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- [00:00]
A
Transforming to the product operating model is hard. It's a journey that demands understanding and navigating complex organizational dynamics. In this episode, I am joined again by SVPG partner Marty Kagan to discuss the often unspoken, yet critical aspects of transformation Politics. We'll unpack the inevitable challenges that organizations encounter, how to address these issues head on, and all the steps teams can take to set themselves up for success. Mari, welcome back to put up therapy.
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B
Thank you, Christian. Glad to be back, Mari.
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A
I love people related conversations and things that talk about the dynamics. You know, I always say all problems are people problems in organizations when you distill things down. And we've talked about leadership issues over time. You recently wrote an article called Transformation Politics. What stirred you in that direction? What prompted you to talk about this topic and why now and what issues were important to you?
- [01:04]
B
Well, like you said in your introduction, I mean, it is hard. And like you, I spend a lot of time with teams that are in that journey. What I realized is if the only factor is your product organization, there are things we would do that are different than if you factor in the full organization. And often I'll have this discussion with a product leader. They're like, I believe I need to do it this way. And I'm like, you could. You will put this entire transformation at risk, not because of your organization, but because of the dynamics with the rest of the organization. And so, you know, when I, when I say politics, and of course I don't mean the negative connotations out there in the world at large, I mean what you said, right, the people dynamics. And so much of this is helping the product leaders to understand where the different stakeholders are coming from, what are their concerns, what are their fears, and how is it that certain things you might do might feel good for you, but really work against your goals? Because we're all trying to get to a successful outcome, in this case is a successful transformation. And that will only happen if you bring the company along with you. So what I realized is there are considerations that go beyond the product organization make a big impact on how we do things in product, because if we don't pay attention to them, you know, it could absolutely undermine the entire effort. Oh boy.
- [02:52]
A
Let's talk about this because, and I want to kind of understand these considerations and first of all, are they parities? Like, do you stack rank these considerations? You know, are there some that are more critical than others? Because I can imagine this list could be long because again, this is a change in the world. And when you make a Change. People are asking the questions, how does it affect me? Or what's in it for me? And so if there are considerations, things that your transformational impacts that are people dynamic related that you need to navigate. Let me just start with the obvious one. If there was one that I cannot ignore and it's super important, where do I start? What is the most important consideration in this journey? For me.
- [03:36]
B
The truth is the answer would probably be dependent on the particular company and the culture and their people involved. But in general, and this is one, this is a good example, I think, but it's also very fundamental. So it is common and I think it's in the sort of general field of change management, which is what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to change a big organization. That's a definite major change management problem. I think the most intuitive approach for most organizations is to do a series of small changes. Series of small changes, which sounds totally logical. However, it usually backfires. The reason for that, and I had seen that over the years, I had seen how that backfires, but it took me a while to really understand what was going on. What I think is happening is that the moment you start in an organization and you know, you get the support and you say we are going to start a transformation, the clock starts ticking and now we have a window. If we don't show real results within that window, pretty much every organization I've ever seen will lose interest, will lose motivation, will get distracted by something else. And so what I realize is there is a window to see real results and you need to show results in that window. Now you don't have to finish a transformation in that window, which is a good thing, because that probably is not going to happen in a big company. But what you can do is show results for a pilot team. So one of the things I've learned is that in this sense of change management is actually better to show bigger changes for a much smaller piece of the organization than to show little changes over the broader organization. Because until you can demonstrate outcomes, everything else just looks like busy work, you know, rearranging the chairs on the Titanic kind of thing.
- [05:59]
A
Mari, who is looking for these results? Like, who are the biggest critics, the people that you need to win over? You're kind of in the whole political arena of your organization. You have started a transformation. You know, who do you lose the trust with the fastest? Who do you lose credibility? Who do you lose patience with? What groups of people?
