10 Keys to Unlocking a Winning Product Team: Part 1

Welcome, Introductions, and Housekeeping

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:05:45

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. My name is Roger Snyder and I’m the VP of Marketing at Productside. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Today we’re discussing the 10 Keys to Unlocking a Winning Product Team, and I’m joined today by Jen Cano. Jen began the dance between marketing and product management in 2003 and has made a career of leading by influence. Today she is Vice President of Product at Elsevier, a global digital media company. In this role she drives product strategy and vision for solutions in the healthcare industry.

Thank you for being with us today, Jen.

Great to be here, excited about this topic.

Yeah, me too. I’m very excited that you were able to join us. Thank you so much. It was a great opportunity given that you also just recently talked with Mira Wooten about your evolution as a product management leader. I encourage people to check out the blog post that Mira wrote all about Jen.

And you’re getting ready for a big move as I recall, right?

Yeah, we’re going to move coast to coast from Pennsylvania to Oregon.

Wow. So even though the slide says you’re in Philadelphia, that’s not going to last for much longer, right?

No, my weeks are numbered.

And I’m based in Scotts Valley, California at the moment, so we’re bi-coastal right now. So let’s jump into the topic here.

Roger Snyder | 00:05:45–00:08:20

Before we get going, a couple of housekeeping items. First of all, we encourage you to stay engaged with the product management community by joining our LinkedIn group on Product Management Leadership. Now more than ever, it’s an important time to feel connected and to have a community to work with. So use this forum for getting together and challenging, seeing how you can get together with challenges, how you can support each other.

And I’ll paste the URL into the chat box so that you can join this LinkedIn group.

As always, we will want a lot of interaction with our audience this morning, so I encourage you to find the questions box and type your questions in as they come up so that we’re able to see your questions ahead of time. And then at the end we will spend some time being able to go through as many questions as we possibly can.

Now, the number one question is always: can I watch this webinar later? And the answer is yes. We will send you a follow-up email after the webinar and that will include some handy resources as well as a link to this webinar so that you can watch it again.

About Productside, the Series, and the Audience

Roger Snyder | 00:08:20–00:13:30

Now, before we get into the meat of the topic, let me talk a little bit about Productside. We are all about empowering product managers and product marketers with the knowledge and tools to build products that matter. Products that matter to your customers, products that matter to your company, products that matter to the world, hopefully, if you’re really working on exciting stuff. The “products that matter” is what we are really focused on.

If you need help improving your skills or your team’s skills, we offer a variety of different services. We provide online live training, we provide self-study training courses, we can get together with your leadership team and help optimize your overall program, looking at your people, your process, and your tools. So for more information, check us out at Productside.com.

All right, we’re truly excited to be in this leadership series and we love being able to help you. Today we’re talking about how to transform your team. It’s kind of a cross-functional one here. We’re going to be both “how to transform your team” as part of this topic and “how do you develop yourself as a product management leader.”

Roger Snyder | 00:13:30–00:16:10

Let’s dive into this a little bit more by understanding our audience. So today we have a nice split. We’ve got 27 percent of our audience who are product management leadership of one sort or another, 37 percent are product managers or product marketing managers. We have a larger number of “other” than usual, and I was interested in that. I didn’t have time to dig into some of the details there, but hopefully maybe in the chat box you can tell us a little bit more about—maybe if you don’t have a traditional product management background—tell us a little bit more about yourselves that way.

What Is Team Culture and Why It Matters

Roger Snyder | 00:16:10–00:22:50

Let’s move into the meat of our topic today, and today we’re talking about how we influence team culture. But I’d like to kind of get us an understanding of where people are at in our audience in terms of their understanding of team culture. So let me launch our first poll.

The question is: how well do you understand team culture? Do you have kind of just a vague understanding of what team culture is? Do you recognize what a good one is when you see it? Or is it more like, “Yeah, I know what it is, but not really how do I actually put my hands on the tiller and guide it myself?” Or do you know what it is and you know how to shape it?

Jen Cano | 00:22:50–00:24:10

Yeah, I think that I have gone through the entire spectrum of this, and I still think even on that last one—“I know what it is and how I can shape it”—I think I know what it is and I think I know some of how I can shape it, but I think this is a lifelong learning, right? How to impact culture.

Roger Snyder | 00:24:10–00:26:30

Yeah, it’s a great point, absolutely. All right, well, we’ve gotten over 60 percent of our audience to respond, so let’s take a look at our results.

