Spotting the duck-rabbit: A stakeholder-led strategy model
As a product manager, sometimes it feels like our stakeholders see the world fundamentally differently than we do. This divergence of perspective can lead to friction, mismatched expectations, and, in extreme cases, behaviours that can appear mutually sabotaging. In truth, stakeholders often do have a different worldview, and for good reason. Recognising this can be the first step in finding a better way of collaborating and developing newfound customer empathy. Let’s dive in.
Reversible figures
Meet the duck-rabbit, a classic example of how all is not as it seems. Viewers of this image may first perceive either a left-facing duck or a right-facing rabbit; the drawing has been carefully constructed to be open enough that either interpretation is equally valid.
How quickly one can switch perspective between a leftward-facing duck and a rightward-facing rabbit is said to correlate with creative ability. However, whether or not one regards engagement with optical illusions as indicative of cognitive dexterity, this image serves as a powerful demonstration of irreconcilable ambiguity. A concept (such as an idea, song, or work of art) can have multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations — and each can be equally valid.
What, then, are we to do with this lesson? And what does it have to do with strategy?
Schools of strategic thought
It’s well-established that the notion of strategy has its roots in military decision-making. The goal of strategy is to use the resources and abilities at one’s disposal to achieve one’s objectives. The most successful strategy is one in which the agent achieves an outcome within their means that best meets their needs.
However, this high-level definition is sufficiently vague that it allows for similar cognitive ambiguity to our inscrutable friend above. This fluidity in meaning has given rise to competing conceptual models, which we will explore next.
Sticking to one’s guns
In 1980, Michael Porter released Competitive Strategy, a profoundly influential book introducing his generic strategies, the concept of the ‘value chain’, and his famous ‘five forces’ model. This philosophy of corporate strategy is based on the design school model of traditional planning, an attempt to systematise strategic thought.
In this model, ‘strategies should appear fully formulated before they are implemented’ — in other words, it permits no distinction between intended and realised strategy. A company, organisation, or product team employing this model does precisely what it set out to do. No recognition is made of the impact of events that take place during the execution of this strategy.
A common use of this is to answer the big questions — why does this organisation exist? What is it meant to achieve? And what markets does it therefore compete in? These things are hard to change, and the answers to these questions tell you who your customers are (and who they aren’t).
Rolling with the punches
By contrast, Henry Mintzberg — another titan of business thought—coined the term emergent strategy to describe a process whereby what gets realised is a combination of what was originally planned, coupled with decisions that could only be made during the execution of that strategy.
Rather than simple chaos, the term “emergent strategy” seeks to formally recognise the role of opportunities, threats, and other pivots while delivering a plan that was drawn up before work commenced. This strategy is recognised as part of the Agile Manifesto principles:
Responding to change over following a plan.
This strategy aims to maximise results by remaining flexible — avoiding negative events and exploiting positive ones. However, by its nature, it doesn’t tell you exactly what you’ll get or when.
‘Consult custom oversight’
Now that we have two widely accepted yet contradictory models of strategy, we have to consider what happens when they are both applied in the same organisation.
In truth, this happens more often than we realise — sometimes two parties can use the same language but have different intended meanings. The title of this section, which is made up of contronyms, demonstrates this: consult means both to give advice and to receive it; custom means both standard and unique; and oversight means both supervision and a failure of it. What we mean may not always align with what our audience perceives us to have said.
Organisations are made up of people, who all come with their own learned behaviours and ways of seeing the world. However, it could further be argued that differing views of strategy actually correlate to different stakeholder groups. As a result, it seems likely that one’s strategic viewpoint is influenced directly by the wider system within which they work — their goals, incentives, and risks.
In exploring these differences, it is worth considering how different contexts give rise to differing views — and, hence, expectations — around strategic planning. Those working to fixed constants, such as time, cost, or scope, may expect others to share their approach. Conversely, those for whom details are fluid, so long as the value is maximised, may apply a different logic when prioritising or making commitments.
Let’s take a look at several stakeholder groups and examine how they may engage with strategy and what might influence this.
Marketing teams
The goal of marketing is to shout from the rooftops about the amazing value proposition that an organisation’s various goods and services represent. This includes sharing what will come in the next few months or even later that year. While helping to build a brand with an innovative and dynamic presence, this also drives the awareness and interest stages in the marketing funnel, which can lead to eventual sales or upsell opportunities.Core to this is the ability to confidently state what things are coming and when they can be expected. The risk is obviously that advertised items may not materialise in the way or at the time they were originally promised. However, interestingly, this risk is typically borne by those downstream of the marketing process, such as the sales, client engagement, onboarding, and product teams.
Drivers of deliberate strategy
Publishing roadmaps
Advertising upcoming features
Sharing product trajectory at roadshows
Drivers of emergent strategy
Sudden market trends
Since the objective is to signpost product or service features well in advance, this team gravitates towards a deliberate strategy — one in which what is realised is the same as what was originally planned. To people working in such a role, the world can look like one in which we are most successful when we do exactly what we said we were going to, regardless of what has been learned in the meantime.
Sales teams
Sales is a complex activity that picks up where marketing leaves off — the awareness, interest, and demand of a sales prospect — and converts this into a sale, turning the prospect into a customer. This involves explaining the various merits of the product or service and how it solves the customer’s problems at a price worth paying.
For a SaaS product, sales cycles may be sufficiently long enough that it’s possible for some of the features a customer requires not to exist at the start of the sales conversation. This is not necessarily a problem — so long as there is reasonable confidence that these features can be delivered before the conclusion of the sales cycle, or at the very least, before the customer comes to use the product.
