What Comes After Strategy with Benchling's Jon Fan - Build with Maggie Crowley Recap

Podcast: Build with Maggie Crowley

Published: 2021-03-26

Duration: 34 min

Guests: Jon Fan

Summary

Effective planning is crucial for executing product strategy, balancing autonomy, and aligning teams, especially in scaling organizations.

What Happened

Jon Fan, VP of Product at Benchling, discusses the challenges of planning in product leadership. He emphasizes the importance of aligning teams on goals and ensuring everyone has a shared understanding of the strategy. Fan contrasts planning in smaller teams, where everyone can fit in one room, with larger teams that require more coordination and alignment across different product areas.

He explains how Benchling, with over 100 people in its engineering, product, and design teams, manages planning by creating a stack-ranked list of priorities. This list helps teams understand the order of priorities and resolve dependencies without resorting to a waterfall approach. Fan highlights the balance between autonomy and alignment, ensuring that teams can execute independently while still moving in the same direction.

Maggie Crowley and Fan discuss the importance of writing everything down as part of the planning process. This documentation helps with asynchronous communication and ensures that new team members can quickly get up to speed. They also touch on using tools like Airtable to track planning details and maintain a roadmap.

Fan shares insights on involving the go-to-market teams in the planning process to ensure alignment. He explains how Benchling creates a one-year roadmap, focusing on big themes rather than specific features to avoid overcommitting. The conversation highlights the need for constant iteration and feedback in the planning process as the company grows.

The episode delves into the complexities of balancing short-term execution with long-term strategic goals. Fan mentions the importance of carving out time for forward planning and how this can influence the company's future direction. He also discusses how product operations and program management teams play a role in running the planning process like a product.

Crowley and Fan explore the idea of treating the planning process as a continuous product, refining it quarter by quarter based on feedback. They also discuss the significance of aligning engineering and product architectures to allow teams a greater degree of freedom in execution. This alignment helps avoid dependencies that could slow down progress.

Key Insights