Four percent said, “I only have a vague understanding of it.” Twenty-four percent said, “I recognize a good one when I see it.” Fifty percent—that’s pretty cool, this is the center of gravity—said, “I know what it is, but I’m not sure how to guide it.” And then 22 percent said, “I know what it is and know how to shape it.”

So this is great because I think we’re going to give you some real concrete tips on how you go about guiding this culture.

Roger Snyder | 00:26:30–00:30:40

So most of the audience seemed to kind of know what team culture was, but let’s be sure that we’re all operating from the same basic understanding. I took two different quotes here from Inc as well as from Wikipedia, and I kind of highlighted some of the things that are in both definitions.

I like this visual as well because it also points out the fact that it’s about values and attitudes, it’s about some fundamental assumptions and beliefs, it’s about then behaviors and the environment. And those behaviors spring from these underlying attitudes and assumptions.

Jen Cano | 00:30:40–00:32:00

Yeah, so you know I would say probably a good 10 years ago or so—maybe even more—I started studying company culture. I looked at Zappos and some other companies that are really famous for building a culture that is just stellar, right? And the thing that they point out over and over again is that team culture is not top-down. We don’t dictate culture; we don’t “create” culture. We influence culture as leaders. And that, I think, is the most important thing to understand. So later, when we talk about influence and we talk about some of those other things, that’s a really important part of influencing that culture.

So I would say that was probably my number-one learning early on about culture, just “How can I influence that culture and how can I empower the team to run with it and to enrich that culture?”

Roger Snyder | 00:32:00–00:36:10

Yeah, I remember when I first became a leader, this was a challenge for me as well, because suddenly now I was responsible for this and I didn’t even kind of realize for a while that I was the one who would be setting that tone, right? As a leader, how I behaved was going to influence how the rest of the team operated and how the rest of the team behaved. So it was a big wake-up call for me, that’s for sure.

So why does team culture matter? Oftentimes folks think, “Well, it’s really more important to just know that we have the right process in place, to make sure that we’ve got the right skills on our team,” and those are absolutely important. And let’s face it, Productside spends a lot of our time and energy helping teams get better that way.

But here are a couple of quotes about the fact that team culture is an amazingly powerful aspect of what it means to be an effective product management team. You know, an essential component of ultimate success or failure. And Gartner talks about it in terms of transformations—that it’s almost more important that this culture is the right culture, more important than business strategy, to make sure that your business grows and transforms.

Jen Cano | 00:36:10–00:37:40

I think a good example of that—of culture of an organization sometimes being more important than the business strategy—let’s take, for example, an agile principle of “fail fast,” right? If we don’t have a culture that embraces our ability to do lean, incremental delivery so that we can learn quick and fail small, then we risk, because we don’t have that culture that accepts failure, we risk really big failure later.

Gartner’s Four Attributes of Business Culture

Roger Snyder | 00:37:40–00:43:40

Yeah, it’s a very good point. And as many times as I failed as a leader early in my leadership career, it’s important to get that vibe going that it’s okay, and to be transparent about that as well.

The part that folks reflected in the survey earlier that they were probably the least familiar with was, “How do I go about making a change in my team culture or enabling the kind of team culture that I’m looking for?” And that’s why I brought up this framework from Gartner that talks about the four attributes of business culture.

I’m going to talk about each one of them a little bit more.

First of all, how you make decisions in your organization—first starting with your team and then as you expand it out to how you run your product management core teams—is very important. There are multiple dimensions to this. One of them that I called out was this sense of velocity versus analysis. Are you going to do a really deep, thorough three-month study before you come out with anything, or are you going to move a little faster?

You were just talking about agile, Jen, and so that would fly in the face of agile today, certainly. But I did work for a military contractor for a couple of years, and in that case there were so many rules and regulations that you had to comply with, and you didn’t want to kill anyone with a product—quite literally and effectively. So sometimes you do work in an industry where you’ve got to be very, very careful and thoughtful in your analysis. I think most of our audience probably goes more towards, “We want to make quick decisions. We want to make thoughtful decisions; we want to make quick decisions.” So you’re going to set that tone.

The second one is how we engage, and this is about sort of the softer side, if you will, as a team—how you collaborate together, what your communication style is, what your expectations are. And the way you do this internally with your group is going to also then reflect on how your product managers communicate externally as well.

