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Episode transcript
Lily Smith:
Randy, when you were a little kid, did TV shows ever start with the words you know?
Randy Silver:
tonight, on a very special episode, oh wow, that brings back memories, Lily. Why are you bringing that up?
Lily Smith:
Because Today, on a very special episode of the product experience, we’re doing something a little bit different in our interview.
Randy Silver:
Ooh, now I’m excited. So who are we going to talk to, and what are we going to talk about?
Lily Smith:
Great questions and I think you already know the answer, Randy. Today you’re going to be our guest and we’re going to talk about your Mind, the Product. Talk about the one thing that separates the best product people from the merely good ones.
Randy Silver:
Well, if you’re listening to this podcast, we already know that you’re one of the good ones and hopefully, by the time this episode is done, you’ll be ready to become one of the great ones.
Lily Smith:
So let’s get to the chat.
Randy Silver:
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.
Lily Smith:
Visit MindtheProductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind, the Product’s conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world, and online.
Randy Silver:
Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.
Lily Smith:
Welcome, Randy, to the product experience podcast.
Randy Silver:
This is so weird.
Lily Smith:
Okay, well, before we get started, would you like to give our audience a quick introduction to yourself?
Randy Silver:
Sure, okay, well, we don’t actually do this very often, or at least this part of Farah. So I’m Randy, I’m the co-host of this podcast and in a previous life I was a music journalist. I did it for a lot of websites and that got me to a weird place where I was working with designers and developers and other people and somehow that led to becoming an interactive producer and then one day someone offered me a job as a product manager and I had to ask them what that was and they told me about Lean and Scrum and Agile and all that, and I’ve never looked back. And then for the last five years now I have been a coach and a consultant and I build communities around product and really I just like talking to people about this stuff.
Lily Smith:
And we’ve done. I think it’s nearly. It’s either nearly 250 episodes or maybe just over 250 episodes Something like that.
Randy Silver:
Who keeps count?
Lily Smith:
Who keeps count. So suffice to say you know a little bit about product management.
Randy Silver:
I know what other people have told me.
Lily Smith:
And recently you also did a talk at Mind, the Product conference, on the classic Barbican stage. How was that for you?
Randy Silver:
It was great. It was really weird. It was, you know, after being in the audience for that so many times. Actually standing on that stage is weird, but it was very, very cool. It was a lot of fun.
Lily Smith:
I always find that conference feels like home, like you just feel like you’re surrounded by your people, so probably one of the best stages to do a talk on, I reckon Even though it’s a huge space it’s something like 1200 people or so in the room it doesn’t feel very big.
Randy Silver:
It feels really comfortable. It was a really nice experience.
Lily Smith:
Nice, okay, so we’re going to have a chat today about the topic of your talk, and one of the things you talked about is what divides good product people from the best product people. So before we get into that, though, how did you figure out the good from the best?
Randy Silver:
Through a lot of trial and error Mostly error. I think it was one of those things that I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I was really good at this stuff years ago and there were definitely parts of it I was good at. But listening to some of the amazing people we talked to and reflecting back on some of the problems that I’ve had made me finally realize it. And then an experience I had a few years back where I worked with someone who was a bit of a challenge and looking back I’d say they’re probably the toughest person I’ve ever worked with, Maybe realize what it was I was doing badly and what I could do better, and I wanted to jump up and down and tell everyone else about this. So you know, it’s what I saw from a bunch of people that we’ve interviewed and the best people that we’ve interviewed and what I’ve learned from them and how I applied that to some of the lessons I’ve I’ve in some of the things I’ve gone through in my own career.
Lily Smith:
Okay, so I think, feel like we need to get to the crux of the matter. So what is it? What gets you from good to great?
Randy Silver:
Okay, so I’m not going to answer that in the most straightforward way. I’m going to do the long answer and yell at me if you need to, but I think it’s four things, and the first three things are the easy ones. They’re the ones that I thought I had figured out for years. It’s about having your priorities straight, so knowing what to work on and what not to work on. Then, if you are a head of product, or even if you’re just a product manager, in working with your team, making sure you’ve got the right people with the right culture, they know what to do, they clearly understand it, they have the permission to do the stuff and to speak about it and ask questions. And then Also, do they have processes that allow them to actually get worked on? Or you just sitting there, sitting in meetings, writing reports and just doing bureaucracy? I’ve been in so many jobs where I’ve spent so much time doing bureaucracy that actually, shipping value was almost a second secondary Concern for us. So I thought it was those three things for the longest time and, to be fair, those are table stakes. You have to be able to get those three things right and do them. That’s what makes you a good product manager or a good product person at all, but the thing I realized that makes you a great one, the things that I’ve seen. Really separate people are the ones who are conscious of the perception of others about how they’re handling those things you know. So it’s not just you. Do you think you’re doing these things well? Are you doing them by the book and doing it the right way it’s? Does your team agree with that? And, more importantly, to your partners and your stakeholders and your customers, do they all agree that your priorities, your people and your processes are working to give them value? Okay, so let’s dig into that.
