Featured Links: Follow Christian on LinkedIn and Twitter | Innovate Africa Foundation | Inspire Africa | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Watch Christian’s keynote ‘The magic of making great products‘ at #mtpcon SF
Episode transcript
Randy Silver (00:00):
Lily, I’m afraid that we don’t have time for our customary joke before the chat with an amazing guest this week.
Lily Smith (00:06):
But Randy, that’s the best part of the entire episode.
Randy Silver (00:10):
Lily, it’s not actually the best part, it’s just our favourite part. But we talked too long with our guest today and we need to save time somewhere. Or did you want to cut some of the chat instead?
Lily Smith (00:21):
Oh no, definitely not, especially when you get Silicon Valley Product Group’s, Christian Idiodi going on a topic. You do not want to stop.
Randy Silver (00:30):
We had a great chat with him about onboarding people in the product team and also the work he’s doing in Africa.
Lily Smith (00:36):
Are you sure we don’t have time for a joke?
Randy Silver (00:39):
No joke for you, just chat.
Lily Smith (00:44):
The Product Experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe. Visit mindtheproduct.com to catch up on past episodes and discover more.
Randy Silver (00:55):
Browse for free or become a Mind the Product member to unlock premium content, discounts to our conferences around the world, and training opportunities. Mind the Product product also offers free ProductTank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.
Lily Smith (01:13):
Hi Christian, welcome back to The Product Experience Podcast.
Christian Idiodi (01:17):
Thank you for having me, glad to be here.
Lily Smith (01:20):
So you have been a guest with us before, but it’s been a while, so if you could give us a real quick intro into who you are and what you are doing in product these days, that would be awesome.
Christian Idiodi (01:34):
Wonderful. Well thanks again for having me. I am one of the partners at the Silicon Valley Product Group, SVPG, and we spend a lot of our time coaching, advising and training companies around the world on how to build products customers love. A big focus of our work right now has been helping companies move to the product operating model, helping them move to empower teams and equipping their teams with the techniques to do good discovery and decide what to do. I have really been spending a lot of time around the world with teams in Africa, has been a big focus of mine recently and I’m looking forward to all the exciting things we’ll do there.
Lily Smith (02:14):
Amazing, thank you. Yeah, and we’re going to talk a little bit about your experiences in Africa and your plans that you’ve got over there later on. But right now, we’re going to be talking today about onboarding product people successfully into your business. Tell me a little bit about why you are so kind of interested in this part of the process of hiring and managing a product person.
Christian Idiodi (02:41):
Yeah, look, it is probably the biggest hidden or very variable secret weapon that most people don’t really leverage in getting people equipped to do their job. I think most people do not start a job with all they need to succeed. That’s always been core in terms of my philosophy and what I have learned throughout my experience. Let’s talk about why I care about an onboarding programme specifically. Fundamentally, I say most people do not start with what they need, but most or almost all job descriptions are crap. Why? Because nobody only does their job description. If you are only doing your job description today, you are probably failing at your job. Why, is because some things are very difficult to actually articulate in a job description. A job description is often written by a manager of the job or a HR person and not by a doer of the job.
(03:40)
There are also several real aspects of a job that are confidential or cannot be included in a job description. So there’s some key aspects of what you actually do in your job differs from what you may be hired to do or told you are going to do. So you can already see why there’s some dysfunction already in our ability to execute at the level we’re expected. Second, we don’t capture our common intent in any job description. Nobody captures your vision, your strategy, your objectives. The first time most people know what they’re working on is while they are meant to be working on it. It’s like, hello, welcome to the team. You are like wartime right away. There’s no space for practise. You think about it, it’s like if in any major sport or anything, there’s no professional at any game in the world that executes at a high level without practising what they’re going to do.
(04:34)
But most importantly for me it’s a big trust dynamic. Anybody comes into an environment, when I say they don’t have all they need to succeed, no matter how competent you are in your previous role, no matter what company you came from, how many years of experience or expertise you have, you don’t know that company. You don’t know the nuances of how they work. You may not know its history, the dynamics of teams. Are you seeing, this already means you don’t have the tools or at least you do not have the perceived trust by people on the team to be competent in your job. So for me, onboarding is a key aspect of trying to tackle some of this.
