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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to Product Therapy. In this episode, I am joined by my good friend and product coach, Elias Liberech. Elias is one of my favorite product coaches and he's worked across fast scaling organizations and global enterprises. If you've ever sat in a meeting about OKRs, you've ever sat on roadmap conversations, prioritization meetings, and you felt something deeper was really misaligned, this conversation is for you. We're going to talk about one of the hardest and most overlooked product leadership skills. Focus. And I just don't mean individual focus, I mean organizational clarity, organizations understanding what the most important thing to work on is right now. Elias, it is such a pleasure to have you. Welcome to Product Therapy.
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B
Thank you very much, Christian. Looking forward to this.
- [00:55]
A
I mean that when I say I love the work you do with teams all around the world. I know you have a passion around helping organizations really get clarity about the most important things they should be doing. Coaching leaders across the group. I want to just start with the basis because it sounds like a very simple topic. Focus. But why is it so hard? And particularly why is it so hard for product organizations?
- [01:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think you're jumping right into the heart of it. And actually I think it's, it's a, you know, it's a very humane thing that's going on. Right. They're the teams and they have good ideas. They talk to customers and they have an opportunity in front of them. The CEO goes out there and sees something amazing in the market. So everybody's pumped sales, comes in with a customer who is just about to close the deal. So there's another thing here. So basically we all come from the right place, but then we end up with just too much choice. And then I think what is really happening, we just can't say no. Right. And that is definitely something we all see in our own lives. But the bigger the organization, the more versatile the ideas and the harder they say no.
- [02:08]
A
I love that you started by calling it a human problem. You know, this fundamental need to, I don't know if it's to please people, like maybe you'll get into why we struggle with saying no to things. You know, in some ways, in a broader context of an organization, there's a culture that is a company culture where it's difficult to say no. Sometimes there's leadership fear, anxiety, like there's something wrong if I say no. But you know, when I talk to many leaders and CEOs, I always say they have fear of missing out. In some ways, every CEO I Have talked to around the world. They see every opportunity as an opportunity and every threat as a threat to their business. So they, you know, they, they jump into, respond. But fundamentally, you know, in the product world, we kind of talk about strategy as being how you say yes or how you say no. Maybe define focus for me in the product context, when you think about focus, what does it, what does it mean to you and what does it feel like when an organization is focused?
- [03:19]
B
So I think the first piece here, and you know, you said it nicely, you come into an organization and you ask folks, what are we actually working on here? You know, and, and then you look at maybe the company strategy and what we oftentimes see is exactly that. It's a, is essentially, you know, a menu, right? Let's get better at everything. Higher margins, more sales, lower cost, happier customers, happier team, really AI somewhere, right? So it's a, it's a rich menu full of choices. And so I think that is where you ought to start. In a product context. If we don't have a good understanding of what is the direction of the business, it is very hard to figure out what could we build to, to support that, what could we do to actually drive that. So I think that is really the first hint. But then what it feels like working in an organization that does have focus, I can tell you from my career, I can tell you from my clients. You know, I worked a long time in ads. Not the most sexy of all topics maybe, but the teams I've been working with had a laser focus. And so, and for some of you might not know, I worked a long time in YouTube ads. And one story up there was the team working on Google Maps, right? Like the funnest product in the world. One flurry down, people were programming self driving cars, amazing stuff. But then the engineers, the designers on our teams, they stuck around, right? Because they knew what we're trying to accomplish. And that is my experience with strong teams. If they know what we're trying to get, they will literally try to go through walls to get there, right? So the most fun and the most fulfilling experience that I had was really in situations where we had a very strong idea of what we're trying to accomplish.
- [05:12]
A
Oh, I love that. You know, I always say because everything is urgent or everything seems visible, everybody has an opinion and there is a, that feeling of clarity and alignment when there is focus in an organization. And you know, it kind of takes the work out of, it takes the fun out of work. When, you know, we talk about, I don't know if you, you've heard the term the swoop and poop, you know, where an executive just comes in and throws in a new grenade of an idea. We should work on this and leaves and everybody's kind of distracted in that way or environment. I think focus requires leaders to say no to good ideas in service of great ideas or great ones. And I don't think many organizations are wired for that. Many organizations confuse movement with progress or they build roadmaps from input rather than intent. And they are rewarding output before they are rewarding kind of clarity in some ways. What are your thoughts on that?
- [06:13]
B
Yeah, you're absolutely 100% right. And I think that is really the nucleus of this conversation. Once you have focus, what does it allow the teams to do? It allows the teams to consider trade offs. I think that's the ultimate litmus test there. I'm presented with my long backlog tomorrow. The escalation comes in. What do I do? Well, if you as the product manager, as the product leader of an organization, maybe as the cpo, right. If you are able to figure out why are the things in here that we are working on right now sticking something new in, what is going to cost, what are the trade offs? So I think happy teams, fulfilled teams, they're able to navigate these day to day things as opposed to if you don't have focus, if you don't know why is number one on number one and a new thing comes in that is very hard to disambiguate, it's very hard to argue, it's very hard to decide. So really that is the difference.
