#mtpcon san francisco – Page 3 – Product Management Confabulation

August 30, 2019

You Don’t Own the Voice of the Customer by Tricia Wang

Can putting a product into the world really be harder than launching a spacecraft? In her keynote at #mtpcon San Francisco, Tricia Wang, Co-founder of Sudden Compass, says it can. While launching a spacecraft seems more complex, it all boils down to math, and there is scant unpredictability in the calculations. But you have to deal with a lot of external complexities that are completely out of your control when you ship a product, so the end result is highly unpredictable. And the most complex part? Customers.

Product + Research = BFFs

As a tech ethnographer, Tricia’s life’s work is all about centering the user. She is focused on using research to help organizations build better products by understanding people. Her career in this space grew at the same time that product management started being recognized as a critical discipline, and the thought of product and research working together made her very excited. Product is accountable for delivering products that can succeed in markets full of complex people, and research is responsible for learning about those people. So it made sense to her that product and research should become best friends!

The reality has been very different. Rather than the two disciplines working together towards the same goal, product and research viewed each other almost as adversaries, each feeling the other is the problem that gets in the way of success. At most organizations, research and product are not as seamless and collaborative as they could be.

Why Does This Tension Exist?

Tricia posits that the tension between product and research exists because each side feels they are supposed to be the ultimate arbitrator of the customer. They each feel that they are the best people in the organization to bring the voice of the customer to the table.

But this doesn’t just stop at product and research. Design, marketing, and executives all feel they have a claim on the voice of the customer as well. So the question then expands beyond why product managers and researchers aren’t best friends – we should be asking why all of these cross-functional disciplines aren’t best friends.

In theory we have user-centered design, but in practice we have me-centered design.

What do we do when everyone thinks it’s all about ME? The first step is to stop fighting over who gets to be the voice of the customer. We need to return the voice of the customer to the real owner: the customer. If everyone is talking to the customer, they can be their own voice.

Giving the Customer Their Voice Back

Tricia lays out three actions you can take to give the voice of the customer back to the customer themselves.

Action 1: Invite Your Cross-functional Partners to Lunch

When you invite someone out to a meal and pay for it, you signal that you want to build a relationship. The act of eating a meal is a shared activity that creates conditions for people to get to know each other, which can help create the psychological safety needed to work well together.

Action 2: Shift the Researchers’ Role From Methodology Gurus to Discovery Guides

If everyone is talking to the customer, then what is the job of the researcher? In a cross-functional world, researchers can provide much more value by enabling everyone to hear the voice of the customer. Rather than executing research, they should embed themselves into the business as partners to facilitate research practices across the organization.

Action 3: Always Include the Voice of the Customer in all Communication

Don’t present numbers on their own. Any presentation with numerical data about a customer should always be coupled with context.

Showing this in action, Tricia gave the example of a team launching a new laundry detergent. Everyone in the team viewed their version of the customer through their own lens and couldn’t agree on anything. Rather than try to bring insights to the team, the researchers facilitated an experience, bringing everyone to New York City for a few days to spend time doing laundry with customers. Getting out of the office helped the team to bond. Their interactions completely changed their thinking as they saw how their customers behaved when doing laundry. The assumptions they had been making were completely wrong. The anecdotes and learnings from this trip became referenced throughout the entirety of the project, and provided helpful context for data they would show.

We Can’t do it Alone

Placing researchers in the role of a guide can help teams to make better product decisions. But they can only do this with the support of a good product manager. Product has the ability to help prioritize research, and to create an environment for the team to be receptive.

Airplane pilots have a system called Crew Resource Management (CRM). The purpose of this system is to help pilots communicate, problem-solve, and collaborate in ways to reduce human error. It divides the responsibility between co-pilots, so that no single person is responsible for the system – no one person is the voice of the weather, the plane, or the computer. They work back and forth, challenging each other and sharing information to ensure a successful flight.

Learning from pilots, we shouldn’t try to be the voice of the customer on our own. Launching products is too important to do alone. We need the collaboration of our cross-functional counterparts. Humans are complex and change very quickly, and none of us should bear the burden of understanding them on our own. It is time for product and research to work better together.

The post You Don’t Own the Voice of the Customer by Tricia Wang appeared first on Mind the Product.

