PRODUCTHEAD: Managing up and down

product on the ladder #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Understand the needs of your audience to be more influential

Go-to-market execs won’t hear you unless you speak in currency symbols

Your manager can’t advocate for you if you don’t brief them

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hello

I’ve published my long-form piece on go-to-market strategy. Read it over on I Manage Products.

I attended a couple of talks last week that tackled the thorny topic of influence and persuasion in different ways.

In the context of public service, Matt Jukes (Jukesie) and Dan Hon laid out the challenges facing product people. On the one side, government organisations are inherently bureaucratic and hierarchical, often preventing those with the greatest situational awareness from interacting directly with policy-makers. This often leads to the creation of policies that are either impractical to implement or attempting to solve the wrong problem.

Nobody want to be on the front page of the Daily Mail #

To add to the pressure, the UK retains a fairly healthy culture of public scrutiny of their elected government, coupled with a traditionally aggressive opposition party. Mistakes and missteps are seized upon and vilified in the Press, meaning there is often little reward or recognition when a policy works well, and plenty of approbation when it doesn’t.

No senior civil servant wants to be the cause of negative headlines in the newspapers for their minister and on the receiving end of the retribution that follows. This all makes the defensive and risk-averse culture understandable, albeit undesirable.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” #

However, civil servants and others working in government can often make a rod for their own backs. Despite being technically brilliant and well-read, some product teams lack basic communication and interpersonal skills.

A team might as well have not bothered with their research if they then try to communicate their recommendations to senior leaders with a 250-page report, in which the critical information is buried deep, rather than pulled to the front. A 150-slide ‘summary’ of the report misses the mark in the same way. Prioritising academic perfection over effective communication is a very time-consuming way to fail.

‘Socialising’ – the work around ‘the work’ #

Matt and Dan described what was meant by ‘socialising’ an idea. Rather than relying on the work ‘speaking for itself’ (it rarely does), socialising is the work around the work – the extra effort to make sure the message lands the right way, with the right people in order the approval needed. It involves:

figuring out who the intended audience will be, applying empathy to understand the needs, motivations, goals and concerns of the audience, then drawing out the details that are of greatest relevance to them;

identifying the influencers that often act as gatekeepers to the actual decision-makers and working to convince them first, so they can advocate on your behalf (I call this ‘borrowing their halo’);

overcoming perfectionist tendencies by sharing early drafts to solicit feedback, both to ensure senior leaders feel they’ve been consulted / informed throughout the process, and to incorporate that feedback while the narrative is still being formed; and

recognising that this process of socialising the idea could take several months of effort alongside the actual work.

“When you use the word politics, it’s because you’re not good at it.” #

Matt and Dan’s talk echoed the main sentiment of Rich Mironov’s talk from the day earlier. In it, he covered the main ideas behind his recent book Money Stories. From his background in large B2B companies, Rich identifies a similar set of problems for product people when communicating with senior leaders outside of product.

Simply put, waffling on about product processes and constraints to non-product executives is at best irrelevant to them and at worst interpreted by them as excuses for not delivering.

Nobody cares about your backlog, Chad #

‘Money stories’ are therefore needed to translate necessary and important product work into a language executives understand: money. It sounds brutal, but nobody cares about what the boxes on your roadmap represent. That’s why a salesperson wanting to ‘borrow’ your entire platform team to work on a feature ‘needed’ to close a $250K deal derails your roadmap with frightening regularity.

If however you can associate a particular sequence of roadmap items with the (realistic) opportunity in hard cash per year they will unlock, then you can give an indication of the length and cost of delay. Then it becomes a CEO / MD decision as to whether to incur (say) $500K of opportunity cost to maybe win a deal that is probably worth less than the $250K originally claimed.

It’s all about the SWAG #

In a similar vein, being able to do a quick SWAG (scientific, wild-ass guess) to determine whether a feature request is worth 4 digits (£1,000s), 6 digits (£100,000s) or 8 digits (£10,000,000s) – whichever order of magnitude would make your CEO sit up and listen – gives you a more effective way to reject low-value ideas , rather than putting them into backlog purgatory only to be nagged about them every week for the next 4 years.

Rich described how to make a SWAG (pro tip: it doesn’t involve spreadsheets):

1. Limit the calculation to 3 numbers: 2 knowns and 1 guesstimate

2. Only use multiplication

3. Round aggressively to the nearest leading digit; being within a factor of 5 or 6 of the actual number is sufficient accuracy for executive decision-making

4. Make sure the resulting number is expressed with a currency symbol as go-to-market executives can’t hear any sentence that doesn’t have one

Type of Story	Number 1 (Known)	Number 2 (Known)	Number 3 (Guess)
Upsell	Total number of basic customers	Price difference to move to premium	% of customers likely to upgrade
Churn (retention)	Number of accounts cancelled last year	Value of an average account	% of churn that can be prevented
Transactions	Number of units sold last year	Profit margin per unit	Fraction of volume increase expected
Support	Number of support tickets received	Cost to service a single ticket	Number of tickets that won’t be filed

While product teams still need to do the actual work to identify meaningful and valuable problems to solve for users, they run the risk of their good work being dismissed or derailed unless they can connect with the needs of their decision-makers.

In the corporate world, we need to be able to speak the language of money to carve out the space to do the work that is more meaningful to us.

For you this week #

While we’re learning how to be more influential and persuasive with the decision-makers outside of product, it seemed pertinent to share a couple of articles about managing up and down.

Leah Tharin points out that most juniors fail because they promised something, but didn’t deliver it when they said they would. It puts their manager in hot water because the junior’s failure has now become the manager’s failure.

Louise Deason also offers some practical advice about managing up. If you don’t keep your manager informed about what you’re doing and why, they can’t advocate effectively for you to others. They’ll guess what you’re doing or simply not bother. Louise offers 6 short scripts to use in emails to your manager, and explains why they’re necessary.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

The skill that gets you fired or promoted: managing up

I’m writing this article on the back of a frustration that happened last week and many times over the past year:

I have a problem on my list today because someone else (whom I pay) promised me something weeks ago and didn’t warn me that they couldn’t deliver in time. I’m out of options and time.

Reliability beats quality if you’ve promised it to someone senior

[Leah Tharin / Leah’s ProducTea]

Six Scripts for Managing Up

Managing up is not sucking up. It is making sure your manager represents you with your information, rather than their guess. Here are the emails.

Make it easy for your manager

[Louise Deason / Technically Feasible]

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FPL x CPO Circles present Rich Mironov – Money Stories

Product managers talk about features. Executives talk about revenue. Money Stories are how product and technical leaders translate what they are building into how it will make money and why that work is essential. In terms that their audience understands Whether you’re pitching a major initiative, defending a roadmap, or trying to avoid adding “just one more thing,” money stories communicate the value of product work.

[VIDEO] Don’t bring a backlog to a gunfight

[Rich Mironov / Female Product Lead x CPO Circles]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from ill-advised deadlifting.