Makin' Money, Savin' Time: When Product Chops Meet Chaos

A pattern I’ve noticed in my career is that product leaders rarely get hired until the chaos becomes unmanageable. I’ve also worked alongside plenty of product colleagues who didn’t have a product mindset or skills, just deep technical expertise and the results were the same. Wildly overflowing scope, no focus, money being poured into work with nothing valuable to show for it. This is not rare; this is why KV Product Consulting was created.

One of the many moments that stands out to me:

I had just started a financial application product role. A very expensive consultant team had been working on a deliverable for months and was just six weeks from their major deadline. My very first day, I attended a meeting with Executives and IT leadership, and the tension was palpable. It wasn’t clear what actually needed to be delivered to meet the deadline. Voices were raised, and blame was being thrown around like beads in a Mardi Gras parade.

I should have been intimidated.

I was invigorated.

I dove right in, building partnerships with Accounting, leadership, and the delivery teams, and quickly identified the real goals. They were working on a lot of things that were necessary, but most of it was not.

I created the strategy and vision, aligned the stakeholders and teams, and deprioritized all unnecessary features. We delivered exactly what the business needed in just six weeks, with a couple of reasonable workarounds. This enabled accurate bonus calculations for over a thousand department leaders, boosted team morale, and restored stakeholder confidence. We made a few small enhancements the next quarter, but most of the scope was determined to be unnecessary. I helped stakeholders understand that there were bigger fish to fry.

Just one example of what real product chops look like in practice. I’ll share another later this week.