Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 12. Creating a Good Strategic Framework

Back at Marquetly, the CEO was making great progress on getting his product team set. He went out and hired an excellent chief product officer (CPO) named Jen. Jen had come from another e-learning company focused on training developers. It had scaled its platform successfully and had a great exit with a profitable IPO.

I was excited for Jen to join the team. She had led efforts around creating the strategy at her last company, and she brought all that knowledge to this space. In her first week, she began picking up on the same problems I saw.

“I went around to all the product managers in the organization and asked them why they were working on certain things. None of them could answer me,” she said. “No goals, no direction. They are just reactively building requests from customers.”

She kept asking. “Then I went to my peers in the leadership team and asked them what was the most important thing we could do as a company,” continued Jen. “They all gave me different answers. It’s pretty clear we’re not aligned on what our strategy is or what we want to become as a company.”

Boom. She hit the nail on the head—​and after only a week. Marquetly was stuck in reactive mode. It prioritized big projects based on customer requests or contracts. It wasn’t thinking strategically about how to grow the product.

Luckily, the leadership team of Marquetly had bought in on getting on the same page so that they could be a more powerful organization. ...