August 23, 2019

How to Influence the Business by David J Bland

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Precoil founder David J Bland offers some helpful tips on how product managers can influence the business and run more effective experiments.

David talks about products that people loved and that have now disappeared from the shelves. He gives the example of Clearly Canadian, a popular flavored sparkling water, widely available in the 90s, which now is nowhere to be found. Why did it fail? David shares three key product themes and the questions that the themes aim to answer which have an impact on product failure or success.

Product managers should evaluate if their products are:

Desirable – Do they?
Viable – Should we?
Feasible – Can we?

With strong evidence and appropriate feedback, product managers can help to solve product problems by validating the assumptions of desirability, viability, and feasibility.

Two Models of Thinking: Product and Business

People often think you have look at your product from either a product-centric or a business-model lens. David poses the question: Why not both?

Product

Viewing your business from a product-centric lens, the product is at the center of everything. You first evaluate the desirability, viability, and feasibility of the product. The product then sits as a part of a business model, which flows further into the overall context of organization. Each of these three elements serves an important purpose, but by looking at strategy from only a product-centric view, you are unlikely to be able to make an impact on the larger business.

Business

From the business-centric lens, tools like the Business Model Canvas template start from the view of the organization as a whole. The product is simply a resource in service of the business model. Looking at strategy from this view can be useful to understand the bigger context, but it is typically built on a system of assumptions that may not be realistic.

A Better way

David explains that “when overlaying the framework of the product-centric themes (desirable, viable, and feasible) on top of the business model canvas, only then you can use product thinking to look holistically at the business model”.

In this blended product and business model framework:

What is desirability? It is your value proposition, customer segments, channels and relationships.
What is viability? It is your revenue stream and cost structure.
What is feasibility? This is all about the infrastructure. Technical, regulatory, and patents.

After identifying your assumptions your next step should be how to experiment.

Experiment Loop – Start with Learn

The problem with the typical build, measure, and learn experiment loop is that product managers start with build and iterate the loop process as fast as possible. Why is this a big mistake?

“It is more powerful to start with learn,” explains David. You should learn well first, then build a product on those learnings. Next, measure the build from qualitative and quantitative results. This revised loop process allows the product manager to understand what people are actually doing.

How can desirability, viability, and feasibility be tested?

Four Experiment Tips

Each experiment is measured against cost, time, and strength. While there are many ways to experiment, David highlighted four methods that could be used.

Partner Interviews – In a B2B context, test for viability and feasibility by listening and talking directly with your partners.
Letter of Intent – With a non-binding legal document, all three themes are tested. This experiment starts the process of clarifying and qualifying verbal business meetings.
Pop-Up Store – More evidence can be generated with all themes tested. This run may answer assumptions about whether customers would be willing to pre-purchase or allow the business to explore an unknown distribution channel.
Wizard of Oz – With all themes tested, this is a favorite type of unbiased experiment. It provides relatively strong evidence due to its nature of a specific customer experience that delivers value manually with people in lieu of technology alone.

In closing, to keep your favorite products on the shelves, product managers can influence the business with blended product thinking frameworks and running lean experiments.

David’s book, Testing Business Ideas, is available here.

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August 16, 2019

Platform Management by Brandon Chu

At #mtpcon San Francisco, Brandon Chu, VP of Product at Shopify, provides some insight into what he considers the most interesting challenge in his career: managing platforms. In this talk he shares what platforms can mean for our product strategies, and what his team learned as they discovered how to build a platform at Shopify.

What are Platforms?

“Platform” is one of the most ambiguous terms in tech, so Brandon begins with his definition of a platform, particularly in contrast to “products”. A product is building something to ship to customers, a platform is building a place where other builders or creators can build things to ship to customers. And while that seems like a small distinction, when you’re building platforms, you aren’t able to control what the end user sees – you’re only able to control who you let build on your system.

There are three main types of platform:

Developer platforms – these are operating systems and tools that enable developers to build products faster. They are removed from the end users; customers never even know the products they use interact with these platforms.
Marketplace and consumer platforms – these platforms are focused on enabling connections between creators and consumers. They are “trust platforms”: allowing two types of people to trust each other to transact. These are companies like Uber or Airbnb.
Product extension platforms – these are platforms whose purpose is to enable third-party app developers to improve your product so it is more appealing to customers. A basic example is the iPhone – while it is a product itself, the apps that developers have for it are what really make it special. Brandon posits that looking for opportunities to create a product extension platform in your own product could have great impact.