Lily Smith (05:15):
I always think it takes around six months to become an effective product person in a new role, in a new company, because it takes so long to learn the business and to learn the market and to learn the product and, like you say, to learn all the relationships and everything and to learn the role itself because there’s probably subtleties and the expectations in different roles. So do you think that you can accelerate some of that learning in that onboarding process?
Christian Idiodi (05:48):
Well philosophically I always say, it’s not even important what you do or how long you do it, it’s important that you do something. I mean, we’re talking from people going to welcome to the first day of your work, go solve world peace and hunger, go build a great product, join the team. Your title says product person, go through product-ey things. I mean, this is the current dynamic for most teams. So first of all… And I’m trying to lower the bar deliberately. I am suggesting here that anything is a significant improvement from what we’ve commonly seen most people do. My first goal here is I’m saying part of why I had to accelerate the programme is because most leaders are also in wartime. We don’t have as much time to say, “Okay, I am going to stay on a six-month journey, a three-month journey, four-month journey with somebody to get them equipped.”
(06:40)
So what they try to do is they want to hire for a level of competency. You’re building a team, you are going to hire the most skilled player so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time coaching them or equipping them. However, they still need to learn about the team and practise playing with the team before you put them on the field. You see? So the higher the competence level, the less amount of time you need to do. So I look at our sports of product management as a really senior professional discipline. My expectation is that an onboarding programme for three months or a deliberate approach for three months to equip people will be significant in getting them competency in their ability to do their job. For my specific bootcamp, I have tried to get it down to two weeks.
Randy Silver (07:29):
Okay, two weeks, that’s amazing. But let’s just be clear, what are you expecting at the end of two weeks? Where should somebody be? What decisions should they be able to make? What position should they be in?
Christian Idiodi (07:43):
Yeah. Well if you think about it in some example. I’m suggesting this a 90-day onboarding type of period of time and they’re impact days to the onboarding period. There’s the first day that matters because it’s your realisation of what it is. There’s the end of the first week where you have your first weekend, it’s the first time in which your family will ask you, “How are things?” You’re getting the time to decompress. Your first paycheck matters because that’s where you measure the amount of work you have against the income or the value you’re being paid for it. The end of 30 days matters. The end of 90 days matters. These are real impact days in the career of people. So the 90-day onboarding programme sticks. But the reason I care about the first two weeks, one of the things that struck me is there’s this study that suggests that the same questions that a kindergartner has on their first day at school are the exact same questions we have on the first day of work. Kids will have questions, like, who will be my friend?
(08:46)
Is my teacher nice? Where do I sit? Is the work hard? Where is the bathroom? For adults it’s almost exactly the same thing. It’s like, is my boss a jerk? Who will be my friend at work? How do I fit in? What’s the real work like? What is expected of me? And truly, where is the bathroom? I mean, are you staying with me? We [inaudible 00:09:06] think about how much work we do to set kids up for work. We don’t do any of that in the early stage of a… So I’m again setting the bar low when you talk about what do I expect people to do. I just listed some of the same things I would want my kindergartner at school to leave knowing when they get to school. What’s expected of me? Who will be my friend? Is my teacher nice?
(09:32)
How do we measure success? Where’s the bathroom? Where do I sit? Now, I’m simplifying this because I want people to get into their head. They want to get into the real tactical logic of all of those key competencies. You are hiring a professional. Their job is to execute at a professional level. But what they are missing are fundamentals of how this specific team works and how these organisations work. So the idea of a bootcamp actually came to me. I had a friend, he is a general now in the military, and he’s been trying to recruit me to join the military, their senior officer programme in intelligence and things like that for years. We always joke about it. I’m like, “Hell no. I’m old now. I can’t do that bootcamp thing. That’s ridiculous. You want me running around. I’m climbing walls. We’ve got a dartboard and we’re proud of it now.”
(10:24)
Then he kind of broke it down to me when we’re having drinks once and he said, “Look, many people think the bootcamp is only about physical preparedness. It’s like, yeah, that’s a big component of it, you want to make sure you’re physically fit and stuff.” But he started to break down some of the key elements of it. It’s like first the military calls their strategic context, common intent. It’s where we get people to know why we exist, our common intent, our purpose, our mission, clarity about the existence of whatever branch you’re in. He also talked a lot about relationships. It’s like bootcamp classes stick together. It’s like if you went through bootcamp together, basic training together, you are like friends for life. You go through this. You learn the skills in there. But the most interesting aspect that always struck me was about trust.
