Author Archives: Steve Cheah

Moving into Product Leadership – April 2022 Wrap

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After working in product for a number of years, and building up your knowledge and experience, what’s the next step? Is it time to move into product leadership? And what does that even look like? 

In April, it was great to be joined by Chris Holmes (VP of Product at IntelligenceBank) to share some of his experiences and perspectives, with lots of familiar (and new) faces in person, and with just as many online, including a couple of special visitors reaching us from as far as Germany and London! 

The Product Leadership Pathway

Senior Product Manager

Generally the first step to leadership is taking on a senior role. This can mean different things in different organisations. From looking after more critical products or projects, with more attention from stakeholders, to possibly having some people under you to manage, such as associate product managers, product managers or business analysts.

Head of Product / Product Director / Vice President of Product

What are the differences in all these titles? There is some localisation, with Head ofs being more popular in Australia, and Vice Presidents being more prevalent in the US. Regardless, as you progress to this level, you’ll typically be managing a team of product managers, and be more responsible for the strategy and its execution. The scale continues to get bigger. 

Chief Product Officer

As you move up, the scope (and scale) continues to change, with more complex products or multiple products. You become completely responsible for end to end growth of the product, covering acquisition, retention, revenue, etc – the full range of AARRR metrics!

Common Myths about moving into Product Leadership

You can use the skills that you use today

Moving into product leadership requires a new set of skills to scale whatever success you may have experienced as an individual contributor. Coaching, developing and letting go of some of the product processes, and allowing your team to occasionally stumble and to find their own way.

You get to make all the calls

Although you may be able to use your seniority to veto decisions and make your own calls, you should proceed with caution. Much of product management is about aligning your stakeholders and to ensure everybody is pulling in the same direction. In the long run, you want to empower your team to be able to make those good decisions.

Product leadership is the next step in your product career

If you enjoy solving product problems, testing different hypotheses, and talking to customers, there is nothing wrong with continuing to be a product manager. You don’t have to move into a leadership position. Is it really something you want to do? The question you need to ask yourself is:

Do you want to manage people, or manage products?

An Average Day in the life of a Product Leader

Communicating with stakeholders

Much of Chris’ time is spent connecting and listening to various stakeholders. From aligning with the leadership team, to hearing from other team members about what’s happening in the market, and managing any escalations and issues that come up. It is extremely important to make sure everybody is on board with the strategy. Ultimately, creating relationships with other areas so you can tackle problems together.

Managing expectations

Part of being a product manager is saying no to people and their ideas. Make sure you get a load of practice, because as you move up, this only continues. Except, now it will commonly be to Head of Departments or even the CEO.

Strategy

Whether you’re setting the strategy, evolving the existing strategy or changing the direction of the strategy, you will need to constantly work with your colleagues to ensure you have alignment. For established products, you’ll need to understand where your product sits, and how you want to approach things.

Coaching and development

Make sure you allocate time to spend time with your team. Time to hear feedback from people they’ve worked with, or others in the team. How they’ve tackled problems. To give some insight, Chris usually spends about 50% of his time coaching his team, from going through the General Assembly content that he used to teach, and now with fortnightly dedicated product time.

 If you need to build up a team, get ready to spend plenty of time in recruitment.

Dealing with something on fire

Like any company, there will be issues that arise. However, as a product leader, your role will evolve from putting them out yourself, to dealing with your team, so that they can resolve things themselves.

This might all seem like the regular stuff for any product manager, however as you become more senior, it becomes more about scale, having a broader viewpoint, and how you deal with things, whether that is shifting resources, changing scope, or helping to get decisions made. Remember to keep a cool head, and act like a leader.

The Essentials of Product Leadership

Being a product advocate

There will always be elements and nuance between different products and industries, and things will never always be set up perfectly. However, the key should be about setting your team and yourself up to be empowered to make the right decisions, and to deliver the most value for customers at scale.

As a product leader, you will have a seat at the table with marketing, sales, customer success and other teams, who will be pushing for certain things, which gives you the opportunity to bring the end-user to the forefront, and advocate for them.

Establishing processes for your team to validate things at different stages of the product development lifecycle, from opportunities and discovery, etc. And then giving them the space to actually do it, and not just moving through an existing roadmap of features that have been prioritised from above.

Communication

Like all product roles, communication is key. 

  • Identifying your stakeholders, and understanding who will need high frequency-high touch, and who will need low frequency-low touch, and working with them to get on the bus.
  • Also another great opportunity to empower your team to connect with other stakeholders (including senior ones), allowing them to gain visibility, and set them on the path to success.
  • Lastly, make time for your team, so you can see how they’re going, where they are struggling and what support they may need.

Know your Market

Recognise where your product sits and who is your addressable market? If you need to move into another market, what does that look like? What are the similarities where you can leverage existing solutions? What are the differences where new strategies will need to be developed?

Understanding your team

What are your team’s strengths and weaknesses? What motivates them? Be sure to carve out time so that you can understand them. Where can you leverage their strengths? Where do they need more development and guidance? A good chance to match their responsibilities and goals back to their KPIs.

Moments of Truth

Define what success looks like

It’s essential that you know how your product is performing, as you will be the one reporting back on how successful your product is. 

Make sure your team knows what success looks like. Set it up together with them, so that when decisions are made, it can be linked back to success.

Sometimes, with established products, there may be an abundance of data available. However, if they are not driving any decisions, you may need to go back to basics:

  • Define the core feature and actions. 
  • Do some historical analysis and overlay them with metrics such as Customer Success, CSAT, NPS, etc.
  • Baseline – if you don’t know where you are today, how can you measure any change?

