Winning Hearts and Minds

In my last article I discussed an anti-pattern where companies embarking on a transformation to the product model make the mistake of trying to run that transformation like a large project, instead of employing the product model to move to the product model.  Many people reached out to me sharing that their company had fallen into the same trap, and suffered the same consequences.

In this article, I’d like to share a positive pattern.  

I first heard this framing of transformation from one of my SVPG Partners, Christian Idiodi, and it immediately resonated with me, and I’ve been using this in my discussions with senior leaders since.

When you boil it all down, a successful transformation is about the product organization earning the trust of the rest of the company, and it really is a race to win the hearts and minds of the executive team and stakeholders before they lose confidence or otherwise decide this isn’t going to work.

Now some people believe that the executive team ought to just extend that trust in advance, at least until proven otherwise.  In practice that’s not how most companies work.  The senior leaders are there to protect the assets of the company, and while most are willing to take calculated risks, they aren’t willing to give a blank check.

So how exactly do you win the hearts and minds?

This is the positive pattern I see:

– product leaders take responsibility for ensuring strong and capable product teams

The primary responsibility of the product leaders (the managers of product managers, product designers, and engineers) is to staff and coach their people to be able to do the job that is necessary.  This is the key to everything that follows, and it’s often the one that gets the least attention. But good luck trying to coach if that manager is not expert in the area he or she is managing.  If the manager does not have this expertise, this needs to be fixed one way or another.  This is where a product leadership coach can make all the difference.  But either way, the managers need to make this coaching their top priority.  Especially for those of you managing product managers, realize that you will be judged by your stakeholders and senior executives by your weakest people.

– product teams have product managers that understand business, data and customers

When moving from delivery teams or feature teams, the largest and most visible difference is having a product manager that has a good understanding of the business, the data and the customers.  Without this person, the product team might be empowered, but they are not equipped to succeed.  Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can just retitle your product owners or feature team product managers and think you’re going to get any sort of real business results.

– product teams can solve problems in ways customers love yet work for business

The product leaders coach the people on the product teams, and they identify the most important problems to solve, but the actual work of solving those problems (product discovery) and delivering those solutions to customers (product delivery) falls on the product teams.  This is where value is created, and where innovation happens.  The challenge is to solve for both the customers and the business (to be clear, this means solving for the constraints of every critical stakeholder).  Please don’t make the mistake of focusing only on your customer and ignoring the very real constraints of your business (legal, compliance, marketing, sales, financial, etc.).

– product teams consistently deliver on high-integrity commitments

In every business there will be occasions when the product team will need to commit to a specific deliverable at a specific time.  Teams that try to deny this reality immediately lose the credibility and trust of their stakeholders and executives.  But the more common problem is that the product team does not have the skills to provide a high-confidence date, and then to consistently deliver on that date.  Realize that most engineering organizations unfortunately have a long history of failing to deliver on promises, so it will take sustained performance to rebuild this trust. 

– product teams can deliver real business outcomes

The product model is all about moving from output to outcomes, so the ultimate measure of transformation success is a product team’s ability to deliver real business results.  Nobody expects every team to hit it out of the park every quarter, but they do need to see consistent positive progress.  Be sure to have clear definitions of what success looks like, make sure your product leaders are coaching their teams towards those outcomes, and then make sure you celebrate your successes.

– product teams can respond quickly and effectively to customer issues

Even in the best companies in the world, customers run into occasional problems.  Your customers, your stakeholders and your senior executives will remember how you respond to these situations.  Be sure you have the instrumentation and monitoring in place to detect and diagnose these issues, ideally before your customers do, and then the capabilities to build, test and release the fixes.  When the product organization responds rapidly and competently, they gain real trust.

– product teams understand their obligation to keep the lights on 

One last point that is critical to understand.  In addition to working on critical customer and business problems to be solved, it’s normal for product teams to also have a list of “keep the lights on” work, which is necessary in order for a stakeholder to be able to keep their part of the business running.  These keep-the-lights-on items are not glamorous, and they’re not about innovation, but if a stakeholder thinks the product team either doesn’t understand why these items are important, or doesn’t care, there is little hope for the necessary trust.

I don’t think anyone would argue that the above points are in any way easy, but I would also hope that most would believe they are capable of learning and developing the skills to work this way, and winning the hearts and minds of the stakeholders and senior leaders.