(11:09)
He kind of said, “If you can imagine somebody on the frontline in a war with a weapon standing by somebody else, why would that person trust that the person standing beside them knows how to shoot that weapon, will not make a mistake in hurting them and stuff? It’s because that person knows this kind of rigorous training and preparation that that individual went through. If everybody goes through that consistently, there’s a perception of the level of competency that the person standing…” It’s like if you made it through and you are with me today, I know what you went through. You are ready to do the job.
Randy Silver (11:49):
So we’re going to go into some of the details of what you specifically do in the bootcamp. But before we get to that one quick question, you were just talking about the military ones and you said, yeah, it’s a group of people that form a bond together. Is this onboarding bootcamp, is this something you can do for one new hire or a couple new hires or do you need to wait and onboard a few or group of people at a time?
Christian Idiodi (12:14):
So the structure of the bootcamp, the first week is about the individual preparedness. The second week is with the team they’re working on. So the team that someone is working on gets to come to the second week of bootcamp because we actually… That’s where we do the practise. You don’t work as an individual. So, ideally the more people you can have in a bootcamp class, the better for you just as the manager doing it. As a leader of product people, I am responsible for the individual preparedness of everybody on my team. So it is my responsibility to equip you. If I only hire for one role, I am running a bootcamp with one person. Ideally, I work with my HR team where I can hire at different times, but I have start windows, windows of time where I want people starting together in the product organisation.
(13:03)
That aligns with maybe your OKR cycle. That might align to your hiring cycle, your planning cycles. So if you are doing this… We always talk about [inaudible 00:13:14], recruiting is an everyday job. It’s not a sometimes thing when you have a need. If you have a need, it’s probably too late. So you are always recruiting, building your team. So, I have windows of time when I want people to start. It is better when they’re a group of people you’re putting through onboarding together, so people can actually… You are hiring all the time. You’re making offers all the time. But I have preferred start windows every quarter for groups. If you cannot afford that, you’re getting to or three you can kind of delay start for people like “Hey, you’re onboard, but you’re going to all start on this window of time to start the onboarding programme.”
Lily Smith (13:52):
So tell us a bit more about what happens in the two weeks. You mentioned an individual focus in the first week and then a group focus in the second week, or you kind of bring the existing team in the second week. So let’s start with the first week. What does that look like?
Christian Idiodi (14:10):
Okay, I teach the first week. I structure it kind of true if you think about… Stephen Covey has a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I kind of devised my own way looking at that with product teams. Remember there are goals I have of my onboarding. One of the big goals I have in onboarding is a trust component. The idea that no matter how great you are, we don’t know you, we don’t know your grade, we don’t trust you, you are probably incompetent in your job. This is the philosophy I’m going through. So my goal is one, I have to build trust between me, the manager and that individual that is coming on the team. I have to build trust between that individual and the team that they’ll be serving on. I have to build trust between that individual and the organisation as a whole.
(15:00)
So what I do with the seven habits, I kind of structure the first week every single day based on a habit. If you think about the first one is be proactive. So day one in it, there’s a whole lot of trusting every single day. So trust is an underlying piece, meaning trust building exercises, do your favourite two truths and a lie, happy trustful, go to the extreme level. What you’re doing is building relationships. Drinking is an onboarding exercise. You are welcome to drink and discuss. The idea here is this is the only time that you are creating a safe place that is not a wartime environment to actually get to know an individual, be vulnerable, understand their strength. So day one is being about proactive. Remember the idea of vessels being reactive. Empower teams require competent people, necessary range of skills given problems to solve without being told what to do.
(15:55)
So this is really all about saying, Lily, I want to talk about why you were hired here. Remember, I always tell this to people all the time when they talk about it with interviewing, nobody is really themselves in an interview. Sure we are not ourselves when we are interviewing people. You are interviewing. You are literally pitching somebody your best self in some ways. So you really don’t know people. Job interviews don’t tell you anything about the people. They are pretending to be who you think they want you to be, and so are we. So these let’s get to know each other type of things. So if you think about what I’m doing here, I’m saying, “Lily, you’re not hired because of your weaknesses. You’re hired because of your strengths. You’re here because of these strengths.” So the first goal of day one is really about relationship, a big emphasis on the strengths, why you’re hired, why the team needs you, why you are on the team in some ways. Okay, so that’s kind of the day one.