Brandon Chu on stage at mtpcon SF

Why Build Product Extension Platforms?

Brandon suggests you build a product extension platform because as your company grows and gains more users, the number of problems you need to solve for users will grow exponentially. At some point, your team will never have the capacity needed to solve all the problems in a timely manner. You can fill the gap between your customer problems and the capacity you have with a product extension platform. Third-party developers are able to meet niche needs your team doesn’t have time for, and can often do it better than you could have yourself.

Product extension platforms grow through a very simple flywheel. You have customers who are attractive to developers. The developers build great features on your platform to gain access to your customers. This in turn, makes your product better and attracts even more customers. It’s a cycle that propels itself into growth. But while this may be a simple concept, it’s not easy to achieve. Below is some of what Brandon’s team at Shopify has learned about product extension platforms.

Lesson 1: Accelerating the Flywheel is Your Job

It’s one thing to look at the flywheel conceptually, it’s another to make it operational. At Shopify, they structured teams around the flywheel, building teams focused on the tools developers need to build, teams focused on helping users discover and access apps, and teams focused on helping developers be successful with areas like payout and user data. That helps them intentionally improve all areas of the flywheel.

Trust is the Flywheel’s Grease

We all have companies we trust and those we don’t. This trust builds up in increments over time and has a very real impact on our willingness to interact with that company’s problems. If we don’t trust the company and don’t interact with its products, the platform is overall less attractive to developers and the flywheel is broken. But when we have trust, it can almost act as grease on every interaction, making the flywheel spin faster. This can be difficult, because while we know this conceptually, it can be hard to justify investing in trust-related features as they often don’t have a measurable ROI. But they are very important to a platform’s success.

Platform Product Managers Need Specific Skills

Platform product managers need specific skill sets in order to be excellent at their jobs:

Software Engineering: With platforms, your product is code. Without having written code or being technically-minded, it can be hard to build really great platform products.
Micro-economics: Platform product managers need to understand pricing and the concepts of supply and demand to really understand where the gaps are, and how to help correct them.
Operations: This is important for product managers of any product, but it is doubly hard for platforms. In platforms you arbitrate between two users: your developers and your customers. You have to build a safe space for both constituents, and operations knowledge can help you manage it.

Brandon Chu speaks at mtpcon SF

Lesson 2: Earn Trust With Developers

While tight restrictions and policies may help earn trust with consumers, it can have the opposite effect on developers. Keeping tight control on your platform can make you difficult to work with, and push developers away, regardless of your user base. So how do you earn trust with your developers?

Your purpose, policy, and business model must be aligned. Your purpose is why you are there. Your business model is what you reward to move your purpose forward, and your policy is what you punish as it goes against it. They all need to be tied together and balanced.
Invest in community. While your first developers may be individual sales efforts, to scale, you have to be able to have “one to many” type interactions. This can be done with meetups and conferences, and helps your developers to connect with each other and feel celebrated by you.
Treat developers as business partners, not users. Developers are investing in you and taking a risk that you will be there for them. Give them the courtesy of keeping them updated on changes that will affect them, apply policy consistently, and work with them to make them successful.

Brandon Chu at mtpcon SF

Lesson 3: Be Patient

Platforms take a long time to come to fruition – Shopify took over five years to see its platform strategy show some real success. Your company must be willing to invest the time and energy to see it through long-term. In platforms, patience is key because creativity is unpredictable. It is impossible to predict what the next killer app or viral hit will be, but every now and then an app can emerge that changes the trajectory of your company. It is not something you can force, and you have to be patient and nurture the platform if you want success.

As you’re being patient, Brandon encourages us to keep a platform “open” as long as possible. When you build a platform, you have to make strategic decisions about how much control you will have over developers and what they can do on your platform. Giving up control can be scary, but staying open will allow you to gain traction. So while you likely will have to create tighter policies and control as you grow, the longer you can stay open, the more creative things will be built.