- [06:17]
B
Yeah, it's usually the senior leaders because they're the ones that, I mean, if you're just doing this as a sort of a. It's just an experiment some people down in the organization would like to work, then fine. There's not, you know, they don't have high expectations. The leaders aren't going out on a limp. But if your company is trying to transform, then at least at the business unit level, the senior leaders there are like, we're making a bet. And by the way, they're usually spending a lot of money for this, even just with their own people retraining there. And if they go hire a McKinsey or whatever, it's even more expensive. Right. But they're spending a lot and they want to see that that is going to generate a return. You can't just. It's not realistic politically to say, oh, well, two years, it's going to be great. They're not. They're like, no, I'm not going to go out on a limb for two years. I mean, and then find out I didn't really get much. They'll say, look, either show me results now or don't expect the funding you're talking about. So that's where a pilot team in a few months, because it's much easier, of course, to change in a big way, one or two small, you know, product teams, pilot teams, than it is to change a broad organization where everybody needs to be trained and everybody. They often, like you've said many times, they don't have people that have been there, done that, so they're short on all that coaching and it would just take a lot longer. Instead, what we like to do politically is show what great looks like for the organization. I remember one of the smartest approaches politically I've seen done was you. And I have a colleague, Jonathan Moore, of course, who was head of product at Trainline. He was trying to transform an organization, as you know, that was really not doing any of these things into a showcase. And he had very demanding investors, a major private equity fund, and he had to show results quickly. He hand picked the best product team he could put together. So he took from the people he had been recruiting, he picked the best product manager, the best designer, the best engineers, and he put them on the most important thing, which in this case was a new native mobile app. And he's told the team, look, I picked you because we need to show the rest of our own organization what good looks like. Right? We need to show the investors what good looks like. We need to show the salespeople what good looks like, you know, that was intentional. So he was being smart when it comes to the politics to make sure that he could show the prize at the end of the road. Right. This is the prize. Now they dis as one product team, but then they use the successes of that team to motivate people to spread that to the other teams. Yeah.
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A
And now Mari, is there no pilot that is too small? Like in that case, it's a mobile app that goes through the whole organization could see it. But can a pilot be too small? Meaning a leader is like, yeah, of course that was easy because it was just that small thing you were doing or just a little outcome for one small segment and they are challenging. Can it scale?
- [09:48]
B
Well, you're bringing up. There are politics just around pilot teams. Yes. One of the things is you need to make sure it's ambitious enough that people don't say, oh man, we could have done that in our old way of working. What's the big deal? Right. So that wouldn't impress anybody if it was just doing what they had done before. On the other hand, you don't want to set them up to fail either. Right. So you don't want it to be, oh, you have to triple the business in a quarter or something like that. You know, in this case, he picked something that the company had. They didn't even have a mobile app. It was terrible. But that's a different story. Right. Why didn't they? Well, that was a leadership issue. But they, nobody would have said that was too easy. And he knew, Jonathan knew because he had built, you know, industry leading apps several times before. He had, that was a big strong suit of his. And so he picked something that he had confidence in they could succeed with and that would have the impact across the organization. But there's other political constraints. You know, you have to make sure that their managers, these individuals that are on the pilot teams, their managers need to be supportive. So, you know, not all, some managers are supportive, some of them are less so. So you have to be sensitive to that. You also have to be sensitive to some practical things. Like what if it depends on a big tech debt issue that's not going to be addressed for a year, you know, then you're setting up a team to do something that they don't even have the infrastructure to do. So you have to look at a lot of factors. Also do you even have people with the necessary skills if they're going to be a pilot team for this? And you know, you're missing the engineering skills you need Then you're going to have to hire those people first or find them some other way.
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A
So, Mari, would you advise, don't even start a company wide transformation if you cannot support demonstrating impact in a small pilot.
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B
Well, that is what I recommend strongly. Pilot teams. I think pilot teams have a lot of reasons they're successful, not just political reasons. When we go back to politics, what is a pilot team really? It's a way at very low cost and very low risk to prove out something that the company's never seen before.