(16:53)
Day two, if you go back to the habits, it’s about begin with the end in mind. So this is where I’m going to talk about vision and strategy and objectives, why we exist, our company mission. I’m giving you a strategic context, our common intent. In some ways, how are decisions made? How do we decide what is important versus urgent? This is where, remember I said to you what you write in the job description, it’s not your real job, but you’re about to find that out because you’ll practise next week with your team. So we’re getting through all of the nuance in here. Habit three is about putting first things first, in some ways. So that’s how decisions are made focused, urgent, important.
(17:34)
Day four is about think win-win, in some ways. So this is where I go into stakeholder engagement. I talk about the nature of the organisation, the whole purpose of the product organisation, how we work with other people to solve problems. This is why I introduce every other facet of the company. If you’ve heard me talk about my favourite stakeholder engagement technique, I actually match a new hire with a very loud, vocal stakeholder in the company and I make them responsible for coaching them and training them. So this is a big piece of what they’re doing in day four. Day five is seek to understand. Then we understood it, so we talk about communication, how do we share information here, listening, we talk about presentation, nuances of how everybody likes to be presented. Then we talk about doing this discovery in this environment, knowing what you can’t know. There are many things a new hire doesn’t know about the organisation. We get through historical context. This is not new hire onboarding. This is me preparing you with what you really need to go succeed in the real environment, right? Okay.
Lily Smith (18:42):
Christian, you’ve said quite a lot in that description that we talk about this and we talk about that. Are you literally delivering this in a conversation with the new employee or…?
Christian Idiodi (18:54):
Oh, no. Great question. This is a structured programme for people. So I have a set curriculum. I always tell people to design it in their organisation. The reason I’m listing it out this way, I’m talking about the outcomes you want. You can decide whether you want to do a presentation, an exercise, a video, you want to dance in front of people. But I want to lead you every day, go in this way. Day six, we’re talking about synergize through collaboration, teamwork, practising working together. Day seven is about sharpening the soul, time management, work-life balance, taking care of yourself. Then what I’m doing as a leader or as a coach during this period is I am actually, by day eight, I am actually looking for what you need to learn, what you need to improve and what you need to be coached on to succeed.
(19:49)
So I am doing an assessment through this. I’m doing a gap analysis and I am preparing a coaching plan for you. This is you getting visibility. In that week, I’m the head of product, everybody’s going to see me hanging out with you. Be like, “Randy knows the CEO or the head of product. Look at them, they walk up everywhere. Who is that new guy? Who is that new guy?” everybody. I’m extending my trust to that person. I will take that person to the head of sales. They will hang out too. Everybody will see that. You see, that person is feeling very good about all the interaction they’re having, all the visibility, but they’re doing it safely because there’s no expectation from them in return. This is about learning. So I have a very set curriculum of teaching techniques, tools, exercises that I do, homework that I give people every single day.
(20:41)
Remember, I am very pointed about what I want you to think at the end of the day. I am your manager In that way. I’m kind of controlling the narrative. I mean that very, very deliberately when I ask the questions of why your first day matter, I’m thinking at the end of the first day, your spouse, your partner, significant other is going to ask you, “How did your day go?” I actually prepare people every day for what they should say at home. I do that subconsciously, right? I’m saying to you, “How was your first day? Tell me about it.” Then I repeat to them what they should feel. At the end of the first week, I know everybody will be like, “How was your first week?” It’s your first weekend. You’re relaxing. You’re going to be thinking how was the first week?
(21:27)
Does this suck? I need to prepare you. So I’m going to ask you questions, like, do you have a friend at work? Do you know what to do here? You see, at the end of your first paycheck, this is the first time you are evaluating is this job worth all the craziness I’m going through, but the paycheck looks good and the work looks low. You see, so what I do at that first paycheck is I actually deliver your very first coaching plan to you. I say, “Lily, you are wonderful. These are all the things you’re great on. But Lily, these are all the things you need to improve on and I am going to work with you to do that.” So what happens is, no matter what that paycheck looks like to you, you’re saying, “This is a great job. I can learn, I can grow. I’m not even perfect yet for it, but they love me here.”
