Tool #21

Products Strategies often fail.
At Tolpagorni, we've made it our business to develop product strategies, advising companies how best to navigate the road to success. Over the years, we've created and driven product strategy creation throughout several diverse industries – and in that time, we've seen it all. We've seen the roadmap with unlimited resources. The suicidal sales-driven strategy. The PowerPoint Dream strategy. The passive run-me-over strategy. And many, many more.

With every new strategy we see, however, the more we ask ourselves the same questions. Why is it so hard to create a great product strategy? What is the thinking behind the creation? And, most importantly, how do we create a strategy that we can effectively execute upon? After years of experience devising hundreds of strategies for hundreds of businesses, we've set about answering those questions. And we approach it from a time and speed perspective.

An alternative perspective SPEED LAYERS. We believe there is a place for a new way of looking at strategy, products, and organizations. We call it Speed Layers. It is a concept for creating a plan, managing products and organizations.

What would happen if we were to look at the strategy, product, and organization from a speed perspective? It changes everything. We can quickly identify that there are layers in our work where different speeds are needed. We handle issues like bugs, sales opportunities, new technology, a new market entry, recruiting new personal, setting up a new partnership, etc. These issues can be placed in different Speed Layers.

Each Speed Layer shall receive its unique priorities, ways of working, and decision-making process. We want to have speed in executing sales activities and bug fixing, and a long term thinking for implementing a new technology platform. Different layers need different financial evaluation models and decision making. But they are similar within one Speed layer. By defining Speed Layers in our product, we become faster by allowing us to be slow!

Speed Layers establish an outcome-driven organization and proper ways of working. It will minimize waste in the organization and increase your value delivery.

To effectively manage the diverse tasks of product management, Adrienne Tan at  Brainmates, often advise product people to utilise a framework known as "Zoom Levels." (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7122051754514419712/)  These Zoom Levels provide a structured approach to understanding where one should operate within the organisation. The zoom layer approach connects very nicely with the SpeedLayer concept. In fact, the zoom layer approach will help you define the speedlayers. (Read more on  ZoomLayers (https://www.theydo.com/guides/the-3-zoom-levels-of-a-journey-framework).

The Speed Layer Methodology has been implemented in some of the world's most successful tech companies in Europe, Asia, and the US. Speed Layer thinking is inspired by Agile Sprints, Kanban Pulse thinking, McKinsey's "Two Speed IT"-concept, and Mozart.

Attached is a: Summary of the tool, White Paper on the Speed Layers, A paper on how to leverage Agile Speed, The need for visionary long term thinking in product management. 
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