- [07:13]
A
You know, maybe you say things from the other lens. So you're talking about what it feels like when a team is focused. What are the signals that a team or an organization is unfocused?
- [07:25]
B
That one's easy. I think that sort of for the listeners that the sure thing to know is if you are spending an enormous time planning and then you throw it all overboard the next day, that means that you are unfocused. Right? So that is very easy to spot. And of course there's a lot of more symptoms, right. A lot of more things that will happen. But I think, let me just say that that is the surest way to see that you're not focused. Right.
- [07:52]
A
You know, we talk about companies that talk about if you cannot answer the question, what, what's the most important problem right now? When you see roadmaps that are just stakeholder requests or filled with past promises, you know, like we had this on our roadmap since 1994, you know, and we are, you know, you never get it done, but it's always on the roadmap. Or when a team is disconnected, you know, from a larger strategy, even cannot explain it or, you know, one of the things I often see is when most product managers or product people are managing expectations as really a big aspect of their job, they are all indications. You know, for me, one of the biggest aspects of focus is this constant drama in companies around something called prioritization. You know, when I hear it over and over again, we have a prioritization problem. We have too many priorities, changing priorities, misaligned priorities, you know, and I often have to kind of say, you don't have a prioritization problem. You have a lack of focus problem. I want to kind of hear your take on that.
- [09:00]
B
In these days, in this part of the year, people call us and they will say, hey, can you fix my prioritization? Can you have. Can you help me have a harmonized way to handle this? Could you help us implement okrs? And I sometimes feel like, I'm not sure if you remember the movie Pulp Fiction where they had this. This guy, that Mr. Wolf, and, you know, you have a crime scene, and then Mr. Wolf comes in, cleans everything up. And sometimes I feel a little bit like that, you know, Elias, can you come in? Can you just implement okr? So everybody knows how to prioritize? Or can you. Can we have Grice or whatever? Right, but it's exactly that, right? The. The root cause, the symptom, like, how did we get to this crime scene? Right? I mean, there's something wrong to begin with. And it is really a, like a focus, a lot of strategy, right? The teams don't know what is important to them. So when prioritization comes, they struggle. And then the next day, once we have done all the prioritization, a tiny thing changes and everything is thrown overboard again. Right? So that is a. Is a very good point, Christian.
- [10:03]
A
And people rely on all these frameworks. I mean, this is the most common pattern I see. You know, teams are complaining. Too many parities. We have too many things on the list. You know, what do we have? We have 200 things on the list to do. This is way too much. And it's always changing and we're not sure. And then the executive team says, let us have a leadership or executive off site. Our job is to prioritize this list of 200 things so that the teams can have clarity. You know, maybe number One on the list was make our platform stable. Number two, make it more secure. Number three, improve its performance. Number four, make more money. You know, those kind of. It might even be like that. They go to the leadership off site and then they come back and they say, we have cut down the list of 200 things to our 12. They always have a nice name, big rocks to our 12 key pillars. Yeah, it's always a very nice name. And then you see number one is now number one, make the platform most secure, easier to use, user friendly, more stable. One long sentence. You know, with all of the things that were on the list just merging into one, love is still doing all.
- [11:15]
B
The things best in class.
- [11:16]
A
Yes, best in class. That's right. You know, a summary of everything best in class means we are safe, secure, comprehensive, user friendly. You know, one definition of all of the things in here. Many leaders, it's often one of the hardest things. Even when I was a leader, I struggled with this because I wanted to please all of the stakeholders and I wanted them to feel like whatever they thought was important was heard. But focus means you are picking 1, 2. I don't know, some companies argue we are so cool. Three things to focus on. And here is why I want you to break this down. Because if we don't define what focus really means for people, you might still get that we are focused. I told them to be best in class, and that means all of the things. Again, how do you help a leader understand what real focus is?
- [12:11]
B
So everybody who's been coached by me probably has some battle scars from this exercise. Gonna share with you. But what I really like. So before we like focus and a strategy and all of these things, but then really a good way to figure out how well focused in organization is just be like, pick a. Pick an engineer, right? An individual contributing engineer is trying to do a good job and just ask them, you know, what's the strategy? What are you doing here? What is all of this for? Why do you show up for work? And the answers oftentimes are super frustrating for leaders, right? And so once we sort of recognize an exercise that I really love to do is called a written narrative, a written product narrative. And literally it's just a set of questions like, you can probably look it up on Google or find it somewhere. But what I use is really like, what are we building? Who are we building for? What is the value? What is the solution that we currently think is the right one? What is some data backing it up? What are some unknowns? What are some Risks involved. And what I've noticed is even mature leader, they struggle, right? It's like pulling teeth. You have all of this decks, you have all of those information. But then a clear articulation to have clarity for yourself to begin with is actually not that easy. And, and that's where we start. And what I really encourage and coach people on is this is not about writing a perfect document. It's a fact finding thing to figure out which parts were the easiest and which parts were hard to write. And for instance, if we get to the user section and maybe there is a vague understanding of user Personas but we can't actually really articulate it well, that is a thing that we can punt on. This is a thing that we can find out. So when we, when we talk about focus, even before getting into strategy and all this stuff, we're really just starting with a very fundamental thing. What are we building for who? And we start with the product leader themselves. And oftentimes that is already a great setup for everything else to follow.
