This month’s topic was managing product managers.

Often Product Anonymous events cover topics to help make you be a better product manager – like roadmaps – but we also need to focus on the the people skills. This month we asked a couple managers of product managers what they do to ensure high performance & keep their people motivated.

Layla Foord has over 20 years experience managing teams of product people. Fiona Moreton has over 15 years as a team manager with background in customer management & sales teams and has been managing product managers for the last 3 years.

#prodanon introducing the speakers. pic.twitter.com/Hwq3LI6jaf

— nickcoster (@nickcoster) June 16, 2016

How do you structure coaching and mentoring of your people?

Fiona is a real believer in the 70:20:10 management rule (as is PageUp). This focuses very much on on-the-job training.  She is involved in providing personal feedback to her people which is very individualised feedback. It needs to take into account where each person is on their journey plus experience in product management.

Layla has managed many people and concurred with what Fiona described as on-the-job observation and personal tailoring of the approach.

She also talked about understanding where your people are on the spectrum – product management is a range of skills and needs. You need to understand each person’s super powers and ensure they are using and showcasing them. Layla described how sometimes her people didn’t want to use their super powers as they saw them as skills to avoid using – but she finds this leads to dissatisfaction in the person and discontentment at work. 

“It’s about behaviours & proof points” @product_anon @Foordstaress

— Julia (@JuliaBearzatto) June 16, 2016

How do you guide your product people through the pull of the technical owner role?

Fiona’s take: PageUp has just decided to rearrange things. They split the roles and will have product owners and product strategy managers. This allows for the clear division of roles but of course they will need to work through how to share and communicate between the two groups.

Layla: talked about it being a range that they are still figuring out. It will keep changing. Right now she guides people towards their strengths. If their strength is working deeply with the tech team, that would be supported. Layla did make a point about the danger of micro-managing the team… if the product person isn’t providing the necessary information for the team to make decisions on their own, that product person is a control freak. You are there to provide a vision, not dictate a back-log.

Layla encourages her people to drop the ego. If you’re only interested in getting your ideas onto the product then you are doomed! Every product manager needs to be ready to accept ideas that come from anywhere and ensure general principles of the product are understood so everyone can contribute.

What does a development path look like?

Layla: Some people get very interested in the detail (technical or otherwise) and she thinks it’s important to remind them to look up (she did quite a good animation of lifting up her chin! 🙂 You need to see beyond the immediate moment (the firefighting).

When they are able or willing to look to that second horizon then are ready to move to more senior roles and the most senior are casting out to horizon three.

Fiona: Knowing when someone is ready for the next step is a combination of time in the role, aptitude and attitude. The way in which they engage with other stakeholders in the business -beyond their own team – are other signs they are ready for those next steps. And there are other ways to keep a person challenged than just the title, it can be about expanding the responsibility of work they are looking after.

How do you decide to carve up product responsibility (say if you have a portfolio of products?)

Fiona had to leave before these last 2 questions.

Layla is a big believer in ensuring the product person has an end to end view. Figuring out how to slice and dice is still a challenging question depending on the product and organisation but she would always attempt to ensure the view is breadth rather than depth.

Should product people be assessed on hard metrics? Aligned with company metrics?

Layla: Honestly? no. Your strength of skills is in areas that are subjective and can’t be measured.

One comment from the audience on this question said it’s tough to align on the company metrics as often they are too short-sighted. A product person is making efforts or work that won’t have an impact on company metrics until 2 years or more down the track.

Thank you to Layla and Fiona for their forthrightness, honesty and humour for this session.

Thanks again to PageUp people for hosting us! Great space and support for our event.

#prodanon – what does a ‘product manager manager’ look like? Thanks @PageUpPeople for hosting! pic.twitter.com/DcWU90Zack

— Peter Lam (@peter8lam) June 16, 2016

Join us for our two events in July – a prep session for speakers for ProductCamp and for a chat about financial skills in product mgmt.

While most of us have a fairly long term relationship with our products (as an employee that is!), there are product managers who experience short term product management. They consult in shorter time frames and need to think about what happens after the product goes live and they are not involved anymore.

Suni Stolic, product manager at Cogent, talked about the idea of having a ‘letting it go’ mindset with your product. She admits it isn’t easy!

The analogy Suni used in her talk was about being a mid-wife who ensures the parents are ready to have the baby, they are happy for you to walk away and you are pleased to hear they are doing well – but you have no further responsibility for the rearing of the child.

Via 3 case studies, Suni shared Cogent’s process for building, dealing with product attachment and managing handover including helping an organisation decide on what resources are needed to support the product – and how sometimes they continue to support the product although it’s not quite their baby anymore…

Letting a product go into the world – kickoff #prodanon @product_anon pic.twitter.com/ductL09lYC

— Zinzi Bianca (@zinzibianca) May 19, 2016

Letting Go mindset

Probably all of us have experienced the problem of the never-ending backlog. The backlog may be full of ideas for making it ‘good enough’ in order to get to launch or fixes for the products flaws.

Suni told us it takes quite a bit of discipline to remember this ‘letting go’ mindset and they help encourage their clients to adopt it, as well as keep themselves in check.