Lily Smith:
I think that’s like a really, really good summary, but I want to. I want to take each one of those pieces one by one. So let’s start with priorities. Let’s prioritize this. How do you kind of like make sure that you’re doing just this piece well, because I feel like we we don’t really talk about Maybe other people do, actually, but I feel like I don’t talk about prioritization enough and kind of how we do it and how we do it in our business and the different levels of prioritization as well, because you’re doing it with that long term view and then like the micro kind of decisions that you make on a daily basis. So what do you see as like best practice or work really really well, and what do you see people get wrong? I mean, that’s a big question, but I’ll take, take whichever bit takes your fancy.
Randy Silver:
I think there’s two key things to this. There’s one is knowing what’s important, what’s really important and why it’s important. So the whole idea of having a North Star metric and having an opportunity solutions tree and you know things like that, being able to articulate what are you really trying to do and what are the things that that load up into it, that make that up, that are the preconditions to that success. You know that are critical to adding up to making that success. You have to have that straight in your mind to be able to explain it. You have to have that logic part, but the logic itself doesn’t always win argument, so you need to. Doesn’t always get everyone understanding it. So I think the really critical part is, once you have that, how do you turn that into a story? How do you tell people we really want to? This is our vision, this is our mission, this is what we’re trying to achieve and this is how we will know when we’ve achieved it. So that anchors all the decision making. But then you say to do that, we’re going to do a. We could do BCD or a, but we have decided a is the pathway to do it and a gets us to the next thing, gets us to the next thing and this is why we’re doing it. These are why we’ve made this, these decisions. You know I’m going to reference a lot of other people probably today, so you know I’ve an opportunity. Solution stream North Star metrics you can talk to people like Teresa Torres and John Cutler about that. I think the storytelling side of it. Don Alicia is an amazing person to talk to about storytelling and Jeff ravine did an amazing talk at mind the product a few years ago. That is just a masterclass in how we tell stories about things that shouldn’t be interesting, but the way he didn’t he can explain it totally is.
Lily Smith:
And what about the situations where prioritization becomes really difficult? For instance, if you have a very opinionated exec on your leadership team who’s just like feeding you feature requests or, you know, doesn’t really think that you’re working on the most important thing, like how? How do you see people tackle that in the best way?
Randy Silver:
Well, that’s the perception stuff. So you know you’ve understand. First comes understanding why they’re saying that. Is it because they don’t understand what the strategy is and why you’re doing it that way? Is your storytelling and or your facts not strong enough for them? That’s, that’s the easiest way to handle this. But the others maybe you don’t have the trust yet. Maybe they do they, or maybe they have a different motivations for it. So, understanding why are they asking for this stuff? Is it because their their bonus is tied to something that’s different than your current strategy? Rich Marinov has a great bit about. When he goes into places and sales are trying to sell things that are not in the current strategy. He looks at their bonus of all measures and he rewrites their bonus criteria to make sure that they’re selling things that that the company actually needs to do to accomplish their strategy. You know, are these things tied to your ideal customer profile and things like that? If you’re still doing that and you just don’t have the trust, you know they they’re asking for these things because they think they know better. Then you kind of have to invest in that. It’s figuring out what are the reasons they’re asking for it, what do they not understand. What do they not believe in? How do you gain that trust? So it’s looking at things that you might think are our assumptions, but they think our facts. So doing a will get us this deal and we need that, or we’ll get us five more deals. So the question is how do you prove that that is or is not the case? How do you do the minimum viable to accomplish that? So what kind of experiments, what kind of research, what kind of discovery can you run to get that as soon as possible to say, yeah, actually, this is contrary to our current strategy and we don’t need to do it? Or, oops, we made a mistake. Our strategy is wrong. We should pivot to what you told us.