- [14:22]
A
You are really going to. The real root cause of this is actually a lack of real product strategy. If you have a product strategy, prioritization is implicit. You have already chosen what to focus on by definition of the strategy. And I love your written narrative technique because you are doing the part of strategy that is really empowering, which is the transparency about why, you know, and here is why.
- [14:55]
B
And it's also, I mean, and there's something magical about the written word. It's not like, I mean we product people, right, we can answer any question, you know, we're elaborate. But actually sitting down and writing it down for yourself, you'll find you'll be surprised yourself, right? I still do this till this day also when I do investments, or so I realized actually, like I don't even know what these guys are doing, I just like them. But it's a good way just to build some interest, perspective. And if you think about it, you know, the larger your organization is, the larger your scope is. If you don't have a clear answer in your mind, you have no business turning around to a big organization and telling them. Because that uncertainty is just going to multiply in terms of ambiguities for the team. So if you don't know, how can they know? And then they look at the backlog and you don't know who the user, who is this person?
- [15:48]
A
Oh, I love that. I call it kind of the grandfather test. But in many cases leaders can only give to their teams what has been given to them or what they have. So you ever get that leader where you say, why are we doing this? And they say, because I said so. In some cases is because they don't have a good narrative or context about why they should be doing it. Sometimes it's because their boss told them to do it. They just passed it on to you. So I really love that written narrative. It. It forces you to. I always say coaching focus starts with slowing down just enough to see why are we doing things? What have we been tolerating? You know, what is important right now? But the narrative is actually, do you understand why? So that you can pass that on to somebody else.
- [16:37]
B
Precisely. Precisely.
- [16:38]
A
You kind of say, going to an engineer. I kind of call it the grandparent test. I used to do in companies. I, I skip levels down in my organization, and I, I. What I'm testing for is I want to see how much context has made its way down to the person that is actually doing. And that is a really powerful aspect in here. Okay. I want to role play a little bit. You're a coach. You spend time coaching a lot of leaders and teams. So, you know, I want to play some product leader that is struggling with focus and prioritization. And my rant to you is like, man, Elias, you know, too many things on the list, too many priorities. I've been trying to struggle. I don't even really show what to focus on. You know, is your starting. You know, how do you coach me through the noise? How would you coach me in where to start? How would you know that I am doing the work? You know, what are some things in here to kind of help me move through this?
- [17:34]
B
Like the first. And, you know, congrats to your new role, Christian. So good for you, I think, a lot of times. So we talk about focus and we talk about strategy. Right? The thing I would bring in, this is really a second piece here, which is critical and sort of talked about enough, which is alignment. Right? So a product strategy, even if it's sharp. And now, Christian, you have clarity. We've just done the written narrative. You brought some data, we discussed it. But now how do we actually get that to your. To your boss, right? The CEO or the board or, you know, the vp? And how do we get it to your team? Right? That is the real. That's the real spicy stuff. And, and so coaching alignment is the next thing if you coach focus. So say, we have a good opinion here. This is what we're building. This is who we're building for. But we also need to align now basically with the CEO and with the board on what is the direction of the company, what are the business goals, Right. And there I see a huge misunderstanding that product leaders don't question it enough. Right. Like you get your, you know, your spicy menu with all the options and then the product strategy could be anything, right? But maybe we have an IPO around the corner. Maybe we want to, you know, maybe want to grow internationally. Maybe we do want to buy a company. Like there could be a lot of context from the organization. So the first thing that we start them in terms of alignment is trying to chisel down to one or two business goals as I guess like a seed direction. Because if we're trying to figure out now strategy, we need to know for what. So, so that is the next piece in, in the way that I approach it with our clients is to build an alignment and handshake agreement with the organization as a whole. So we have some cohesion. And that will be very important later, not only to pass that on to the teams and hear back from the teams what's possible, but also to keep the strategy actually alive. You know, we said at the beginning the litmus test for strategy and focus is that you can navigate the day to day. If the CEO understands why we're doing it and has agreed to that and now has a new idea, we can actually do the best thing in the entire world. We can have an intellectual discourse about the trade off decisions. Right. And that is really the most valuable thing. And I have, you know, this has worked magic for some of the people I've been coaching. Just starting with that, actually having the teams work on stuff that everybody cares about and coming back with results actually is the surest way to have a happier life. Right? That magic, what does it feel like? That is what it feels like. You know, people cheer for you and they want to invest more in what you're doing because you bring something that everybody wants.
- [20:19]
A
I want to get practical on that point of the alignment. And I really love this framing for you. You say, okay, focus for you starts with we got to write down the written narrative, pull some insights, some data. What's most important, what are the user problems? What are the, these are the things we should go focus on. But that's not yet really the power of focus. You need alignment and so you need to get alignment with stakeholders, alignment up with leadership tactically. Help me walk through the alignment piece. So let's say you're a leader. You think, oh, the most important problem is to drive Improve user engagement or something on our platform. But, you know, I'm the head of marketing. I think it's my funnel. I. I'm the head of sales. I want to win. So I have other things in my head. You've gotten some data practically. Walk me through how I gain alignment. Am I selling this? How am I, how am I pitching.