Platforms: An Integral Part of Strategy

Product extension platforms are a really important part of a product strategy that we don’t talk about enough, especially in a world where we can build and connect in ways that we have never thought of before. If you haven’t already, consider what it might look like if you opened up your product to developers, and created a platform.

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August 9, 2019

Helping Product Managers to Let Go by Michael Sippey

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Michael Sippey, VP of Product at Medium, shares some insights on how to think big and create clarity and focus for product management teams to unleash their full potential.

The Power of Optimism

At the start of his keynote Sippey says that: “Most acts of creation – live music and conferences like this – are optimistic acts”. Optimism is fundamental in order to make things, he says, and he defines it as “hopefulness and confidence about the future or successful outcome of something”.

No one can be a product manager without being an optimist, but “optimistic” feedback loops can expose real product challenges. Sippey references a tweet – “My bank’s iOS app let me know it now offers ‘podcast streaming’ and I really need to talk to the product manager” – and asks if the banking customer is confused, what does it say about the bank’s internal teams? It means the engineers, designers, marketing and executives are equally confused about their product.

Key Operating Principles

He highlights two of the seven operating principles defined in Principles by Ray Dalio, founder of the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund.

1. Think Big

In the startup context, thinking big should be unconstrained and boundless. This stage is the “yes, and…” stage – it is where brainstorming, whiteboards, Post-It notes, and stickies live. The focus is on imagining the future you want to be in. At this phase, the product manager of a banking app convinces themselves their app needs podcast streaming.

2. Create Clarity and Focus

The real job of a product manager is to create clarity and focus. To unlock the full potential of product teams and help build great products, you need to blend the principles of thinking big and creating clarity and focus.

Why do Product Managers not Want to Prioritize the Backlog?

It is very challenging work. It is more fun to work with a designer, report a bug, or talk to customers. Most of us are dramatically underinvested in this area of focus. Sippey recommends we make use of agile and keep to ordered lists only. He offers a simple hack to help with prioritization:

A Grand Unified Theory of Work

Make a list of things to do.
Prioritize the list.
Do the things on the list, in order.
Constantly communicate about items 1-3.

Three Take-Home Hacks

1. Banish Unordered Lists

The art of getting better at product management focuses on banishing unordered lists. Stop using bulleted lists. By only creating lists with numbers, product teams will have to prioritize and focus on what actually matters. Practise this exercise during crucial conversations in one-on-ones, with management, and during staff meetings.

2. Let go of Needing to be Right

During the brainstorming phase, treat the act of prioritization like brainstorming a feature or coming up with a new idea. As product manager roles attract Type A personalities, the act of testing prioritization opens vulnerability within yourself and the team you manage. “Being able to tell your team the truth takes vulnerability, self-love and trust,” Sippey says. And he advises those of us early in their careers to build their vulnerable muscle now. Being vulnerable with your teams is the most important thing you can learn as a product manager.

3. Enlist your Team

Make room for the optimists. Another hack Sippey suggests to ask teams is 10 questions for product opportunity assessments from Inspired by Marty Cagan. For solutions requirements? Talk to engineering. For how to bring a product to market? Talk to marketing. How big is the opportunity? Speak with sales.

Banish Your Inner Critic by Denise Jacobs

What blocks us from doing our best work? This is the question that Denise Jacobs, author of Banish Your Inner Critic, asks us in the opening keynote of #mtpcon San Francisco. We often think of our biggest blockers being external: a crazy CEO, recalcitrant CTO, surly engineers, or designers who just won’t do what we want them to. But what if our biggest blocks are actually in our own heads?

We all have negative thoughts. We tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, that we don’t know what we’re doing, and that everyone will figure out we’re frauds. These voices take over our mental bandwidth and hijack our decision making. This is our Inner Critic, and it stands in the way of us fully accessing our own brilliance. But imagine a world where we were able to fully show up in our power and be who we truly are, without the self-doubt. What would that look like?

Meet Your Inner Critic

Product managers tend to have strong inner critics. We have to have broad knowledge across business, technology, and user experience, and daily are working with people who are experts in their domains. We have great responsibility, but very little authority. Because of this, imposter syndrome runs rampant. It gets stronger as you progress in your career.

The Inner Critic blocks creativity and creative flow. When we’re in our creative flow, our work feels easy, magical, inspired, and energized. Creative flow is power, so we need to find ways to get into that flow more often.