So, for example, as a product management leader, if I insist that we use Asana or Jira or something as one of our communication tools and that we do write things down—yes, we’re fast, we want to move at an agile pace—but we still take a moment to write a sentence or a paragraph every week about the progress that we’re making. If I set that tone, then the rest of my product managers are going to start doing the same thing in terms of how they communicate with the rest of their teams. That’s just one example of what we’re talking about in terms of collaboration styles.

Jen Cano | 00:43:40–00:45:00

I love that you’re pointing out, too, that this model has both the soft skills and more quantitative or metric-driven pieces to it. I really like that blend. I had not seen this model. I’m really excited to have folded each of our sections into this model. I think it works really well when we talk about how we’re going to turn these ideas into something practical that we can actually do.

Roger Snyder | 00:45:00–00:49:10

Yeah, when we’re looking at business culture one of the things is it seems so amorphous, so I wanted to talk about a framework that allows people to have something to hang their ideas onto.

The third one here then is, how do we go about measuring success? And that’s not just company and product KPIs, but also how do you measure success as a team? We’ll talk a little bit about that in the subsequent slides, but it’s important that how you go about measuring success in multiple dimensions is a part of what you think about as you’re trying to form a successful team culture.

And then the last part of this is, how do you work as a team? This is kind of the nuts-and-bolts practices, processes. I put out budgets, and we’re going to talk about this several times because in my career, before I was a leader, I was a product manager on a team, and one of my product management directors said, “We really need to understand our customers really, really well.” And I was like, “Okay, great.”

At that time I was working on wireless carriers for our customers, and so there were only five or six of them at the time. There are fewer now, but there were five or six at the time. I said, “Well, I want to fly to Kansas City and spend a few days with my customer so I can get a deeper understanding of their needs.” And then my leader’s like, “Well, we don’t have a budget for that.”

So if your spoken words are, “We’ve got to deeply understand our customer,” but then your actual support for making that happen isn’t there, then is that really your team culture? So that’s one of the other challenges here.

Jen Cano | 00:49:10–00:50:25

Yeah, and I think right along with that is, we get what we incentivize, right? And so if we think about budgets kind of like that, and the support kind of like that—if we don’t support it, we don’t get it.

The 10 Keys and Today’s Focus (First Five)

Roger Snyder | 00:50:25–00:55:00

Absolutely. All right, so now let’s dive into the actual 10 keys. And we’re going to come back to this idea of the team culture framework as we talk about them all.

Now, when Jen and I originally came up with this topic, we came up with these 10 keys, kind of collaborated together and thought about, over the course of our careers in leadership, what were the things that mattered most? How did we then kind of consolidate them? And we came up with these 10 keys.

As we did this we came to the conclusion that there was no way we were going to be able to cover this topic in the depth that we wanted to cover it, and be able to give everybody a chance to kind of let it all soak in, so we decided to split this webinar into two parts. So today we’re going to cover Part 1—these first five topics:

• how to start and end with the customer
• how to lead with influence
• how to stay curious
• how to focus on outcomes and not effort
• and how to be expert

We’re going to dive deep on those first five.

Then we’re going to go into a second part next month on what we do to support that leap from imagining into doing—and I love that phrasing, that was one of Jen’s ideas, I love that—“don’t be afraid to fail,” and we already talked a little bit about failing fast. “Be a trusted partner” as a leader of product management across various different parts of the organization, “how to enable ownership,” and lastly “how to instill a sense of servant leadership,” because as a product manager you are serving not only your customer but all the other teams that you’re working with as much as they are part of the team building up this product for you.

So those are the two parts, and we’re going to cover today, Part 1, these five topics.

Key #1: Start and End with the Customer

Roger Snyder | 00:55:00–01:02:30

So let’s dive into the topics one by one. I also want to pause for a moment and just encourage everybody to be asking questions in the question box as they come up.

Number one: starting and ending with the customer. This is something that I repeat on almost every topic in every webinar—that we need to understand our customers deeply. We need to understand their needs and we need to understand their wants, because with those two things, if we understand their problems—that’s what we call being in the problem space—if we understand their problems, then we can look to our products and our services and see whether we have solutions that will meet those needs, meet those wants. And if not, how do we go about making sure that we do those things so customers actually are going to buy our product, use our service?