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A
I love that.
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B
So if you're a CEO, this is something that, I mean, most CEOs, I think if they understood, they would demand this because this is the responsible way of really looking at what would be really involved in a transformation.
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A
You know, we kind of talk, how do you judge a good transformation? Why do you transform? And you say you hope to be able to do things you couldn't do before, to respond to threats or go after opportunities you couldn't do before. And I found a catalyst of getting a company on a transformation journey by trying to identify when they've done some things that were amazing in the culture. I've worked with a company and they were just describing, oh man, we had this little thing we put together, they were so good, they delivered this AI product in three weeks. And I said, well, let's talk about not those people, because they always have a name. You know, it was Matty's team, he was so good. And I said, let's talk about what made them successful. And when they start to break it down, they say, well, the team had focus, they were clear on what they were measured on. Oh, we put, the engineer was driving that. And I said, well, you're kind of identifying those first principles that you want to be true in your success. And I say, that's an example of a pilot team. And what you're trying to describe. You know, I love the first framing where you said the clock starts. The second you say we're transforming, people say, okay, okay, okay, we're transforming from what to what A fine makes sense. But you're saying this is all about achieving outcomes. The clock is starting to demonstrate that where you're going is much better than where you've been or how you've worked is much better. And a pilot team gives you the ability to quickly and at a low cost demonstrate those outcomes to the organization.
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B
To do it now safely too, pointing out it doesn't put their revenue at risk. It's a much small subset.
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A
I like that. And you've called out the problem, has to be ambitious enough and impactful enough, but not so difficult that it's impossible to do. You have to look at the constraints around it. There was one aspect you called around leadership and management, and I want to make sure I'm always critical about that. It's almost I need a good evangelist as the leader of the pilot team because I've had several companies do pilots with a very bad story told about it where, you know, there's a success and there's an ego in a leader that jumps in and says, look at how great they were because of me. You know, look at all the things I did to help the company. And maybe describe what you're looking for in a leader of a pilot that is a champion of a transformation.
- [14:46]
B
There's the champion of the transformation, and that is somebody that is absolutely critical on this for the reasons you describe. They have to be the chief evangelist for this. Now, I have had CEOs of companies that have transformed that tell me that they believe they succeeded because they were that person. They believed that they needed to be that person, the CEO needed to be it. I also believe you don't have to be a CEO. You could be, you know, the chief product officer leading this, but somebody needs to lead this. And they are, you know, they're putting a lot of their reputation on the line and they're showing why it's going to be good. They had better be good at internal evangelism. Right? That's another political thing we can talk about. So the first thing we already said, which is you have to show results before that clock runs out. Then you have. There's another issue. You have to keep beating the drum, we say so. You have to have a constant drumbeat of successes. And that leader, that champion, as you described him or her, it needs to be very on top of that. Always making sure everybody in the organization lets that person know every time there's a success, every time there's a step forward so that that person can make sure that the company at large understands the progress that's being made. Everything depends really on that first pilot. But when that pilot goes well, if it doesn't go well, you might get another chance. And again, that happens. But when it goes well, that's just sort of. You've earned the right now to a longer term effort, but you have to show the progress. All right? Now that person is probably going to have a very. I mean, they're vested in this, right? They're often the ones that told the CEO. This is why you hired me, to help you get to there. I am committed to this. They are pretty vested in it. They might not be the actual manager of the people on the pilot team. They are usually not, but boy, are they involved. Right? They are helping to pick that pilot team. From all that discussions we said they are probably coaching the managers of those people on the pilot team. They are probably doing some skip level, they're doing some work because they, you know, which is, by the way, exactly what Jonathan had to do. He was from the top. He was a cpo, Chief Product Officer. He was making sure this was gonna succeed.