Drivers of deliberate strategy
Customer procurement requirements
Market entry requirements
“Sales blocker” lists
Drivers of emergent strategy
Sudden opportunities
This is where the risk of promised features is most evident since entire deals can become mired in contingent feature delivery, also known as “sales blocker lists.” Such a situation is where deliberate strategy overpowers emergent strategy — the challenge being how to minimise the value lost while pivoting to deliver demanded features instead of discovered ones. This is the battleground between being sales-led and product-led, a subject worthy of its own blog post.
Product teams
The world of a product manager is strikingly both similar to and different from those of sales and marketing. In each case, deeply understanding the customer base is necessary. In each case, the most valuable opportunities come from business problems and resulting customer pain points. However, while the focus of sales and marketing is financial — equating to business value — the focus of product management is providing customer value in a way that aligns with business interests. It is the obsession with customer problems that fill a product backlog, and craven attention to solving them that shapes a roadmap.
Popular discovery and delivery approaches, such as the double diamond technique, underscore the iterative and divergent nature of problem and solution finding. By their nature, these processes are hard to timebox, and the resultant findings may transform the feature originally conceived when the problem was first reported (which almost always takes the form of a preferred solution).
Drivers of deliberate strategy
Dependency management
Stakeholder demands
“Sales blocker” lists
Drivers of emergent strategy
Assumption testing
Experiments
Unexpected complexity
“Sales blocker” lists
As a result, product teams can’t help but be drawn to emergent strategy, with each new finding having the potential to transform previous understanding. Perhaps the customer value trapped behind this problem is larger than originally believed, or maybe the complexity turns out to be high enough that, while solvable, other problems offer greater returns. This openness to re-examining previously held beliefs in the face of new evidence not only sways product teams towards emergent strategy; it fundamentally challenges any deliberate strategy since the end result can’t be predicted at the outset.
Interested in learning about the advantages of transitioning from technology-driven to product-driven development? Check out this article for more details.
Engineering teams
The engineering process begins with an agreed set of requirements and culminates in the release of a software product or feature that solves them adequately and in a usable manner. While this implies a linear process from requirements → feature, in actuality, this is often an iterative process that involves returning to some requirements to elaborate or even invalidate them as unfeasible or too costly.
This iterative flow leads to an inability to predict exactly what will be delivered and when. All previous steps in the value delivery journey (marketing, sales, product management) involve plans, while the engineering team is responsible for execution. It is unsurprising, therefore, that this team most closely embodies emergent strategy. The very concept of estimation is frustrated by a process whereby some of the knowledge about what needs to be delivered is not available until after delivery has already commenced.
Drivers of deliberate strategy
Technical debt
Platform/dependency management
Drivers of emergent strategy
New technologies
Unexpected complexity
Support cases/bugs
Deprecation
Engineers respond to this lack of predictability by remaining adaptable — some problems can be solved by amending the scope or certain requirements, while others will simply take longer than anticipated. The process of delivering software becomes even more complex towards the end when user trials or beta testing commence. These can often surface new requirements not previously considered. It is up to engineers and product managers, working together, to determine which requests are vital to deliver the committed value and which represent unnecessary iterations that can wait until a subsequent release. However, even this action undermines predictability and naturally promotes emergent strategy.
Strategies for reconciling strategy
In exploring the challenges faced by different teams in a typical software product organisation, the two schools of strategic thought interact in several ways.
Deliberate to emergent
The journey from marketing to delivery starts following a deliberate strategy (product roadmaps projected into the coming 3 – 12 months) but ends up being managed via emergent strategy once “the rubber hits the road.” As commitments become actions, the weight of the unexpected forces an adaptive approach that simply resists up-front planning. The only dynamics that can overpower this are high-consequence design requirements, such as safety tolerances or matters of compliance, which are non-negotiable. Everything flexes as the expected delivery date draws closer.
Emergent to deliberate
Since work is constantly being planned and marketed, it is commonly the case that as current work is being executed, future work has already been planned. This means that there are knock-on effects from delayed delivery that impact not only the current feature but also the subsequently planned ones. This implies that a deliberate strategy may need to be emergently revised to account for a new reality where work cannot commence until a month or a quarter later than originally planned. Likewise, emergent strategic decisions made during delivery today can become a source of deliberate decision-making tomorrow. For example, technical debt accepted during the delivery of one feature must be consciously accounted for during future work and will usually narrow the solution space.
Avoiding a clash in strategies
There are a few tactics that may be employed to help prevent the negative consequences of competing strategies:
High-integrity commitments raise the stakes for deliberate strategies. Avoid fixing deliveries to specific dates where possible, focusing instead on quarterly goals or simply using a now/next/later approach. This aligns all teams around a plan that minimises the inevitable friction as emergent decisions impact deliberate goals.
When a high integrity commitment is unavoidable, derisk this by splitting the double diamond approach in two — only once discovery has been completed should a delivery commitment be attempted.
Instead of managing time, manage scope by committing to outcomes rather than deliverables. This reserves space for product managers and engineers to be creative about what is released on the due date. Future iterations can always increase the value delivered.
Conclusion
The duck-rabbit is a useful depiction of irreducible complexity. It is impossible to state which animal is pictured, as either interpretation is equally true. Understanding this, and the reasons why we make the decisions we do, can help us empathise with other stakeholders who may think and act differently.
Our priorities and worldview are a function of how our effectiveness is measured and what we need to be successful. Different conditions lead to different approaches across teams. Only by understanding what leads to better outcomes for a colleague — predictability or elbow room — can we truly empathise with their needs, leading to more effective and empathetic collaboration.
Can you see the duck-rabbit?