Culture

It is not uncommon to find companies that are stuck in the build trap – who only focus on delivery and not much else. These companies with a poor product-practice can be difficult to change. They may be supportive at first, but it takes time, and constant reinforcement to show the value of product thinking. 

Talk to some customers. Showcase the findings. Bring people into the process, and get them hooked on the insights. 

If you’re going to move something into development for a few months, and spend so much time and effort, it really is worth taking some time to sort out the basics first, validating customer desire, and that the solutions will make a difference.

Setting Up your Team (and yourself) for Success

  • Set clear goal and objectives;
  • Process and systems;
  • Make time for coaching and development;
  • Prioritise ruthlessly; and
  • Get out of the way.

Lessons Learnt

Delivery can be one of the hardest items to control when moving into product leadership.

  • Use your influence to change the direction of the product.
  • As you scale, there is usually a (false) expectation to deliver faster.
  • When faced with time pressures to deliver, you can consider changing resourcing, or scope.
  • Consider how you will disseminate information to stakeholders. Create different rituals to bring people into the tent, and involve your team to help spread the load. This will also help remove yourself as a bottleneck for information and future updates.

Spend time with customers. 

  • Just because you move into a product leadership position, doesn’t mean you should stop hearing from your customers directly. 
  • Reserve time to listen to your customers, so you can understand how they are using the product. What do you really like about the product? What are the gaps?
  • Bring a Product Manager, so you are not listening to feedback in isolation.

Empower your team

  • Create a safe space (with appropriate guardrails) for your team to try things and learn. 
  • Have regular check-ins, so you can hear feedback from them, or their stakeholders.
  • Get them to present to others and senior leaders, so they can craft their style, and also build their credibility.

Don’t try to change everything at once (or by yourself).

  • Just like a product, there are an endless number of things you can do or change. 
  • Develop a strategy and be realistic of what you can achieve.
  • Where are you now, where do you want to get to, and what are the steps to take to get there?
  • Don’t just start trying to fix everything, and burn yourself out.

Get help!

  • It can be overwhelming when you are new to the role, with large amounts of information to learn, and stakeholders approaching from all directions.
  • Network with other product people and leaders, and see how they approach things.
  • Get a product mentor for advice.

Planning the Move into a Leadership Role

  • Look for opportunities for growth in your current role.
  • Act like a leader.
  • Be comfortable with uncertainty.

About our Speaker

Chris Holmes is a digital delivery and product specialist with over 10 years experience launching and managing products for companies including Jetstar, SWEAT and Origin Energy. Chris has a strong passion for customer experience and driving change through technology, and central to his product management philosophy is a focus on ensuring collaboration to deliver results.

Chris is now VP of Product at IntelligenceBank, a marketing operations SaaS platform that delivers applications for management of digital assets, creative approvals and compliance, marketing project management and creative distribution.

Further resources

Thank You

Thank you again to Chris Holmes for sharing some of his experience and insights, to Nosh for helping to organise, to Aaron and PageUp for hosting, and to our Zoom sponsor A Cloud Guru (Pluralsight).

Teaching Product Teams to Fish for Themselves – March 2023 Wrap

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For our March session of Product Anonymous, we were fortunate to be joined by Amir Ansari, Global Head of Product Design at Iress, to share some of his experiences with raising design maturity and capability in his organisations, and it may not be how you would initially think.

Appreciation of Product Design

Over recent years, many more companies have started to appreciate the value of product and design. And as an industry, we’ve seen a bit of an explosion in growth. Many companies have bolstered their design teams, and transformed the way they work. 

  • Atlassian grew 1600% or 16x in 4 years (6 to 106 designers)
  • Coles grew 550% or 5.5x in 1 year (10 to 65 designers)

But how many designers are enough?

Is it even about the number of designers? Or more about the ratio of designers to developers?

So what’s the best path for designing and building better products? Is it to hire a bunch more designers, and get the ratio down? Some implications of this approach may be your increase in overhead, and the need to change your operating model, which is not necessarily a terrible thing. However, surely there’s a more scalable way to grow.

In fact, according to a Nielsen Norman Group article, the typical ratio alone does not ensure greater organisational impact, better designs, or more usable products.

The Challenge – How might we Improve Design Maturity…

When we talk about Design Maturity, we’re talking about:

  • Product Design
  • Innovation
  • Human Centred Design
  • User Experience
  • UI design
  • Visual Design
  • Service Design

Back to that designer to developer ratio. For Iress, the ratio is 1:35. Or 1 designer working across 5 squads. That’s 14 design practitioners, grown over 20 years, covering 120 products. When it comes to design, Iress still falls short of a minimum acceptable amount of practitioners.  

An assessment against NNgroup’s stages of UX maturity would be between 1 and 2, with obvious aspiration to move towards a 6.

So therein lies the challenge – how might we improve the design maturity, without unrealistically increasing UX headcount.

Guiding Principles

As the old adage goes, If you give somebody a fish, you feed them for a day. But if you teach somebody to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. 

The same goes for design – to increase design maturity, don’t just rush to increase design headcount.

Over the past 15 years, one of Amir’s fundamental principles has been to democratise the craft of design – to teach and empower everybody within the organisation to practise design, from customer research, to experimentation, validation and much more.

Ensure everybody has the confidence and is empowered to talk about design. Talk about the product. Talk about the customer. Talk about the end user.

Designers are facilitators of the design process. Not owners of the design. 