- [21:13]
B
This top of mind? Because we just gone through Black Friday, Cyber Monday and these folks have done really well. Actually, a CPO now, cpo, recently promoted, approached me. He was new to the company, actually rehire. And when we started, it was exactly that. Like, everybody is working on everything. Those are good ideas. It's a very successful company. Good ideas, but we're not really getting any traction. Right. There were just as an example, they were building a dashboard for their customers. It's like an e commerce space, a dashboard for the customers. And it was an idea sort of brought to them by sales. They thought if the customers would see all the insights, all the data, they would make better choices and it would give us more money. Right. And you know, these kind of projects took them two years. They built it, everybody loved it, but it didn't move the numbers. Right? So sales loved it, customers loved it. No effect. Right. So we were trying to work through it and we did the narrative and it turned out he had a very good command of a certain part of the audiences, but it was another part of the audiences. And actually he struggled writing that down. Right? He started writing it down and he was surprised himself. He came back and was like, I actually didn't. Like, I have like three lame assumptions about them, but I don't really know. So he did it the smartest thing in the world, right. He reached out to the sales team in that region, right. And he asked like, hey, actually I would like to know more. I'm thinking here about product strategy. Would you be able to help me? And I said, sure. Like, that's what we've been waiting for. Of course. Right. And you know, he flew over there across the Atlantic. They have really cool events. So he went into like Miami and I don't know, but like joined these customer events. He looked at the win and loss analysis that they had done and then they realized people were not as interested in these dashboards, these customers over there. They are very conversion oriented. And that's not, I mean, it sounds, I mean, they knew that conversion was important. But that insight that for a certain tranche of customer, that is the number one thing, right? They're less emotional about how it looks Et cetera. They're like performance driven. So when he came back and now we're getting a bit more into the lineman piece, he already had a very happy sales team. You know, saying, man, like, Lars is great. It was fun, and he really gets it right. But then we started to write down a perspective on strategy, and we started to work with the founders that have very insightful people, built a fantastic, very successful company. But now they started insight. They saw the sales leader show up with the product. Maybe that's a good thing. So now we buy ourselves some license to focus on this conversion piece. We buy ourselves some license to maybe one or two bets, but also to say no to a lot of things. So they actually redirected some of their teams towards working on conversions. They got to work. We did actually a pilot. No, it's not the focus of this episode. We're going to get to that at some point. But that is a super good thing. So we basically got a bunch of really good folks together looking just at conversion rates. And then they started to look at that particular problem. They started to really do experimentation. They found a lot of juicy stuff, right? For instance, changing the color of the button does a lot to conversion rates. But they also found something else, can't say what, but a piece that they actually had never seen before that had a massive impact on conversion rates. And so they changed that. It got it ready. Before Black Friday, they made a lot of dough. So now you can, you know, you can see how that feels like for that team, how it feels like for leadership, how it feels like to a friend, freshly promoted cpo. Congratulations. Right? So that is what it's like. And now we're asking, how could we pour more into this team? How could we get better at this? Because that's true focus now, right? That's the magic, really.
- [25:21]
A
I love that story a lot. And I don't want to underscore some important points around company politics and relationships, the things that actually foster alignment. You know, when I wouldn't talk to leaders about alignment, I brought this insight, and I can't believe they won't accept it. I'm like, it's not that they don't trust your insight. They just don't trust you. And I'm like, it's hard to hear when I tell these two leaders. But you're describing. He flew over to, you know, build a relationship. He asked for help. Like, I want to walk on strategy. I need your help. He. He fostered relationship. There was presence. People actually saw him doing the Homework by spending time with sales and with customers and in the team. So they kind of trusted how the insight came to be and what. And they felt like it was their strategy, you know, like, you know, that's the part of the magic of alignment.
- [26:14]
B
You're going to love this, but we. So just to get it going right, you know, how important it is to. To show some progress quickly. Even if you get focus, even if you get alignment, it can't be a thing. That's going to take us three years. He really. And with the team with his entry, they chose a pretty simple example. And I told you, they changed the color of the button. So they made it a little bit like, because people have been talking about that in a company for years. How much does the shape and the color of the button, does it matter? So they changed it and made it like a little bit more like Amazon because they're probably smart, right? That should perform better. And just ran an A B experiment and turns out, well, it actually did worse. But actually it had a big impact. So. So that was an immediate feedback loop saying we know how to tune this very important thing that has a big impact on the overall trajectory of the company on that what we actually trying to accomplish. So now, well, that's. It's a given, right, that the CTO also, by the way, congratulations. Freshly promoted CTO as well. That these two, the CPO and cto, that they're part of the big room, right, the senior leadership, because they see how critical that part of the company is to the overall success. So that is really what it can do for you.
