The Next Steps toward real outcomes.
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What superpower are you looking to flex?
Decide which problem set below most resonates with you. Then, click the super bright yellow button in the upper right and be sure to let us know! We’ll reply quickly and work through your specific hurdles together.
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Tailored approach and execution together.
We’ll work with you to execute the plan we develop together. Don’t worry, we can handle the heavy lifting if your bandwidth if filled.
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Measure & Evaluate the impact.
It rings hollow for us to do the work, but not measure the true impact we’ve made together. This could mean making some tweaks to plan or a celebration of achievement. The biggest thing is to know your time and dollars haven’t been wasted.
Decision-making culture.
There’s many ways this cultural superpower gets derailed. Most often, it exposes itself through bottlenecks and lingering timelines. If your chief executive or leader’s name is brought up more than once in a meeting, more than likely this is an issue to address for your organization.
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The outcomes you or your board are aiming for don’t wait for your organization to catch-up. We’d be curious to further understand the structure and behavioral patterns that have reinforced this over time.
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If the top of the top doesn’t have specific clarity on what they want to accomplish over a specific amount of time, how would anyone else? Even more challenging, what is leadership willing to not pursue?Don’t expect those gaps to be filled by lesser empowered humans.
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Happening the most frequent of all the items here, are you asking your organization to do things that you aren’t doing? Most often, these are blindspots that leadership has and could be weeded out in healthy environments we’re retribution isn’t a fear. However, humans are fearful by nature, so those environments are few and far between.
Audience Empathy
Traditionally, this has been thrown around with buzz phrases like “Know Your Audience” or “Human-centered design”. Neither are bad concepts, but have too often been referred to without context or specific criteria. Empathy represents an intuitive connection your organization can only build through unending curiosity and connections directly with them.
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We’ve seen it all to often that these interactions are often events, instead of conversations. If you’re not interacting with at least a handful of your audience each week, there’s no way this is happening in your organization.
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Human’s are intuitively astute and don’t need to understand full contexts to be able to give valuable feedback. Often, organizations get hesitant to share their work with their audience before it’s complete. Unfortunately, this simply causes a ton of rework or confusing experiences for your audience. Maybe without you realizing it.
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This one often is nearly completely overlooked by organizations. Clearly commitments in general are trust-building, but here we’re referring to being the most reliable advocate for your audience ongoing. Most pain points arise because audiences have become apathetic due to your lack of follow-through from previous interactions - in person or through content. This is dangerous ground as your audience becomes silent and your organization has no indication otherwise.
Real-time Coaching
Maybe you know something isn’t working as well as it should and just need some just-in-time coaching, suggestions or feedback. We’ll work with to integrate with your organization, parts of your organization or in a direct one—on-one way. We’ll observe first and then share our synthesis with you. Then, we’ll determine a path forward together.
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Recent history has shown that over and over again, true differentiating ideas often come from ‘accidents’ or feedback from folks in your organization who don’t typically have a seat at the table. How you’re shaped determines how you operate. How you operate is an early indicator of your success.
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It’s amazing to us that strategy stack development isn’t a topic that gets more attention. In short, it’s how problem sets your organization are trying to solve are broken down, approached and measured - from mission statement thru execution and evalution.
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Fear (F), Uncertainty (U) and Doubt (D) are the largest business risks any organization can encounter. The goal here is to identify ways these are being introduced so they can be mitigated. Most often, this distills down to unclear expectations or rushed communications.
Fractional Leadership
Maybe your biggest concern right now isn’t the sharpness of your narrative, but literal bandwidth. Or maybe you’d like someone to protect your newly focused narrative as it cascades through your organization. Or maybe it’s both. No matter - we can provide our services as an integrated member of your organization for the role you need.
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Having someone in your organization who consistently maintains, fosters and protects the two-way communications is essential. Tempting to bypass, but trust us, the best way to speed up is to slow down.
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The best founders realize immediately that they can’t reach their objectives by owning both strategy and operations. If you have a winning idea, but struggle with the product-market fit or how to launch it, having a fractional leader will make all the difference in the world.
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If you’ve gotten started, made headway in the industry but have seemingly hit a ceiling, our team can help. Scaling isn’t always the best thing and more than that, the timing of scaling is an inflection point. It’s worth the fractional time to have a consistent set of eyes and ears on this as you run your normal day-to-day.
"You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the next step."
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
FAQs
This sounds amazing, but what will it cost me?
The specific costs are difficult to fully predict looking across time and energy as each plan will be tailored to your organization. However, our services are complimentary for a limited time as we’re looking to build out our clientele
What industries do you serve?
One of the constants we’ve noticed over the years in public and private employment is that while there are learning curves, for the most part industry is irrelevant to the success of our approaches. Our heart lies in helping local, community-centered organizations who have been around for decades or just getting started.
Would you help me if I’m a small organization or sole proprietor?
For sure, and in fact, you are where we hypothesize that we might be most helpful. Organizations that are highly constrained by expenditures or maybe in their awareness of what product management leadership even is!
Um, what your saying makes sense, but I’m not sure about this?
Don’t worry, with over two decades of experience in a craft that very little outside of the digital world have even heard about, we’re used to this! We’d be happy to continue to chat as often as needed to help validate this for you! You might even consider doing an internet search on product management to see how it’s grown over the past 5-10 years.