Product Thinking

Creating great products is about the systems, processes and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader.

Melissa continues the conversation about strategy, this time from the perspective of the senior product leader. What does it take to be a good CPO? What role does a product manager play in setting strategy for the company? What’s the difference between company strategy and product strategy? Melissa poses these questions to this week’s guest, Georgie Smallwood. Georgie is the Chief Product Officer at Tier Mobility, and the former CPO of N26. She has deep insights into what it takes to create and successfully implement product strategy, and why that is important for autonomy.

Here are some key points from Melissa and Georgie’s discussion:

Your strategy is the connector between your mission and achieving that mission. It narrows your frame of work and space you can operate in, Georgie says. [6:04]

“Creating the strategy is just one part of it. You have to over-communicate all the time. Everything has to come back to it,” Georgie points out. [9:45]

Melissa and Georgie discuss the differing ideas around the concept of autonomy. Should there be autonomy without constraints? What is privileged autonomy? [11:42]

No product strategy framework is better than any other one. What matters, Georgie says, is how effectively you use them and what you do with them. [20:00]

“If you want to change the way that people are doing things in the future, no amount of data is really gonna help you; because there are some leap of faith assumptions that you need to take.” [22:53]

If you want to be a senior leader you need to be an expert in something. You need both hard skills and soft skills to be effective. [35:25]

Georgie answers a Dear Melissa submission. [35:53]

Resources

Georgie Smallwood on LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium

Creating great products is about the systems, processes, and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader.

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about strategy. 

Q: How do you convince the CTO of the value of working towards understanding problems rather than defining pre-made solutions? [1:54]

A: Sometimes you just have to demonstrate to them what the customer discovery process is, how it works and why it's valuable, which means you'll have to go out and do it. Figure out how you can define that value, package that up into something that will work for your CTO, and then present it. Start small and demonstrate success.  

Q: Do you have any tips for a product leader to make sure that their team gets the big picture and has visibility and ownership end-to-end, including the business success? [9:00]

A: There is often a misalignment of business goals across multiple levels of organizations, which indicates that something is wrong with the product strategy. [I suggest] you over-communicate and ensure that the product strategy is well deployed. Everyone needs to understand what problems they are facing and what goals they are trying to achieve.

Q: What’s your recommendation on building a product strategy at small scale within the product team and leveraging that strategy up to get broader visibility, and buying from leadership and other stakeholders? Does that work? [13:55]

A: Yes, it does work. I would start by finding out if there’s a product strategy that’s been poorly deployed. Figure out the goals that the executives want to achieve, use that opportunity to define said goals, and build your product strategy. 

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Product management has been adopted all over the world in the last decade. But despite its popularity, great product management is still hard to come by. The Product Thinking podcast is setting out to change that. This show will cover:

How product leadership influences organizational systems so that product management can thrive.

What the role of a product manager looks like at every level.

How to invest in yourself as a product manager at every stage of your career.

Product Thinking will have two different kinds of episodes - Dear Melissa, a direct line to Melissa to pose your biggest product management questions, and deep-dive conversations with industry leading experts who are pushing the boundaries of what it looks like to excel in this industry. Melissa Perri is a product management leader turned educator and author who has trained hundreds of people around the world to think like great product leaders. Learn more at Produxlabs.com.