How to Apply Product Thinking to Strategic Bets and Portfolio-Level Work

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/how-to-apply-product-thinking-to-strategic-bets-and-portfolio-level-work/transcript.md ## Published episode notes Did episode 4 get you thinking about how to flip your product topology pyramid and move more work towards empowered product teams and groups? I hope so... The reality is that in a multi-product organization, it’s almost impossible to manage ALL the work in these teams. Some work will still require collaboration across product groups as well as strategic consideration by product and even business leadership. You might be calling it your product portfolio. In this episode, we explore how to apply product thinking to this cross-product / organizational level work: * Managing work that spans multiple product groups or the entire organization * Applying product thinking to strategic initiatives * Examples of strategic bets * Balancing work across empowered teams, product groups, and organization-wide initiatives About the Navigating the Product Operating Model Landscape Audio Series What You’ll Learn: * Why Agile Feature Factories Fail, and What to Do About It * Assessing Your Current Operating Model, Are You Stuck in Projects? * Principles of Effective Product Operating Models * When does a Product Operating Model make sense? * Making It Real: Mapping Your Trail Toward Transformation Subscribe to the free audio mini course here: https://yuvalyeret.com/from-buzzwords-to-clarity-product-operating-model-audio-mini-course/ This is for you if you’re: * A Head of Product, Technology, Engineering, or Product Ops, trying to apply or scale product-led practices * Tired of theory or comprehensive perspective frameworks and hungry for real-world strategies that work * Too busy to sit down for training or even watch a video “masterclass” (Webinar in disguise…) and prefer to consume audio podcasts. * Not a fan of 6-figure, inspiring slide decks left behind by expensive consulting firms and product experts. Need help navigating the product transformation landscape? https://yuvalyeret.com/work-with-me/figure-out-your-product-operating-model-strategy/ Interested in more of my insights on the Product world? https://yuvalyeret.com/category/blog/product/ To hear more, visit yuvalyeret.substack.com ## Transcript Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/how-to-apply-product-thinking-to-strategic-bets-and-portfolio-level-work/ Source RSS GUID: substack:post:176412234 Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English ## Transcript [00:00:00] One other type of work that will happen in most organizations eventually as they scale is we might have worked at cuts across multiple product groups, what you might call a portfolio level. [00:00:11] Organizations often have synergies across the product line or initiative that require a collaboration between the product organization and other parts of the organization. [00:00:23] Those are the strategic bets of the organization. Even these we want to apply product thinking to and I would say, especially these we want to consider as bets. [00:00:35] We want to consider as hypothesis and discover if there's value and use some tracer bullets to see if we're heading in the right direction and develop them as product, even though in some cases those aren't really products. [00:00:53] Think of a move from on-prem to the cloud or adopting generative AI in the organization or even adopting products led growth. [00:01:06] We might need the premium. We might need some features in the product that encourage you to use it and to share it with others and make it viral within the organization. [00:01:17] But there are also other aspects to it like how do you change your sales motion to complement a PLG approach? It's not just a product thing, but it is an initiative bet that we want to develop like a product. [00:01:33] We want to try some things, see how it's working, double down or change direction. [00:01:38] And we want to make sure that we are working on the right amount of these bets and not try too many of them at the same time. [00:01:46] As a healthy product organization, we still would have work that cuts across the entire organization. [00:01:54] We won't be able to move all of the work into discrete and powered product teams, especially if we're an organization with some history in our product and complexity in our product. [00:02:07] And not everything is clean, cut, greenfield anymore. [00:02:11] And whether we're a scale up that has more and more complexity as we're adding product lines and maybe doing M&As or partnerships or supporting different customer niches at this point as part of our growth and whether we're a more traditional technology organization that supports a technology enabled product [00:02:32] or whether we're an enterprise product company. [00:02:35] All of these environments have product complexity that leads to the reality where we would have some balance between empowered product teams and powered product groups and some product oriented initiatives that cut across the organization. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.