- [17:23]
A
I, I, I wanna talk about a political dynamic that shows itself up in different flavors in transformation. And this is the role of the CEO. You've kind of started to talk about this in some CEOs say I'm the chief driver, the chief evangelism. We've seen transformations that start, you know, bottoms up. You know, some team maybe read a book about it, maybe feel inspired to want to work differently and they want to be a catalyst for change. Some that start at a business line level, a line of business ahead of product level. We've seen this at different levels and flavors of it, and yet we always recommend the same thing like transform as a product, do a test, do a pilot. Often I do executive sessions where I recognize my audience is really one person, the most senior leader in the company. As a CEO, I want you to do two things for me today. One, put yourself in the shoes of a product leader trying to make the pitch to a CEO on a transformation effort. Maybe kind of give me a sense of how you frame it. And I want to play the role of the CEO, trying to understand what outcomes or expectations I'll have of you of this journey. Because I kind of want to help with the political expectation setting of the dynamics that people will go through. You know, frame out this journey for me and what to expect.
- [18:39]
B
Right. Well, the first thing we should probably be very clear on is that at scale, there's two scenarios here that are both very common. One is the company is a multi business unit company. You know, a lot of the big ones, that's how they're set up. In which case, honestly, we recommend doing one business unit at a time because this is more politics. But very often when they're multi business unit companies, one or more of those business units are the consequence of an acquisition. As you know, when it's a consequence of an acquisition, all bets are off. It's you, you really need to realize it could be a very different culture, very different skills, very different customers, very different everything. So just because you nail a transformation in one business unit does not, it's not transitive, it won't just happen in the other one. That's right. So in a multi business unit company, the strong recommendation is to treat it on a bu by bu basis. And so in that case, I would substitute CEO for gm, General manager of.
- [19:48]
A
Head of that business unit.
- [19:49]
B
Head of that business unit. And you probably at some point will have an audience with the true CEO of the whole, you know, conglomerate, in which case the argument is we are proving this out in one business unit. If you have opinions, you know, about which business unit that should be, let us know. But we're going to prove it out here. It's safer for you and then you can judge all this. On the other hand, if it's a company that is just one large business unit, basically, which is a lot of companies, then the CEO really is critical here because transformation is more than just the product design and engineering organizations. Transformation impacts sales and marketing and HR and finance. And so the CEO is a very key role to play. And what I explain to those CEOs, because most of the time they don't have this experience. They have not worked in the product model before. When they have, it's much easier but, but it's, you know, that's the rare case. Sometimes the board will bring in a new CEO from a place like, you know, Amazon or something. And they are the ones that are driving all this. But, but in more often than not they haven't been exposed to this. But they also know that there's some reason driving all this there, you know, if they haven't explicitly been behind it, you know, it's probably not even started. So they need to be a leader there. But they will often ask me, like I've never done this before, where am I going to have to help? And I give them examples. So I like, I want you to know, you know, most of the time this is going to be your product leader and your technology leader. They're going to drive this. However, there will be cases, for example, if this changes the dynamic with sales, if this changes the dynamic with finance, that nobody's saying that those are ignored anymore, but it's a change in the dynamic. We have to expect that sometimes they'll be all, all in and other times they'll be reluctant. When they're reluctant, you're going to need to show them your support. Otherwise they will continue business as usual. That's just normal.
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A
What does support look like here?
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B
Yeah, support usually means, say, going to that head of sales, going to that head of finance, whoever it is, and saying, look, we need to make some changes. We are not going to just change everything at once. We are doing a pilot team. For this pilot team, I am supporting this. That means you're supporting this too. It's not everything. We're going to judge this together afterwards. But for this pilot team, it requires we all work a little differently. And that's what we are trying. If you're not willing to do that, I'm going to need a leader who can. That's where. And I don't think it's that. We're not asking them to, like, go out on a limb. That's, again, why pilot teams are so important. If you were to go to a CEO and say, yeah, we're going to put 100% of your revenue at risk for the next year, we're going to change everything. Most CEO are like, no, I'm not doing that. But you are saying, look, we've identified one or two pilot teams. That's what we're gonna do to test this out. We need to do this.