- [27:32]
A
Oh, I love that a lot. And I kind of call out with strategy and focus sometimes it feels very logical in terms of why we are focused on something in the grand scheme of a picture. You know, like I always say, if you're, if you're building a house and you were walking on the foundation of the house and I came to you and I said, let's walk on the roof right now. You'd be like, yeah, I get the roof is important for a house, but it's not important right now because we don't even have walls. So we don't even have, you know, the, the scaffolding in place. You know, what's your take on saying no versus saying not yet? And you know, you know, how. How do you mentally use that tool or coach people in using that in, in their prioritization?
- [28:21]
B
Let's start with the good news, right? Once you got that all going, it's easy, right? Because People trust you. If you do what you're saying and you're generally heading in the right direction, folks will distrust you on this. Right? So as you are developing this once you actually have some alignment, most of the time, the answer is never. No, the answer is not yet. Right. And that is the interesting part. Now that everybody, like, you know, sales, leadership, marketing, the teams, once we're all aligned, it buys us really the license of the trade of conversation. So a new thing comes in. We can now understand across all the different perspectives in the company, what is it going to take away, Right? Because we really wanted those conversion rates. And we have one thing here in the pipeline that we actually think is going to move that. So, yes, that customer request, that's an important partner and we really would want that deal. But wouldn't they also want better conversion rates? Wouldn't they also be excited? Wouldn't we want to talk to them about that? And maybe, maybe they would actually be happy with more conversions for Black Friday and then we could do the other thing later. Right? So the not yet conversation, that is really your go to. It's the, you know, for every product manager starting out, that is probably the best career advice I could possibly give you. If you're able to articulate what, what the impact is that your team is bringing, and if you can have those conversations, your team's gonna love you. Your stakeholders are gonna, I'm not sure, love you, but, you know, they're gonna like you a little bit more. But it's going to definitely also, I guess, put you in the situations where you're being now asked in terms of what do you think? What could we do? What is the right order of things here?
- [30:14]
A
As a product leader, one of the things that, or where this falls apart is at the team level. People complain a lot about stakeholders dropping grenades of ideas, shifting priorities, changing requirements. And I do get two schools of dynamics in big enterprise companies. I will hear things like, you know, there's a mandate, a regulatory requirement that is not shifting priority or shifting focus. You know, we got an audit or we got, you know, there's business as usual things. How. How does a leader protect their team's focus from stakeholders? Changing priorities, shifting strategy, should they or, I mean, what is the right dynamic as a leader with the team? Where should we manage or filter out noise versus what's important?
- [31:08]
B
I think it is also good news that gets better over time. Like, as you grow in your career, you're going to get a little bit more relaxed, right? Like somebody calls you and Is like, you know, everything's on fire. We have like legal, like legal tells us to do this, right? And you get a little bit more, I guess, relaxed. And the first thing that you really want to find out and that, that would be my advice. You want to find out is this a serious request, right. Even if somebody's talking about legal, right. It could be completely out of context. So the first thing you really want to do is you want to, you know, take the request seriously, but you want to really understand what is behind and if done right. The second piece here, and that is maybe a bit more advanced technique. We talked about trade offs, right? Which putting something in and something else has gone out in big organization now there are trade offs that are not obvious to the person who's requesting. So over here Bob really thinks we should have X. And over there, finance really requires this change. So it's fine from an accounting perspective. So that is a bit more advanced now because we will have to really understand the different requests. We have to build some trustworthy stakeholders that we understand them. But we also in a way have to make transparent the trade offs that are going into the decision making. So that is a bit more tricky. But that is also something over time where you can build very, very powerful organizational support. If finance understands that there's a critical rollout and marketing really needs something, maybe the accounting piece, maybe we could just, you know, maybe we could just roll a little bit longer with the like crappy accounting process that takes all the manpower at the last day of the month because they can help marketing. So if you can bridge that and if you take everybody in the process seriously, you already in a good place and that gets a lot easier over time.
- [33:06]
A
In my last operation role, I used to write a strategy narrative every quarter. It was probably the most sought after internal document in the company because, you know, it really talked about all of the learnings and insights I have gathered and seen throughout the quarter. And it typically always ended with a very clear statement. You know, after thorough analysis of all this learning over this last year, we are choosing to focus on these things or not change our focus from last quarter or change our focus. And the powerful part of that narrative was every stakeholder could see their problem, their request, their issue in that document. It's almost like, I heard you, I see you, I have spent, you know, and so it was very exciting because you kind of want to see what are the trade offs, what were all the issues from everybody else that has allowed us to choose to do this? And I Never used to understand the importance of it, but it grew over time. When, you know, people will probe me, where's the document? You know, every time they had a request they want to see, go back to the narrative to kind of see what are the other issues in the business. It's many people fail to understand what context is, the powerful nature of context. I was just explaining this to a team, like there's nobody that sees there's a, you know, I have an idea to help the company make 1 million and then they see the team working on something to make the company 1 billion, that will say, no, you must do my idea first. Or you know, many leaders just don't know what the trade offs are, you know what. And so you're calling out something very powerful around, you know, once you end the trust and once people start to understand you can deliver. But we need to know if we're doing, working on the most important thing right now. It changes the dynamic.