We then have the need to also make sure we understand why are they buying and when are they buying. Trying to sell Christmas wrapping paper in February may not be the best time to try to sell that product, right? So there are multiple factors, timing being one of them, that are important in terms of when are people going to buy and how.

When you’re doing B2B, for example, it could be that if you’re selling software or services that are helping with taxes, for example, for corporate taxes, then knowing the timing of when that’s important to a corporation—when are they going to consider upgrading their infrastructure in order for their next tax cycle—means that again you’re going to look at the timing of when is the best time for me to spend my precious advertising budget, when is going to be the best time for me to release a new version of my product with those new features people are looking for.

So you’ve got to understand those motivations to buy. Then, ultimately, can you delight your customers? One of the examples I love to use in my classes is you look at the old VW Beetles or the new VW Beetles. They put a bud vase in the dashboard. That bud vase does not make the car go faster, it does not make the car more fuel-efficient, and yet it puts a smile on the customer’s face. So that was a delightful addition to that product.

That’s something you need to be thinking about. How can you actually delight your customers with your product? And ultimately can you keep them coming back for more? A lot of our audience is in software-as-a-service or they’re doing a service offering of some sort, whether it’s a subscription, and you don’t want people to just kind of get into a habit of paying every month and not thinking about it. I mean, you kind of do, but honestly you want to deliver more value over time, and that’s why you think about how does your product evolve, and how do you keep them coming back for more.

Jen Cano | 01:02:30–01:05:20

Yeah, and I think when we’re talking about building culture—team culture—around starting and ending with the customer, you know, this needs to instill in the team a very deep sense of needing to really understand those needs and wants of that user and that customer.

When I was—you know, I’ve spent my career back and forth between marketing and product. It has been a long time since I’ve been in marketing, but the study there that really instilled in me, you know, the study into the “why.” Why do people buy? Why do they invest their time? And buying isn’t just dollars. Buying is also investing their time. It’s also an opportunity cost for them to decide if they’re going to solve their problem using your solution or solve their problem using something else or do nothing.

So when you talk about needs and wants, the psychology of purchasing says that they buy what they want and they justify it with what they need. And so really understanding that is pretty key. And I would say just a steady drumbeat of that with the team over and over again: “What is the problem we’re solving?”

Roger Snyder | 01:05:20–01:10:00

Yeah, it’s a very important point, definitely. We actually got a question that I think maybe I will tackle right now. We got a question from Nate about, generally, “You’re using customers anonymously with user, but any tips for when they are not the same? For example, B2B. How do you delight the buyer (customer) and the user when we can’t do both? Who wins?”

Jen Cano | 01:10:00–01:15:10

That is a really—that’s the holy grail, right? I’ve worked on a number of products that have required both a customer who is separate from the user. In academic settings we see this happen, and lots of times in enterprise purchasing that is what we see happen. We have a bunch of buyers who have certain motivations, and we have a bunch of users who have completely different motivations. And sometimes those motivations are in direct conflict with each other.

Again, I would say this goes really deeply into really understanding, “What is the outcome that they’re all looking for?” And we are trying to figure out how you match those up. I can perhaps give a little bit of an example there in the world of medicine, which is the industry that I work in right now.

Often a hospital will want something—a hospital organization will want something—like guidelines that everyone has to strictly follow, versus the user, who are clinicians, who are saying, “Hey, my patients are all different, and I can’t necessarily follow, and I don’t believe that I should follow, the same thing for every single one of them.” And so we have a buyer that wants us to standardize this care. We have a user that is concerned about the standardization of that care and the impact on a patient.

So the true innovation then happens with trying to figure out how we can accommodate those pivots for those users while at the same time providing standards. “Okay, if you pivot here, then this is the standard, and if you pivot there, then this is the standard.” And in that way you meet both. But it really does take deeply understanding the end customer and the end user.

Roger Snyder | 01:15:10–01:20:10

Yeah, and I think it’s a great point. I like the idea of you create this standard, almost flow, if you will, so that you have that standard, but you also then have the variety of different circumstances or scenarios still laid out to help the actual clinician, or the person at the end there who’s administering this.

In terms of the delight part of this, one thing that I can talk about is the fact that we put a lot of energy at Productside into streamlining the purchase flow. So our customers, if you will, are oftentimes product management leaders—a VP of product management or director of product management—but the procurement officer or the HR professional who’s responsible for professional development is involved as well. They’re a stakeholder in this B2B experience.

