A person’s success in life can be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

As a Product Manager, you are likely to face many difficult conversations, for example, stopping work that fails to align with top priorities, giving feedback, negotiating roadmaps, and apologising when you took your eye off the ball. Mastering difficult conversations can give you superpowers. You can get the confidence to promote new product ideas, drive organisational changes, and lead your group.

Managing difficult conversations

<ul><li>The "What happened" layer. What's the story here?</li><li>The Feelings layer is uncovering how you really feel.</li><li>The Identify layer ask what does this say about me?</li></ul>

Three layers of difficult conversations

Conversations fall apart when we say, "I am right, and you are wrong." This is because we have more information about ourselves than we have about the other person. We know our intent, but we judge their intent based on their action. We also base our deduction on what suits our pre-conceived ideas.How to overcome this limitation:<ul><li>Use the "And" stance, meaning acknowledging that both stories can be right.</li><li>Disentangle the impact of the action from the original intent.</li><li>Map the contribution system. Each party can acknowledge that one of their actions contributed to the case.</li></ul>

The "What happened" Layer

Feelings are at the centre of a difficult conversation. Ignoring emotions can cause resentment, anger, and broken relationships. There are three steps to expressing feelings in difficult conversations.<ul><li>Get better at uncovering your feelings. Reframe feelings to something you experience, not who you are. You are not angry, you are experiencing anger. Question what is behind the emotion.</li><li>Realise that you can negotiate with your feelings. Your feelings are caused by what you're thinking. </li><li>Describe your feelings to your colleague without venting. "I felt that my opinions were not paid attention to."</li></ul>

The Feelings Layer

In the identity conversation, you start to worry about what the conversation says about you. Three core identity-related questions we think about:<ul><li>Am I competent?</li><li>Am I a good person?</li><li>Am I worthy of love?</li></ul> You are more likely to lose balance if there is a gap between what you believe to be true and what you fear to be accurate.To regain balance:<ul><li>Use the 10/10/10 framework. Ask yourself: Will this matter in ten minutes? Ten months? Ten years?</li><li>Get help from a therapist, coach or a friend.</li></ul>

The Identity Layer

1.  Start from the third-person perspective.It helps you create distance to have a broader point of view and to express yourself more objectively. 2.  Listen more intentlyUse the SOAR framework<ul><li>Make Space</li><li>Observe and validate</li><li>Ask</li><li>Repeat and confirm</li></ul> 3.  Speak for yourself with clarityMost people prefer to be with people who speak their mind. We trust them and feel confident in them. Assertively state your story without aggression or getting defensive.

Mastering difficult conversations

Navigating difficult conversations is a skill that gives you Product Management superpowers. It can help you influence, negotiate and lead effectively.

Have you ever avoided a conversation that you know that you needed to have? Has a desire for comfort taken you off the direct path to achieving your goals? Or even worse, have you ever had the…

Stashed ideas

Product Managers Can Use These Techniques To Master Difficult Work Conversations

A lot has been said about avoiding the feature factory approach to product management. No one wants to work on a product as though they’re “sitting in a factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line,” without knowing if they’re actually having any impact. It’s the definition of aimless busywork. It’s jumping straight from one project to the next, with no evaluation of whether past efforts made a difference. It’s a fixation over shipping features regardless of the actual outcomes they drive for your users and your business.

Avoiding The Factory Approach

Objectives And Key Results (OKRs) are credited for the rise and dominance of companies like Intel and Google, where it has helped them move mountains while maintaining alignment and agility at scale. And it’s been employed by thousands of smaller organisations that are plenty agile, yet looking to focus their scattershot efforts on one clear strategy. The logic behind OKRs is intuitive, time-tested, and universal to defining good objectives in general.

Defining Objectives And Key Results For Your Product Team

OKRs provide a flexible hierarchy of objectives that cascade down through every team and individual. Everyone knows what to focus on. Everyone’s objectives are aligned.
Objectives are inspirational (qualitative) goals that communicate the business outcomes you’re looking to reach. They’re timebound, most often to a quarter, or sometimes to a year.
Key results are the 3-5 indicators (often quantitative goals/KPIs) associated with each objective that help you track your progress and ultimately determine whether the objective has been met.

OKRs Explained

The key results at the organisational level can become objectives for the next level down — whether that’s division, department, or team (depending on the size of your organisation). The further down you go, the more specific and tactical the objectives become.