Everybody else in the room, from Business Analysts, Quality Assurance, Engineers, Product Owner and Product Managers all have a perspective and opinions too. Use the right toolkits to validate those opinions.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”

Maya Angelou – American Philosopher

Nobody can be an expert straight away. Mastery comes with practice. So continue to practise and build that muscle.

Don’t start by putting slide decks together to pitch for why design should be more valued, or why you hire more designers. Rather, get out there with the clients, and start doing design work, and showing value. Use that newly created value as the enticement to invest more in design.

Strategies

Educate, coach, train anyone who shows interest, and promote DIY. 

When Amir first started at Iress, there were only 6 designers to support 700 engineers. Way too many to try to teach every single engineer about design practices. So one of the first things they did was to document their playbook, starting with some of their most common human-centred design activities that were relevant to Iress. And without jargon, so that non-designers could understand and follow too.

A typical Playbook Topic skeleton could include:

  • What is it?
  • Why should you do it?
  • When should you do it?
  • How to do it?
  • Resources and templates
  • Skill level required
  • Typical duration

This way Business Analysts, Product Managers and others could read the content, reach out for guidance, and give the activity a go.

Following the activity, the design team would debrief them – how did it go? What worked, what didn’t? Try this next time. Essentially, helping team members add another tool to their toolkit.

The design team also tracks the playbook engagement. Who is visiting, and from which disciplines? Which topics are being used? Are some topics being neglected? Do they need to run campaigns or refreshers to get people to re-engage?

Create champions

It’s important to reduce the friction for non-designers to get involved, learn and talk about the design craft. At Iress, they introduced communities, and have created over 25 design-specific slack channels, some around design-related themes (eg, the Iress Design System), others based on region (eg, for Melbourne Product Design Team, or the UX Research Enthusiasts UK channels).

Also, after running design activities, Amir’s team gathers feedback and measures the sentiment of non-designer participants about the process. Was it valuable? Could something be done better? Would you come again? Build interest and iterate the process so that people want to return.

Bake into existing processes

When you’re trying to change the way people work, there is always going to be resistance. Everybody is already overworked. Reduce the barriers. Break up the processes and the craft, and insert smaller portions into existing processes.

Product design principles – agreed and followed

The Design Team (or one of their principals) created a design charter, or a set of principles, that the team could easily and quickly refer to, so regardless of where they were in the design or build cycle, they could check that they were on track. Have they removed their biases? Did they understand what success would look like? And can it be measured? 

Make it a team sport

Design is a team sport. We all work for product companies. We are all responsible for delivering value to the customer through the products we build.

Create demand in product design and UX. 

Show value from the UX craft, so that more people want to join in and share the same

Beware, some of the Traps

The Dunning Kruger Effect

After you’ve coached somebody, and they’ve read a bit of material from your playbook, and even run an activity, there’s a danger that they overestimate their ability. There is a chance that they start to erode the craft of design. 

Constant education and reinforcement is required. 

  • Did you know you only need 5 users for meaningful research? But did you also know you should have asked the user this, and you should do that. 
  • Did you know if you run a design sprint, you need to prepare x, y and z?

If you build it they will come

You cannot assume that just because you’ve taught a group of people once, that they will continue. Everybody has their own work to do, and their own agendas. Again, constant education and reinforcement.

Thank you

Thank you so much to Amir for sharing his insights; our volunteers – Gwen, Nosh, Sakthee and Steve; and our event host – SEEK.

Further reading and resources

Some resources mentioned during the session include:

Level Up with a Bespoke Product Management Capability Framework – Feb 2023 Wrap

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Photo courtesy of Yau Min

When Aaron Hardy first moved into a product leader role at PageUp, he needed to take stock of the situation, and work out where to focus his efforts first. Were there changes to make to the product? Did they have an adequate strategy to guide them? Or should he begin with his team?

After speaking with his new team, one area Aaron identified as lacking was a capability framework or career ladder. How were the team to know how they were performing? What steps would they need to take to move to the next level?

The team had already been through multiple restructures, with various leaders coming and going. And with that, each time the team would inevitably end up having to explain what they did, what value they brought, and justify why they were needed on the team. Would he put them through that all again?

Taking inspiration from Ben Horowitz (and Jim Barksdale) Aaron decided to start with his people.

"We take care of people, the products, and the profits - in that order" Ben Horowitz.

Step 1: Researching Capability Frameworks 

Before jumping straight in to create his own capability map, Aaron researched the existing frameworks already available. And there were plenty out there. However, none of them quite fit what he was looking for. 

  • Intercom’s framework has been shared quite extensively, and does a great job to show how to level up as a product manager. However, they have a very different business model, making it difficult to apply to PageUp.
  • The Association of Product Professionals had a good structure, demonstrating external (market) vs internal (operational) aspects. However, it was a little too heavy for what they needed. Aaron needed something simpler for his team to use.
  • Pragmatic Marketing Framework: Looking outside of direct product management, Pragmatic gives a good visual of broad capabilities. It also helps you evaluate what you’re doing and what you’re not. Then giving you the opportunity to assess if you think those gaps are important.

Aaron wanted to find something that was relevant to the way they did product. Something that his people could relate to, and use in their day to day activities.

Many different frameworks, from Pragmatic Marketing, Intercom, Ravi Mehta, the Association of Product Professionals, and more.

Step 2: Product Mastery Levels

After having a good view of the different skills needed, the other side of a capability framework is how many levels you need. Where is your company at, and what’s right for them? 

Also, it has become more common for companies to recognise and support different career tracks for:

  • individual contribution; and 
  • people leadership.

Wherever you land, remember – it’s for a point in time. As you grow and mature, you may need to extend the framework in the future.