Lily Smith:
You make it sound so simple. But just playing like that kind of scenario in my head, I’m thinking like it can be so frustrating when you are battling different perception, and I know that you’ve had like direct experience of this, which was kind of like how you came to some of this conclusion yourself. So like how did you have those words with yourself or like that conversation with yourself to try and remain cool-headed in the face of, I guess, like misperception?
Randy Silver:
I mean that’s assuming I’m good at this and there are times I’ve definitely gotten better at it. But and this is the reason I put all this together and did talk about it and put a canvas together about this is because I need the help. But I’ve been looking back at you know what are. What do other people do that I admire what. What have I seen succeed for other people? And I remember I had a boss years ago who would always seem to be coming out ahead. He would win every war forgive the metaphor, but he lost a lot of battles along the way and he never got to steamed up about them. And you know, I know you and me and lots of other people, we, we feel it. It hurts every time we lose something because it’s wrong, but it’s. The question is, is it OK to invest in a relationship and be right in the long term and take some small, inconsequential losses along the way? And sometimes it’s important to slow down, to speed up later, to invest in relationships. There are other things you can do. You know it’s working around them, working with other people, seeing you know if it’s your CEO that’s your is fundamentally disagreeing with you on some of these things, you better invest in it. But if it’s one person, one partner on the leadership team or one partner is somewhere else in the company who is who is being problematic, but you’ve got everyone else on side, unless other people, you don’t have to take them on directly. You know, ultimately you need to get to disagree and commit from that person and get them to trust the process instead of trusting you initially. So there’s a lot of things you can do, but now it’s emotionally. It’s really hard. What I’ve had to realize is when I get emotional one, I find myself getting excited or hot under the power about stuff, trying very hard not to be reactive, and that just honestly. A lot of that comes from experience and learning that being reactive does not work very well.
Lily Smith:
I think that’s a really great point and it is personally. I have my like go to people who I know I can you know in I think it’s Brenny Brown’s words of like this is my shitty first draft of like how I’m feeling and I’m just going to talk like a stroppy child for a moment and then I’m like OK, now I’m going to like get over it and just carry on.
Randy Silver:
And this is also one of the reasons I got so into into working with people and communities. It’s because it’s so important to have these safe spaces where you can blow off steam and ask for advice, and sometimes it’s just hearing from other people that they’ve been through it too, or telling them giving you alternative approaches to things that you haven’t thought about. You know, sometimes that’s all that you need.
Lily Smith:
OK, so let’s talk about people. What is it with the sort of people side of things that we need to get right to be good or best product managers?
Randy Silver:
I think there’s one of my favorite documents is this thing called the 11 Laws of Show Running and it’s written by I’m going to butcher the guy’s name so I’m not even going to try it, but he was an executive producer on Lost. He’s got his free PDF. We’ll put the link in the show notes. It’s 25 pages of the best management advice and it’s the most. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read about product management. That’s not about product management at all, and he has things like expect varying levels of competency from people and delegate. Often make decisions early. It’s so relevant to what we do. But I think the that thing about expect varying levels of competency from people Not everyone can do everything Set your expectations appropriately, create cultures where people can ask questions where they have the permission and if they can’t do it, take a look at is it the culture? Are they in the right place? Do you have the right capabilities in the team? It’s hard, you know. Something seems like they should be easy, but they might not be, because the, the organization, the organizational structure isn’t set up for them to succeed or you don’t have the capabilities that you need. So it can be a lot harder than it should be and just recognizing what are the problems, what is the reality and what can you do to make things better for people. You know you, we’re product people is very little that we actually do ourselves in terms of well, we do a lot, but there’s very little that we do in terms of rolling out the, the features, the capabilities, the product itself. We’re organizational people, we’re leaders.
Lily Smith:
We were setting directions and asking people to come with us and do stuff for us or with us, but very rarely are we actually doing it ourselves and You’ve done quite a lot of consultancy work as well and I imagine when you’re doing that, the you have to kind of go in and quickly establish relationships with you know, your team and your peers and the leadership. Do you have like a method of like trying to understand the dynamics of the business and the relationships and the different characters in the business, or Is it very much just a? It just takes time?