The Pyramid

A company’s highest objective is stated in its mission statement, but when discussing top-level objectives, we typically mean the goals the company aims to reach in the next quarter, half-year, or year. Company objective: Expand our impact by selling to the enterprise (by end of quarter)— KR: Win 20 new enterprise deals— KR: Grow sales-touched revenue by 20%— KR: Grow ARPA by 15%— KR: Launch major product initiative Y

Company OKRs

The product team’s objectives are often especially closely aligned with the organisation’s at large. Even at larger organisations like Google where objectives exist at the parent company, company, division, subdivision, function, team, and individual level, a company-wide objective (e.g. Increase market share within segment Z) may skip multiple levels to be assigned to an individual team! What a thrill to have the entire company rallied behind your success, but quite some pressure too.

Product Team OKRs

If you’re a product manager, your objectives will likely address a handful of user needs or business goals. Key results may include the successful launch of major features and the indicators you use to measure desired outcomes. Objective: Help customers better categorise their data for rapid retrieval— KR: Ship tag management— KR: Ship advanced search— KR: 80% decrease in support tickets related to tags If you work at the director or VP level, or if you’re a product manager at a startup, you will likely own the objectives of your team of product managers, department, or division.

Individual OKRs

By choosing your own objectives and key results, you use the context you have from the frontlines to decide the best way you can generate value for your customers and your organisation. And in the mid-term, inputs that employees on the frontlines feedback to leadership can influence the top-level objectives set for future cycles.

Choosing Your Own OKRs

Don’t tell people what to do; tell them what you need accomplished, and you’ll be amazed at the results

The primary purpose of OKRs is not just to document, but galvanize. If OKRs are to be made sufficiently ambitious, they need to be kept separate from performance evaluations. Otherwise goals tend to be set too conservatively to do much good. This is especially true of moonshot OKRs. If you find moonshot OKRs are being met with close to a 100% success rate, you’re probably not setting ambitious enough targets.

Succeeding with OKRs

What gets measured gets managed

When setting key results, consider what negative outcomes they might incidentally incentivize. Aim to counterbalance these. Keep an eye out for blind spots! If you’re setting key results to validate whether users are getting value from a new feature, it’s likely not enough to verify that they configure it (adoption). You’ll also want to ensure that they’re coming back on a regular basis (engagement).

Counter-Balance Your Key Results

To get full value from OKRs, post them where you’ll see them every day, or adopt a dedicated OKR management solution and refer to it on a regular basis. Capture product OKRs in a product management solution like Productboard where you can use objectives to prioritise and plan supporting feature ideas. Score your key results to indicate your confidence that you’ll meet them and update regularly.

Don’t Forget Your OKRs

OKRs bring the promise of greater focus, alignment, and measurable progress toward exciting outcomes. They require an upfront investment and ongoing attention, but hopefully with the tips we’ve reviewed here you’ll be well on your way. As with all things, sometimes your best bet is to start small and just get started. You can take OKRs for a trial run and adjust as you go.

Life Beyond The Factory

Whether you’re new to objectives and key results (OKRs) or just brushing up, this stash aims to help you feel more confident about driving your product team toward clear, measurable outcomes in 2021

Whether you’re new to OKRs or just brushing up, our blog post aims to help you feel more confident about driving your product team toward clear, measurable outcomes in 2021.

Defining objectives and key results for your product team | Productboard

As product leaders, it is your task to build a great product culture.
This prevents ineffective product management and helps to reduce churn. Generally, it gives the people you work with the opportunity to grow.

Building a product culture

Product teams need to understand human motivation and psychology. Entrepreneurs Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor state that there are three pillars of motivation: <ul><li>Play: The number of tasks, projects, and priorities can feel overwhelming. But keeping a sense of fun brings innovation and creates value to customers.</li><li>Purpose: A person wants to feel like their work is meaningful and builds a better world.</li><li>Potential: A person needs to know that there is an opportunity for growth and advancement.</li></ul>

Three pillars of motivation

This eBook includes tips product leaders can put into action to help motivate PMs, reduce churn, and establish a great product culture.

The 3 P's of a Great Product Culture: Play, Purpose, & Potential

The key to a successful product is a cross-functional team that supports every aspect of the Complete Product Experience (CPE). They understand their role in making the product successful and work towards fulfilling that role. However, many companies do not understand the concept of a formal product team. Each group operates in a bubble. It may cause multiple difficulties such as:<ul><li>Duplicate processes and tasks.</li><li>Teams are unwilling to accept others' solutions.</li><li>Not thinking how one action impacts the whole.</li><li>Tasks take forever.</li></ul> This could lead to a product no one really wants.

Creating winning products

Delays are caused when people are unclear on what is a priority. Value for the company and customers come when you are able to prioritise what is most important. Product team members become ambassadors of strategy and champion alignment in their functional groups and together.

Strategy alignment

Product teams are organised around a specific customer need or value, not individual projects. When problems arise, you can refocus people to the common objective and away from competing interests.