- [23:07]
A
What about the alternative in which I've seen a pilot team walk, and as a CEO, I'm demanding a sweeping change across everybody. I don't wanna wait anymore. That was good. I want, you know, I'm mandating it.
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B
Yeah, I've seen that. I've only seen it a couple times, but I have seen that mostly when the CEO feels like he or she has absolutely no choice, they feel like we don't have time for that. You know, whoever it is, Amazon, it's coming after us. We do not have the luxury. I've seen CEOs say, you're either on board or you're out. Yes. There are always going to be some people that are just. They're called laggards in the technology adoption model. They're never going to voluntarily go along. So you'll have to show some leadership there. But that's a small percentage. What I explained to the CEO is that you also have no trouble with the early adopters. A lot of the people just want. They know, they want to work this way. They're not the problem. The problem is in the middle. If you do this at once and say, we're all changing now, a lot of people that would have, if they had a little more time, would have been very, very happy contributors to it, because they're being forced to do that sooner than they were ready, they may leave, some of them may leave, some of them may check out whatever. You're going to have some level of collateral damage. That's the downside of just doing it all at once. And I do explain, you know, if they, if they don't understand the theory behind the technology adoption curve, I explain it to them and I show them how this is a real thing. It's with every product deals with this, this is what's going on. And if they still feel like they have no choice, then, then it's the CEO's prerogative. Right. But I do recommend, I say that it's going to take a little longer on the clock, but it'll be a lot smoother and you'll get the whole organization basically with you.
- [25:04]
A
I always say if you do it all at once, you discover all at once as well, you know, you will hurt all at once in that way. And it's kind of the pilot argument. Now, if I were pitching a pilot team to the CEO and the CEO is saying, okay, I'm going to support you, when can I start to see those outcomes and what indications will I know that you're on track or things are going well?
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B
Good.
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A
What are you saying to me?
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B
Good. Well, first of all, and I, you know, let's just acknowledge we love this hypothetical because the CEO is very involved, right? Yes. That's what we want. That's a really good leading indicator for success. So one of the things we would do in that case is we would include the CEO in the discussion of the right pilot team, the right problem to solve, and the right measure of success. Because you want to make sure, if anybody's impressed with the result, it should be the CEO. So you want to make sure, you know, in the case of Trainline, you know, we're going to do a native mobile app. We're shooting for double the number of transactions that happen. You know, would that be success for you? And the CEO's going, Hell yeah, that would be success for me. So, yeah, maybe that's the kind of thing we're looking at. So we want to make sure we're on the same page again. Terrible, avoidable Problem is the team is all fired up about solving something and the CEO is like, that's a big nothing burger to me. Right? We don't want that. So we want to make sure we're on the same page. Normally, the cadence for business results is quarterly. Sometimes, as you know, depending on what you're working on, it may just mean Multiple quarters. You do that. Sometimes you can do things faster than a quarter, but normally the cadence is quarterly. It's enough time for us to do a lot of discovery and delivery work. And then. And so, so let's say for this quarter, for a pilot team, you know, everybody's watching. They know that we won't really know the results until this is deployed to our customers and stuff. But there are lots of activities that are going on that are useful, like sharing what we've been learning in discovery. Now we're back to politics. One of the things that I tell product teams all the time is that when you're with real users and customers and you really get to know them and you share what you've learned, you build so much credibility with the organization. Yes, you do. Your salespeople are like, oh man, I can't believe they now finally got their asses out of the building and they're talking to customers. This has got to be good. And the CEO is like, hey, I know those people. That's good. You should know these people. Remember, what we tell is as long as the CEO views him or herself as knowing more about the customers than the product people, and you can't blame them for. Yes. So anyway, this is good. This is just activity, but it's a good leading indicator. Another thing that works really well and is, you know, the CEO is a stakeholder. So showing the prototypes that are evolving constantly, I love that. Doesn't even have to take the pilot team's time. The product leader might say, you know, let me have 15 minutes once a week I'll show you the very latest prototype.
