Episode 203: Christmas Special Greatest Hits 2024: Mastering Product Leadership Through Research, Goals, and Growth

Summary

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Product Thinking Podcast

Episode 203: Christmas Special Greatest Hits 2024: Mastering Product Leadership Through Research, Goals, and Growth

Host: Melissa Perri
Release Date: December 24, 2024

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Episode Overview

In this Christmas special, host Melissa Perri revisits the top moments and lessons from Product Thinking Podcast’s most popular 2024 episodes. By compiling insights from leading experts, Melissa focuses on advancing product leadership through deep research, effective decision-making, goal-setting with OKRs, leadership coaching, and driving product growth across the business. This “greatest hits” roundup is designed to leave listeners with actionable wisdom for product management and leadership improvement as the new year approaches.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolving Role of Research in Product Management

Guest: Steve Portugal

• Research as Discovery
  • Research reveals the unknowns that organizations aren’t yet aware of.
    • “Research is about what you don’t know that you don’t know and how big is that aperture?” (Steve Portugal, 01:15)
  • Many organizations focus too much on closed-ended research, missing valuable context.
• Research as Both Activity and Role
  • The distinction between user research as an activity vs. as a formal role has evolved.
    • “I've long wondered about user research, the need for user research and the need for user researchers. One is an activity and one is a job title or a role... Who does research? I think maybe people have always been talking to customers, whether they had a label for it or not.” (Steve Portugal, 01:48)
  • The proliferation of books, conferences, and courses has formalized this function.

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2. Decision-Making Challenges in Large Organizations

Guest: Quincy Hunt (AWS)

• Consensus and Decision Paralysis
  • Involving everyone can slow decisions, especially with complex or contentious issues.
    • “That mindset of having everybody involved in the decision sometimes adds a level of lag... when there's a very complex decision that has to be made.” (Quincy Hunt, 02:27)
  • Teams and executives often defer responsibility in a “loop” where decisions are delayed.
• Fear of Mistakes
  • The fear of making the wrong choice often leads to indecision.
    • “People are afraid of making mistakes, people are afraid of making the wrong decisions. So... no decision is made because nobody wants to make a mistake, nobody wants to be penalized by it.” (Quincy Hunt, 03:16)

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3. Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) and Organizational Alignment

Guests: Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

• Setting OKRs at the Correct Level
  • Goals should be established at the level where you have the most influence.
    • “You should be setting objectives and key results goals for the organization that you have influence over.” (Jeff Gothelf, 04:00)
    • Example: An authentication team’s OKR is to build the best authentication process, which indirectly benefits the whole company by reducing costs and friction.
• OKRs, Focus, and Avoiding Contradictory Incentives
  • OKRs should drive focus and alignment, not measure individual performance.
    • “The reason you don't use OKRs for individual incentives is exactly that. You want to simplify the alignment process by introducing as little noise into the process as you possibly can.” (Josh Seiden, 05:42)
  • Overcomplicated incentive systems fragment alignment.
    • “When you start multiplying the incentives by the number of employees you've got, everybody's got their own incentives in addition to team incentives. Now you can measure individual performance, but you've just messed up your ability to align all of these people.” (Josh Seiden, 05:24)

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4. Leadership and Coaching in Product Teams

Guest: Kate Leto

• Coaching Empowers Teams
  • Coaching is crucial for leaders to help team members discover their own solutions.
    • “Where I think coaching is super powerful as a leadership skill is that it really does help people realize they've got the answers to a lot of these challenges already within themselves. They just need a little space and perhaps some nudging and some questioning to help them figure it out for themselves.” (Kate Leto, 06:11)
  • Leaders shouldn’t feel pressured to solve every problem themselves—effective coaching enables teams to build independence.

