Product Thinking

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers a subscriber’s question about ‘soft skills’ and why they are equally as important as hard skills.

Q: What would you say to someone who's concerned about their assertiveness? [00:51]

Q: What resources or experiences would you recommend for people who recognize the need for hard skills as part of product, but who would intentionally like to cultivate these soft skills (empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence) as well? [9:06]

Q: What would you recommend a team of product managers to do if they’re headed by a CTO who does not have time for the team, or product management know-how? Can a product team ever be successful if they are led by someone who doesn’t seem to have organizational power? [14:03]

Going to the C-suite yourselves may not be the option, but how do you surface up the problem? If it's a good C-suite they should start to see that this is an issue because the team might not be performing the way that they actually expected to be. I think you can go to the C-suite to have conversations about your individual products, not necessarily the same product leader but helps surface up what good looks like. [15:48]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Kathy Pham. Kathy is a computer scientist, a product management executive, and co-leads the Ethics and Responsible Tech at Mozilla. She also co-founded the Mozilla Fix the Internet Incubator, as well as the Product and Society at Mozilla, which focuses on product management, ethics, and the public interest. Kathy joins Melissa to discuss product ethics.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Kathy talk about in this episode:

Interesting details about the product management class Kathy teaches at Harvard. [00:47]

Kathy’s experiences working at The White House, Harvard, and in product management. [5:52]

Ethics and its implications for product management. [12:58]

Accessibility and security are important and need to be integrated into a product from the very beginning. [15:48]

When designing products for an inclusive audience, you have to take into consideration the team culture that is in place and build out those personas to be as inclusive as possible. “I think it's important to build into the culture knowing that the moment something is built it's really hard to reverse,” Kathy tells Melissa.[19:35]

How to respond to changes or challenges with your product platform when it happens in another country where no member of your team is from. [23:34]

As product managers, we need to be listening to our users, and that includes listening to those users who are telling us what we don’t want to hear. It means not condemning or shutting down their feedback by telling them they’re wrong. [28:34]

Having diverse perspectives within our product teams is very important for the decision-making process. It ensures that the concerns of the target audience are heard and are taken into account. [30:32]

When the people building our program algorithms make terrible assumptions or have blind spots, they bake into them issues that already exist in the world and just propagate them through code. [38:50]

Resources

Kathy Pham | LinkedIn | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers a subscriber’s question about choice architecture and competing priorities between the business and the customer. 

Q: How do you balance the ethics of choice architecture as a product manager who is responsible for satisfying possible divergent priorities between the business and the customer? What is our duty when priorities may conflict?

Hear Melissa talk about:

Choice architecture and dark patterns

What to do with your priorities conflict with each other

How ethics in product is vital to how you view your products

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Matt Wallaert. Matt is a behavioral scientist and a product strategist. He has spent over twenty years applying behavioral sciences to practical problems. He currently holds the position of Executive Director of Behavioral Science at Frog, a Capgemini Company, where he helps organizations build their own behavioral science capabilities. 

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Matt talk about in this episode:

Behavior change can be applied across many disciplines but its natural home is product. The point of product is to change behavior. [1:09]

How Matt got interested in the world of behavioral science. [3:07]

What it means to have actual outcomes for customers and how behavioral science can be used to point out what those outcomes should look like. [8:41]

When doing behavioral research, segment on behaviors rather than demographics. [9:43]

Behavioral statements come at the very beginning, and they describe the end. It's calling into being what hasn't yet occurred. [13:08]

Activating someone means to get them engaged. "If people feel like they're creating business value, they'll be super engaged." [17:53]

Product leaders need a deep understanding of the human side of product management. [26:08]

The best product managers are curious people. They want to know how the system fits together and how all the processes within the system work. [30:00]

How product leaders can determine if a person has cognition, and the relevant questions to ask to find out. [30:38]

"If you can figure out how to change behavior naturally in the world, I can teach you the science part. I can teach you the process part. I can teach you four stages and competing pressures and all of the tricks and tips and tools that we use to make this work in the modern environment. But you have to want to be that person," Matt says. [35:19]

"Product people are not status quo people. It's inherently about difference. It's inherently about change." [36:21]

Resources

Matt Wallaert | LinkedIn | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to use their time wisely, whether they’re trying to support their sales team with a complex product, getting the most out of a customer advisory board, or finding time for discovery work on a Scrum-focused team.