- [35:05]
B
I mean just, just to riff a bit on this because it is connects so deeply, right? So, and just two tricks for people listening to this, right? So the one thing here, I mean you write a narrative, but then to build alignment, right. Another really critical piece here is that you start to talk to some of the stakeholders as you know, as you have some gaps, maybe marketing has some ideas on the user segments, maybe they have some data. But the thing that Christian's calling out here, and I love that a lot, they will have questions, they will have concerns, they will challenge. And the best thing in the world is to acknowledge, to refine. And then there's two things I would want people to do if you, if you go down that route. One is please put everybody who has been working on this with you onto the document. So Christian said like we would say we choose. So it's very hard to mess with the strategy that has been created by everybody, right, the main leaders in the organization, maybe there's one person is a bit on the fence, but if everybody else is already there, maybe it is a bit easier. And the other thing I would, would recommend that really wonders for me and like for some people I've code it's something called a product faq. So because you will stumble over these elephants in the room, right There will be almost impossible to reconcile decisions. And so what do you do? Right? Like you cannot, it's not an easy intellectual discourse to get to a clear answer. So what you can do is just take out the question, you move the question in the product FAQ and you say as of, you know, Q4, 2025, as of Q1, 2026, this is the best answer we have. And it could be, we don't know, but it acknowledges the concern. So when we go and talk about it, we're seeking a review for it, we're seeking resources for it. People will see themselves being part of that. They will see the concerns being there, being transparent, and they will value us basically doing the hard light work, coming back to them and saying, hey, this is what we've got, or this is what we've included. Would you mind take a look. So in terms of cohesion and alignment, that's really the gangway.
- [37:21]
A
But yeah, I love that. No, you're spot on. You're calling out, I love you calling out those. What makes it magical is the co creation, the co accountability in it too as well. So I mean, we've talked about the leaders protecting the teams. What if I'm a team or a product person on a product team and I feel like my leaders wouldn't prioritize or like, oh my goodness, we don't have any focus, you know, is it an excuse to not do anything or what do I do?
- [37:51]
B
Like, you know, the thing I would generally recommend if you like, if you are a product manager or a product team, the conditions are never perfect, right? Not at Google, not at YouTube, not at, not at SVPG, I guess, you know, there's always like a, like there's always some imperfections, so get used to it. It's like sort of my realistic expectations to you and pivot your mindset into what's the opportunity. Right. And oftentimes the ambiguity that is happening is a lack of strategy or it's a recent reorganization or refocusing. So the first, like that is the biggest one you could do in any situation is try to figure out what is in it for us, right? What could we do with this? As opposed to sort of going two steps back and saying, whoa, another change. Like, I don't like that, you know, so that is a mindset thing. And then concretely, so now you have your backlog, right? Very, very specifically with your backlog and the team is struggling with prioritization. Do an exercise, try to sit down and take just every single item that is high on the list and just try to write down who is it for? What is the impact that we think it's going to bring? Just try to answer that. And if you cannot answer that, Mel, maybe it shouldn't be there. The other question is, and that is a sort of Very practical issue. I see teams feel like they have to come up with all the answers, right? If you don't know, it is absolutely okay to ask maybe your manager or other parts of the organization. And saying there is some context that I don't know and oftentimes there is an answer, but somehow that gets lost, right? We feel like we're the product managers, like the mini CEOs, we have to have like, so be humble. If you don't know, just ask. And if people around you don't know, then maybe that's a bigger conversation. So you can add a lot of value also in that sense to, you know, first of all, see the opportunity, try to be clear on what are we building for who. And then if you don't know, try to figure it out, right? And maybe somebody has an answer, maybe they don't.
- [40:02]
A
I love, you know, I get a little more pointed when I coach teams. I say, if you cannot answer the question, what's in it for the business? Meaning I always say, why are they paying you a salary to do this? Meaning you might call it out in our world, what is the business objective? That is the nice way of saying it. But I say, if you cannot answer the question, what is the business objective? Kind of, why are they paying me to do this? If you cannot answer the question, how will they measure success with this? Like, how will we know we're even doing a good job? If you cannot answer the question, what problem am I trying to solve and who the customer is we are solving this problem for, don't do it. And I say, you know, the reason I say that, I'm like, to be very clear, it is not strategic if you cannot answer those questions. Because if I'm an executive and I say, hey, Elias, what are you working on? I'm building the new API for this dashboard and I don't have a clue what that is. And we're thinking to ourselves, we need to manage our budget and cut some things. The very first thing I'm going to cut is that, you know, so I tell people, if you cannot pointedly say, I am working on driving revenue, driving conversion, improve, you know, what's in it for the business and the measure of success, you may not be working on something that is strategic.
