In the ever-evolving world of product management, we often find ourselves trying to balance. It’s a dance between thinking big and working small. And in this intricate dance, there’s a space that is often overlooked. It’s the ‘messy middle’. A place where big strategic thoughts meet the minutiae of execution. But what is this ‘messy middle’? And, more importantly, how do we navigate it?
The Messy Middle
Let’s define the ‘messy middle’. It sits between our grand, long-term business strategies that span years and our short-term, agile experiments that take weeks. It’s an ambiguous space of a few quarters. The place where we wrestle with questions of alignment and real-world execution. It’s a place where teams often lose sight of the larger strategic vision. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Remember the old product management models? They were like factories. They were full of features, operating on time-based goals, and disconnected from each other. In those models, teams shipped products, but significant results were often elusive. The ‘messy middle’ was mired in confusion, conflicting goals, and siloed efforts. We needed change. We needed to become agile.
Agility brought us the promise of a better way. But as we started to work small, thinking in two-week sprints, we bumped into a new problem. Our quarters began to feel like big sprints. The ‘messy middle’ got even messier.
How To Clean Up the Mess
So, how do we clean up the mess? How do we bridge the gap between strategy and execution?
John Cutler, a renowned product coach, offers a novel perspective.
He draws an interesting analogy:
Imagine growing a plant. What do you need?
Light, temperature, water. These elements don’t change.
They are your constants. Your North Star. Your big strategic picture.
Just as you water the plant daily, the small, agile tasks are your day-to-day execution. You’re still focused on your North Star: the growth of the plant. The hacks, the tools, and the techniques may change, but they are all in service to your North Star. And within this analogy lies our approach to navigating the ‘messy middle’.
To bridge the gap, Cutler recommends four key things:
- A compelling strategy – the sunlight guiding your growth.
- A persistent model – your North Star.
- Opportunity-focused bets – the daily watering and care.
- And the freedom to work small – the ability to adapt and optimize for growth.
Persistent vs. Work Models
If we delve into the heart of a persistent model, we uncover a dynamic ecosystem of ideas, concepts, and beliefs.
John writes that a persistent model isn’t tied to a specific time frame, unlike a work or goal-related model. It stays the same every quarter. It doesn’t pivot with every experiment. It persists for as long as the strategy holds, often spanning years. It captures our assumptions, hypotheses, and beliefs about how value is created and sustained in our product. It’s a blueprint for growth.
Take, for example, Amplitude’s North Star metric.
Weekly Learning Users that consume & share more than three charts
This metric doesn’t change with the seasons. It remains steady over time. There’s no implied “work” in it. It stands as a testament to the enduring nature of a persistent model.
In contrast, work-related models like OKRs focus on specific goals for a designated period, usually a quarter. The team strives to achieve these goals by the end of that time frame. This brings a dynamic, active element into our strategy. It’s the engine that drives us forward, pushing us to test, learn, adapt, and grow.
These two types of models might seem at odds, but they are complementary. They operate on different scales, but they both guide our efforts towards creating value and driving growth.
Without persistent models, teams can easily fall into a tail-chasing cycle. With every new quarter, they must start from scratch, coming up with new OKRs, goals, and directions. This can turn the OKR-setting process into a “big deal”, a high-stakes, high-pressure situation. It leads to burnout, confusion, and a loss of strategic coherence.
But with a robust, well-articulated persistent model, setting goals is more straightforward & intuitive. Teams have a clear direction and a clear context. They know where they’re going and why. They understand the bigger picture.
Shifting to a mindset that embraces persistent models is a fundamental transformation. It’s about moving away from siloed, disjointed efforts towards a unified, synergistic approach. It’s about evolving from isolated feature factories to a cohesive, sustainable growth model.
This transformation isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. It’s about thinking big but working small. It’s about aligning every task, every experiment, and every effort with the strategy. It’s about ensuring each puzzle piece fits perfectly into the big picture.
Balancing the use of both persistent and work-related models is a crucial skill in product management. It’s the key to navigating the ‘messy middle’, bridging the gap between strategy and execution. It’s where we find the proper harmony of thinking big and working small.
This is a process that takes time. It requires patience, perseverance, and much learning. But the results are worth it. As we shed light on the ‘messy middle’, we begin to see alignment. We start to see how our daily tasks contribute to our strategic vision. We see how our product evolves and grows, much like the plant in our analogy.
Several tools have popped up to ease you into this process:
- Amplitude provides the tooling to collect and reflect on the data.
- At Amplitude, John has developed a North Star Metric framework anyone can develop.
- DoubleLoop is a tool that helps connect all the different data sets into a coherent model.
- And Vistaly helps frame your models and bets together in a connected decision tree.
Product management is an art. And like any art, it requires us to embrace the big picture and the minute details.
The ‘messy middle’ is where these two converge. So let’s not fear it but navigate it with a clear strategy, a persistent model, and a focus on growth. Let’s embrace the ‘messy middle’.
In this space, we find the true essence of product management: the harmony of thinking big and working small.
