for execution. "Winging it" is never a good idea.

Take going on a road trip for example. If you don't know where you want to go, chances are that you won't end up in a place that you want to be.

Clearly defining your goals, i.e. the place where you want to be in the future, gives you a definite target to work towards.

Alignment — as opposed to lack of alignment

It is your job to align the team towards a common vision to work towards. This is where the clearly defined outcomes, goals and tasks come in handy.

When you have clarity on what you want to achieve, half your job is already done, however, not explaining your thought process on how you arrived at the given strategy for execution is a trap you might fall into.

When the team doesn't know why things are defined to be the way they are, it often leads to misalignment, where the team members act like zombies to follow the exact instructions provided by the PM which ends up demanding a lot of involvement from the PM and might even lead to unintended end results, in a bad way.

When the team understands the "why" and is aligned with it, you will be surprised with the results that they can achieve.

When the team is aligned with the vision, you'll witness magical results.

Reflection, review and revision

Once you have a strategy and a roadmap ready, it's time to execute.

When executing, it is easy to lose track of the big picture and mindlessly ship out whatever was documented in the roadmap. Hence, it is important to remember that the reality is constantly changing, and what was true yesterday, may not be true today.

This is where planned reflection comes into play. As a PM, it is your job to reflect on your strategy for execution of the product and map it to the current reality from time to time.

A well thought out strategy rarely ever needs to change during execution and hence serves as a guideline to regress back to, if the current path seems to be diverging from the goal.

However, this is not the same for the roadmap, because the timelines often need to be changed due to iterative improvements and feature additions to the product while executing due to the constantly changing reality.

To ensure effective execution it is important to plan reflection and review in advance to revise the execution plan when needed.

Conclusion

A step-by-step guide on effective execution

1. Don't plan under the pressure of a deadline - even if a deadline does exist, forget about it while defining the strategy and roadmap.
   
   
2. Define clear goals with easily measurable outcomes for everyone in the team - make sure to define even the smallest of tasks as to-dos - to the extent that virtually no thinking is required for execution.
   
   
3. Once you are sure that you have documented all goals, sub-goals and tasks properly, divide responsibility for outcomes between team members by involving them in the process of division of tasks.
   
   
4. Once every outcome has a responsible person associated with it, arrive at the critical constraints and dependencies with the team.
   
   
5. Only when you've done all the above, should you move to creating a strategy for execution, which, again, should involve your team's consensus.
   
   NOTE: Strategy isn't a roadmap. A well-thought out strategy rarely changes once execution starts - it serves as the guideline to regress back to when the roadmap and plan needs to be reviewed.
   
   
6. Once everything is done, assign timelines to your goals and tasks with the help of your team to create a roadmap.
   
   
7. Make sure to plan reflection and review in advance, because it's easy to lose track of the big picture while involved in execution.
   
   

EDIT (April 25, 2020): Prastut pointed out in a private conversation between me and him that clarity is not a goal that can be achieved in a fixed time, it is a process. I agree with him. However, I will need to spend more time to arrive at a clear line of thought to communicate this while still retaining the point that I was trying to make under the "Clarity — as opposed to lack of clarity" section of this article. Hence, I just wanted to communicate this lens of looking at the same.