(22:10)
You see, so I am very deliberate. So every day for two weeks, there’s a deliberate outcome, a deliberate goal I want people to have and feel at the end of that day. Those are the outcomes that, regardless of how you want to shape it, you want to see established.
Lily Smith (22:34):
Hey Randy, are the rumours true?
Randy Silver (22:38):
Lily, I can’t believe it. MTP are giving away all nine of the San Francisco keynote talks for free, both a recording and a written summary of each one.
Lily Smith (22:48):
And handy discussion points and thought starters to think about solo or with your team.
Randy Silver (22:53):
And an email notification each time a new talk is published on mindtheproduct.com.
Lily Smith (22:58):
So you’ll never miss a talk and be the first to hear when the next one is hot off the press.
Randy Silver (23:03):
Of course nothing can beat attending MTP Con in person, but this is the next best thing.
Lily Smith (23:08):
So sign up at mindtheproduct.com/sfkeynotekit. That’s mindtheproduct.com/sfkeynotekit.
Randy Silver (23:26):
Christian, this is an intense thing obviously. So you’re sitting there, you’re a head of product, you’re CPO, you’ve got X number of product teams, you’ve got group product managers and other heads of product working for you. Are you doing this for your direct reports? Are you doing this for everybody? Who else gets involved? How many hours of your day are you devoting to this?
Christian Idiodi (23:49):
Remember, if you do this well, you set your organisation up for a very long time and it feeds itself. It’s a very interesting dynamic here. What I’m doing is I’m kind of minimising my coaching effort in the wartime because I have done it upfront. The number of distractions that happen when people are in the game and then they have a question. So what’s our objective this week? You’re just like, oh man, I wish I’d covered that with them earlier. Those things… Just imagine the knee-jerk reactions from so many people. When I say I onboard all of my direct reports, all of my direct reports… So I am the head of products. I might have a director of products that may have hired a new product manager. I still do the onboarding for that new product manager. Why? Because I am also coaching my director on how to coach the person and I’m also sharing the coaching plan with that person.
(24:50)
These are the things I observed. What did you observe that Randy needs to work on? You see, what are the dynamics we don’t know will happen well? So all of my directs are involved in onboarding, like onboarding two weeks in a quarter are big for the whole organisation because if we get it right, we accelerate the effectiveness and productivity of a new hire exponentially. The true value for this is really outcomes for me, because the second I put a product manager, a designer, an engineer, in play, in the field, they are delivering results. The two weeks of time, the payouts for it is years and years of learning and exponential result. So this is designed by the product leadership team. They all get involved. There are things I am not good at doing. Maybe the head of design is very good about talking about this subject of dealing with customers.
(25:45)
Maybe the head of engineering is very good at stakeholder communicate. We all participate. So we designed the curriculum together. We all participate in onboarding people together. You’re going to leverage the strengths. But I’ve always emphasised I am the head of product, I will get involved in doing all of that, yeah.
Lily Smith (26:03):
So you mentioned in week two the team get involved. What does that involvement look like?
Christian Idiodi (26:12):
Great question. Remember this is a team spot. Your product managers, the designers. Think about what happens in your alternative scenario. The very first day you’re put into work, you’ve probably really never met the team. Maybe they read your resume. Maybe they saw an announcement. Maybe they saw your LinkedIn stuff, but they don’t know you. They’ve never worked with you. They don’t know your communication style. They don’t know how you make decisions, what pisses you off. The first day you come to work, you’re not in peace time, you’re in wartime. This is execution time. We have a deliverable. We’ve got roadmap commitments. We’ve got stakeholders screaming and there he is, Randy is going to come and ask a dumb question that he should already know and we are going to try to be nice, but we are impatient with Randy because we have pressure.
(26:54)
You see, these are some of those examples of the dynamics that happens in teams. So the team comes in the second week to practise, and by practise they come in and they’re doing the same kinds of things, trust and get to know the team, all the fun things. That’s always a given. Many people think that. But that’s to build trust and relationships. But what I do is like, Destiny’s team is working on XAPI integration. I give them a real life scenario in a practise environment. Yes, they call from a head of sales and the team role plays the entire way they will work to solve it. I mean, they’re doing sprint planning, stand up, but doing all of the agile rituals. I mean, they’re going through those motions, but there’s no real pressure. There’s no real deliverable. It’s a safe place.