Randy Silver:
It does take time, but there are some, some tricks, some things you can do to make it go faster. One of them is doing informational interviews with people. When you first go in, ask everyone a very similar set of questions about what is it that they’re trying to do? What’s stopping them, what are their biggest obstacles and challenges. Asking them about North Star metrics, bonusable measures, things like that. Just trying to understand their motivations and their perception of things. And if you’re getting a lot of Different answers, then you know you’ve got problems because the organization isn’t on the same page. One of the other really good tricks especially when you’re going into a new place and you don’t have context yet is For bigger meetings and workshops going in offer to be a facilitator. It’s fascinating because you have this position of power by standing up in the room and Controlling the board and things like that, but you’re just asking questions. You’re not doing anything in terms of offering opinions. But there’s a lot of subtle things you can do in the power dynamic to see how other people act, making sure that everyone is speaking up, asking for clarification. You know there’s. The facilitator role is one that’s actually really powerful and if you master it, there’s a lot you can learn by facilitating some meetings for other people.
Lily Smith:
It seems like you just can’t breathe these days without hearing the term AI Tell me about it. If I hear someone say AI one more time, I’m I’m gonna scream when chat GPT launched, it felt like things absolutely snowballed, and it’s quite an effort to keep up with it all, which is why I wanted to tell you all about mine. The products, brand new AI knowledge hub.
Randy Silver:
I told you I was gonna scream, didn’t I? But Actually Tell me more please don’t scream.
Lily Smith:
It’s a dedicated place for all things AI, with a wealth of completely free content from voices in the field, including insights from working product managers and AI experts. In In the AI knowledge hub created in collaboration with Pendo, you’ll discover a range of free Resources that will help you delve into the world of AI. You can learn what AI truly is, explore its impact on product management and dive into Extensive case studies that showcase how product teams have harnessed AI to improve their craft.
Randy Silver:
Okay, there’ll be no screaming this time, because that sounds like a good way to actually explore the angles of AI and product management. Is there anything in particular you’d recommend?
Lily Smith:
Absolutely. Sign up for a free AI webinar, download the free AI playbook and take the brand new AI for product management online course in Partnership with Google Cloud. Just visit mine, the product comm forward slash AI knowledge hub, and dive in. One of the things I loved in my last workplace was they did the see me color profile. It’s like one of those psychometric tests and it gave you like a cheat sheet for everyone in the office and, as someone who Feels slightly on the spectrum when it comes to people and doesn’t always understand where people are coming from, having that like kind of cheat sheet I find really really helpful, because then you’re like okay, so I know that you generally think about things in this way or you care about this type of situation more, or whatever. So, yeah, I really love that. I mean, it’s obviously not available in lots of companies, but when companies do do that, I think it’s so helpful. Okay. So the third element is processes. Tell me about prices.
Randy Silver:
You know there are so many things that, especially if you’re dealing with older companies, there are so many things that build up over time. But even with startups, you know things that work when you’re at a certain stage don’t always work. As you get bigger, as there’s more nodes of communication, sometimes you have too little process, sometimes you have outdated process but some people have left. Sometimes you’re repeating processes because you’re doing this something for marketing and for sales and for somebody else and for somebody else. And there are times when you know You’re trying to ultimately, as product teams, you’re trying to make sure that value is really such stuff that is a value to the company and to your customers, so that ultimately, you’re getting the metrics that you want to get. And if you’re spending all your time on bureaucracy internally, you might be delaying the shipping of value and the realization of value. So you need to ask the question on a regular basis why are we doing this? Is this still the best way to do it? How do we go from decision to to shipping and what are the critical things along the way? I find that mapping is really useful here, doing some story mapping about how we go from going from the Strategy to making sure that things are released and what are the critical points along the way? What are the things that you need to worry about? But sometimes things just they just persist over time and they build up and it’s not really adding value anymore any value to the process. Philip, I’m saying the word value way too many times, but that is okay. It’s important. It is important, but yeah. So just taking a look at your processes and questioning them, is this still worth doing the way we were doing it before? Is there a better way? I talked to someone the other day who was talking about a report that his team did that he knew For a fact that someone spent an entire afternoon doing it once a week and only two people were reading it, and one of them was himself and he was the guy’s boss. So he started doing things on these, on these emails, with the report saying if you see value in this email back, if not, we’re going to stop producing it in X number of weeks. And they were able to start cutting reports that they were doing. If you know, if no one’s opening it, if no one’s getting any value out of the stuff you’re doing, you can stop doing it unless there’s no audit requirement.
Lily Smith:
I think process is really interesting as well in different types of businesses. So, like a small startup versus a big corporate, you’re gonna have like Different levels of maturity of process but then also Different amounts of influence over the process that you have within your, your product team. So I guess you have to kind of flex and, you know, go with what you can do in that situation.