So we actually put effort last year into improving our legal flow and payment flow so that we anticipate the top 10 questions that either the HR professional or the procurement officer is going to have, and have all those answers already laid out and ready to go in our onboarding process. We’ve actually gotten positive feedback from these other stakeholders that we were one of the easier vendors to work with. And so that actually did bring delight, and it actually made the job of the VP of product management easier too, because then they didn’t have these other stakeholders complaining to them about, “Hey, this vendor is really hard to work with,” or “We still haven’t gotten our papers signed; we can’t start the class until the contract is signed.”

So there is this interplay between stakeholders, and if you identify those things, that’s actually how you can bring a delightful experience to them.

Roger Snyder | 01:20:10–01:24:10

What I want to do now is move into: as the leader, how are you going to make it real that, in fact, if you want to state that starting and ending with the customer is a part of your team culture, how do you go about making that real?

A couple of tips, and what I’m going to do now is connect these back to the Gartner model. In terms of how we engage, first and foremost—and you’re going to see this one repeated in almost all 10 of them—you’re the role model. So you, in your questions as a product management leader, are going to always be thinking about the customer. You want to be sure that you’re starting from the customer’s needs, wants, and desires, for example. So you’ve got to be the role model.

Secondly, in terms of how we work, it comes back to the anti-pattern, using the agile terminology, that I mentioned earlier in my career. If you’re going to tell your product managers that they need to understand customers, then you’ve got to provide them with the resources so they can actually understand customers. So they have the budget for customer visits, or they have the budget to conduct real customer research.

Next up, in terms of how you go about making decisions: if you make all your decisions without requiring much in terms of customer research, then the shortcut for the product manager is, “I really don’t have to do that research.” But if every one of your documents requires that you have customer research to fall back on—that you’ve got data-driven decisions that drive why these are the benefits you need—suddenly that’s going to become the way your product managers behave, because they know they have to have that customer research.

And then, down in the trenches in your everyday interactions with folks—these days those interactions maybe are going to be over Zooms rather than at the water cooler—talk about your customers every day. If you as the leader are asking questions every day about your customers, and you are encouraging your product managers to talk about customers every day in terms of, “I had this call with sales today,” or “I spent a little time with customer support today and I learned this,” those kinds of conversations will once again get this virtuous cycle going where talking about our customers every day is just a natural thing.

And then the last one: it really matters if you actually are paying attention to your customers in the end result of, are they satisfied with your product? There are a number of different ways to do this. The old one was Net Promoter Score—just asking a question—and it’s still a valid mechanism today. But these days, in many of our products, you are allowed—and I talk about software a lot, but I want to talk about physical products too—when you unbox something, there can be a survey right there inside that box, with a very simple, quick-to-type-in URL that allows the customer to provide feedback for physical products as well.

Key #2: Lead with Influence

Jen Cano | 01:24:10–01:32:20

Number two: leading with influence. There’s a quote I love a lot. I think that we’ve all seen it many times, and I’m just going to read it really quick and then I’m going to make some comments. So the quote is:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, to divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

That always, to me, has sounded so wonderful and idealistic, and I’m sure that those of you listening are like, “Well, that’s awesome, but how do we translate that into real life? I have a real team with real problems, a real business. I am pushed against the wall really often. How is that really helpful?”

I have this dual side then: the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other saying, “The devil’s in the details.” But the angel’s still saying, “But we can achieve this.” And I want to talk today about what I have learned in my career about leading with influence.

I have made a career, really, out of developing some pretty strong soft skills. Over the past many years I’ve worked as president of various volunteer organizations, which is an incredibly great training field for any product manager who really wants to learn how to lead with influence. Because volunteers are not taking a paycheck for doing what you say. They’re not taking a paycheck at all to accomplish anything. They are following you because they want to, and your job is to figure out how to make them want to follow you.

This is not a story about manipulation—that is not what leading with influence is. Leading with influence is all about how genuine you are and about recognizing others as human beings and providing that inspiration.

I have this list here. I’m going to probably talk through the first ones and give examples. The first one is: identify those commonalities. That’s where I always begin with a new team. I always get to know each individual team member.

I will say that leading with influence, there is an investment overhead in the beginning. It is slow going in the beginning, potentially, depending on how skilled you are with leading with influence. It takes a little bit of time. It’s like a bank account: you invest, and then later, when you need to go faster, you can pull on that bank account because you have a team that trusts you, that has confidence in you, that you have listened to, that you understand what’s important to them, and are able to make decisions based on that.