Denise Jacobs at mtpcon SF 2019

The Inner Critic comes from the fears that we have about ourselves, combined with the negative things we’ve heard from other people. This combination operates in the background, and drives subconscious behavior in an attempt to protect us. To combat it, we have to first understand how to recognize the voice of the Inner Critic. Denise had the room write down the negative self-talk they hear on a regular basis. People had statements such as:

I’m not intelligent
I’m not vocal enough
I’m incompetent
I’m too young
I’m not organized enough

Fighting The Inner Critic

We all have these kinds of negative thoughts, but we’re born with mental power tools to combat the Inner Critic.

Neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to adapt in the face of new stimulus. It is guided by our thoughts and what we focus on, and can reshape our thinking.
Mindfulness: we have the ability to step outside our thoughts, look at them objectively, and shift our focus when we need to.
Self-compassion: having self-compassion strongly correlates with achieving mastery in our field. And on a physiological level, we produce oxytocin, and reduce anxiety. To access self-compassion, think about what you would say to a friend who has the same doubts you have.

Learning how to shift our focus away from negative thoughts

So we know the tools that can help us. But how do we use them to silence self-doubt and do our best work?

Reclaim Your Brain and Stop Self-Sabatoge

Denise highlighted a story from her middle school basketball team. As a teenager, Denise was significantly taller than other girls her age. When her basketball team played, she would try to avoid getting on the court and hope not to be noticed. She told herself that because she was tall, people would expect her to be good, and she couldn’t live up to their expectations. She was letting her self-talk hold her back.

Denise gave us three strategies to stop this self-sabatoge:

Remind yourself, just because you’re thinking something, doesn’t mean it’s true. We have to think like a scientist, examining our thoughts and viewing them through an objective lens. We should look for evidence to either prove or refute our thoughts, and not just take them as truth.
Be intentional with the words that you use. Words like “should”, “have to”, and “must” are words that remove the power from us and place it externally. By thinking about the things we “want to”, “get to”, and “can” do, we are able to make decisions for ourselves.
Recognize when you catastrophize. Rather than letting our minds spin out of control, extrapolating to the worst possible outcome of our failures, reconsider scenarios to highlight all the positive results that could occur.

Denise Jacobs on stage at mtpcon SF 2019

Own Your Expertise and Unblock Creativity

We’ve established that imposter syndrome is common for product managers. We have trouble internalizing our own successes, assume wins are a fluke, and hold ourselves to much higher standards than we hold others. We don’t see ourselves clearly. But Denise introduced us to the Imposter Syndrome Paradox:

You will only experience imposter syndrome when you are competent and skilled.

It can be hard to recognize in ourselves, but the mere fact that we have imposter syndrome means we are skilled enough to understand the full depth of our field. It is a sign of our own competence. We just need to remind ourselves of this daily.

She also introduced us to the Expert Enough Manifesto to help us realize we don’t have to be the supreme expert on every topic. Having a good amount of knowledge on a topic is enough to accomplish what we need to.

Our negative self-talk is our biggest barrier to success. When our Inner Critic is really active, it means our self-talk has gone awry. To reboot our self-talk, we need to practice “self-distancing” and talk to ourselves like a coach. Good coaches are able to motivate and inspire, while pushing people to be their best.

Step Into Your Power

The potential for greatness is in all of us, but when our Inner Critic is present, it is like someone is snipping the buds off a new plant, and keeping it from growing. We have the power to banish that Inner Critic and grow to be fully magnificent. Banish your Inner Critic, step into your power, and change the world with your creations.

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July 24, 2019

What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2019

In the fifth year of #mtpcon San Francisco, 1,700 product people came together to celebrate our craft and learn from each other. Here is a look at what we learned from this year’s line-up of speakers:

Product Challenges are Universal

Mind the Product founder Martin Eriksson opened the conference by reminding us why we gather each year. While #mtpcon has been coming to San Francisco for five years, the Mind the Product community began nine years ago. And as the community has grown and scaled around the world, we’ve seen that the challenges that product people face are the same, regardless of where we are. Whether you’re working on a consumer app in Singapore, a SaaS product in San Francisco, or a challenger bank in London, we all struggle with the same challenges – and we can learn how to deal with them by coming together as a community.

