Streamline your lead management funnel for Product Management

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hi i'm christine luke today my talk will focus on how product managers can lead a team consider this a communication fundamentals talk in order to point you in the right direction and thank you to product school for inviting me to be here today to give you a bit of background on myself i've worked in companies of various sizes ranging from small startups to large billion dollar companies where does my expertise on team building come from it comes from a career as a product marketer designer and product manager in a diverse set of product areas i've experienced good teams and bad teams in a number of contexts for today's agenda here are some of the topics we'll be covering why communication matters how communication looks like in bad teams and good teams team meetings constructive feedback and we'll touch a little bit on mediating conflict to cover the asterisk cultivation of leadership skills is a lifelong practice while i will cover it at a high level with you here i highly encourage you to invest in learning about leadership and communication beyond this talk as well as practice the skills you learn with your team there are different audiences that a product manager faces for today's talk we are focusing on your team loosely defined as anyone building the product with you this could include designers engineers data scientists why do communication skills matter from the product manager point of view this role is designed for a team context by design product managers do not build everything themselves when more than one human being is involved communication is the preferred way to interact with them it's a much better alternative to violence and as of today mind reading hasn't been invented yet so in order to interact productively with other human beings it's critical to learn how to communicate with them what happens when communication skills aren't a priority i surveyed nine working professionals and asked them to tell me signals of a bad team answers included lack of constructive feedback fear of information sharing or lack of guidance or direction a theme that i observed in their answers was poor or even antagonistic communication how can you get anything accomplished in this type of environment well what might good team communication look like in that same survey i asked people to tell me signals of a good team and here's what they said answers included knowledge sharing people feeling safe to speak up a safe space for feedback and high levels of collaboration in other words good communication is fundamental to creating good teams why should a product manager specifically care about cultivating and leading a good team it has a huge impact on the quality of the product itself for example engineers and designers can feel empowered to communicate problems with a feature or strategy early on versus a product manager hearing it for the first time in a high stakes situation with an executive or high profile customer another example is that roadblocks could be identified and cleared sooner if people communicated those roadblocks to you and one another team members could focus on the product work instead of any lingering frustration from interactions inside a bad team any negative energy from you know thoughts being misinterpreted or secrecy etc it will also reduce the amount of stress coming from the actual team of course we know that in this discipline there's stress in many different directions focusing on the strategy the customers you know the competitive landscape i think just in terms of that day-to-day impact not having the team be that source of stress for you will be the difference between night and day so how do we lead a team a fundamental principle in order to move in that direction comes from this famous quote seek first to understand then to be understood if you have this core principle underlying everything you do you'll go far in practice this involves active listening active listening is defined as the ability to focus completely on a speaker understand their message comprehend the information and respond thoughtfully to be explicit this means to listen to what's being conveyed by people talking to you people such as you know your team your designer your engineer it's important to focus on the things that they're saying rather than using that time that they're speaking to rehearse your own ideas and think through what you want to tell them how can you start to understand your team it's important to uh start fresh and get to know them as in professionals um create a forum for getting to know them so that you can explicitly learn about who they are not just who they are but you know what matters to them in their work what matters to them in their work environment uh ask this is the the fastest way uh to get to know them and otherwise if you don't create that discussion or opportunity they'll um have their own assumptions about how things should operate and you'll have your own assumptions and there might not be an opportunity to get on the same page you could facilitate a team norming session as a group or host one-on-ones to learn about each individual there are many templates out there that you could google for team norms workshops but make sure to cover at least the following areas how the team will communicate with one another for example do they prefer asynchronous uh communication over slack or do they prefer to talk in real time over a zoom call what does collaboration look like um are there preferences for when people want to collaborate versus when they don't want to you know do designers prefer to run through a prototype with uh engineer before creating the user stories or um like what happens at the implementation stage you know how how are we handling uh corner like error states for ui um how do we want to talk about that do you want to talk about it in advance or during what does that look like when you get in the weeds of that collaboration there could be many different expectations and it's good to talk about it as a group another thing that's important to discuss is roles and responsibilities i like to call this out because everyone has a unique interpretation of what a product manager does and it's important to be on the same page with your team some product managers like to create all the wireframes themselves others expect to be present for a handful or the majority of uh qualitative research interviews having this discussion with a designer or engineer team just so that we all have a shared understanding of what we expect one another to do is important rather than finding it out in a live situation where a misunderstanding has occurred it's also important to talk through how people prefer to give and receive feedback what medium works for them what's the timing of it do they prefer it one-on-one do they prefer it written do they prefer to talk about it live there are a number of topics that we could cover here and i highly encourage you to research really articulating what those preferences are and level setting with one another you know how you want this team to operate as a collective in your day-to-day experience um leading a team often shows up in the meetings that you have with that team so you're not going to have a team norms meeting every day hopefully you will have that build that shared understanding and try to adhere to one another's preferences as you work together but what does working together look like so with regards to meetings i like to start with some really foundation foundational basics be sure to have an agenda for each of your meetings share it with your team define what you want to discuss and accomplish together and stick to that agenda ideally share it in advance if you can or um when you kick off the meeting cover it and then go into the uh go into the meeting if people raise topics that aren't tied to the agenda record those topics jot them down somewhere maybe have it visible share it out afterward find a different form for that topic so that the team could stay focused on the original agenda what's important about this is uh without an explicit agenda it's really hard to negotiate what the goal the meaning should be so um when you have the agenda um everyone is and everyone agrees that you know it's valuable for us to discuss this then it's easier to focus