Customer focus

Breakthrough ideas seldom come from individuals. Bringing together a different and diverse group of people from multiple disciplines can lead to creative solutions.

Opportunity for innovation

Teams in an organisation have different priorities, causing multiple efforts to happen in parallel. However, product teams share a purpose, making it easier to resolve bottlenecks or pivot.

Iteration speed

People with a different skill set may view a challenge from a new angle and offer solutions you might never have considered. While few people want to attend a meeting they are not directly involved in, there is value in all groups hearing the same information.

Problem solving

Making a case for the necessity of a formal product team.

Product teams are organized around a specific customer need or value stream — not individual projects. Learn about the core benefits of formal product team structure and how you can advocate for one in your company.

The Benefits of a Cross-Functional Product Team

The job profile of a product leader is akin to a CEO of a company.
A product leader is ultimately responsible for the success and failure of a product, and by extension, the company itself. This raises the question of what makes a true product leader.
We find out the traits of a model product leader and the product team in this book.

The Product Leader

More and more organisations are moving away from a traditional top-down approach, whereby senior management determines ‘upstream’ what people ‘downstream’ should be doing. 
Companies like Spotify have been very successful in creating autonomous and cross-functional teams. The success of this approach doesn’t only come from the cross-functional and collaborative nature of Spotify teams; people within these teams are also very close to the customer. The People in the company are the product.

Employees Are Paramount

The primary focus has to be on the problems faced by customers. Instead of features, one can opt to provide themes, based on what the customer wants and what problem is solved.
Themes are a promise to solve problems not to build features. Once you’ve truly understood customer problems, you can start prioritising. Prioritisation is best done through the lens of the core product management principles: first, is it valuable; second, is it usable and third, is it feasible?

Focusing On Customer Problems

Successful product teams do NOT require hard skills, such as engineering, design or even specific product management expertise. 
In contrast, with product managers, the focus is much more on soft skills.

A Successful Product Team

Experienced product people with strong soft skills are low in supply in most markets. One can derive the characteristics of good product leaders from the high level traits of a successful team. One key aspect in this respect is a product leader’s ability to align team members around a shared goal or vision.

How To Identify Product Leaders

Common characteristics of Successful Product Teams: <ul><li>Lifelong learning.</li><li>Strong communication.</li><li>Empathy.</li><li>Diversity.</li><li>Business savvy.</li><li>Cross-functional representation.</li><li>Collocation.</li><li>Autonomy.</li><li>Interdependence.</li><li>Accountability.</li></ul>

Product management and product leadership are people-first roles. Teams are made up of individuals who each bring their own personalities, perspective, and opinions. Understanding what makes people tick makes it easier to get the best out of them and identify when there is a problem.
Being an empathic product leader doesn’t mean you have to be all things to all people but you’re able to engage emphatically with others, even if they don’t have a lot in common with them.

Playing Well With Others

The kind of leader that needs constant recognition and praise is not likely to be the best person for this job. 
The top product leaders hardly ever get recognition for their hard work and dedication. Furthermore, they tend to turn any limelight they receive back on their teams.

The Team First Approach

Product leaders are typically comfortably wearing the hats of marketer, manager, technologist, customer advocate, and facilitator, to name a few. 
This doesn’t mean they are experts at each of these roles; rather, they are comfortable working across all areas as the role evolves or as the product demands.

Wearing Multiple Hats

Having a deep interest in learning, enthusiastically accepting new challenges, encouraging others to speak up, and listening to their perspectives are all actions driven by curiosity.

Curiosity

The ability to share information in a clear, concise manner is a necessary and desirable skill for a product leader. 
Whether they’re talking, listening, writing, planning, sharing, or facilitating, the goal is always to be understood.

Clear Communication Ability

This might be controversial, but when you consider what product leaders do each day, it’s no surprise that selling is one of the things to look out for in product leaders. 
To be clear, this is not the type of selling associated with business development; rather, it’s not the type that works to change minds and get buy-in from others.

Every Job Is A Sales Job

<ul>
<li>Equanimity.</li>
<li>Working with ease under pressures and deadlines.</li>
<li>Having an understanding that shipping products is a race against time.</li>
<li>Displaying grace even under fire.</li>
</ul>

Other Traits of A PL

Product Leaders and Product Teams: Management Basics

In today’s lightning-fast technology world, good product management is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it’s rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don’t? This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource. In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore: Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristics Best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company’s evolution Strategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders

Product Managers Can Use These Techniques To Master Difficult Work Conversations

Defining objectives and key results for your product team | Productboard

The 3 P's of a Great Product Culture: Play, Purpose, & Potential

The Benefits of a Cross-Functional Product Team

Product Leadership

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