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Have you gone before an executive team to request funding and been turned down? Maybe the problem had to do with how you communicated your product strategy and vision.
A top shareholder and equity administration provider had a solid product strategy in place regarding their core transfer agency business. The group’s senior vice president (SVP), however, wanted his product managers (PMs) to perform strategic reviews of key product offerings—and then present the findings and recommendations to the executive team.
“We wanted to know,” says the SVP, “if we should be in the businesses we were in and whether or not we should continue to invest in them.”
The PM”s knew what needed to be done, but hit a major roadblock: They didn’t know how to achieve the desired result—a brief, yet effective, fact-based presentation of their product strategy.
The first PM to go to bat delivered the initial draft of his presentation to the SVP. Said his boss, “The presentation
included dozens of slides, with a mix of factual and anecdotal data. It didn’t offer a clear, concise view of the product, it didn’t say where we wanted to go with it, nor was it clear how we were going to get there. I knew the executive team would tune out after five minutes.”
The SVP recognized that his product managers needed help—not only with developing their presentations, but also with communicating a finely honed product strategy and vision for their businesses.
The fix? Obviously more than simply rearranging a slide deck. With one-on-one coaching, the first PM and his team learned how to question old assumptions and create a new context for their story—one that was tied to hard data and bottom-lined objectives.
The result? A PM who could demonstrate the value of his business to the exec team in less than 15 minutes—including asking for and receiving a significant incremental funding request.
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