(27:39)
Now what am I doing as a coach and a manager? I’m observing dynamics. Oh my goodness, when Randy says this, it pisses Jenny off. When Suzanne says… Yeah, you see like, okay, I need to coach this new hire on how to deal with this. Hey everybody freeze. Okay, did you see what happened here? I’ve known Randy for the last week. It’s not that he’s upset with you. When he gets excited, he just speaks loudly. Are you seeing? Everybody’s like, oh okay. Safe place to learn about how Randy interacts in that environment. We’re doing all of this because what you do in practise is what you do in the game. And, you know why it matters for me that the team is involved? I’m doing the same thing. I’m also coaching the team. When you throw in a new person into a team, you change the dynamic of the team. You change the effectiveness, the productivity, because they’re learning. They’re stopping and starting.
(28:32)
They’re understanding that person’s role. Are we getting one plus one equals three? What’s the synergy? There are some of those dynamics I’m like… So the team will actually accelerate the team’s performance by giving them time to practise and regroup. There are many scenarios where they actually bring real world situations into the bootcamp with this new hire. But it’s safe because bootcamp is a coaching environment, it’s a practise environment. So everybody in the product organisation, they get the benefit of something that I am a big advocate for in all of professional work, practise. What we don’t have in our professional environments anymore is an opportunity to practise our craft, getting better at our craft, because we’re constantly under pressure to deliver from a craft that we’ve had no time to practise. You see? So what I have always done is two weeks, every quarter cover our practise time.
(29:26)
This is a deliberate forum to getting teams better at their craft, to practise their work, to improve communication, collaboration, to improve effectiveness in decision making, stakeholders. We are going to tackle all of that in it. But it’s actually one week for the team, but for a new hire it’ll be two weeks. You see? So just imagine if you dedicate one week every quarter to team practise, team building, team stuff. The bootcamp provides that environment to get good at that.
Lily Smith (29:56):
Yeah, that’s amazing.
Randy Silver (29:57):
What about everybody else? So you’re doing this for the product people. Do devs and designers, do sales and marketing, do they get any version of this? Do you go out and work with them?
Christian Idiodi (30:08):
When I talk about product people, I’m talking product managers, design and engineering. Everybody in the product organisation goes through my bootcamp because again, it’s a team spot. I may take, if it is a new designer, the head of design may take a more prominent role on some topics than I might, but I am involved too because it’s one organisation. That fundamentally has to be true, that if you’re collaborating in that way, you have to do it. But this is also the place in which I invite head of sales, head of marketing. They’re excited about this. They also get points on their… They know it’s happening every quarter. If they can’t make it, they delegate somebody to come in from their organisation to practise with them. I mean, they enjoy it because they’ll bring a real example of operations person screaming on a call.
(30:54)
It’s a real customer complaint I got last week. They’ll throw it in there and they will learn how the team solves the problem together, and I will even coach them better on how to bring… It is a fantastic, healthy, cultural building thing when done well.
Randy Silver (31:08):
Then when other departments, when sales, when opps, when other teams are onboarding people, do you get involved? Do you reciprocate and go visit them?
Christian Idiodi (31:17):
I absolutely do it. So my favourite technique that I always tell people here is I do the job shadowing type of thing. So if we are having friction with sales, I say we’re going to be a salesperson for a day. You’re going to go learn in the onboarding class how they do sales training. You’re going to go out in the field with salespeople and then a salesperson will come do the same on your team. It builds a mutual respect of everybody’s role. “Man, I need you. I can never do sales.” “Oh man, you are awesome at what you do.” That is such a great healthy dynamic. If you have friction between groups in your company, the best way to bridge that gap and rebuild trust is to learn. It’s not to go vent about all the friction. We suck at communication. No, you’re going to say, “Hey, let me come learn about your world and then let you come learn about my world.” Through that learning together, you’ll improve the dynamics that have friction.
Lily Smith (32:10):
Christian, if people want to design their own version of a bootcamp for new employees, what kind of advice would you give to someone who wanted to do this?