Individual contributor career track: Associate PM > PM > Senior PM > Principal PM People Leadership career track: Senior PM > Group PM, VP of Product

You should also consider the different types of product work, from:

  • Feature Work
  • Growth Work
  • Scaling Work
  • Product Market Fit Expansion.

And the different possible paths into product. 

Beyond the obvious Product Owners or other product adjacent roles, some other sources to grow your talent pool could be from support, operations, consulting, marketing, psychology, research, entrepreneurs, and many more.

Step 3: Making it Bespoke

The next stage is to try to pull it all together:

  • Mapping out all the skills;
  • Removing the irrelevant ones;
  • Finding the duplicates; and
  • Ranking what is important.

Hot tip: Making things visual can make them easier to understand.

Excel sheet with multiple crying emojis.
Cleaner visual representation of frameworks with colour coded sticky notes.

However, then comes the hard part:

Mapping to your own framework:

  • Writing descriptions for each capability. This will eventually be incorporated into Position Descriptions, so some things to consider would be:
    • What is expected at each mastery level? 
    • How are the different mastery levels mapped to different roles? 
    • How would people demonstrate their capability? 

Socialising:

  • How does your capability matrix align with other disciplines you partner with (eg, UX)? It’s good to gather feedback and support from your peers, senior team members; partners and possibly even senior leaders.

Input from the team:

  • You can also include the team. Have them help with the descriptions and differentiators. Rank the importance of each capability. Get them involved so they can contribute and shape the result, making it easier to create buy-in.

Ways to Level Up

Once you have your shiny new capability framework, it can help provide clear guidance for the team of what’s needed to reach the next level and they can do one of many self-assessments available online. 

But how can they actually level up?

There are plenty of methods are your disposal:

  • Formal training or courses – to either learn new skills, or revalidate existing skill levels;
  • Observation – following product leaders on social media;
  • Informal / on the job training;
  • Coaching and mentoring; and
  • Meetup groups.

Thank you

Thank you to Aaron for sharing his journey; our volunteers on the night, Yau, Yasha, Sakthee and Steve; and our event hosts Propel Ventures.

Slides and Additional Resources

Frameworks

Assessment tools

Additional reading

Reece’s Secret Sauce to Product Success – October 2022 Wrap

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How well do you really know your customers?

Do you have to reference a user testing report to try to understand their needs?

When you are designing and building solutions, how easy is it to test your assumptions?

Do you need to kick off a testing with a 3-4 week lead time, to recruit, book and run sessions?

Could there be another way?

The folk at reecetech thought so. 

Immersion, Immersion, Immersion – Branch Time

Starting from their grad program, and soon proliferating throughout the rest of their teams, new Reece employees are given an induction like no other. They are sent to one of the 644 Australian branches to immerse themselves in the business.

It’s back to apprentice mode, as you get first hand experience of the customer sites. The 7am morning rush, helping setup customers, picking and packing orders which come in from all areas (overnight orders, phone, app and in-person), receiving stock, organising deliveries,  reporting back when things don’t go quite right. And seeing Reece’s customer obsession service standard for yourself.

Not just for research purposes, or standing on the sidelines taking notes. But by working side by side with the branch staff, serving customers. 

Everyone has done Branch Time. 

Even the CEO.

How long can vary for different areas, depending on their needs. But the standard stint for a Product Manager is around 6 weeks.

The Pros and… More Pros

But sending every new hire to Branch Time is a serious commitment – in both time and dollars. 

So what’s the upside?

Firstly, accelerating your understanding of the business, and building a strong foundation to make decisions in the future. This is not always tangible or measurable by reporting, but what better way to fast-track your decision making capability?

Also, forming connections and relationships with the branches, and understanding the mayhem of retail. You even get direct experience with using Reece’s internal systems, such as TRS. You always have access to feedback, as you’re constantly in contact with branches. 

And, of course, establishing deep empathy with your customers, the majority who are tradies. Understanding and becoming intimate with their customer problems, so you can ensure the right solutions are developed to deliver the right outcomes. Knowing their world also enables you to contribute and create meaningful OKRs (targets). 

But it doesn’t stop there: 

  • Branch managers and staff also benefit from building relationships with somebody in head office.
  • After Branch Time, you have ongoing access to the branch network, to continue to foster relationships, to interview or to validate ideas and concepts with staff or customers. 
  • New team members also go through the same Branch Time experience, so there is a shared understanding and common ground established.

Thank you

Thank you again to Cameron Rogers and Nikki Pecora from reecetech for sharing, to our volunteers (Nosh Darbari, Yau Hui Min, Steve Bauer) and to our lovely hosts Lexicon and A Cloud Guru.

Ask Me Anything with a Panel of Product Leaders – September 2022 Wrap

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If you could get access to a bunch of Product Leaders for one night, what would you ask them? 

Well, in September, we did just that!

We caught up with Tom Williamson (Common Code), Pearly Yee (Brainmates) and Brendan Marsh (Organa) for a special Ask Me Anything session.

What was your most embarrassing moment in product?

Pearly: I haven’t had many embarrassing moments… When you galvanise the team towards a direction. You’re bold, and push the boundaries. But then after you launch, things don’t work out as planned, and you need to acknowledge the fact with the team, and then try to pull them in a different direction. It can definitely feel embarrassing in the moment, but you also learn a lot from it too.

Tom: Early in his career, while working at a startup, Tom was encouraged by his Head of Experience to hit the street and interview people. After buying around $300 of prepaid coffees from a local cafe, and approaching people with a coffee for their thoughts, people were so preoccupied and busy, Tom couldn’t even give away the coffee cards.

