At a higher level, does the revenue it could result in be enough to move the needle and therefore be worth the attention up and down and across the management chain (to the degree it's a discrete program)?
A good notion for value is that of option value. Not a lot of product managers understand this notion very well. Engineers tend to intuitively get this but they can't articulate it. You do work now to give you the option to do something later. Very simple really. PMs really don't get this. All this refactoring, over engineering, and whatever you want to call it. They'd prefer you to not do any of it. But of course engineers understand that those things can pay back later.
Option value is a notion that Don Reinertsen promotes in his Lean 2.0 notion (google that and his name, mandatory stuff for wannabe PMs IMHO). Very simply put, he draws an analogy with stock options. They give you an option in the future to get some value. But there's a chance they'll be worthless and that you lose your money. The point is that the payoff can be much larger than the value loss. That's why they are popular tools for stock traders. There's a non linear relation loss-profit function. Which means you only need a few of your options to convert to profit to finance all of them. VC capital is based on this notion as well. Most startups are a write off. But a handful turn into unicorns and pay for the rest.
In product management, option value is the notion that some idea might be worthless but could end up being worth a lot. Doing a lot of work on something that's just not worth a lot is probably wrong. Doing a little bit of work on something that might have a huge payoff is probably smart. Even if it's slightly risky or uncertain. Doing a lot of work on a lot of things that might be valuable like that at the cost of stuff that you actually should be doing is probably not optimal and very risky. But you should be taking some calculated risks at least part of the time just in case. Worst case you lose some time. Best case you create a lot of value in a way that you never planned to. Balancing risks is your job as a PM.
The point here is that if you only do planned things and don't even entertain doing things that might be valuable outside of that scope, you are probably destroying a lot of value and you are placing a risky bet on your plan instead. If the plan is wrong, you might lose everything.
Which is one of Reinertsen's key arguments against the original lean movement. You throw out the baby with the bath water if you do that. Bad idea for startups because you now make a risky bet on your plan being correct. Which of course it often isn't in startups. Pivoting is the notion of being able to turn a bad plan around. That gets easier if you invested in some option value that gives you the option to do so. A lot of unicorns emerged out of the ashes of failed startups.
Big organizations are notorious for being risk averse and not having the internal capability to innovate even after they've identified the need to do so. As soon as management chains get involved, that's what happens.
Option value is a notion that Don Reinertsen promotes in his Lean 2.0 notion (google that and his name, mandatory stuff for wannabe PMs IMHO). Very simply put, he draws an analogy with stock options. They give you an option in the future to get some value. But there's a chance they'll be worthless and that you lose your money. The point is that the payoff can be much larger than the value loss. That's why they are popular tools for stock traders. There's a non linear relation loss-profit function. Which means you only need a few of your options to convert to profit to finance all of them. VC capital is based on this notion as well. Most startups are a write off. But a handful turn into unicorns and pay for the rest.
In product management, option value is the notion that some idea might be worthless but could end up being worth a lot. Doing a lot of work on something that's just not worth a lot is probably wrong. Doing a little bit of work on something that might have a huge payoff is probably smart. Even if it's slightly risky or uncertain. Doing a lot of work on a lot of things that might be valuable like that at the cost of stuff that you actually should be doing is probably not optimal and very risky. But you should be taking some calculated risks at least part of the time just in case. Worst case you lose some time. Best case you create a lot of value in a way that you never planned to. Balancing risks is your job as a PM.
The point here is that if you only do planned things and don't even entertain doing things that might be valuable outside of that scope, you are probably destroying a lot of value and you are placing a risky bet on your plan instead. If the plan is wrong, you might lose everything.
Which is one of Reinertsen's key arguments against the original lean movement. You throw out the baby with the bath water if you do that. Bad idea for startups because you now make a risky bet on your plan being correct. Which of course it often isn't in startups. Pivoting is the notion of being able to turn a bad plan around. That gets easier if you invested in some option value that gives you the option to do so. A lot of unicorns emerged out of the ashes of failed startups.
Big organizations are notorious for being risk averse and not having the internal capability to innovate even after they've identified the need to do so. As soon as management chains get involved, that's what happens.