Christian Idiodi (32:23):
Yeah, it’s important that you have values that you stand by and you believe in terms of… I believe a lot in coaching. I believe that developing people is my number one job as a manager, as a leader of people. My kids in elementary school, they used to have a vision pledge, which was kind of like, every day I do my best, I listen, I follow directions, I work hard, I am honest, I respect others and the environment and what I do to today makes a difference. They used to say that as kids growing up. Those things fundamentally shape what you want to see people accomplish. So first I always say you’ve got to have clear values for what your belief in getting people better and getting people successful at your job.
(33:11)
Second this is doing the work upfront. It’s going to pay tremendous dividends. If you truly believe that value, for instance, that this is your number one job, then you are going to put the effort into designing something that makes people successful. I promise you this, you find the best person in your company at their job and you try to write down what makes them good at their job, the list is always the same. Always the same. Doesn’t matter what company. Everybody trusts them. Oh yeah, have friends. You are going to find the exact same list. Those things don’t happen by chance. They’re impossible to replicate just by telling people to do it, impossible. They have to practise. You have to create an environment. It’s like taking a communication class doesn’t get you better at communication. Communicating better means that you’re better at… It’s almost like so you can do all of those kinds of things. The bootcamp on itself, the training on itself is not the solution. It’s actually getting people better.
(34:12)
Meaning you have to not just provide information, you have to create a space to practise their craft. So I’m sharing my structure. I am probably going to do some more writing about it. So I’m happy to share my full curriculum, share the full topics and share my training models so that people can emulate it. I have found it to be absolutely valuable in really setting people up for success.
Randy Silver (34:36):
So we want to move on to Africa, but I want to ask you one last very brief question.
Christian Idiodi (34:40):
Please, dive in.
Randy Silver (34:41):
I mean, I definitely want that curriculum. But who’s doing this well right now? Who do you know that does a great job of onboarding?
Christian Idiodi (34:48):
Well, many companies have variations of this in some ways, and some companies have the APM programmes that you might see at Google or Atlassian or Instacart and stuff. They have a lot of components here that they are spending two years to equip somebody to be a product manager, two years. But then they hire somebody from the outside and just because they already have the title product manager, they assume that those two years, they’ve probably had the similar rigour and training that they may have had. So many companies do this by immersing new hires with high performing people and they learn by osmosis or they learn from competent product leaders. I have seen some companies try to design flavours of this, whether it’s two weeks or a three-month onboarding programme. I’m stressing, this is not new hire orientation, this is not, let me give you the company cookie and spill.
(35:44)
This is about equipping product people to be competent and successful in their job. What you’re saying is they don’t have all they need to do that and we know they don’t have it, they know they don’t have it, so we already have a trust problem and we also have an empowerment problem because they’re not going to take on doing the work because they know they don’t know. This is the ability to accelerate that. So you’re going to find many companies, most of your tech companies have different flavours of getting people on. I was with a great company, Snagajob, early on in my career. They have a great body programme where they give you somebody to help you throughout your first two weeks. They have a great orientation programme and training programme. So there are different variants of this. I think throughout my career I took the pieces of what always stood out to getting me successful and what I saw people that were successful did early on in their career, and I kind of designed this programme to help.
Randy Silver (36:45):
Thanks Christian. Okay, so let’s go into Africa, or at least to the work you’re doing with the Innovate Africa Foundation. Tell us about that. What is it and how can people get involved? How would you like people to be involved?
Christian Idiodi (36:59):
Yeah. Well we’ve had a passion for the work at SVPG of helping people around the world build great products. There are several markets that we found to be uniquely underserved, and Africa being one of those markets. If you didn’t get some of that hint, I am African, I was born in Nigeria and I grew up there as a child too as well. So I’m a product of an environment where we have minimal resources or exposure to use technology in a meaningful way to solve problems. We are not shy of creativity, lots of super creative people, but the ability to leverage meaningful technology to accelerate the solutions we bring to market has been hindered over time. So the Innovate Africa Foundation is a passion of mine, to accelerate the use of technology in solving problems in Africa. It means building a strong product community of product minded people and entrepreneurs and tech community.