Brendan: Similar to Tom, an early experience for Brendan involved canvassing a local university to survey students about healthy habits… for Breast Cancer Awareness week. 

Advice for Product Managers early in their career to accelerate their learning?

Tom: There is no perfect way to do product. Holding a (‘right’ way to do product) view usually does not lead to a productive outcome, and instead can prove divisive with your team and/or management. As an alternative, focus on how you can help the company fill the gaps that it may have.

Pearly: You can also create a capability map, plotting competencies from tactical to strategic, and skills from technical to sales and marketing. Then you can assess where you are, and identify which areas need development. 

Brendan: Find a mentor who can help you identify where you need to grow.

When should you seek a mentor, and what should you look for?

Liz: As soon as you start in product!

Brendan: Or even before you get into product. 

Tom: Tom approaches mentorship differently, more transactional rather than a relationship. He has around 15 mentors, who have different experiences and expertise. So depending on what specific advice Tom is after, he will access his most appropriate mentor. 

Are certifications such as CSPO or Pragmatic important?

Pearly & Tom: Can they make you better? Sure, they can help. Especially for interviews. However, are they essential? Probably not. They shouldn’t be definitive. They may, however become the new benchmark in future.

Tom: For individuals, you can mash up information from a variety of sources to get what’s needed. From a corporate (or team) perspective, it can also help to form a common language. 

Brendan: The less dogmatic about how you are certified, the better. If a recruiter has agile or product certification as requirements, then that in itself may be a red flag, as they may value the certification so much. 

What’s a reasonable 90 day plan for a Product Manager who just joined your team?

Pearly: It usually takes substantial time (eg, 6-12 months) before getting a return from a new product manager. You shouldn’t rush in to make changes. Spend the first month observing, and formulating your plans. Don’t fall into the trap of making decisions without any information.

Tom: The best product people are those who have good relationships with their co-workers, as there will be plenty of communication and negotiation ahead. So meet your co-workers.

Also, get closer to the product. Use the product. Sit in with the customer service team. Use the systems that your support team are using. 

Brendan: When you start a new product role, begin with a fact finding mission. What data is available. What are the strategies?

How do you convince senior execs or founders that not everything needs to be in JIRA?

Pearly: I had previously been really strong about not believing in templates. It’s not about templates, but the thinking behind it.

When people don’t know how to communicate effectively with each other, sometimes tooling can reduce collaboration, eg, I work on my tickets, and reassign them instead of communicating. However, standardisation can help create a shared understanding and common language.

Tom: Using Jira, and not fighting the structure can also be freeing. Instead of spending your energy on continuously striving for the perfect template, you can instead focus on actually making better software. 

Brendan: As an agile coach, I do not want people to blindly use the tool or follow a process, without understanding the intent behind it. 

When was a time you killed a product or initiative?

Brendan: Sometimes the strategy evolves, and products (which may have been loved) are no longer aligned with the new direction. Decommissioning can be necessary, and also freeing. It definitely made our developers happier, so they had one less thing to support. 

Tom: At one client, we explored a bill scanning feature – scan a bill, use OCR to read the details, and feed into a rules based engine to derive a comparison. What started as a two week block of development quickly became 6 months of trying to get it to work. But it never worked. There was 0% conversion. It was not only about the time and money spent on this feature, but also the opportunity cost of all the things we were not building, because we were focused on this feature. 

Pearly: When I worked in publishing, one of our products, the Business Review Weekly, was well regarded, however not making any money so we had to decommission the brand and product and created a new Leadership Section to the AFR. It was a great experience because of the amount of work required to decommission such a legacy. 

Why did you get into consulting?

Tom: For me it was about the scope of work, and exposure to so many different companies and industries. Lots of other varieties.

Pearly: I like change, and a way to learn different things. I have the opportunity to observe how product is practised in different ways across different organisations, but also see similar problems.

Brendan: Like the others have mentioned, the variety. But also, personally, it was a lifestyle choice. Being a contractor or permanent employee can sometimes be all encompassing. Whereas consulting allows the freedom to go off the grid and volunteer for a week. 

Where do you see the future of Product Management in 10-15 years?

Brendan: Hopefully there will be much more empowerment. What’s the point of people spending so much time and energy to get close to the problems, and get insights, but are then not empowered to make the decisions? They need to be trusted and empowered to make the decisions.

Pearly: Product Management will become more ingrained at the upper levels. More people will be able to recognise what good product management looks like, and understand the value of being product-led.

Thank you

Thank you to our panellists Tom, Brendan and Pearly for sharing their time and wisdom; to our volunteers, Nosh Darbari and Yau Hui Min; to our host MYOB and our zoom sponsor A Cloud Guru (Pluralsight).

How to Save The Planet, One Feature at a Time – August 2022 Wrap

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With the ever increasing focus on Environmental Social Governance (ESG), organisations are tasked with developing strategies to create long-term and sustainable value. Rarely a simple task in our rapidly changing world, needing to balance a broad range of stakeholders, from employees and customers to investors, suppliers, community groups, and our societal and environmental obligations at large.

In August, we teamed up with the Victorian Cleantech Cluster to hear from Jeremy Stimson (Planet Innovation) and Evannah Jayne (Terran Industries) to explore how to save the planet, one feature at a time.

The Challenge

Extending beyond ‘because it is the right thing to do for our environment and planet’, there are various commercial risks for not taking ESG seriously:

  • Growing focus on the Environmental part of ESG policy;
  • Supply chain volatility;
  • Evolving legislation;
  • Investor priorities;
  • Attracting talent; and
  • Brand association.

