You don’t build a business, you build people. And then people build the business.

Zig Ziglar

I love this quote. And with 2022 winding down and 2023 on the horizon, the idea of building people is forefront in my mind. As I was thinking about ‘how can we end this year well and get the new one off to a flying start’, an opportunity presented itself. PI Planning for Q12023 was coming upon us, and as my boss so poignantly reminded me … how we execute in Q1 will set the tone for the rest of the year. What better time to bring the team together a day early for an all-day Product Summit.

From an agenda perspective, there were several things on my mind. First, this is a new team. Partially blended together because of internal changes organizationally, partially because we’ve added several new members to the team. One objective was finding a way to accelerate the Form/Norming stages of new team development. The second objective centered on ensuring expectations for the new year were firmly rooted.

It was in preparing for this Product Summit I had an aha moment … where several ideas from this blog began to coalesce into something I hadn’t seen before. And I thought it worth sharing.

Objective 1 – Team Building

I mentioned this was a new team, so I wanted to ensure intentionality around getting the team acquainted with one another. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Form, Storm, Norm, Perform with new teams, I highly encourage you to read a bit more about it (the link is just one sample source on the topic). As you will read, when teams first get together there is a level of excitement and newness and exuberance to make great things happen. This is the FORMING stage. After a while, the halo effect of the newness wears off and when the team realizes there’s actual work to be done, there tends to lose momentum.

So, accelerating the Forming/Storming phase was important to me. And yes, queue the eye roll because I did begin with the obligatory ‘3 questions’ approach. But I found a fun way to make it not so predictable.

• The first two questions were to understand people’s backgrounds a bit … Why did you choose a role in Product … How long have you been in [domain]?
• But for the last question, I had a bit of fun with this Random Question Generator. It was the randomness of the questions that sparked some good discussion and at times, hearty laughter. Just what the doctor ordered!

The second step was to leverage a wonderful tool in the Birkman Assessment for understanding our own tendencies as well as those of our teammates. As a high-level summary, the assessment is

• a non-judgmental profile of your strengths, behaviors, motivations, and interests
• a predictive summary of how individuals and teams approach communication, conflict, and decision making
• a way to help people manage life and work situations to get their motivational needs met and reduces their stress

Across 9 components (one shown below), you get a view of how folks scored and then discuss how best to work with one another. Who are the introverts and extroverts? Who likes to be direct vs. needing lots of context? You can already see the value of discussing the results in the sample below due to the variances in how the team responded. Now imagine this compounded across all 9 components! Really good discussion and excellent way to promote effective team collaboration.

Objective 2 – Expectation Setting

The next part of the agenda would focus on setting appropriate expectations for the team as we embarked on a new year, and there are two perspectives I really wanted to spend time on. The first is Competency related … what is expected of us as a Product team in the organization? And what things should each of us in a Product role be expected to do? The second is Goals related … what is it the company is trying to do in 2023, and how do we contribute?

Competencies

This one was tough because it had to begin with a common understanding of what Product Management is. Where some folks on the team chose the role, some were thrust into it out of necessity (coming from roles such as Support, QA, Sales, Customer Service, etc). So, setting the proper foundation was critical.

Over the years, I have been influenced by many Product Management methodologies/frameworks. I appreciate them all because they all focus on setting a proper foundation for the organization.  To coalesce on the common elements, let’s reverse engineer the problem a bit. From an output perspective, every product has net new customers to pursue (as well as attrition to monitor). But how do you know who to pursue?  Do you understand your customer and/or why you win or lose? Every product needs marketing collateral.  But what story is being told through the collateral … what problem is being solved?  Every product should have a product roadmap. But what feeds the roadmap?

The commonality of the frameworks we as Product Management leaders should focus on is addressing three simple questions:

1. Who am I serving?
2. What do they need/want, and are ready to buy?
3. How can I reach them and persuade them?

This led to a brainstorming exercise where I asked the team to share their thoughts on what they thought the organization expected of us in our roles? The end result was discussing a vast number of the competencies you would find in the frameworks mentioned earlier, or I summarized in my posts on Interpret, Inform, and Influence. Not surprisingly, some areas were discussed/exposed fairly heavily (especially as it pertained to liaising with the development team). In other areas, acknowledgement of tasks like product launch were mostly glossed over.

This pointed to gaps as an organization, so the next step was to ask the team how they think we are doing collectively against those competencies? It was a leading question to be fair because in the several weeks leading up to the Summit, I had surveyed the key stakeholders to quantify some of the anecdotal evidence I had been hearing. The focus was on a subset of the broader framework, and really keyed in on 7 topics: PI Planning, Sprint Planning/Grooming, Requirements/User Stories, Release Notes, Release Demos, Roadmap, and Commercialization/Launch.

7 questions, ~40 recipients, 10 responses … so a ~25% response rate. And as an average, we scored a 5.5 on a satisfaction scale of 1-10. Definitely room for improvement, and as an organization we’ll do the survey again in 6 months to measure improvement. As Aristotle said … knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom … criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

Which led to the second part of the conversation on individual Competencies. I’ve talked about these pretty extensively, so am not going to belabor the point, but these two resources are wonderful for understanding how to approach this and are worth sharing here.

1. Product Management Assessments | Sequent Learning Networks
2. Competencies-of-a-Product-Owner.pdf (agilecockpit.com)

Goals

This part of the conversation started with a discussion around Vision, Execution, Measurement. Let me use a sequence of quotes to explain.

Where there is no vision, the people perish! – Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, quoted this old Proverb in his inauguration speech. This is true for countries, for companies, and essentially everything having organization tied to it. As Product Management leaders, our role is to develop a crystal clear vision of where we are going while at the same time inspiring others to embrace it and help to make it a reality. Success mandates we share the vision with every key stakeholder at every opportunity to ensure clarity, consensus and alignment of goals.

Vision without execution is hallucination. – Thomas Edison

As Product Management leaders, we need to dream big, but we also need to identify the path to success through execution (e.g. – Get Stuff Done!).  This is exactly the reason why Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has two axes for identifying leading companies/products … Completeness of Vision AND Ability to Execute.  The first in and of itself is a great start, but not enough to warrant a leadership position in the market.  There also has to be an Ability to Execute.

The numbers don’t lie. Once you actually know the truth, you can start improving … The numbers don’t lie. The numbers hold you accountable to making real improvements … The numbers don’t lie. The numbers inspire you to make action plans for reaching goals. – Cheryl Bachelder, CEO Popeyes

This thought about measurement comes from her book Dare to Serve and seems pretty straight forward in my mind.  Everything ties back to the numbers (revenue, margin, etc), so make sure you understand the contributions Product Management is making (or not) towards business success.

Tying it all Back Together

As I stated in my post My Take on Good/Bad Product Manager, the ideas originally put forth by Ben Horowitz are, in my opinion, timeless. If you are interested in being a successful leader in product management, this is where you need to start!  And while I’ve summarized the list down to 6, you can see the vision, execution, and measurement elements represented.

So, working backwards from Goals and tying it all back together … what is the vision for where the company is going broadly? How does this translate into the “big rocks” discussed during the budgeting process for the upcoming year? Which product(s) are affected by these big rocks? What is the sequence of work allowing us to solve for them? How will we measure along the way? By the way, having a dashboard is topic we’ll be exploring as a team soon.

But don’t lose sight of the Competencies … what is the organization expecting of us in this role? How are we doing against those expectations? How are we doing against what a Product Manager or Product Owner should be doing? What is the sequence of steps we taking (collectively or individually) to improve? How will we measure?

Ultimately ensuring success is the combination of both of these items!