(37:58)
My big focus is building in Africa for Africa. If you can imagine most of the super smart, talented skills technology or product minded people are one, either working in other countries or building for multinationals. They’re working for Google and Amazon, but they’re in Africa. My hope is that over the next decade we can accelerate meaningful solutions by Africans for Africans, building social for them, platforms for themselves and technology or phones for themselves like you might see in China or in India. That means we have to accelerate training and upskilling product and tech-minded people. It means we have to provide access to funding and entrepreneurial communities to do that. It also means that we have to create an ecosystem where we can start to tackle really meaningful problems in Africa. The more key thing the foundation is going to do, we’ll start in September this year, we’re going to be doing our first conference in Africa, the Inspire Africa Conference.
(39:04)
All of the Silicon Valley Product Group partners will be coming to Africa. We will be teaching, coaching, advising product teams. We’re expecting to have about 2000 product people from all across the continent all converge in one day. We are going to pour out everything we know and help to try to do this. We hope to do this every year to try to bring a community of product people, upskill them, use it as an opportunity for people to get training, to get coaching, and to get connected to resources.
Lily Smith (39:34):
That sounds amazing.
Christian Idiodi (39:40):
You can get more by going to inspireafrica.com or going to the innovateafricafoundation.org. This is just going to be meaningful work that has been… I’m super passionate about, I just did a tour in Africa, going to about five different countries to learn. It was kind of discovery for me and that was just a fascinating, humbling experience to spend time on the continent.
Lily Smith (40:01):
It does feel like there is some kind of tech or digital hubs popping up across Africa. Where are the key hotspots at the moment for you?
Christian Idiodi (40:13):
Yeah, well, Nigeria is by far the biggest technology market, biggest startup community in Africa. It’s also Africa’s most populous country. I was in Ghana where they have some innovation labs and incubators that they do well. Rwanda, as a nation, has been on a big move to digital transformation in their work and they want to be an enabling environment for this kind of work. They have a [inaudible 00:40:38] lab there. Kenya is also a great spot for innovation and as a tech hub. South Africa has been prominent with investment in terms of its stability and ability for investors to have exits, so it’s been an exciting market for Africa. But we’re seeing this continue to grow and emerge faster than any other market. It’s been the fastest growing technology market in the world. Biggest investment growth in terms of tech funds. So there’s tremendous growth in the market.
(41:09)
With that comes the challenge of do we have the skills to actually do the job? I mean, you see lots of African people build technology and then they move out to other parts of the world because it’s easier to make money there. Speaking with the healthcare provider that is trying to solve a problem for providing access to healthcare for people in the rural villages, and they’re trying to do telehealth in the rural communities, but do people have access to a cellphone or do they have access to internet to do it? And that problem becomes really hard, and so what do they do? They take it to the people that can afford a telehealth solution because investors want returns. So they lose sight of solving the problem because they are chasing the exit in some ways, or investor demand. So one of the things we’ve got to get better at is not just equipping them at solving problems, but building patient capital in Africa, where people can invest in actually solving problems than making money on the problem.
Lily Smith (42:14):
It sounds really, really interesting and I’m excited to see how that develops and how the conference goes. Let us know if you ever need us to come and do some live podcasting, because I would love to join.
Christian Idiodi (42:33):
I will love that. We could use help from the product community in championing work in Africa, in providing coaching, training resources in Africa. We would love to do as much as we can for free to people. Obviously, there’s a cost in trying to train and equip people and bring people together to do that. I know we started a GoFundMe page and we’ve already seen tremendous people donating from the product community around the world to go train people in Africa. We want to build schools to train technology and engineers and product people, to help have centres where people can go get upskilled in this. So as much as I would love to shine a light on the continent, in some ways, I want to put up community to take it upon themselves to see this as a problem worth solving and I want investment of their time to champion this, whether it’s podcasting, sharing knowledge and showing that they have a reach in that market as well.
Lily Smith (43:31):
Christian, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.
Christian Idiodi (43:36):
Always a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Randy and Lily.
Lily Smith (43:48):
The Product Experience is the first…
Randy Silver (43:51):
and the best…
Lily Smith (43:52):
podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith…
Randy Silver (43:57):
and me Randy Silver.
Lily Smith (44:00):
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver (44:03):
Our theme music is from Hamburg based band Pau. That’s P-A-U. Thanks to Arne Kittler who curates both ProductTank and MTP Engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via ProductTank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith (44:24):
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproduct.com/producttank.
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