- [28:20]
A
I love that.
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B
I love it. It gets them like, yes, look at all the things that are being tried. Look what's working, what's not. I see where this is going, I see why now. Maybe you should try this or try that. But they're feeling involved, so there's a lot you can do. Truth is, that quarter goes by pretty quick.
- [28:38]
A
It does. I mean, it gets me excited because the way you're describing navigating this politics makes it more feasible than when people start to think, you know, big company, you know, small changes, you know, and that journey. And often I think people struggle with the scope of transformation. You know, it's like, well, you know, step one, we move to agile, you know, step two, we move to cloud step, you know, and there are all of these massive company wide changes and there are no real outcomes. You know, we might have better technology now. They are not real. But I love how possible the journey feels when you kind of say, we want small group, big changes, big impact. Can we make it work? Where we have a team of competent people with the necessary range of skills, giving them problems to solve that are doing discovery and taking a company along a journey of saying, these are the things we can do today that we couldn't do before, demonstrating those to the team. This is why we transform. And, you know, I always. I've seen this work well, and I've also seen the excitement that happens where other people start to believe that they are already well equipped to do the same thing and they've missed out on the principles that made it work. So let's talk politics across and down, because I've seen. Let's. We're anchored on a pilot team at the politics. We're going through transformation. Where do you see teams and leaders lose trust in the organization or, you know, you kind of always say you're only as strong as your weakest employee in some ways. What are some of these things that happen that tend to be. Not even transformation circle backs, but they're like, yeah, I'm not really sure how to navigate. I'll go back to my old way. I don't really know. They instill doubt in some of the stakeholders.
- [30:30]
B
So there's two levels to this, and I think these are two of the most important things to be sensitive to politically. So if you're talking senior leaders and senior stakeholders, their peer in this are the product leaders. And if they don't have trust in those product leaders, because, remember, from their point of view, it's a change in the dynamics, it's a change in the power structure. Now you have to be sensitive, again, for political reasons. You have to be sensitive that they don't feel like what this really is is a move from them to you. That's why we avoid the terms product led, product driven, because that feeds that suspicion. What we try at every turn to do is encourage them to view it now as a collaboration, a real collaboration, and we're there to show them what that looks like. All right, so the first is if those stakeholders do not trust the product leaders, if they don't feel like those product leaders, they don't have the product sense, they don't have the experience with the customers. They don't have the knowledge. Yeah, they're not going to be willing because in a very real sense, they've been running the business, those stakeholders, and they. They're going to. If they're even to be a partner, they're going to want somebody to be substantial there. Now, most of the time that's not the biggest issue because the product leaders are pretty, you know, if you've done a reasonable job hiring or promoting, they're pretty good. Much more common is the more grassroot level stakeholder. You know, they're responsible for some critical thing in the business and their partner is really the product manager. And I tell people, you know, I've been dialing this up, even though it really does bother a lot of people, but if the product manager you are pairing that person with, like as their partner is a product owner in the very cspo PSPO sense, you're doomed. Those people have none of the training, none of the experience that that stakeholder needs in a partner. They're fine for the stakeholder to just continue to give features to and they translate those into backlog items. But that is not the product model. So the, the quickest path. The number one reason I think I see transformations fail is because the product leaders think all they could, all they have to do is retitle their product owners to product managers.