- [41:18]
B
And by the way, Christian, just like as you were talking, I mean, this is so this is gold, especially for, especially for teams that are not as obvious, right? So maybe you're working on this internal tool, right? You know, I work on internal tools for, for code review, for instance, and if you're just saying, like, you know, we're just cranking along like, no one cares, we're internal team, well, maybe we could think about a code review tool as the productivity for the entire company, right? So I really do a lot of coaching on what I call the currency. And the deeper you go down into the stack and it's the good news, right? Like, I'm in a platform team or so kind of machine roomy stuff, oftentimes the more heavyweight the impact is on the rest. So if you're able to articulate that right, it's just gonna help you. And I also found that super good for longer technical migrations, right? It's like a mountain of work. Nobody know, like, everybody forgot, why did we start this? So if you're a product manager, you're working on this and you can refocus and you can say like, oh, we did it. Because the other thing is very expensive to run and takes forever to build stuff. Well, we're getting a bit closer, so you need to really be able to articulate exactly that. And, and, and, and that's just going to make everything better. It's going to have a more motivated team. You can slice it a bit better anyways. Just a lot of good stuff.
- [42:39]
A
And I love the internal tools example. I, I often have to state to people strategically, like, what strategy really means. Even when I talk to executive teams, because we talk about things like risk or legal compliance or keep the lights on, walk. You know, I'm like, well, we have something we have to do and we have to prioritize this. And I'm often like, I'm going to be talking with them like a big bank and they're like, we had a compliance request. We need to reprioritize. Why is that a surprise that you work in a regulated industry and you have a regulatory request? This is also the absence of strategy because, you know, in your household, you don't compete between, should we pay our power bill this month or should we watch Netflix? You know, there's a cost of running a business, cost of running a home. You kind of, you're not questioning your utilization. You're baking it in your budget and your growth. And I say, you know, when I see companies struggle with, like, we have to trade off whether we should do a legal request versus whether we should innovate. I'm like, you've missed the whole point of it. Internal improving your efficiency, improving your productivity. Those are real problems to solve. What your teams are doing is disconnected from it. A whole Lot and pointedly kind of what I think about this whole focus discussion. I tell teams, you know, you don't have a prioritization problem, you have a lack of focus problem. You don't even have a lack of focus problem, you have a lack of strategy. An absence of strategy problem is always my roots because strategy, you know, in the product world we have things that help focus. If you have a product vision, you're kind of already choosing what world you want to create. You're already focusing a little bit. Strategy is saying, I want to get to that wall while taking into account all of the business needs, company objectives, stuff. So I'm choosing what to focus on right now. So when I, when I'm coaching focus, I love how you've called out all the pieces around alignment and insights. Those are the things that really help a company do kind of do this well. Okay, I want to get through some breakthrough moments in your coaching because focus is not a one time decision. It's a habit. You know, it's something that you cultivate and build over time. It is the most common conversation I have with CEOs all around the world. How do you build the muscle? How do you help people kind of shift this focus mindset and harden it.
- [45:16]
B
Like throughout the conversation. I think we already like put together a couple of puzzle pieces. So let's bring it all in, right. I think it's really like it typically starts with a single person in the organization, actually takes it on them to try to really answer some of these fundamental questions. And as you start to, I guess like sort of in concentric circles, right. If you bring in the rest, maybe your CTO that you trust, maybe the CEO next, maybe your team as you exploring that, I think that is really the first step. The second step is once you have something like that. And that is really why strategy is so critical. It's the connective tissue from, I guess what the company wants as a whole, what we can contribute as the product to what the teams are working on. The second thing I coach people on is almost immediate feedback loop, right? Immediate success. I've been recently working with a very large company. They had a very strategic project they've been working on for years. It's been like we looked it up, it was on the strategy for six years. And then we asked these questions like who is it for? And we realized the group that was for, nobody had ever spoken to. So as we've been exploring it in the leadership team, just 1pm with his team wrote up a bunch of question called Up a couple of those customers and came back with results, right? That took a week. So this is how you start. The muscle is you have to show small positive increments. The second thing I would say is, how do you do this? How do you manage that? Alignment is a very fragile thing. We bring all of that in, we have the evidence, we have talked about it, we start on a very, you know, crisp point. And then as time moves on, a new person joins the team. OpenAI launches ChatGPT. Right. Like the alignment just kind of dissipates in different directions. So we have to bring it back in. And we have also, we have to bake in new information also, right. We don't want to be ignorant about the rounders. And what I typically recommend is the first piece is the short term, the very short term. So maybe we plan in the quarter, maybe we're very verbal, like what I'm going to contribute to conversion rates this quarter, what is that thing and how far do we want to take it? And so now another concept I want to introduce here is accountability, right? So say we have that focus, if we have that alignment, say the teams go and they're on the loose, right? They're trying to figure out how to do this. Well, we should check in, we should check in regularly, maybe every six weeks, maybe at the end of the quarter. What we should really take a serious look at that we make a dent and then that is a piece of alignment maybe at the end of the year. And that's typically what I recommend for strategy. That's another check in point. And you mentioned that, right? Like you did that document once a year. And that should be really a thing that people are highly anticipating because it consolidates a whole year of learning, plus some of our gut and product sense. And. But that is a good moment to basically completely realign everybody back, all the new joiners, all the new information. So that is, I guess, a good way to incorporate the learnings by being also a bit technical, right? Like what are we going to do this month, this quarter? So you have to integrate those two things as well.
