Kellogg PM week18: Leading product teams

In previous week, we focused on machine learning buzzwords and the nature of analytics tasks. It was quite clear when the instructor demonstrated a tool like the jupyter notebook. Like every other task, as a product manager understanding their language helps maintain not only the good relationship but seamless conversation and expectation.

In this week, we focused on challenges in managing stakeholders, team pitfalls, managing conflicts, and running effective meetings. Professor Sawhney outlined important problems and how to face them. For example, customers request price discounts, or features that you don’t plan to do. In this case, we should just say no to it. We may encounter different opinions with the engineering team such as different priority, convince engineering to pivot from one product to a better version, and totally opposite of customer requesting for personalized feature engineer want “one size fits all”. Lastly, getting buy-in, resources from the leadership team within your company isn’t that easy at all.

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

I summarize key principles to resolve conflicts. First, understand the problem, this part does not only mean high-level understanding or reading through the paper. I think you need to talk to the person who has the problem and understand their concerns, remember that customers always don’t know what they definitely want. They just state what they guess they want, if you truly understand it, even if the problem is real you might have a simpler method to resolve it. Second, use data or numbers or figures. Please do not solely rely on intuition since we all tend to have bias toward something we like or based on our experience which might not be true in real world markets. You might have a rule of thumb that you rely on to make decisions faster in normal circumstances but you should be aware and cross check when encountering a specific case of conflict. Third, stand in their shoes to convince them. After you truly understand, you can think of several alternatives to resolve the conflict. It’s more of a continuous problem rather than a binary, you don’t need to either accept or decline. You can propose your own solution too.

Professor Sawhney suggested 10 strategies to influence without authority.

1. Know you market and customers: use expertise or insight to influence
2. Get senior executive support: gain support and be a representative of the source of power
3. Recognize the accomplishments: build relationship with different team
4. Use facts: support your argument with data
5. Build consensus: Work together as a team and gravitate toward the satisfied end goal
6. Recognize expertise: Don’t step on people’s toes, give them space and ownership to decide and work on their part.
7. Borrow authority: What would customers do?
8. Take ownership: help the team get credit in front of senior executive
9. Listen actively: active listening, I would say
10. Be confident: not bold and closed minded

Professor Sawhney pointed out 8 reasons why team fail

1. Lack of clear purpose and goals
2. Lack of proper resource planning
3. Lack of accountability
4. Lack of effective leadership
5. Lack of trust among team member
6. Excessive and dysfunctional conflict
7. Ineffective problem-solving skills
8. Lack of diversity

He also recommended five principles to improve team work.

1. Stop:
   - Excessive low value task
   - Urgent but not important task
   - Endless meeting
   - Analysis paralysis
2. Simplify:
   - Eliminate complication from your product, team working flow, task, meeting
   - Delegate
   - Ensure “go-dos”, who do what
   - Don’t micromanage
3. Speed up
   - Get important stakeholders in the room, so it’s ended in one meeting instead of an endless one.
   - Agree to disagree: get 100% alignment
   - Disagree and commit
   - Reward experimentation and intelligent failure
4. Inspect
   - Establish the sense of done for the work, this includes what is the goal? What is the output format? What is the criteria of done?
   - Assess progress based on the alignment meeting, can do in the 1–1 meeting too.

The professor introduced the functional conflict concept, it’s the opposite of dysfunctional conflict. We should encourage functional conflict and mitigate dysfunctional conflict. We aim to have conflict not because we love fighting each other but the constructive one tends to provide an additional viewpoint or information that one might miss at first. While dysfunctional conflict arises from ego, status quo bias(resistance to change due to the preferred old familiar way), and emotional fight.

Photo by oxana v on Unsplash

7 tips on how to lead a product team from product leaders

It’s more of picking 7 random quotes from product managers in different companies. But anyway here is the list down below. You can search this article in the additional readings section down below.

1. Before you take on new work, ask what metrics you are driving
2. Soft skills in product management are wildly underrated
3. The benefit of starting together can be enormous for a product team, or any team.
4. Ground your roadmap in product strategy to communicate the value each person adds to the team
5. Is this external distraction serving me, or am I serving it?
6. There are at least four good ways to figure out what to learn next.
7. Using agile methodology is the best way to plan because it does not allow for waste.

Additional Readings

1. 7 Tips on How to Lead a Product Team from Product Leaders
2. How to Setup and Lead a Great Product Development Team
3. Empowered Product Teams
4. 11 Time-Tested processes to Manage Remote Product Teams
5. How Cultural Differences Can Impact Global Teams
6. The Future of Team Leadership is Multimodal
7. Managing Multicultural Teams

Recommended Books

1. Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
2. Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams
3. Team of Rivals
4. The Making of a Manager
5. HBR Guide to Leading Teams