But remember, where there are risks, there are also opportunities, where you can use these attributes to differentiate yourself from the rest of the market.

Where to start?

The transition to sustainability can feel overwhelming at first. The task can seem insurmountable. So where should you start?

  • Begin with monitoring and tracking your emissions.

There are many software options available for emissions monitoring, data collection, and sustainability reporting. Many can also help in strategic planning and decision-making by analysing historical data to provide insights and predict the future. 

  • Make it bite size. 

Like most things, break down the problem. Begin with small steps to build some momentum. Canvas opinions from others, and find internal partners to gain support, working your way up the chain (ie, don’t go straight to the CEO).

  • Work with your timelines.

There can be many challenges in a corporate setting, such as having contracts with existing suppliers. But rather than fight against the system, look for a path of less resistance. When is the contract due to expire? A month before the expiry date, conduct a review for alternative options.

  • Keep climbing the ladder.

Change won’t happen overnight. As you start to make some progress, keep going. There is always more than can be done.

You don’t have to work on a climate tech product to make a difference with the environment.

Additional Overlooked Opportunities

There are many opportunities to improve, and move towards a circular economy. Try not to only look at the obvious things. Widen your view and look beyond what is just in front of you.

A few things to consider:

  • Data storage: storing information, emails and backups all require servers and the energy to power them. Is it time for that retention policy to be reviewed?
  • Reverse logistics: Instead of products ending up in landfill, can they be re-acquired, refurbished, and resold? Not only does this reduce our waste, but it can also generate an additional revenue stream.
  • Waste management: Companies spend money to deal with their waste. However, reducing the amount of waste also provides an opportunity to alleviate that cost.

Additional resources

Thank you 

Thank you to Jeremy Stimson and Evannah Jayne for sharing with us; and to our event partner, Victorian Cleantech Cluster; and to Green Hat Solutions, Terran Industries and Planet Innovation for supporting the event; and to our volunteers Nosh Darbari, Steve Bauer, Yasha Lim; and to Stone & Chalk for hosting us in their lovely new office.

Product Management Career Development Workshop – July 2022 Wrap

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How long have you worked in product? 

And in what capacity? 

As a Business or Product Analyst? Product Owner? Or Product Manager?

We all start from different places, and our paths for growth are varied. 

In July, Adam Wensor, Craig Brown and the crew from EverestEngineering joined us to run an interactive Career Development Workshop, where we co-created a development framework. 

The challenge

For many of us, we stumbled our way into product. Our early days spent trying to work out what we’re supposed to be doing. Slowly building in some reps, and some muscle over time. Eventually feeling more comfortable with the work. 

But how can we objectively assess ourselves?

And what sort of things should we work on to improve, and level up?

How might we build a roadmap for ourselves?

Product Management Competencies

What are the core competencies for product management? 

This can be workshopped with your team. Alternatively, we leveraged a few experts in the field:

  • Roman Pilcher;
  • Marty Cagan’s Silicon Valley Product Group; and
  • John Cutler

Next, we grouped the competencies into themes.

Then, we considered what different levels of mastery may look like?

Like many workshops, it was as much about the journey rather than the destination. However, with a broad mix of tenure in the room, it was a great opportunity to reflect how things can feel earlier on in our careers, and to gain some insights from those who may have more experience.

Thank you 

Thank you again to Adam Wensor, Craig Brown and the team at EverestEngineering for running the workshop and hosting the evening, and to our volunteers, Nosh Darbari and Yau Hui Min for helping on the night.

Resources and Additional Reading:

Products Don’t Last Forever – June 2022 Wrap

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In product, much of our time involves understanding our customer needs, and becoming deeply intimate with their problems, so that we can build innovative and sustainable solutions. But what happens when your solution is no longer hitting the mark, and it’s time to retire them? In June, Ana Rowe from Thoughtworks joined us to share some industry examples, as well as her own experiences and with sunsetting different products.

Why sunset your product?

Do we know what stage our product is in? Are we still in the growth stage? Have we started to decline? It’s important to appreciate where our product sits within the product lifecycle, so that we can make the appropriate plans. However, as product people, we’re often optimistic, which can sometimes cloud our judgement.  We often don’t recognise (or accept) where we are. 

If we understand where we are in the Product Lifecycle, then it can make it easier to decide which way we go.

When to sunset your product?

There are many reasons why you may need to sunset your product, including: 

  • Low performing products: When Netflix developed Netflix Friends, they set a 20% growth target as an indication of success. However, over what time period? Do you spend a month, a quarter, a year before you change direction? 
  • Change in needs: Over time, both the environment and our customer’s needs will evolve. What was once cutting edge may no longer be hitting the mark, or possibly superseded or incorporated into other solutions, like the Apple iPod. Is it still a problem (or the right problem) that needs to be solved? 
  • Unsustainable: Is our product too expensive to maintain? Perhaps the margins are too small, or even negative, which we cannot support in the long term. Revolv customers were frustrated when they found themselves on the other end of this equation after Revolv was acquired by Nest (a Google/Alphabet company) and then subsequently shut down about 18 months later. 
  • Diluting your core value prop: Home Ideas (REA) started out as an idea during an internal hackathon. Unfortunately, it always remained an idea, without a true owner, and never quite aligning to the company strategy. 
  • Changes in strategic direction: When A Cloud Guru acquired Linux Academy, they decided to migrate their new customers and consolidate them onto their existing platform, which also meant stopping support and sunsetting the existing Linux Academy mobile app.