Jen Cano | 01:32:20–01:38:20

I’m going to give an example around this importance of very quickly, with a team, building trust—this concept that the more trust you give, the more trust you’re going to get back, and also about creating joint ownership, also about compromising wherever possible. Because my ideas are not the only ideas. They’re not even the only ideas that are going to be successful, and it’s really important to understand when to just let someone else’s idea prevail.

At one point, years back, I was standing up a new program within a company, and that program was to develop a new revenue stream for the company. There was a lot of pressure on that program, a lot of new pressure, and as the head, as the product head of that effort, I thought, “I have an idea of how I want to model this program.”

Of course, there were others within the team who also had ideas of how to model this program. There was another workstream that was notoriously—there was notoriously some contention between product and this other workstream. I know this never happens at any company; we’re all smooth sailing. But there was a little bit of historical tension—not necessarily between me and those players, but as I came in new I knew there was this contention.

This leader of this other workstream said, “Hey, I have an idea for the model for this. I’d like to take the lead on coming up with the first draft on this.” And there was that split second in the back of my head that I thought, “Yeah, but I’m the product owner, and I should be setting this. It’s me. I own this.”

And then, kind of thinking about, “How do we create joint ownership? How do we compromise whenever possible? Is it really important for me to die on this hill?” Right? The way that I respond to this right now, in this moment, is going to send all kinds of signals to everyone on the team about what kind of leader I am.

I decided in that moment, this is not the hill I want to die on. It might be more effective if I let that other leader say, “This is the first draft of that model.” They may be very open and receptive at that point in time for me to come in and say, “Okay, but here are the adjustments that I would make. Here’s how I think that I would change it.” And that is exactly what happened.

It came in—surprisingly, it was very similar to what I already had in mind—and I was able to say, “Hey, I think that maybe if we make these tweaks here and these tweaks there…” They were completely open and ready to go. From then on there was this feeling of, “We’re in this together. We’re collaborative. Jen really is listening. We understand.”

Jen Cano | 01:38:20–01:41:10

With listening particularly, I would think that this skill is particularly important when there is a team member that brings to you a challenge, something that needs to be overcome. What I’ve learned is that if I listen all the way through until they’re done with explaining the challenge, often they also have a resolution in mind and they want to tell you that resolution. That’s why they’re bringing you the challenge—they want to tell you about the resolution.

But if you jump in too soon, it takes away that joint ownership. It destroys that feeling that they have that you trust them. All of us have probably been in that situation where a senior manager has just jumped in too early when we’re explaining a problem and said, “Have you tried this? Have you tried this? What about this? What about this?” And we all are just rolling our eyes and we’re thinking, “Will you stop talking for a minute so I can tell you?”

This is an important skill: to just stop and listen all the way through. If they don’t come up with a resolution, then I would go that extra mile and ask them, “Do you have a resolution?” and then give your feedback.

Roger Snyder | 01:41:10–01:45:40

Yeah, these are great moments, absolutely. Now let’s talk about how do you go about making it real, and you’ve already given some good examples, but let’s just kind of cover this.

In terms of how we work, we collaborate and we set goals together. If, as a leader, you come in with the quarterly goals and say, “Here they all are,” that doesn’t get them adopted as effectively as if you say, “Okay, so what are our goals going to be this quarter? Here’s what I think, here’s the first draft, but now I’d like everybody else to start fleshing this out, and let’s come up together with what our goals are going to be.”

In terms of how we engage, we compromise wherever possible. And if you read the literature on this and on leading with influence, a lot of the literature talks about not just “throw people a bone every once in a while.” It is literally every single time you can compromise, you should. That’s the guidance. And that is how you get that trust. That’s how you get that feeling of joint ownership.

Also, give credit. If you delegate something to someone and they don’t know how to do it and they fail, they’re less likely to follow you again next time. So you need to provide them with the tools to be successful if you’re going to delegate to them. If you don’t, they’re not going to follow you next time.

With all of these, the interesting dynamic is that the more you give away authority, the more you give away power, if you will—the more you compromise—the more you actually are respected as a leader, and the more you actually have more influence and more authority. And you’ve earned it by leading with influence.