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5. Growth and Cross-Functional Opportunity Identification

Guest: Leah Theron

• Growth Means Looking Beyond Traditional Boundaries
  • Growth involves surfacing business opportunities across teams, especially where functions aren’t always aligned.
    • “Growth usually does is they try to find the best opportunity, whether it is in acquisition... retention or... monetization. This is why we talk about usually activation, where we say that growth is responsible for activation.” (Leah Theron, 07:29)
  • True growth work balances acquisition, retention, and monetization but focuses on activation as the lever for long-term product success.
• Retention Over Sales
  • Retaining users is more meaningful and sustainable than optimizing only for sales.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Research is about what you don’t know that you don’t know...” (Steve Portugal, 01:15)
• “People are afraid of making mistakes... it creates an environment where no decision is made...” (Quincy Hunt, 03:15)
• “You should be setting objectives and key results goals for the organization that you have influence over.” (Jeff Gothelf, 04:00)
• “The reason you don’t use OKRs for individual incentives is exactly that. You want to simplify the alignment process...” (Josh Seiden, 05:42)
• “Where I think coaching is super powerful as a leadership skill is that it really does help people realize they’ve got the answers... already within themselves.” (Kate Leto, 06:11)
• “Retention is the ultimate goal.” (Leah Theron, 07:20)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:37 – Introduction by Melissa Perri
• 01:15 – Steve Portugal on the purpose of research
• 01:48 – Portugal on the evolution of user research roles
• 02:27 – Quincy Hunt on decision-making barriers at large organizations
• 04:00 – Jeff Gothelf on proper OKR setting and alignment
• 04:57 – Josh Seiden on OKRs, focus, and incentive pitfalls
• 06:11 – Kate Leto on coaching as powerful leadership
• 07:08 – Leah Theron on growth finding business opportunities and activation

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Final Thoughts

Melissa closes with thanks to all her guests and listeners, celebrating the show's milestones (over 100,000 monthly downloads, 1000 YouTube subscribers, over 200 episodes). She encourages continued engagement and teases a future episode about 2025 predictions.

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For product leaders:
This episode serves as a powerful, compact masterclass on the “system and soul” of successful product organizations—bridging research, decision-making, goal alignment, coaching, and enduring growth. Each expert brings practical examples and mindset shifts that you can carry into your own product leadership journey in the year ahead.

Transcript

[A]

Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.

[B]

Hello and welcome to this Christmas special episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Just like last year, with 2024 coming to a close, I've been reflecting over some of our most downloaded episodes and the key insights which our amazing guests had to share. From product and user research to overcoming decision making challenges at large companies and setting business goals, this episode has you covered with this year's highlights. Let's dive in. We'll start by hearing from Steve Portugal who says that research is about finding answers to what you don't know that you don't know. Our conversation turned out to be one of the most popular episodes ever on the show. Over to Steve.

[C]

Research is about what you don't know that you don't know and how big is that aperture? Like how much appetite does anyone have for that question? I'm always going to be interested in that and sort of try to get to what I don't know that I don't know and that for better or worse, I think there are so many closed ended things. We need to understand this thing. We're at this point in the development. We don't need to go to people, we've gone to people in the past. We understand this larger context. It's all taking place on the screen.

[B]

Next, Steve walks us through how he has witnessed user research evolving over the years.

[C]

For this environment, we're trying to tease apart like a bunch of interconnected things. I mean, I've long wondered about user research, the need for user research and the need for user researchers. One is an activity and one is a job title or a role, you know, and that's definitely something that has changed over the years, like who does research? I think maybe people have always been talking to customers, whether they had a label for it or we have a term and we have books and conferences and courses you can take.

[B]

Thanks again to Steve for his invaluable insights. Quincy Hunt taught us about the challenges of making decisions at large and complex organizations and what tools are available to overcome them.

[D]

In organizations you have these teams and you know, you want everybody to be involved in helping make the right decision sometimes and in most cases on behalf of the customer. But that mindset of having everybody involved in the decision sometimes adds a level of lag and slows down the complexity or slows it down when there's a very complex decision that has to be made. So I've seen that as a very common pattern. You don't know when to agree on issues or challenges that are very contentious or different from what you traditionally do. So there's a lot of consensus that goes around. It goes up and down. The executive team, the executive team is expecting the teams or the product management teams to make the decision. The product management teams are saying, well, no, this is above our pay grade. We want the executives to make a decision. And it is that constant loop. So I think that's been a challenge. I think the other thing too that I see quite a bit in terms of a pattern is that, you know, people are afraid of making mistakes, people are afraid of making the wrong decisions. So you know, it creates an environment where no decision is made because nobody wants to make a mistake, nobody wants to be penalized by it.