Q: I'm constantly helping our sales team run demo calls and our account managers onboard and set up new customers. What can I do to empower my team so I can focus on improving our product instead? Have you ever used a dedicated team member to fill this space as a product specialist role? [1:38]

Q: What am I signing up for when setting up a customer advisory board? What should I do to launch it smoothly and get the most out of it? What risks am I facing? Is this a stupid idea? [9:31]

Q: Is there a way to make product discovery a process and make time for it, like what scrum does for delivery? [16:28]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

This week’s guest is C. Todd Lombardo, the VP of Product and Experience at Openly. C. Todd and Melissa discuss product research–a key combination of user research, market research, and analytics–and how product managers can better implement research practices into their organizations.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Todd talk about in this episode:

The kind of product leadership Todd does, and how he got invested in product management. [1:24]

The biggest change in product management in the last decade is the legitimacy of position, and product leaders finally having important roles in organizations. [5:40]

Product research is about gathering information and trying to synthesize it in a meaningful way. [10:48]

Product managers need to have the ability to go out and speak with customers and do qualitative research. [13:16]

The mindset of discovery, and how it can contribute to designers and engineers making better decisions which lead to better products and eventually, better outcomes. [18:23]

Our job as product leaders is to figure out what our customers want. [21:55]

One of the main rules of product research is to prepare to be wrong and go into [product research] with the intent to prove yourself wrong. “If you can't prove yourself wrong you might be onto something right.” [27:09]

Always take into account the audience you’re presenting to. Remember that you’re talking to busy executives, so share your conclusions up front so that they don’t miss the main points. [30:30]

Resources

C Todd Lombardo | LinkedIn | Twitter

Openly

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about:

Q: As a CPO, what should I think about when managing disciplines I’m not an expert in? [1:08]

Q: Do you have any tips on how to set up good 30-60-90 day smart goals as a product manager for a mature startup? [7:00]

Q: What advice do you have in evaluating next steps in moving on to a career after product management? [14:51]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

The theme of this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is agile development, and Melissa Perri’s guest this week is Jeff Patton of Jeff Patton & Associates. Jeff is one of the first agile product managers, and his company helps other companies use product and customer- centric thinking to improve their market and the way they work. Jeff and Melissa to discuss agile development in this week’s show, including what’s currently going wrong with it.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Jeff talk about in this episode:

How both Jeff and Melissa got into agile development. [01:10]

The issues agile development was created to mitigate. [7:01]

How agile development was understood when it was first created. [14:15]

The difference between agile development now and agile development in the past is understanding what an outcome is. “[Product] outcome is measured by whether the customers and users see you try and use it, and keep using it,” Jeff tells Melissa. [14:51]

Product development is about prototyping, experimenting, and spending time with customers. [19:12]

Three things you should never not do in agile development. [21:54]

Companies are now conducting more business via technology which requires them to become more agile. However, they’re not adopting the agile manifesto in the right way. [30:55]

Jeff hopes that agile development will morph and become what it needs to be in the future. [39:09]

Resources

Jeff Patton | LinkedIn | Twitter

Jeff Patton & Associates

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about applying product practices to nonprofit companies and customer engagement and debunks myths about MVPs.

Q: How applicable are product best practices and principles outside of for-profit SAAS companies? [1:08]

Q: Do you have any suggestions on how we can encourage our users to experiment with the new payment method our company introduced? [6:32]

Q: How do I advocate for a more iterative and incremental approach to new product releases and product updates, as opposed to big bang releases? [10:34]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

The theme of this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is culture, and Melissa Perri’s guest is Gibson Biddle, author of the “Ask Gib” product newsletter. Gibson is dedicated to teaching product strategy and culture both in and outside of the classroom. He joins Melissa to discuss the importance of having a good organizational culture, and how that affects strategy.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Gibson talk about in this episode:

The product leader’s job is to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways (DHM). [3:18]

How Netflix developed their high-level strategy for personalization. [8:47]

Gibson’s experience with managing the product team as VP of Product Management at Netflix. Every product leader who worked for him was expected to have clear, defined strategies for their teams. [12:39]

The failure of Project Griffin. [20:37]

Building a culture where everyone is on the same page about making the best choices for the business is difficult, but not impossible. One key practice is context over control; ensure that everyone understands the context that the business is operating in. [25:54]

“At the end of the day, people are not there forever but the culture is; the culture describes the [company’s] values and the values describe the skills and behaviors of everyone in the building,” Gibson tells Melissa. “At our quarterly meetings, we would discuss strategy, but we would also learn to form good judgment. This is what the culture is about; helping individuals make great decisions about products.” [29:41]

"Culture is all about who you hire… who you promote- every time someone was promoted to director or VP there was a celebration because it was about them being a culture carrier, them living the Netflix culture. And [when you would] let people go, they might demonstrate amazing results, but they were living outside of Netflix's values,” Gibson shares. [38:46]

Strategy is important when starting a product organization, but it’s ok if half of it fails. It’s a process and a bunch of hypotheses that you need to learn from. [43:46]

Resources

Gibson Biddle on LinkedIn | Twitter

GibsonBiddle.com