While we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the mechanics of product management, the most common challenge we hear about is discovery: how to know if we’re building the right things. We have to focus on the basics to answer this question – research, understanding our customers and their needs, and discovering what we could build that is valuable, feasible, and desirable. So we brought together several speakers with different perspectives on this topic to help us think about how we approach discovery.

Banish Your Inner Critic

Before we can understand our customers, we have to understand ourselves. Denise Jacobs had us ask ourselves: “What blocks us from doing our best work?”. It turns out that most of our biggest blockers aren’t external, they are negative voices inside us that plague us with self-doubt and keep us from showing up in our full power. Denise helped us to identify this “Inner Critic” inside, and gave us some tips to reclaim our brains and stop the self-sabatoge.

Denise Jacobs on banishing your inner critic

Clarity and Focus are Very Important

Michael Sippey, VP Product at Medium, pointed us to one of the most valuable jobs of a product manager: prioritization. It is easy to get lost in the “think big” portion of building products, but, unless the creativity is paired with clarity and focus, you can end up building features and products that don’t serve customers’ needs. To create clarity, Michael recommends banishing unordered lists so there is always a #1 priority. He also encourages us to let go of the need to be right (difficult for many product managers) and enlist our teams to help us answer: What problem are we solving? Who are we solving it for? How will we measure success?

Mind the Platform

Brandon Chu, General Manager and Director of Product, Platform at Shopify, gave us insights into the challenges of managing platforms. Platforms can be very useful – opening up your APIs allows other companies to serve user needs that your company can’t support. To aid a platform’s chances of success, Brandon recommends accelerating the “flywheel” – helping customers find the right third-party app at the right time, which makes more third parties want to participate, and helps the platform grow.

He also recommends investing heavily in trust features, even when the ROI might not be immediately apparent, because trust makes platforms stable. Most of all, he says, you should be patient with risk. It can be tempting to close control of your platform early to reduce risk, but product managers must help to keep the platform open to creativity as long as possible to allow the ecosystem to thrive.

Brandon Chu on the challenges of managing platforms

Start with Learn

We always talk about the “Build – Measure – Learn” loop of lean product development. But the problem, says David J. Bland, Founder and CEO at Precoil.com, is that we start with “Build”. Why don’t we start with “Learn” instead? Do the customers want it? Could we build it? Should we? If we’re looking to learn about a business, we should be using experiments. David walked us through several methods of testing our assumptions using methods that don’t involve building the product upfront. He challenged us to run experiments, and use our influence as product people to test the business before building the products.

You Don’t own the Customer

It is easy to get caught in the argument of who owns the “Voice of the Customer.” Product managers, researchers, designers, marketers – we all feel that this is a key part of our roles. The truth, points out Tricia Wang, Co-Founder Sudden Compass, is that the customer owns their own voice; no one owns the “voice of the customer” when everyone is talking to the customer! It is our job to work together to facilitate an understanding of customer needs. When we collaborate across disciplines, we can truly uncover what the customer is saying. This shared experience of knowing the customer leads to stronger product-market fit than any one discipline can discover on their own. We have to be vulnerable and work together to better serve people.

Tricia Wang on who owns the voice of the customer

Tell Great Stories

Fareed Mosavat, Director of Product for Slack Lifecycle, took us back to the roots of management, reflecting on times where strict hierarchies were the norm. But now, we are not looking for people to simply execute tasks – we’re looking to give smart people the freedom to do their best work. Fareed looks to the film industry and film directors to see what we can learn from making movies. He told us to tell great stories with just enough detail for our teams to paint the picture in their minds. Then unlock creative freedom of the team members, allowing each to contribute in their own way, and connect the dots with feedback. Review your progress before it is ready. Doing this will allow you to act less like a product manager, and more like a product director.

Don’t Just Test. Research

We often jump to the concept of testing when we think about user research, and focus heavily on usability. But what we really need is a deeper understanding of our users, not just validation of ideas we already have. Consultant and author Steve Portigal talked us through the art of user research, providing tips on how to work through qualitative research to thoroughly understand our customers and gain the empathy we need in our roles. Immersing yourself in your customers’ environments and providing plenty of open space for them to tell their stories will allow them to relax, and provide the insights you need to find the real opportunities for impact.