[B]

Quincy's experience at AWS gives a unique perspective on how to leave product in such companies, providing insights for aspiring decision makers. And it's no surprise as to why he was among the most popular guests from 2024. In 2024, I also had my friends Jeff Gotholf and Josh Seidem back on the show. We discussed how objectives and key results should be aligned with business verticals and how functional goals need to feed into enterprise goals.

[E]

So the way that we talk about it is that you should be setting objectives and key results goals for the organization that you have influence over. If you're an executive and you're in charge of an organization, then you're setting corporate goals, enterprise wide goals. If you're an executive in charge of a business unit, your OKR is going to be focused on that business unit. You're the authentication team. Your OKR should be focused on making the easiest, smoothest, most efficient, most successful authentication process right in the world, that type of thing, because that's the world that you can influence. When we make this authentication process the best it can be, that actually leads to more folks interacting with the system more quickly and it reduces our operational costs because we're not getting calls to the call center to reset passwords. So that's how we're contributing to the organization by making the best authentication process possible.

[B]

Josh shares his perspective on OKRs focus and alignment, providing valuable insights from our listeners.

[F]

I think one of the ideas that I like a lot about okrs is an idea from Christina Woodke. We use okrs to talk about what is the focus of our work and how to align focuses across large groups of people. First of all, there's going to be stuff that falls outside of OKRs. You hear some people call them KPIs. If we think about focus and alignment, we're trying to get everybody pulling in the same direction. And so the more complicated that your incentive system is, the more directions people have to pull in. But when you start multiplying the incentives by the number of employees you've got, everybody's got their own incentives in addition to team incentives. Now you can measure individual performance, but you've just messed up your ability to align all of these people by giving them contradictory incentives. The reason you don't use OKRs for individual incentives is exactly that. You want to simplify the alignment process by introducing as little noise into the process as you possibly can.

[B]

This was a great duo to have on the show, allowing for a rewarding discussion on OKRs for Focus and alignment. As a fellow coach and educator in the product sector, I loved having Kate Leto on the show this year. She had a lot to say on the importance of coaching and developing leadership skills.

[G]

Where I think coaching is super powerful as a leadership skill is that it really does help people realize they've got the answers to a lot of these challenges already within themselves. They just need a little space and perhaps some nudging and some questioning to help them figure it out for themselves. And by teaching people, helping people figure out how to do that, that takes a lot of pressure off the leader or manager because you don't have to answer all the questions, you don't have to come up with all the solutions to all the problems because you've got a team of people who can do it for themselves.

[B]

Kate's knowledge on leadership and coaching provides a lot of value for those looking to excel in their product career, but also enables our current leaders to effectively nurture existing talent. We wrap up this episode with Leah Theron's thoughts on the role of growth in identifying business opportunities across acquisition, retention and monetization while focusing on activation to drive long term success.

[H]

My first touch point in growth was to create business cases outside of a product function that go over all functions of the business and nobody's doing this product doesn't care. Sales definitely does not care what happens in the product as long as they can sell better and selling is not the ultimate goal, retaining is the ultimate goal. And marketing also doesn't care. So what growth usually does is they try to find the best opportunity, whether it is in acquisition without doing the entirety of marketing's job, whether it is in retention or whether it is in monetization. This is why we talk about usually activation, where we say that growth is responsible for activation.

[B]

My conversation with Leah on product functions and how to stimulate product growth was amazing. These areas are so important and applicable for almost any business, and this is why her sharp insights made it into one of our most memorable episodes of 2024. Thank you to all my incredible guests this year and a shout out to all of those who weren't mentioned today for coming on and sharing their stories. I hope you enjoyed this Christmas special of the Product Thinking Podcast. I'll be back next week to discuss predictions for 2025. My final thank you goes to all of our wonderful listeners for tuning in each week as we reached over 100,000 downloads a month and helped us get 1000 subscribers on YouTube and we crossed 200 episodes. Thanks for making this podcast a success. I couldn't have done it without you and I hope in 2025 you continue to write me to dear melissa.com asking me all of your burning product management questions, season's greetings, and all the best to you and your families for the New Year. We'll see you in 2025.