From day 1 of a project, Suni works with the client to be open & transparent (in both directions) including sharing all outputs, having only 1 document (not internal vs external) & equal ownership of the decisions & direction. Co-locating is an important factor for success especially during the development phase.

It’s critical to have a customer first mentality for any product but when you, the product manager, aren’t going to be around for long, you need to be sure what you are delivering will work for them.

Things are unpredictable and so you need to be ready to deploy or be done at any time. Especially in the startup world, Cogent have seen clients need to pause the work in order to reassess the viability of the idea, strategy, business model or other. If there’s going to be a pivot, it’s better to wait & not waste money & resources on something that will change. Funding bursts are another reason they may stop & start.

Super proud of our @cogent_co product manager, Suni, last night as she rocked the @product_anon meetup. Rock on! pic.twitter.com/XftA5sPqJc

— Matt Shanks (@astutely) May 20, 2016

Case study 1:

Cogent worked with Monash University on the Eliminate Dengue Fever Challenge.

The team needed better tools for collecting data & their field work as they had outgrown Google Docs.

A mobile site, called Tracker, was built for use in the field & data arrived directly in the lab for analysis. What previously took 2 hours for data entry was able to be completed in 20 minutes and it was immediately available for the people at the lab. The application is still used and there’s been only very minimal support needed since the release.

Case study 2:

Taggd is a social to revenue tool for retail.

After building the tool, they had to help the organisation decide whether or not they had the people internally to manage the product development – or continue to resource with Cogent.

It can be tough to hand over a product when you have been involved from the very beginning. You have to retain the discipline to not get caught in the excitement/insanity of thinking about the product constantly!

Case study 3

Having launched only 3 weeks ago, Six Park is in support mode. They built the product which is an automated, really smart way to build a personalised share portfolio with simple 24/7 reporting.

They had lots of good conversations about the seriousness of a product which deals with people’s money – both building the product & providing customer support.

The first response was to go with a high support model but then you determine there are certain windows of time that the tool is actually being used and true 24/7 support is not required.

One person in our audience raised the idea of learning just “how detrimental every card is”.
The Cogent team have learnt the art of asking Why at every opportunity and ensuring each piece of work (i.e. each card) is tied to a goal for the customer. This is a good reminder for us all as I don’t doubt we all intend to do the same but sometimes things get away from us…

Thank you to Teamsquare for the fabulous space, Cogent for food and drink and Suni for a great talk, looking at product management from a different perspective.

We talked all things roadmaps at the April session of Product Anonymous – we had an intro from our three panellists and then we broke into an activity where all our PM’s in the room gathered to build a roadmap for Deliveroo. We only gave them 20 minutes… it was never long enough but we got some great insights from the groups on the pluses of the good ole’ roadmap and the pitfalls to avoid when organising your roadmap.

Our panellists were Adam Fry from Sportsbet, Chris Duncan from Carsales and Matt Kirkey from Learning Seat.

Excited for @product_anon tonight where I’ll be sitting on a panel discussing #roadmaps, my favourite topic. #prodmgmt

— Chris Duncan (@ChrisDuncz) April 14, 2016

Adam kicked off the session taking us through the positives of a good roadmap – as a communication tool it links the strategic thinking with tactical execution. He suggests it is better to work with the verb “roadmapping” than the “roadmap” as focussing on the artefact loses sight of the purpose. Plus the fact that the artectct is out of date as soon as it hits the printer.

To the plusses:

• Communication: roadmap artefact is an easily digestible summary of all of the thinking and hard work that goes into planning the future of your product. Your vision on a page
• Alignment: puts everyone on the same page about what we are trying to achieve, how we will go about it and roughly in what order. Helps give focus to teams involved in the success of the product (delivery, sales, marketing, etc)
• Buy-in: vehicle for taking stakeholders on the product journey, giving them context and allowing input to the product direction. Connects the day to day with the bigger picture
• Sales tool: in some cases (e.g. B2B) can give customer confidence that there is commitment and a future vision for the thing they are buying into today

Things to watch out for, Adam warns, are the expectations set by a roadmap, the potential curve balls that occur that should change the plan (CEO, competitor, etc.) and ensuring teams remain aligned is where it can all go horribly wrong.

Expectations

• Out of date the minute that powerpoint slide hits the printer. It is particularly out of date on longer time horizons. When stakeholders confuse your intent with a commitment you are headed for disappointment. This is why the roadmapping process is so important, and should be continuous. Aim for minimal surprises!
• A one size fits all approach is limiting. Like any form of communication you need to tailor the message to your audience. If it’s your delivery teams you might be more specific about details and dates, if it’s marketing maybe more on the story and problems you’re solving, if it’s investors or execs maybe more on the vision and outcomes, and for a customer more focused on their specific needs
• Everyone ‘thinks’ they understand it. The artefact is inherently high level and without proper context everyone will take away their own interpretation of what a line item is and why we’re doing it. Be as descriptive as possible but always offer the accompanying context for your roadmap