How to sunset your product

Once you’ve made the decision to decommission your product, what next? 

Ana shared some of the challenges they experienced with Linux Academy. As an education and training platform, customers enrolled in courses to learn about a variety of topics, often in preparation for formal assessments or certifications, some of which were still part way through that process. Many had invested significant time on the platform, which also maintained their learning history. Furthermore, the Linux customers liked the platform they had joined and were using. 

Some other questions that needed to be addressed:

  • How do the products compare? 
  • Should both platforms be maintained?
  • Are the pricing strategies aligned?

So it was a difficult decision to migrate all these users to the core A Cloud Guru platform, and to eventually retire the existing Linux Academy mobile app. 

However, migration plans can also take significant time to develop.

Meanwhile, this change in priorities meant no more development on the old app, therefore no more addressing bugs, which caused the app store rating to tank. This also created a flow on effect with support issues raised by customers. 

Also, customers couldn’t just sign up to A Cloud Guru. They needed to wait for their profile to be migrated to allow for the learning history to be transferred.

What were the key learnings?

  • Planned well… for the happy path;
  • Didn’t take customers on our journey;
  • Communication was confusing and sometimes conflicting;
  • Lack of Tripwire metrics, to get early indication that things were not going as planned.
  • Slow to act.

If you find yourself needing to sunset a product in future, you may want to consider a Go From Market approach:

  • Analysis
  • Decide
  • Set milestones
  • Pre-sunset comms
  • Sunset
  • Support
https://twitter.com/brianborowsky/status/1540135962386509825

Thank you

Thank you to Ana Rowe for sharing; our volunteers (Nosh Darbari, Yau Hui Min, Steve Bauer) for helping on the night; to Kogan.com for hosting and to our zoom sponsor Pluralsight / A Cloud Guru.

Resources and Slides

AMA: Hiring in Product and the Great Resignation – March 2022 Wrap

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As the environment continues to evolve, so does Product Anonymous, with our first hybrid event. 

Over the past couple of years, many companies had to go into survival mode: pivot business models, apply recruitment freezes and even let people go. However, as the environment began to improve, and business confidence started to return, the (jobs) market reopened, with a lot of companies beginning to recruit again, seemingly all at the same time. 

We were joined by Megan McDonald (Head of Product and Experience Design, World Vision Australia), James O’Reilly (Talent Partner, PaperCut Software) and Shiyu Zhu (Group Product Manager, Zendesk) for an Ask Me Anything panel session, talking about the state of recruitment and hiring, and the great resignation.

How has recruitment changed?

With so many other opportunities being so visible, the power dynamic between the candidate and recruiter has changed, and candidates know it. 

Megan: Recruiters and hirers are now much more in sales pitch mode – ‘why you should want to work for us?’

James: It’s important to try to differentiate, and showcase the benefits of joining your company. 

Megan: In the past, when working with both internal Talent Partners and external recruiters, both would often come back with many of the same candidates. Now, not so much. 

How has the recruitment process changed?

James: Because Product Management is a mix of art and science, it can be difficult for a recruiter to recognise what makes a good product manager. Therefore it is as important as ever for Talent Partners and Recruiters to work closely with the hirers (ie, Internal Product Managers) to really understand their must haves. In the current environment, the nice to haves have become a luxury.

The candidate experience has also become incredibly important, which includes being responsive to queries, and the speed to progress through the process.

Shiyu: Zendesk adapted their approach. Rather than individual interviews with engineering, product, design and a VP, they started to combine some of them. As there was always some crossover, this allowed the to trim some of the fat. 

Also, their take-home assignment became an in-interview case study to help understand how the candidate thinks and approaches business problems. 

Megan: World Vision Australia have taken a more holistic view, not just focussing on recruiting, but extending to the onboarding process. They want to avoid candidates having post-purchase dissonance and regrets about not working somewhere else.

But are compressed interview processes all good? 

James: Can the process be too short? Yes. With engineering, they went down to 3 stages, and some candidates said it was too fast, so they went elsewhere. Have empathy for the candidate, and check in with them around the process. Ensure they have adequate  opportunity to tell you what they can bring, and why they are right for the job. 

Shiyu: To remove people who are just good at interviews, and who may have practised the perfect answer to behavioural questions (such as, describe a time you dealt with conflict), Zendesk use case studies and business examples instead. This way they can get an insight to how the candidate thinks.

How can smaller companies compete with the finances of bigger players?

Shiyu: What is your value prop as an employer? How are you different? What can you offer? It doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary. 

Megan: Consider how you invest in your people. Don’t limit your thinking to just what they need to do a good job, but also how they can grow their career.

Hiring is the easy part, how do you keep the talent you have?

James: There are many different aspects here:

  • Onboarding: set the right expectations of the role.
  • Recruiter handover: during the recruitment process, more than likely, the recruiter will be the one who has spoken to the candidate the most often and knows them best. So handing over any recruitment knowledge to the new manager, such as their motivation and goals, can help set them up for success.
  • Impact: Allow candidates to understand what impact they can make.
  • Exit process: When things don’t work out, the exit process is important, to learn why people are leaving, so you can identify what things may need to be changed. 

Shiyu: A common misconception about a person changing jobs is that they will just be getting more money elsewhere. However, different people have different motivations:

  • Title;
  • Responsibilities;
  • Visibility; or
  • Earning more.

As a manager, give your team members the opportunity to be able to win. Set them up on their winning ways. 

What areas do they want to develop? Have them do a self-assessment, and then start the conversation and create actionable items that they can use to progress. Giving them a goal, how they want to grow, and then continuously revisiting can help them see where’s next. 