Steve Portigal, the art of user research

Products Have Power in Society

Product leader Kathy Pham joined us to talk about ethics in tech. We are past the point where we can just build products without thinking about the larger impacts. Technology failures and poorly designed services can have an impact on human rights, safety, and democracy. We own the product lifecycle, so we should be advocating for the user. Discussions of ethics in tech are not new, and we need to recognize that the power lies with the product builder. It is incumbent on us to think about the impact of the things we build, and to have contingency plans for when things go wrong. We should also honor expertise, recognizing that we may not have all the answers within our teams. We should seek out the people who know about the subjects we’re tackling in order to evaluate the ethical impacts correctly.

We All Want the Same Thing

Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google, brought us a case study, and took us through the process of building the Google Material Design system to understand the importance of research. A product of this scale is so much more than just a design system – Google wanted a system that would inspire builders. As she walked the audience through the story of Material Design, Elizabeth highlighted the collaboration points between product, design, research, and engineering, and pointed out that we’re all interested in the same thing: research that will lead to great products!

Show Your Work

Product discovery coach Teresa Torres closed the day by talking about our desire as product managers to have the “right answer”. We build roadmaps and present our plans to stakeholders hoping for their approval, but when the highest paid person in the room has a different opinion, we often change direction. We create this problem ourselves: when we show these roadmaps, we ask for opinions on our results without showing our working. We back our “best idea” up with data, but rarely present more than one “best idea”. Teresa advocates using a tool called the Opportunity Solution Tree, which allows us to map the entire opportunity space and explore where we can really provide the most value for our customers. When we focus on the opportunities rather than the solution, we can be released from needing to find the “right answer”. We are not one feature away from success and we never will be, so we need to show our work and embrace the team effort of building product. This will allow us to find better options overall.

Now What?

We’ll be returning to San Francisco in the Summer of 2020, but this year’s conference is over, and we’re back in our day-to-day work. But the learning doesn’t have to stop here! We’ll be posting the full videos of each talk over the coming weeks so you can share what you learned with your team. You can also stay connected with the community. Find your local ProductTank, join us on Slack for product-related discussions, or join us for product management training or at one of our other conferences. We’ll see you soon!

The post What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2019 appeared first on Mind the Product.

July 23, 2019

Insights From the #mtpcon San Francisco Product Leadership Forum

As product management evolves, so do the challenges and questions facing product management leaders. At last week’s #mtpcon San Francisco Product Leadership Forum, senior product professionals got together to discuss the current hot topics of career paths, talent management, and psychological safety.

James Mayes welcomes the crowd at mtpcon Leadership Forum Here are some of the insights that surfaced during this year’s forum.

Theme 1: From Product Management to People Management

Top Tip: Be authentic, vulnerable, and honest about your motivations.

Spotting a Prospective People Manager

Consider what’s driving someone who wants to manage people. Ask the individual about their motivation. Do they understand what the job entails and not just what they’ll get out of it?

Prospective people managers demonstrate management attributes before they officially become a manager. Look for the people that are mentoring an intern, running a meeting, or organizing an initiative for the team. No one should be surprised by the promotion.

Julie Zhuo and Martin Eriksson at mtpcon Leadership Forum

Managing People Isn’t for Everyone, and That’s OK

Do you care more about the outcome that a group of people can arrive at, or the specific role you will play in getting to the result? If the craft is what you love doing, then management may not be for you.

Product leaders should think about how to support and develop all product managers, without assuming they want to become people managers. Some companies address this with equal, parallel management and individual contributor (IC) tracks.

Transitioning From Individual Contributor to Manager is Hard

The transition from an individual contributor to a manager is hard. We tell people to stop doing what they’re good at and don’t give them the support they need to be great.

Often new managers hold on to their IC work because it was so much of their identity and they worry about not keeping their skills fresh. However, if you still have IC work, you either aren’t giving your new team enough support or you’re failing in the IC responsibilities.

Your job as a manager is to enable the best outcomes and results from your team, not for you to be the best. If the manager is the best at everything then they don’t have a very strong team.

Management Can’t be Learned From a Book

Books can help, but they aren’t a substitute to learning about management by doing.

Management is about working with people, and people are infinitely complex. It’s hard to recreate how you’ll feel in different situations, but with experience it won’t scare you as much.

