Your Headspace

"Your headspace, your responsibilities, and how your performance is measured, are all correlated."

Get into the Right Headspace

I once had a brilliant conversation with a seasoned executive in product management. Sanjay's specialty was to lead product teams that started with hundreds of people and to leave them when they were thousands of people. At that time, I was in a point in my career where I wanted to know how to scale businesses and teams: his expertise was exactly what I was seeking. Sanjay introduced the concept of the right "headspace" to me. I'd like to share what he taught me.

What is "Headspace"?

Headspace is the time frame that a person in a particular role is working in. In general, their responsibilities and performance metrics are measured in this timeframe.

For example, a software developer's headspace is less than 3 months; they are thinking about HOW they are going to build something since they've been told what to build in the next 4 weeks. An account executive's headspace is up to 3 months (quarterly); they are thinking about HOW and WHAT they can do to close sales at the end of the quarter because their sales commission depends on it. A CEO with a large team is mostly thinking about the next 2-20 years; they are thinking about WHY the company mission matters over the long term.

The following table that shows a general relationship between headspaces, focus questions, and the expectation of someone with such a job title.

"A senior leader may be focused on the far future, but they need to move between headspaces when communicating with their team."

Why the Right Headspace Matters

Knowing your headspace and everyone else's on the team will help do the following:

• Product managers can prioritize and keep re-prioritizing what product features need to be delivered in the next three weeks, 3-months, up to 12-months, and 2+ years.

• Product manager can determine the priorities of new, unexpected requirements after receiving user feedback.

• Product managers can communicate to the development team what everyone needs to laser-focus on within the next 3 months. As a result, the development team can focus on designing detailed user experiences and the technical details of how to deliver prioritized features.

• Product managers can communicate product milestones to executives on a quarterly basis.

• Leaders can provide a roadmap to their team so that everyone can understand the full product vision, from short to long-term.

Why Senior Leaders Need to Understand and Move between Headspaces

Senior leaders are usually focused on the far future, but they need to understand the different headspaces when communicating with their team. As such, they need to understand the responsibilities, performance criteria, and headspace for each role on their team. As such, a senior leader can delegate leadership responsibilities to other leaders on the team, who can set expectations. This is how you'd scale any team.

Conflicts and confusion arise when a leader doesn't realize the differences in headspace between their team members and their own. Here are a couple of examples that I've observed myself.

Example: Product Managers in the Wrong Headspaces

I once observed a team of inexperienced product managers(PMs), which consisted of a senior product manager, intermediate product manager, several junior product managers. They were often focused on the deliverables for the next 4 weeks; they didn't create proper 3-month and 12-month plans. In this case, it was the senior and intermediate PMs who fell short of taking responsibility by not understanding their respective headspaces. Here were the challenges created, which caused a domino effect of trouble:

• GIVEN the 3-month and 12-month roadmap was created with minimal input from their product designers and customers; WHEN 3-month deliverables were submitted to the sponsoring executive, THEN the lack of prioritized features made the promised quarterly timelines questionable.

• GIVEN the roadmap lacked prioritized features; WHEN the 3-months goals were NOT communicated and re-communicated across the whole team, THEN the junior product managers, designers, and development team were scrambling to find out what to do next.

• GIVEN the roadmap lacked prioritized features; WHEN the designers could not complete designs ahead of their developers, THEN the development team was sitting idle or doing low priority work.

• GIVEN the product roadmap lacked prioritized features; WHEN the dependencies between features were not planned properly, THEN the development team was not 100% allocated because some team members were scrambling while others were would wait for this work to finish.

• GIVEN the roadmap lacked prioritized features; WHEN the designers and development team would re-prioritize features based on dependencies, priority, and customer feedback, THEN the quarterly deliverables would change.

• GIVEN the product managers were not communicating the changes to their sponsoring executive regularly; WHEN the product managers presented different deliverables than promised, THEN the sponsoring executive began to question the management capability of the product managers, AND resorted to micro-management and leadership change.

Unfortunately, the sponsoring executive did not train their product managers on their expectations when the product roadmap was approved so it was failure in leadership at the executive and product manager levels.

Example: Startup Founders Who Build Too Much

I learned the hard way that an entrepreneur can be too focused on the future and not enough on the immediate. My first startup's prototype was too ambitious so we ended up creating groundbreak technologies that took too long to deliver for customer testing. By the time it was released, the customer didn't have the infrastructure and culture to adopt them. Our headspace was in the 2+ year range. As a startup mentor, I try to encourage new founders to think in all different headspaces, but to focus more on the next 3 months at the beginning.

New startup founders are typically in the 12-month to 24+ month headspace. However, this causes some "blindness" as to what's really important to deliver in the next 3 months. Thus, their initial product offering tends to be bloated, which causes timelines to be extended and budgets to be blown.

For a new business, it is now possible to user-test products with the absolute minimal features to assess their value($) and "lovability". My advice is ask yourself the following:

• What minimal product can we deliver to get customer feedback in less than 3 months, to assess its value and lovability?

• Is this feature-set enough to get the customer to commit to an immediate purchase or to immediate use it? Prove it.

• How are you repeating this process so that you can accelerate your learning? What is your cadence?

So at the start of a new product, a founder or product manager needs to plan for all the headspaces mentioned, with a focus on "less than 3 month" during the customer discovery stage. When they find some financial success, then they can hire (or delegate to) other leaders to focus on the short term, while they move onto to longer term headspaces.