Satya Nadella in his recent letter: "To succeed, we must continue to think in decades but execute in quarters, approaching each day with the humility and curiosity required to continuously improve, while being guided by our bold vision for the future."
Here is my attempt to articulate what this means for individuals in product roles.
A — Bold Vision / Think in Decades
Let us take an example of the general insurance space in India. One common challenge is the claim process. Consider a situation where someone has encountered car damage due to a road accident.
How can we redesign this experience? Can we, in the next 2 minutes, provide an assurance of the claim amount based on a live video? The video captures the car number, the model, understands the condition, the accident site and surroundings. Using this input, it fetches all relevant information and provides a good estimate.
"Today this can work on 15–25% of your claims. Do you have the building blocks defined that will help you reach 95%?"
B — Execute in Quarters
Your vision won't scale to 95% today for multiple reasons. Is your image recognition model getting better by 1% every month? Does your IT architecture support adequate concurrent videos? Do you have proper storage and retrieval to train models continuously? How will you filter suspicious claims? Does your CRM have clean data?
You need a clear view of how your current efforts connect to your long-term vision. Quarterly agility will remain key because in this journey you will:
- 1.Discover many more constraints
- 2.Unlock new opportunities
- 3.Encounter shifts in industry/regulatory/competitive forces
At every step you build, you will learn, and sometimes you will get schooled by problems you never expected. That is what humbles you. That is what reminds you to go back to your north star metric and put the customer at the center.