all of the group in a particular direction but if you don't define the agenda when you begin the meeting it could really the team could pull it in many different directions and maybe even switch gears midway through and it could be hard to see any creative or valuable output at the end of that time frame so make sure to have this there are times when you may need to give feedback to another member of the team say if a design isn't solving for the user story consider using a feedback framework to prepare your feedback particularly for high stakes situations i've listed some example of feedback frameworks that you could research although i imagine there are multiple types out there there's situation behavior impact observations feelings needs actions actionable specific kind etc let's work through how we might actually use a feedback framework in this case i've pulled one for the situation behavior impact framework or sbi framework so um here in the situation i'm a product manager and i'm trying to give feedback to um one of the engineers on the team so uh as i think through the feedback um i'll describe the situation so imagine that you're taking notes to articulate or work through the framework but for us we are encountering an increase in critical bugs reported by our customers okay um what is the behavior from the engineer that we're observing i'm observing that opportunities to discuss how to resolve this are being ignored for example if it's brought up during stand-up or during a retrospective it's the the claims are dismissed although there are suggestions to work together to bring up ways to solve it they're not being prioritized in their their calendar et cetera et cetera the impact to this that i will communicate to this engineer is that there is no clear path forward and i need your expertise in order to identify next steps um so the impact will cover um the impact to the team uh it could the impact could apply to impact to you as an individual giving the feedback it's pretty broad in terms of how you can think about it but what i think is important when communicating feedback is creating a forum to identify um what the resolution could be um so in marketing terms we've heard this as like a call to action but when the when the feedback lands uh what happens next you don't necessarily have to define what that is i would encourage you to work with the other party to come up with what we could do going forward what's important for um giving constructive feedback is to practice giving the feedback before giving it um jot down what you want to communicate if there's a risk to the relationship if the feedback is poorly phrased um think it through uh consider running it by a neutral party to see if the points you're articulating are understood or if they're interpreting it in a much more negative light than you intended so for example with the sbi example i might take those notes and run it by appear let's say a product manager who's not involved with this team at all and see if if the messaging resonates or if i could include additional clarity or detail concrete information to really flesh it out or if i could word a particular phrase more diplomatically et cetera et cetera it in a way you could consider it as iterative feedback uh iterative feedback loop what's important though is that uh because these are working relationships with your team this is a team that you are with for the duration of um the product that you're leading um don't wing it uh don't say something half baked on the fly um especially if it could hurt their feelings or be poorly phrased it's important to treat these relationships with respect and put in the time and attention that you would want them to do when they're giving you feedback okay at the core of it when handling conflict within a team uh see if you could take it outside of a team meeting uh i a comment scenario i've seen is you know there's a team meeting just to go over stand-up uh like daily stand-up or um retrospective there's a particular line item that's starting to take up much more time than we intended uh it's starting to cover a lot of different facets that maybe an engineer designer wasn't prepared to elaborate on in the time frame for that meeting uh and and uh emotions are getting high and the conversation started to get heated um just at the core um see if you could take it out of that meeting you know put a pause time out uh and find another time uh to really have the proper dedicated discussion where the goal is to really uh understand um what's what's going on rather than um the original goal of uh whatever the original meeting was right so um let's say you're in that session uh let's say you've you've set aside a meeting now this is the time to really talk through it make sure to start with a shared goal right between designers between engineers data scientists whoever maybe the goal is we'd like to successfully release this feature or we'd like to improve cold code quality articulate what the goal is and really get agreement um from all parties if that is indeed the goal you know maybe they could clarify maybe they could really state their perspective find alignment so that we know that we have the intent to move in the same direction next seek to understand um assume positive intent when uh facilitating a discussion like this um uh in order to encourage positive intent from other individuals you might even want to say that out loud you might even want to set some ground rules on how we'll communicate with one another um for example you know we'll focus only on this topic we're not going to bring up past issues etc etc it could manifest in a number of ways um but really um how will we communicate about this then um use a feedback framework even in a conflict setting um you know talk through the situation you know talk through the behavior talk to the impact as a collective if it's a conflict between more than two individuals um maybe uh it'd be important for everybody to get on the same page about that situation maybe there are some aspects of the situation that is visible to some members of the team versus other members of the team and so creating the form to really um seek to understand and hear about it so that we could all be on the same page is critical and um maybe um be honest about the behaviors not just negative but positive uh you know in this situation we what we liked was that people were so responsive and people put aside their work in order to really uh troubleshoot the situation and i appreciate that right uh um it's it's critical to um really level set and look at the situation overall and not necessarily just focus on the negative right um in order to help the team understand that the negative within this broader context maybe isn't that negative maybe it's only a small portion of the overall situation and um talk through the impact uh similarly to a one-on-one conversation um we should talk every party involved in this conflict should really talk through the impact from their um perspective and for this i recommend um having them represent their own experiences um it is tempting i've seen to represent someone else's experience for example if you're on a team where one member is highly trusted they've heard the venting or complaints or problems from other members of the team and it's they have like a broader perspective um maybe put aside that time to make broad generalizations about perspectives and just represent your own perspective and potentially as a ground rule uh when facilitating this conversation um ask all members of the team to do the same um you know please relate or relay your direct experiences um it has you know it's most accurately um and fully presented and it'll be easier to ask clarifying questions in order to in order to get to the root of any particular conflict so um yeah there's a number of situations that may rise but um there's the getting to know the team doing the day-to-day meetings and handling conflict i know that i covered it at a super high level uh but hopefully this will give you some of the vocabulary in order to start practicing these different techniques and um getting better over time of course you could always ask for feedback to see if the way you conveyed the feedback or mediated conflict was successful and just as a reminder this is a lifelong practice and don't get too discouraged we're all growing so [Music] thanks