Key #3: Stay Curious

Roger Snyder | 01:45:40–01:52:10

Number three: stay curious. As product managers I’ve always encouraged my teams to always have a learner’s mind—always be learning. Of course, we’ve already talked about customers, but you want to be learning about your product and your competition and your competitive products. You want to be continuing to learn about your own company—where it’s headed and what it wants to do—learning about your own profession, so continuing to grow in your skill set, and even learning about the wider world.

All of these things contribute to the importance of, can you in fact take stuff from other realms and bring those things in to influence the way your product is going to evolve?

I love this quote from Walt Disney, where he talks about the fact that we keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. Those new paths are amazing.

Another quote that I have here is from Harvey Mackay. He’s written a number of different successful business leadership books. The gist is that leaders are paying attention—and not just your direct manager, but leaders all around you—and those leaders who exhibit curiosity typically are seen as those that are going to be great leaders. That is the point of this quote as well.

So how do you create a culture of curiosity? Let’s talk a little bit more about that.

In terms of how we engage: you need to start by being curious. You’ve got to ask questions of your product managers on a regular basis, but you’ve also got to be curious about the wider world and bring what you are seeing and learning to the table at your team leadership meetings. Can you be talking about, “I saw this, I saw that, this was an interesting take from a competitor. What about this new thing that we just heard about in terms of regulation?”

So you need to be a curious leader and lead by example again.

Reward your team whenever you hear something or see something that is what I call serendipity—these little occasions where something pops up unexpectedly. Serendipity that your team members are bringing to the table—maybe they’re talking about competitive situations, or they’re talking about something in a parallel industry, like, “Look, I stayed at a hotel and I saw a new way of them providing me service, and I would love to think about how we take that service value and bring it into our own services.” Completely different from maybe the business you’re in, but you’re being curious. You’re walking through the world, always noticing whole-product solutions, always noticing things that might influence the way your own products could evolve.

Find ways to cross-pollinate ideas. This is a proactive one. This is one where you as a leader need to periodically think about, “How can I get my team together with another product team?” or “How can I get my product team together with a partner out in the industry outside my four walls, and just have an afternoon session where we cross-pollinate ideas or we talk about a competitive situation?”

Support and enable experiments. Part of curiosity is being able to test things. Again, with budget and with time, you’ve got to be able to support and enable the opportunity to conduct experiments.

And then, lastly, in terms of how you measure success: track and report new ideas. We do a lot of work on change management, and we talk about innovation. Folks say, “Oh, innovation is such a woolly, amorphous topic. How do you actually get people to innovate?” One technique that has come from the industry is: actually have an idea box. These days it can be a Google Form. But you can have a way for people to submit suggestions and either do it anonymously or put their name to it.

You can track and report new ideas that are being submitted, in particular from product managers or from other parts of the organization. Have this suggestion box form be available for everybody to use. Again, you’re signaling to your whole team that you are rewarding out-of-the-box thinking, you’re rewarding curiosity, and you’re rewarding it widely across the whole organization.

Jen Cano | 01:52:10–01:54:00

A couple of good takeaways I think from this. Number one is we don’t have innovation without curiosity. We don’t solve problems without curiosity. The other is I like what you have to say about cross-pollinating ideas because, for me, a lot of times innovation comes when something new comes out of the combination of two or more existing things. We see this happening in the creation of stories and literature—that’s the truth, right? We also see that in product, and that’s really exciting. It’s still innovation if we’re taking two separate ideas and combining them to make something new.

Key #4: Focus on Outcomes, Not Effort

Roger Snyder | 01:54:00–01:58:00

We’ve got two more topics and I do want to leave time for questions, but we also have a poll. The poll question is, “Our team celebrates when…”

The options are:

• We finish a project on time.
• We finish a project under budget.
• We have reached a measurable outcome.
• We have worked lots of overtime.

Jen Cano | 01:58:00–02:03:00

I would say that there isn’t a “correct” answer here. I know that all of us are—we’re so deeply ingrained in “when we have reached an outcome, yes, that is the true celebration.” But I think there is a place for, as you said, if we worked a lot of overtime, celebrations during that time can keep spirits up. We’re not celebrating the fact that we did work overtime, though, and we’re not celebrating the fact that we have achieved an output. I think that’s the big difference.

There are three powerful truths about output, and those are those three bullets there:

Overtime does not inspire gratitude. I have spoken with and mentored a number of product managers, and really I harp on that a lot. When a product manager will say, “I’m working all these hours,” I would say, be super careful about that. Be super careful about that because no one is going to remember next year all this overtime you worked. But all that overtime is bringing you to an outcome.