- [33:08]
A
You know, I was just doing a coaching session earlier this weekend. You know, a leader, they had just done that type of thing. And he said, you know, we've done all of this and every single person still goes to those two people. I've told them, you have a product manager right here with you. And they still go. And I was saying to them, those two people in the minds of your stakeholders or your business leaders, that is the minimum standard for what a product manager in their head is. And like, you have to understand, ask yourself, why do they go to those two people? And I'm asking them, probing, well, they trust them. I say, why? It's like, well, they know the industry well, they have good relationships, they've been delivering results for us for years. And I said, you can see the drastic difference between that person and the people. You've retitled the first point on product leadership. You know, people kind of talk about subservient models to collaborative one. You know, you've been doing things for us before. And someone asked me tactically, I said, well, we are sales led. How do you really change to collaboration? Do you just wake up tomorrow and tell them, we are going to collaborate now? And I said to them, if you that is truly the dynamic in your company where everybody serves this organization, you need to recognize politically that that's where the power is. And what I tell people to do is I say, you know, I go and I tell those groups we need to learn from you. We need to spend time with you. Our job is to help you succeed at your goals. You know, and part of what you're doing there is you're building relationships with that organization. You know, I would have gone in my transformation journey of making product goals, sales goals, meaning, you know, for this quarter, my product teams are working on your salespeople getting their quota, your win loss ratios, you know, and what you're trying to do with this is you're kind of creating alignment of the same team because they need levels of collaboration to move from their subservient thinking wiring. I mean, there are so many businesses just used to be like, yeah, you need a feature. Tell the product team, send this email over here. And now you're saying, what is the difference? You are going to be telling us what to do or what to sell. And so it is a. I think for leaders, they have to recognize the move from subservient to collaborative can only be earned by you increasing your product sense. People trusting that you have a deep understanding, they will not understand that over 90, they don't know you. So you got to build relationships. I always say, recognize the power struggle. And you know, nobody goes into a pack that is in a pack and automatically becomes the pack leader. You know, you kind of join the pack and then you can kind of earn the right to be the leader in the pack. So it's like you seek to understand before you're understood. I love that a lot. Mario, you've talked about kind of change management in some ways. One of the other political things I see is this conflict between we have a new future and we've got keep the lights on work, or we've got maintenance work, you know, and, you know, leaders constantly struggling with how we balance innovation versus maintenance, new feature requests versus tech debt. Maybe talk about how you navigate that in this journey.
- [36:17]
B
Well, in fact, that's a perfect follow up to what you had just asked because, you know, you were, we were talking about what are ways that can lose that trust with stakeholders. Well, one of the ways is if you get a product team and this is an unintended consequence sometimes, you know, because we go. Part of being a pilot team is you're trained on new skills like product discovery. And it's very easy to get like, yeah, I want to solve problems. We're just, we're not there to just build features on a roadmap anymore. We're there to solve problems and deliver results. And that's all true. However, there is a Caveat that's super important that I try to always remember to remind the team of, which is that those stakeholders, they still have a business to run. And there are things which are called keep the lights on. Some companies call them bau, business as usual. But the point is, they're usually a lot of little things. Things like, we need this for reporting. You know, we need this for tracking. We need. But there. There are things that are legit things. If now we're talking politically here. If the stakeholder believes that the product manager does not understand the need for those keep the lights on items, they lose credibility pretty much instantly because now they're like, okay, you're being pretty naive about this whole thing. I'm willing to, like, I want to solve hard problems, too, but, you know, this is not going away. I mean, I literally cannot file our, you know, SEC reports without this. And you control the developers right here. I mean, what do you want me to do here? This is sort of is very important that the product teams understand what's involved in running a business. Most of the time, it's very straightforward and not at all a problem. There's these. These things that are clearly keep the lights on. Every once in a while, somebody will have something in a keep the lights on that is not really a keep the lights on. It's a much bigger thing. And then you got to bring that up and say, well, you know, if we did that, we wouldn't be able to work on the problem to solve this quarter. So we need to talk about this. And you can have a discussion, but we coach the product managers to be very sensitive to the fact that you are changing how you solve problems, but you still need to run the business.
- [38:50]
A
Yeah, I love that a lot. I've seen. There's also the flavor of where product teams say, you know, we are now solving problems. You didn't give me a good problem. You know, you were not very clear. You know, how do you know it's the right problem? You know, I have seen that dynamic in pilot teams. You know, politically, you know, that's almost political suicide for me when I hear, you know, how do you. How do you advise teams around reframing their thinking in that dynamic?