Support for Product Leaders can Come From Anywhere

It’s important to find your support network. They can reassure you and help you not feel as alone.

Mentors can range from parents to work colleagues, and peer groups.

Theme 2: Talent Management

Top Tip: Be explicit about expectations and creative in defining paths to Product.

Define What Product Management Means to Your Company

The product management role is fuzzy, and many companies don’t define what product management means to them. This isn’t fair to your current team or to anyone who wants to join them.

Be explicit and deliberate. Set expectations through your job architecture, hiring, performance reviews, and growth conversations.

Don’t go overboard with your product management competencies. Keep them simple, clear, and realistic. And don’t expect your product managers to be an expert in everything: they should be well-rounded but have a forte.

Spotting a Prospective Product Manager

Product management jobs can be seen as an escape route or an easy path in to tech. Be clear about roles and responsibilities and get creative in how you assess potential product managers.

For example, experiment with short-term secondments to the Product team and ask questions to unearth motivations. “If you don’t join the Product team at this company, would you leave to do Product elsewhere?”, can reveal the real driver.

Is Communication the Most Important Product Management Trait?

LinkedIn asked: “What are the traits of the top 1% of product managers?” “Communication” was the top result, double that of all other results. Does this apply to the product managers you know?

You’re Developing a Team, not a Family

It’s easy as a manager to get defensive about your team and to want to believe they’re great all the time. But your team isn’t your family. Sometimes you need to listen to the feedback from outside your team to improve.

Theme 3: Psychological Safety

Top Tip: Be proactive in measuring, spotting, and changing toxic environments.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is about being open, honest, and accepted. It’s not always comfortable, and will sometimes feel bad.

Look out for Psychological Safety red Flags

Keep a look-out for the signs that the team doesn’t feel psychologically safe. For example: no one speaking up in meetings; people questioning management decisions in a back channel to you; no one correcting someone saying something inappropriate; leaders asking for feedback but dismissing everything they hear.

Psychological Safety and Product Management

Product managers have to take personal risks to create psychological safety for their team. Creating a healthy team environment often means saying “no” to leadership requests, but in many companies this can have a negative impact on the product manager’s rewards and recognition.

As a product management community, we need to consider:

How do we better align the conditions for psychological safety with rewards and recognition for product managers.
How much risk are we willing to take on as product leaders? How can we model that behavior?

Measuring Psychological Safety

There are ways to measure the psychological safety in your company. For example: could you:

Gather and act on anonymous feedback about the team and yourself as a leader.
Run quarterly health checks.
Count the number of hops in a conflict. Are people responding to issues directly or passing it to someone else? Ask: “What did this person say when you talked to them?”

Changing a Toxic Environment

In a toxic environment, the team will be doing the minimum necessary to get by.

Be purposeful about changing this environment. What’s the situation today and how do you want it to look in the future?

Don’t just pay lip service to change: make it real through your actions each day. Be realistic: it may not be possible to change every organization, but it is possible to create safety with your team and the group of people you work with.

Psychological safety isn’t once-and-done. People need to experience the new normal multiple times to believe it.

Improving the Relationship With Sales

The relationship between Product and Sales can be tricky and exacerbate psychological safety problems in the company. There are ways to increase trust and work together better:

- Be transparent and have conversations about outcomes rather than just features.
- Invite Sales to join the conversation and Product process. For example, joining weekly Product demos or standups may help them to sell what the team’s building and to demonstrate that Product is a partner rather than a hurdle.
- Find low-hanging fruit that will help to build the relationship.
- Invite Sales to a regular Product counsel where the roadmap, requests, feedback and tradeoffs are discussed. Having everyone in the same room will make the prioritization process clearer.

Psychological Safety for Consultants Working With a Toxic Client

When clients don’t create a safe space for a consultant team, the consultants may feel frustrated and disempowered.

Give feedback to the client and coach them if they’re open to it, but be prepared to walk away. Consulting companies need to look after their employees, and should protect their greatest assets.

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Resource Recommendations

Drive – Dan Pink

Radical Candor– Kim Scott

Project Aristotle report on the secrets of effective teams at Google

Collaborative Gain for peer feedback.

Culture Amp for quarterly health checks.

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