I’m a hard worker; I work a lot. But I’m always thinking about the outcome, and I’m not giving myself a pat on the back for having worked really long hours. I’m giving myself a pat on the back if I’ve achieved an outcome.

Checking boxes will not create job satisfaction. So if we managers are celebrating the checking of these boxes for our teams, that is not going to create a sense of team satisfaction and morale.

Another truth around output is velocity will not make our customers and users fall in love. Speed to market is awesome, but it’s not awesome if it’s not achieving an outcome. They will only fall in love if we’ve achieved an outcome.

And so what we’re really looking at here is, yes, outputs are important, but only when they are contributing to creating outcomes, and those outcomes are pointed directly at specific impacts. So the questions we should be asking ourselves all the time: What is the impact we’re looking for, and how will you know you have succeeded?

Roger Snyder | 02:03:00–02:06:30

So how do we go about making that real? In terms of how we work, all of our goals are outcome-oriented. In terms of how we engage, of course we celebrate those outcomes and not the outputs. And in terms of how we measure success, we measure those outcomes through KPIs and OKRs. Whether that’s for a team or for an individual performance review, we measure those outcomes. That level of objectivity really matters.

Key #5: Be Expert

Roger Snyder | 02:06:30–02:11:40

Number five: being expert. A PM’s authority flows from her or his expertise. As a product manager, you should always know these things: your customers and their problems; your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses; your product’s capabilities and limitations; the business model and how your product makes money; and your data—how the product is performing.

Ultimately—and I’ve told my product managers on every team I’ve ever led—your ultimate goal, you know you’ve arrived as a real product manager, is when you’re the go-to person that everyone comes to to ask questions about the product, to ask questions about the market, to ask questions about the customers’ needs.

But—and I love this quote from John Wooden, another amazing coach—“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” So you’ve got to be honest and say, “Look, I don’t know,” when someone asks you a question. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know,” and then follow up immediately with, “I will find out.”

As a leader, how do you go about doing this? You’ve got to be expert yourself, first and foremost, in product management skills. So if you don’t have that, then get some formal training. And as a leader, be an expert in leadership. You’re attending today, and I’m happy to see that you’re here, because hopefully that’s helping you grow your skill set as a leader.

Ask tough questions. If you don’t let people skate by with simple answers, it’s not good enough to say, “Most physicians agreed with this.” You want to get to that number—“Six out of seven physicians did this.” So ask the tough questions that encourage people to dig deeper.

Encourage cross-training and team swaps. I worked for a company where we would swap out every six months—this was with developers, but you can do the same thing with product managers. Swap out product managers across different teams. Help them get a different understanding of a whole different product for six months, and then they’re going to come back with some amazing new expertise that they can bring to the team.

Support and fund professional development. Once again, it’s in the budget. If you’re going to talk about being expert, you’ve got to have dollars set aside so people can go get training in new areas. Especially these days with digital transformation going on, becoming more data-driven—maybe you want to learn about product-led growth.

And lastly, recognize and reward certifications. Those are marks that will show that folks are not only getting that knowledge, but they have that attitude that they want to improve. And when you reward that attitude, then everybody on the team is going to be striving for those areas of improvement.

Wrap-Up, Part 2 Preview, and Next Webinar

Roger Snyder | 02:11:40–02:16:30

All right. Well, I hope that you’ve learned, in our first five, today. You’ve learned the power of team culture. You’ve learned a little bit about how to shape it using the Gartner framework. We talked about the first five successful elements of PM culture and how you build up—or how you go about shaping—your team. You now have, I hope, some concrete examples of how to go about doing this with your team.

Next month we will come back and talk about Part 2 in November, where we’ll cover the remaining five keys.

I want to invite you to our next webinar coming up next week, and this is a joint webinar with AIPMM. The topic is “Five Career-Damaging Mistakes to Avoid in Your First 100 Days.” I encourage you to sign up for that.

I want to thank Jen Cano for joining us today, and she’ll be back next month with me and we’ll go over the second set of five tips. I hope in this coming intervening month you take the time to figure out, “How can I go about putting into action any one of these five tips to start evolving my culture to be a more effective product management team?”

Thanks for joining us today, everyone. Have a great day and a great rest of your week.

Thank you, Roger.

Thanks, everyone.

All right.