- [39:16]
B
No, that's a great one. And I'm surprised we have. And that hasn't come up yet because that is a very big one. And it's a little tricky because the truth is, once you train a product team in product discovery, they are actually capable of both problem discovery and solution discovery, and both are fun Too, most teams will tell you they like problem discovery better. You know, let's see new opportunities. But now let's introduce the political lens from the political side. The stakeholders are like, are you serious? We have been dealing with these problems for like 10 years and you're telling me you're not going to believe me that these are problems and you have to go out and spend two months rediscovering the problems and convincing yourself it's a problem. Now talk about a way to really undermine trust right at the beginning. And what I try to tell the teams is, yes, you could do this, you are capable of doing this, but please don't. What I try to say is, look, trust your stakeholder on the problem. They are almost certainly right that this is a real problem. Almost certainly. And by the way, in that remote chance that they're not right, you will find that out the first day you test your solution prototype with customers. Right away you'll find out that that's not really the problem they thought it was. So that's. Don't worry about that. Instead, say, look, we're going to just assume that problem is a real problem. It probably is. And what we're going to focus on is what we are hired to do, which is to come up with a solution that's better than the competition so that our customers actually choose us. Is it necessarily the most valuable problem to work on? Who the hell knows? There's no way to really know that anyway. It's a judgment. What is a safe thing is it is a legit problem. Yes, you can trust your stakeholders for that because you have to realize politically this is a give and take. Right. You are asking the stakeholders, please don't give me solutions anymore on a roadmap, just give me problems. Yes. And in exchange, you're saying, and in exchange for that, we're gonna commit to those solutions to those problems. We're gonna really give you something great. Will commit to an outcome, not just an output. That's a big deal. If you go and say, oh, in addition, we want to pick the problem still. Now, the reality is, and I explain this to the product teams, if you can solve stakeholder problems, after a few times of truly solving those problems and delivering real results for those stakeholders, you have earned a seat at the table. They're going to be interested in your thoughts on problems. So you earn that. And then now you're a partner there and you can say, hey, as we've been doing this work, we've noticed some other problems that maybe haven't been brought up that much. Maybe we should talk about these together because it seems like there's some pretty good opportunities here.
- [42:23]
A
I love that.
- [42:24]
B
That is very different once you've built that trust. That's right.
- [42:28]
A
You've got to build trust. And I always say you got to win hearts and minds before you even seek to lead. Have a seat at the table. And outcomes are the best way to do that. You know, I've even seen the flavor when stakeholders still provide solutions and some product teams think their job is to just validate that that is a wrong solution. You see, I did 500 tests. Nobody went to it. It was bad. And I said you've missed the point. Your job is to discover what works, you know, because they still have the problem, you know, regardless of whether you proved your idea was right or wrong. And that requires some big coaching and shifting. This was such an insightful conversation. And you know, I can talk all day about people dynamics around there, but we framed really a lot. I love that initial framing. We want small group, big changes. It's a race to demonstrate outcomes when you're going on transformation. All of the political capital you have that you've leveraged to even start this journey is dependent on your ability to prove. It's a journey worth doing, worth sticking through. And so the best thing you can do is to demonstrate outcomes as quickly as possible. And you've kind of called out some important dynamics. The role of leadership, the competence of good leadership, product managers really demonstrating outcomes, being competent in their job. We've talked about change management and that dynamics in here and the problems to solve or the power dynamic. Truly a phenomenal time today. Mari has always been. I am super grateful for the time you put into this and discussion. Thank you again and hope you have a fantastic holiday season.
- [44:04]
B
You too, Christian. Thank you.
- [44:06]
A
Want to learn more? Until next time, Please check out svpg.com, sign up for our newsletter that Mary Kagan 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.
- [44:28]
C
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.