Curveballs

• Surprises will happen… competitor movements, dependencies failing, regulatory changes, technology advancements, pet projects
• Try to leave yourself some room to accommodate these, but more importantly keep track of what competitors are doing, watch tech announcements, stay in close contact with your stakeholders and feed facts into the roadmapping process to minimise impacts

Alignment

• Everything on roadmap should have a reason for being there that aligns to the strategy. It’s basically a view of how you are investing the company’s resources over time so you want to keep it focused, relevant and valuable
• Need to be aligned to the realities & constraints of your organisation or your roadmap is a work of fantasy… can the delivery team actually build this, does the technology strategy take things in a completely different direction, can marketing and sales drive the idea in market and does launch timing fit with the bigger story, are budgets and people available when you need them
• Believing you own the roadmap. You are probably 100% accountable for it, and will be the go-to person when somebody’s heart is broken because their idea never makes it on, but the roadmap should represent a collective approach by the wider business. The product can’t win in isolation of marketing, sales, delivery, support etc.

Chris took us through some tools suggestions and the collaborative approach he takes to building a roadmap. He told his story having learnt from the painful experience of NOT doing this when he first became a product manager and shared his wise words. His preferences were for the roadmap to tell a story – so ensures that his version include where you are coming from not just where we are going. He has tried a bunch of tools too, but has made the mistake of letting the tools limit the options or that it just takes too long to update so the document beings to mould as it hasn’t been updated recently enough or the format doesn’t work for your audience.

How to get ready to collaborate on your roadmap: 

• Establish your targets before hand, as this can be a time consuming process. This should be worked on with the stakeholders of your business (but remember… you’re defining targets, not how to get there).
• Get your team all together in one room, and explain what your targets are and why you’re striving to achieve them. The team may also have some targets they’d like to achieve, so keep this in mind.
• Together, start brainstorming ways to achieve these targets. It’s a good idea to have some ideas pre-prepared to get the ball rolling if the group gets stuck.
• Properly consider the ideas that are raised by the team. If you’re only there because you feel like you have to be, and you have no intention of using their ideas, you might as well not be there.
• Once you’ve collected the ideas, it’s time for you to go away and do your research. Try to find a way to measure the value these ideas will contribute to your goals. From here, you can begin to construct your roadmap.
• After preparing your roadmap, show your team first. They’re the ones that are going to make your plan a reality.

Lastly, we asked Matt to give us a the devil’s advocate point of view. Is this roadmap really all worth it? Matt suggested roadmaps are a terrible idea and has so many disclaimers on his he wonders if there is any point in having one at all. The other side to this is that the roadmap can become a crutch for a lack of communication in the organsiation – “it was on the roadmap” is a common way to look like you are doing your job because it ended up on an artefact, a slide etc. but is not the case if you haven’t shared it with people and ensured the plan has been heard and understood! [editor note: Matt did me a big favour and played the devil’s advocate for the panel session, during Q&A he ‘fessed up to loving the roadmap and finding it an essential tool in his organisation].

Matt echoes Chris’ points around collaboration: the exercise of getting everyone together to develop a roadmap is a fantastic activity to perform in a company. Another benefit of the exercise is that it will highlight pain points in your organisation from an operational perspective. Typically communication issues, silo-effects, hierarchical problems and lack of alignment both vertically and horizontally. Ensuring these are addressed will significantly increase the effectiveness and engagement in your organisation.

From here we asked our 60+ product managers to get out of their chairs and have a go at roadmapping together. We asked them to think of the things they hated the most about the map, and the things they loved. Then we gave them some goals and customer feedback about a “fictitious’ food delivery service to see where the discussions would get to as a group on how to approach the process. One team did find they started with timelines… but eventually the wisdom of the group convinced the advocate for dates to switch to more general terms like now, next, later….. 

@product_anon the roadmapping begins… pic.twitter.com/Vw8JSgb7hd

— Steve Bauer (@stevecares) April 14, 2016

Halfway through the activity we threw a curveball at the teams, where the “CEO” pivoted and changed the focus from food to dessert delivery. Many teams were frustrated they had to go back to the drawing board (never felt that before 🙂 ) while some were able to incorporate option into their existing roadmaps with a few tweaks.

Some examples of the roadmaps made during the activity and some of the items listed in the likes and dislikes buckets:

Notes from #prodanon Road Maps friend or foe – a live document, amend to audience, visualise it, prove your worth pic.twitter.com/AWOKSjI1jK

— JonneyYeates7 (@jonneyyeates) April 14, 2016

Some of the insights from the groups:

• make sure you convert vanity metrics to something meaningful
• avoid any timelines on your roadmap – most commonly used groupings were now, next, later.
• The roadmap is a useful artefact to help avoid the (random CEO) change in direction. It is evidence of what was previously agreed so should we not stick to it?
• roadmap favourites included: alignment, customer pain points are covered, facilitates conversation
• roadmap dislikes were: lack of context, it gets stale, change is bad!, others assume it equates to delivery

A great night thanks to Zendesk and their beautiful space. We were well taken care of by our hosts. See you next month for our May event – RSVP now.

If you missed the session – we have video content hosted on Dropbox – it is 45 minutes long.