- [48:48]
A
I love that a lot and I love that you called out on the accountability of it to it. I mean, when I coach leaders, sometimes, you know, I get those future requests and you know, the two things I always, you know, when someone says we want, I want this future, I want to build this, fix this. And I always say, okay, if we fix this, what becomes possible? What are we, you know, I want you to reframe your mind, but I Will often ask leaders, what are you pretending not to know that's in your way, as you know. And I want to get what's really in the way of this to really get you thinking around those things. And there are habits in these things that take a while. We've covered a lot of elements in here that I think are important to rehash. You know, the idea of focus coming from those insights and data, a deep understanding of the customers, the problems, the markets, your industry, your business. Those things help build trust. It's not enough without alignment. You know, you don't get focused if you cannot align with your stakeholders, with your leaders. We talked about the politics of building trust relationships. Ending the right with a pilot and a test to kind of show people like, you know, if you trust us with information, we have a way of experimenting, proving point. We can translate what is important into action in some meaningful way. I think that's a fantastic top track. We kind of went down. I beat up that point a whole lot. Like, we don't have a prioritization problem. You have a lack of focus, a lack of strategy problem. I would also joke because I do get capacity questions. I don't know if you get that a lot. You know, like, we need to hire 10 more engineers, 20 more engineers. And you know, and I was with a very big enterprise company and you know, they were like, we need $50 million more in our budget for. I'm like, what in the world, you know, to hire to start this whole initiative. And I said, how many employees do you have? They're like 300,000 employees. I say you don't have a resource problem. You have a lack of focus problem. Because if you, there's. When we talk about work in progress in combine, right? There's, you know, there's only so much you, you can load into a wash, dish washing machine or a dishwasher. Like it doesn't matter. It's still gonna run the cycle and the time it does. Whether you, you say and over capacity. We want to be laser focused on the most important things. But the empowerment comes with understanding why, what those trade offs are in it. Okay, this is fantastic. I wanna go through some rapid questions in here just to kind of get some thoughts on some things in here. What is kind of one thing if you are talking to a product leader, you say, I want you to stop doing. If you want to be better focused.
- [51:33]
B
Like stop doing this back to back meetings all day. Ooh, ooh.
- [51:39]
A
That's a whole other topic, Elias. Like you just, you Just scratched open something on that one. Because, you know, it's funny, we talk about insights and data and thinking as a leader, you know, if you are in meetings all day, when did you have time to even think about those things? Oh, what a great one. That's a good one. Okay, give me a magic coaching question that you use to kind of cut through the noise. You know, if you're talking to a leader and you're all over the place, what. What will kind of help you discern what the root cause of things may be?
- [52:12]
B
Who is this for now?
- [52:14]
A
Now say a little more about that one.
- [52:16]
B
The biggest products I've been working on, the biggest successes I have were literally because we realized that the, that the needs that we had cut out for ourselves from our customers actually weren't cutting it. There was an adjacent or a specific user group customer segment where there was a lack of value to be had organizations. And I've been victim of that. Right. Like we thought about our customer as the large customers and the small customers. Enterprise SMB.
- [52:43]
A
You know, as you had me thinking about that and I'm reflecting on my career, like many leaders are nice. They say yes by default. You kind of started there. You know, I often tell leaders you are trading clarity for comfort and that's a bad deal every time, you know, because you're. You're going to be very uncomfortable later on, you know, so it's one of those kind of big things in here. All right, so we talked about kind of go to question. On the other flip side, if I'm. If you could talk to every CEO on the planet and their organization struggle with focus, what is, you know, one go to message or key points you want to get across that will help create clarity of focus in an organization.
- [53:28]
B
I think my question would be like, when was the last time you had a hit that was intentional?
- [53:33]
A
It's. It's the point I always make to companies all the time. In many cases it feels like things are how much of your work is something that is happening to you. This is something you are making happen, that intentional aspect of it. You know, I tell all CEOs all the time. You know, I love that quote. The company cares about what the leaders care about or what the CEO cares about and absolute power in the whole aspect of focus and the work being done there. All right, Elias, this, I. We could talk about this and refund this for days. I love this topic of focus. I love the conversation. Your wealth of knowledge and experience working with teams. I absolutely impressed. I really enjoyed this conversation. This was fantastic. Is there any kind of last word message for anybody out there, points you want to make before we wrap up this episode?
- [54:26]
B
I love the conversation. It got me, you know, it got me going. I would want to hang out here longer and there's so many, you know, parts here that we could, could have camped out. But no, I think that's a good rep. I really love the show. So thanks for having me on this. This made for my day today.
- [54:43]
A
Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for being on and thanks for being on Product Therapy. Thanks a lot.
- [54:48]
B
Thank you, Christian.
- [54:49]
A
Want to learn more? Until next time, Please check out svpg.com Sign up for our newsletter that Marik Hagan puts out. Join us for one of our workshops near you and get access to all of the articles and content we put out. And thank you to everyone for joining us. Until next time, have a good day. A Quick Disclaimer While this podcast is named Product Therapy, it is not hosted by licensed therapists or mental health professionals and it is in no way a substitute for professional mental health services. We recognize the importance of mental well being and encourage anyone facing personal difficulties to seek support from qualified professionals. See www.findahelpline.com.