Megan: We’ve seen a higher proportion of people moving sideways internally. Attitudes are important, and you don’t necessarily need all the technical skills, those can be learnt.

What advice do you have for applicants?

James: Usually the first touch point will be with somebody in recruitment, and they won’t be able to understand how good you are at Product, as you need a Product Manager to be able to assess that. So, demonstrate to the recruiter how you are good (eg, display you’ve done your research, about the company, the roles, the industry, the products). You can also show in depth thought and knowledge through your cover letter. 

Megan: Ask the smart questions, not just the short term and immediate outputs. 

Shiyu: Some of the attributes that Zendesk looks for include a can-do attitude, the desire to build awesome products, and also a willingness to learn. And it is not just about hard skills, like defining a vision. Soft skills are just as important, like how you structure your responses in a logical manner, so that somebody can follow your thinking.  

With the current market, are lots of short term roles a red flag still?

Shiyu: In San Francisco, job swapping was common. However, maybe a better perspective to apply is, does your current job give you the satisfaction you need, and the room to grow. If you have a history of changing jobs, the recruiter or hirer may ask you about it, so you need to be able to answer it, hopefully with a compelling reason.

James: This has become more common in the current climate because of the abundance of opportunities available. The explanation could be as simple as ‘the market was hot, and you saw an opportunity that unfortunately didn’t pan out’.

Any tips to progress product careers, from product owner to product manager to senior product roles?

Shiyu: Make sure you talk to your manager, don’t expect them to know without you telling them. Work through it together, and look for opportunities. Sometimes those other opportunities may be in other areas of the company.

Also, get involved with Communities of Practice *cough*Product Anonymous*cough*.

Thank you

Thank you again to all our panelists, Megan McDonald, James O’Reilly and Shiyu Zhu for sharing; to Chris Holmes, Michael Lambert and Nosh Darbari for helping on the night, to IntelligenceBank for hosting and to our zoom sponsor Pluralsight / A Cloud Guru.

After Research: Creating Useful & Well-Executed Research Outcomes – February 2022 Wrap

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Following a number of sessions on gathering customer feedback, we were fortunate to be joined by seasoned researcher Jess Nichols to share some insights on the next stage of research – bringing it all together and synthesising your qualitative data, creating reusable and actionable insights and advocating your research across your team. 

Setting up for Success – Do Not Do Research in a Bubble

Research is there to mitigate business risks. 

Therefore, one of the worst outcomes is for your research to be ignored, shelved, or not utilised. 

Alleviating this risk begins before you even start conducting your research. Give some thought to what successful research looks like. Are you trying to drive to specific research outcomes? What is the wider business context? Are there strategies or OKRs that can act as your guardrails? Work with your team to ensure you are solving the right knowledge gaps for them. Having this North star can help to provide clarity in what questions you need to answer with your research.

Synthesising your Data

Once you have collected all your feedback and conducted your interviews, it’s time to collate your research and find the patterns in the data. This is crucial for connecting your data to any desired outcomes. 

Participants will commonly try to contextualise questions with their understanding of the problem or situation. They may apply their own biases to their responses. So you should not take their responses at face value. Understanding, and classifying the data into behaviours (what people do) and attitudinal (what people think) can be beneficial. Try to drill into the responses to find the underlying pain points. 

"What people sat, what people do & what they say they do are entirely different things" - Margaret Mead

You can then form insights from the patterns of behaviours or attitudes.

Some tips for when you analyse your data:

  • There is no single right way to analyse your data. So just start, and pivot along the way.
  • Use your OKRs to guide you.
  • Be comfortable with conflict.

Sharing your Insights

One of the aims of research is to have no surprises at the end. Share as you go. This can help to identify what resonates, what may be controversial and need more care, or what can derail conversations and should be avoided. 

Research also won’t be useful if your teams don’t understand it. Creating stories can be a useful vehicle to deliver insights. Your team is more likely to remember stories that they can connect with, which can make it easier for them to incorporate the customer insights into their work. 

  • Tie the insights back your original research questions;
  • Advocate for your customers’ needs (especially those which may not have been considered by your team in the past);
  • Help your team understand how to action what you’ve learnt about your customers. 
Insights are the sticky stories you want to tell about your customers.

There will always be biases, from both your participants (friendliness, social desirability, habituation) and your own (confirmation bias, cultural bias, halo effect, etc). The main thing is to recognise them and to then try to minimise them. 

Ensure your Research makes an Impact

As well as being the biggest advocate for your research, find and partner with others to help champion and influence behaviours.

A handy way to approach this is by:

  • People: to amplify your learnings. You can start with designers, marketing and product marketers, other product managers and your research community.
  • Processes: to add traceability to your findings. Insert relevant insights into the product development process, through user stories, requirements documents or annotations in designs.
  • Platforms: to store your research for future use. Upload your presentation to your internal wikis. Bring up relevant insights during meetings. Share bite-sized insights over chat.

Your research will not always have a clear or direct impact on a business outcome. Sometimes the result will be more subtle, and change the direction or the way we understand our customers over a longer period of time. Either way, celebrate the impact you make, big or small. 

Successful research involves a level of humility. Not just listening to your research participants, but listening to your internal stakeholders so you can be effective with them using it.

Thanks

Thank you to Jess Nichols for sharing, to our volunteers Nosh and Steve and our event sponsors Pluralsight / A Cloud Guru.

Further Reading and Resources

You can find Jess on LinkedIn, Twitter or her website http://www.jessnichols.com.

Some resources mentioned during the session include: