Strategic Product Management and Leadership

A Product Manager is the hub of a wheel that holds the internal organization together

A People Person. He is obsessed with assembling best teams, evangelizing their needs and empowering them with resources to excel in their spheres.

Every organization is structured differently. Functional, program oriented, and Skill driven teams are typical examples. Irrespective of how they are organized, each individual operates with personal and professional goals tied to their context.

Brimming with ideas, suggestions, requests and complaints, they seek to and need to have a say in how products are built.

A product manager gets to interact with legal, sales, marketing, industry analysts, business development, technology, CXO’s, data analysts, user researchers, user experience designers, security experts, customer success, customer support and finance on various disciplines that will impact the product launch.

A product manager compiles, consolidates and cross pollinates ideas from all disciplines  of the organization.

Today, More than ever software is programming the world. All of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale. said Marc Andreessen of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz.

The rate of change we experience today Is the Slowest It Will Ever Be. In such a fast-paced environment, identifying factors that will enable success is a predicament for Product Managers.

The old ways of working that withstood the test of time are crumbling, the hidden cracks are showing up and there is a heightened need to reinvent working culture and adapt to reality.

Incremental changes won’t yield. Agile, Lean, Scrum, MVP et all are falling short of expectation. Radical change is the need of the hour.

Where do we change? What do we change? How do we change? How often should that change happen ? are some questions in the minds of product managers.

There is growing realization that product building is a team sport. Shared responsibility and accountability is key to nimble decision making and execution.

While a robust architecture, a badly needed feature or optimal coding are important, they are not deciders of product success. We can give many examples of great engineering gone wrong.

Product Success is a black swan that occurs with a perfect blend of customer empathy, engaging design, lean engineering and empowered business. To make it repeatable occurrence product teams need to get the critical ingredients right.

Thought Leaders in Product Management like Martin Eriksson, Rich Mironov, Marty Cagan encourage 5 principles for sustainable success.

Assemble a Diverse, Cross-functional and Co-located Team.

Create an environment of  Psychological Safety, Autonomy and Purpose.

Encourage and reward them for beginning with customer pains, problems and goals.

Pick The Process that Balances Discovery, Definition, Development and Delivery

Set in motion a framework to continuously learn from all types of feedback

“Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires”  said Eric Ries who pioneered The Lean Startup

It does not make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do.” - Steve Jobs

“A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players” - Steve Jobs

How many Product Managers grasp what it means to hire smart A+ Players?

Irrespective of the functional orientation, Any productive individual need to master hard and soft skills.

Hard skills are technical relative to the domain. Expertise and Efficiency are Key to Success. Soft skills are social skills relative to people. Empathy and Self Control are Key to Success.

A smart A+ player is one who exhibits the perfect blend of hard and soft skills in a given context. He is exceptional at something. He can listen, learn and interpret other things.

A responsive Product organization is normally structured to balance organization vision and customer need.

Inside out, it is driven by aspiration to find, mind and grind customers.

Outside in, it is driven by the purpose to build a Desirable, Feasible and Viable product.

Both approaches feed the continuous Discovery, Definition and Delivery cycles.

A great product talent is one who evolves his or her skills depending on the phases of product development and stages of product growth.

A great product talent demonstrates a growth mindset and is focused on delivering consistent value to all stakeholders. Strategic yet Tactical.

Exhibits emotional intelligence, aspiration, drive, empathy, active listening, critical thinking , structured thinking, design thinking, intuition, curiosity, problem finding, problem solving, experimentation, creativity, collaboration, communication, decision making and business acumen.

There is no single person or team that possess all these competencies. Hence, the role of product manager is to anticipate and facilitate the availability of such talent.

Any product needs to fulfill 3 criteria to be successful.

It has to alleviate customer pain and enhance experience - Be Desirable.

It has to empower stakeholders with the confidence to forge ahead - Be Feasible.

It has to deliver win-win outcomes without draining resources - Be Viable

Balancing such a complex dynamic is only possible with extraordinary talent who are conscious, nimble and adaptive.

Any Product team member is busy with their things. Product Roadmaps, Customer Interviews, Technology Architecture, Prototypes, Coding, Copywriting and Launching are created and propagated. None of it is yielding expected results. Momentum is lost. Acrimony is amplified. Collaboration Breaks Down and Customer is Left in the Lurch.

Product teams fail to execute when there is imbalance in team composition.

Ignore hiring of smart A+ players at your own peril. organizations with weak talent get busted sooner or later. The real challenge is that problem with a dysfunctional team isn’t obvious.

“Everyone’s fault. No one’s fault.” A sense of accountability is the driving force for high performance teams.

Product managers don’t have an option other than to play their best game every time. Finding such contextually relevant co-creators is hard but not impossible.

It all begins with defining organizational purpose, principles, values and drivers. Creating a culture of shared ownership, common language, reciprocative expectations and mutual empowerment enhances trust.

In addition to focus on hiring individual talent, experts recommend assembling a cross functional team of designers, developers, business and relevant domain experts to form the core unit of execution.

Teams can only play their best games when there is autonomy of decisions and actions. Finding people with the right mindset and attitudes improves communication, cohesion and collaboration.

Daniel H. Pink author of Drive stated “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”

Dear Product Managers, Your job is to make people awesome.

“Product Management is not about the product but about the people” said Martin Eriksson of “Mind the Product”

There is a growing realization that the strength of products are founded on the capability of people and the culture binding them.

As per Harvard Business Review, cultural norms is the tacit social order of an organization that defines what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group. Culture is the result of teams giving up on fixed mindset and embracing a growth mindset.

It all begins with aligning different teams to a shared vision of the future. Establishing a learning process to Improve everyday. Accepting accountability in pursuit of common goals. Being comfortable challenging each others assumptions.

Healthy interactions among team is fostered when a team member appreciates his peers. Overcoming inhibitions and feeling confident in front of his/her team fosters collaboration. Demonstrating Transparency, Commonality, Credibility, Reliability and respect during interactions with enhances trust.

Unshacke the critical, creative, and curious perspectives of team members  in pursuit of excellence.

In fast paced environments like product development, continuous change is necessary to be responsive. We need people who feel safe enough to nudge for that change.

Product Culture will need to evolve with the the growth of your company. We need to balance respect for our culture, with an openness to change it as needed. As a product manager, you need to maintain a team that is open to adapt.

Move away from output to outcomes said Lea Hickman of Silicon Valley Product group.(SVPG)

Biggest cause of headache and heartache in teams is Friction within team, among teams and stakeholders.

Friction is a normal outcome of us being together. Motive boils down to the need for reinforcing our individual identity and sustaining our tribal identity.

It’s like in a Marriage, where occasional tiff's lead to stronger bonding. Not all friction is bad. A healthy dose of it is essential to bring out the best in individuals and teams.

WorkPlace Performance Studies have found that deficiencies in Leadership, Communication, Alignment, Engagement, Accountability, Competence and Decision Making as causes of friction and resulting low productivity.

Depending on team size and interconnections, friction is multiplied and amplified. Layers of bureaucracy have never been found to deliver high performance.

Control reduced friction in factory floors where knowledge disparity is rampant. Leaders in Digital Products succeed by empowering knowledge workers with information parity so as to innovate on behalf of the customers.   

Innovative teams are purposeful, aligned, autonomous and collaborative.

Successful products are built by people who are bound together by purpose and are intrinsically motivated to collaborate.

In other words, people who grasp the need to continuously improve their competencies through persistent effort. A lifelong learner inspired by success of others. Carol Dweck calls it “Growth Mindset” .

Industry leaders are looking for people who recognize the existence of multiple perspectives, demonstrate sensitivity to other People and exhibit an ability to Imagine thinking and feeling of others.

Great Teams are shaped by emotionally Intelligent and competent contributors.

Where can we find such people ?

How do we structure hiring to identify them ?

How do we nurture them for performance ?

are some very important questions product managers should be focused on in every stage of team development.

Product teams can make anything they wish. In a constantly changing environment, the challenge is to make something people Love.

Good products are built based on grasping the needs. Truly Great products are built based on grasping the feelings.

Empathy is the ability to hear, see, think, feel, say, do and experience like others. Customer and Colleague alike.

Why is empathy so important ?

“For every Action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Like cosmos and physical things human behavior is reactionary. For every behavior you exhibit towards others, they exhibit a response. Positive or Negative.

Higher density of positive behavior means that relationships are healthy and primed for mutual benefit. A load of negative behavior is one of top reason for product failures.

Holding the internal team accountable for empathetic behavior is essential for delighting the customers.

“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget ‘how you made them feel.”

A market is defined by a set of potential customers who have a set of needs. Needs are fulfilled by products or services with attractive value propositions. Market environments are lopsided. It’s either tilted in favor of the seller or the buyer.

Need groups due to their shared interest reference each other when making a buying decisions. They constantly evaluate their experience and put undue pressure on vendors to make something that suits them.

Precisely why, all innovative products must overcome odds and years of obscurity before they can be demand positive. Crossing the chasm and emerging as a mass market favorite requires customer loyalty.

World of subscription driven intangible products like software is even more daunting as the product needs to keep up with customer evolution and continuously delight them.

If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.

In other words, the software built anticipating the changing needs of the customers and need groups will stand out.

Given the plethora of choices, a sensitive, personal and humane touch will differentiate your promise. A product can only match such ideals with conscious empathy of the teams involved.

People don’t buy from you because they understand what you do. People buy from you because you understand what they do.

What’s in it for me is the subconscious drive propelling individuals within groups, organizations and nations.

Competing priorities of life, human psychology and market led culture all reinforce the need to maximize self gain. Decision to purchase a product is no exception.

Based on multiple research, it is found that we humans have 10+ intrinsic desires.

Thinking, Association, Acceptance, Competence, Influence, Autonomy, Relationship, Stability,         Purpose and Status are things associated with career and work.

As a customer, heightened need  for gain and improvements is a reaction to insecurities about perceived deficiencies in status quo.

A buyer goes through a journey of discovery with a clear purpose. Transition from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. Transform Painful Experiences to Gainful Outcomes.

Students of psychology and human behavior use several words to explain the intangibles. Emotions, Feelings, Drive, Motive, instincts, decisions, Needs, Wants, Desires, Impulses, Jobs etc.

Abstractions with no clear cut and universally agreed definition. They help explain the causation of our behavior.

Notwithstanding the levels and depths of their layers, the world of business uses a few terms to explain the journey of a human from skeptic to customer.

Applying these terms to distinguish groups helps businesses focus on high potential options.

People with needs are said to have immediate propensity for action. Business Scientists further categorize needs to unworkable, unavoidable, urgent and underserved in order to give a criterion for investors to weigh the business case tradeoffs.

Customers are only worried about their need that must be fulfilled.

Humans are allergic to change … - Grace Hopper

Have you ever wondered how facebook out competed myspace, google vanquished yahoo, instagram outsmarted flickr, salesforce over sap etc ?

There are more examples of winners and the vanquished in both the b2c and b2b markets.

incumbents while leading the way have to work day and night to fend off competition from existing and new entrants.

How is it possible that the things we rave about today becomes obsolete tomorrow ?

What does the consumer see different that they ditch the current solution for the new ?

In hindsight, we can be philosophical about innovation, disruption or dig deeper to find out the causes. In order to fathom how facebook outsmarted myspace, one needs to grasp how myspace outcompeted it’s predecessors.

Some users wanted their own page to express, some wanted to overcome their social inhibition to find pals, some wanted to hook up, some wanted a friendster alternative, some to find lost friends, some to advertise...you get the idea ?

Change happens only when the new solutions can delight the customers with a 10x better solution. (kano model)

Customers are married to their own goals. They choose best options within their constraints.

Sometimes vanity matters while in other occasions value matters. Everything is relative to their journey in life and the compulsions of their existence.

Customer Loyalty is a function of how well we understand their head and heart. As long as there is no better alternative, they stick to their existing relationship.

Happy Customers is a mirage. Satisfying them requires being ahead of their expectations and anticipating their needs.

Mike Jones, the former head of MySpace stated, “.. the world had been trained by MySpace that social networking was interesting, but the actual product had been perfected by Facebook”

Availability of an improved choice accelerates change. Moving droves of users away from their existing choice.

From chat rooms to social networks to messenger to ..., the need for interaction, engagement, appreciation, association remains unchanged while the tools fulfilling those needs evolve with environmental impetus.

“People hire a product or service to get the job done” says Clayton Christensen. Jobs to be done is a framework to explain human choices and change behavior.

Journey to give up on old ways in favor of the New way.

Everything we consume is hired. Take a sample case of ordering food online. you need to be hungry, it is breakfast, lunch or dinner time, there is no food at home, have other work to complete and need help.

We don’t order every meal online. Sometimes we cook, go out to dine, take food at office. As per BJ Fogg, the behavioral psychologist a unique combination of trigger, abilities and motivation lead to a particular behavior.

We have different choices under different circumstances yet consistent in our behavior. quite easy for us to fire with the same panacea we hire.

What explains our behavior of protracted choices ?

Bob Moesta a leading consultant explain this using the forces model. he hypothesized an internal struggle justifying favorable and unfavorable arguments for consumption.

There are Push (internal and external) and Pull (expectation, outcome) forces accelerating the “why’s” to consume.

There are also habits (internal and external) and concerns (self doubt and trust deficit ) that are stifling consumption and explaining “why not” ?.

Hiring and Firing are deliberate choices. Manifestation of conscious, unconscious pain avoidance and gain seeking.

Switch is the moment where there is an explicit choice to a new solution. Bob Moesta & Chris Spiek, The Re-Wired Group.

The moment where our internal decision system overcomes inertia and flips over the tipping point in spite of internal resistance.

As creatures of habit, we are at ease doing the things that make us feel good, secure and comfortable. shaking anyone off that state of inaction mindset is hard.

A tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged is how our defense system maintains balance. When it comes to acquiring customers, the status quo bias is the product teams staunchest adversary.

In the world of SaaS and digital, Creators don’t have the luxury to wait for conversion. Product teams are obligated to only build products and features against the backdrop of a confirmed need that is monetizable.

Debilitating Pain is an uncomfortable feeling that tells you something is wrong. Jobs to Done is a way for innovators to identify pains badly in need of relief.

In the digital world, products evolve and continuously improve the experiences at the click of a button.

Ability to enhance and deprecate capabilities on the fly demands a very disciplined perspective of grasping customer pains and their change over time.

Today, Products are an Integration of thousands of micro solutions weaved together to deliver complete outcomes. A sum of parts where both sum and parts can deliver benefits.

Established academic theories of product managements is breaking down. Instead of a product monolith, we have units of software that is mixed and matched dynamically to deliver contextual value.

Abstracting the transformation of capabilities using ideas of Product life cycles is arcane, useless and dead.

Product Leaders building solutions should instead be concerned with the life cycle of micro solutions and their integrations.

Modularizing the construct into a benefit life cycle helps us grasp the small pains causing the big headache.

There are two terminologies that are interchanging used and abused.

Pain is a pseudonym for sustained bad experiences causing an emotional hurt while the problem is the sum of all issues that cause real-world losses that are sustaining the pains.

Different need groups and individuals face different pains, different levels of pains caused by different problems and different levels of problems.

Manifested by a lot of moving parts leading to very unique needs for different customers. Just imagine the permutations and combinations possible. 

Further add their constantly changing nature to the mix, eradicating pains and solving problems for a large group of customers in the enterprise is indeed very very difficult.

In the digital world, solutions offering customization capability outsell those that don’t have. services is the holy grail of software industry.

Most companies procuring Commercial Off the shelf products (COTS) spend billions to achieve integration and interoperability to achieve true collaboration.

Finally, with the advancements in stability, reliability, security of the internet, the opportunity to build truly personalized products for enterprise is finally there.

Materializing that opportunity is only possible with a human centered product design.

What would your marketing look like if your customer signed your paycheck? - Ann Hadley, Chief Content Officer, Marketingprofs

There is a raging debate online about what SaaS business should focus on as they strategize an outreach. Some say it’s 4C’s of Customer, Context, Content, and Collaboration. Some others say it’s 5C’s of Customer, Context, Content, Community, and Conversation. Even more say it’s 6C’s Customer, Context, Content, Connection, Communication, and Convenience.

Crux of SaaS outreach rests on a sound grasp of Customer, Context, and Content. Influence of other factors vary depending on the interplay of 3C’s. Customers are influenced by great content and ruminate on decisions predicated on context.

With need being the same, different situations elicit different decisions. Context is about a moment in time where an individual or a group interacts with their environment with a very specific need. Context brings together people, situations, aspirations, intent, and decisions to deliver optimal results and delightful outcomes. 

Neuro Scientific Studies reveal that a decision to buy a product is made subconsciously based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that tactfully leverages ration and emotion to make and communicate decisions. In other words, context is about the study of all possible obvious and non-obvious factors that a customer will apply to assimilate insights. It’s about grasping the transformation process of those insights into intuitive decisions.

Context is the bridge connecting the subconscious thoughts with the observable behavior. Study of context helps organizations resonate with audience and replicate decision making at market scale.

Study of context requires mastery of people. The things that stay constant and relative, subjective and the objective, the mask and the real, the rational and emotional, the explicit and implicit, the words and deeds.

Gary Vaynerchuk, a thought leader in the media space argues that “Content is king, but context is God”.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions - Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot

Digital products benefits are explored in discovery, conceptualized in definition, constructed in development and distributed in delivery. Together, they form the comprehensive customer feedback loops.

Establishment of these loops helps teams constantly stay on top of blatant customer feedback Ability to continuously deploy software and learn from it helps gain a stranglehold on latent customer needs. Integrating these feedback loops throughout the product and feature life cycle helps construct an objective process to build, measure and learn about real customer needs.

Unlike in the past, where it took years to iterate, acquire customers and deliver value. Products of today reach dramatic milestones in shorter time frames. Keeping pace simultaneously with constantly evolving needs and hyper-growth is no small feet.

Discovering effective solutions, delivering those efficiently thereby unearthing mutually beneficial value is the cornerstone of iterative product development. All the constructs of agile, lean, their different flavors and their interpretations all started with the single goal of accelerating this customer feedback loop.

Unfortunately, they have lost track of their larger goals and devolved into mere execution enablers. Stress on selective terminologies and constructs like backlog, user stories, retrospectives have deviated product teams from their real objectives of customer-centricity.

This inward focus coupled with the demands of various stakeholders have created a cocktail of confusion and muddled the water in terms of priorities. Inability to adjust to progressive customer needs is forcing companies to shut down and abandon digital product initiatives.

High rate of product failures among startups is no exception. Swimming against the tide in murky waters is a luxury no one enjoys.

You will learn the importance of upfront thought work and research to capitalize sustainably on opportunities coming your way.