Randy Silver:
Yep.
Lily Smith:
He’s nodding. Nothing doesn’t work on a podcast.
Randy Silver:
I did say yeah, okay.
Lily Smith:
And then let’s just kind of cover it again, because I do think it’s a really, really good point perception how do you understand, like, what everyone’s perception is of you? Know you as a product person in your business and like where you are, you know how you’re performing on each of those different areas.
Randy Silver:
Yeah, this is hard. I mean, ultimately you do need to do discovery about this. You need to talk to people, you need to find out. So Sometimes you can ask people directly. Sometimes you’ll see subtle signals about it. Are people asking you for things that aren’t on the roadmap, that aren’t in part of your strategy? Sometimes you’ll see it in Internal polling. You know employees satisfaction and things like that. Sometimes you’ll get signals from your boss and other people about what’s what they’re happy about and not happy about. I did a talk years ago about how to judge whether you’re successful or not and I finished it with one slide which showed a dog at Doggy daycare when their owner came to the door and the dog got super excited, jumping up and down and couldn’t wait to be with their owner. And I said If this is what your customers are acting like when you come to visit, or what your stakeholders are acting like when you’ve come to visit, then you’re doing your job well. If they’re not acting like this, then you still have work to do. Ultimately, it kind of comes down to that. If people are welcoming, if they’re, if they’re Collaborative, if they really are enjoying working with you, you’ll know, and If they’re not if you’re having problems. You’ll know that too. Most of the time we focus on us and them. You know, product versus the business and things like that, and that’s not healthy. It’s we’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to do the same thing. Sometimes the organizational structure isn’t there to support us doing it right, but we need to keep working on that. We need to keep working with people and and trying to change it. And this is the difference, what I see, between Good product people who are trying to do the job, trying to do it Well, who have the best of intentions, work great with their teams, and the ones who are really making great Environments within their company for them to succeed and for their teams to succeed. They’re making alliances and building bridges across the entire company. I mean, I make it sound touchy-feely and like it’s all about being nice to people. It’s not. Sometimes there’s hard truths. Sometimes there’s a lot of things that are not right. Sometimes there’s real candor involved. Sometimes it’s Sometimes you have to work around people and change things. But being honest about it, finding the right alliances, building the trust, building the credibility to get there that’s the stuff that you need to do.
Lily Smith:
Okay. So why is it so like? What kind of compelled you to talk about this, and why do you think it’s so important that people understand how important perception is?
Randy Silver:
So I’m gonna guess the last time you went to a conference or to product tank or something like that, you met a lot of people who were frustrated with their jobs. And when you talk with other product people, you hear them blowing off steam and being frustrated and there’s a lot of burnout in our community. The average tenure of a senior product person is Somewhere around two years. That’s not really healthy. It’s not healthy for us as the product people, it’s not healthy for our friends and family around us and it’s not doing a whole lot of good for our companies. If we’re not lasting that long, you know whether that’s because we get into a place and we say this isn’t really a product company, this is a feature factory or this is a company doing agile I’m sorry, doing waterfall using. You know two-week sprints and things like that. Whether it’s one of those scenarios and we say we got to leave. Or whether they hire us because they Fundamentally believe they want to transform and then we get there and try and change it and they don’t want us to. It’s, it’s not good, it’s not helping the companies, it’s not helping us. So you know, fundamentally product people are change agents. We’re brought in to make change, and whether that’s at the, the feature level and the product level, or Often it’s also about how the company delivers things. So we’re trying to do transformation of the organization as well. Companies are resilient. They don’t really like change, no matter how much they say they want to. So it’s a hard job. There’s a huge psychological load on us, there’s a lot of stress and we get a lot of frustration a lot of the time. So it’s really important that you can step back and see the bigger picture and understand which are the battles worth fighting. How are you going to do it? What is your strategy for doing this? How are you going to create a better environment for yourself and for everyone else around you?
Lily Smith:
I think that’s such a valuable message. And you’re totally right. When I go to networking events with product people, there’s always, like everyone always says, it’s like a therapy session.
Randy Silver:
Yep.
Lily Smith:
Which sounds terrible, but yeah, it’s. It’s a full-on job, so it’s a really important point, and do you feel like this message is kind of generally more for leaders than Practitioners, or a bit of everyone?
Randy Silver:
Definitely for everyone, because you know, no matter how Unimportant you might feel in your job sometimes, how powerless you might feel, the reality is you are organizing things for other people. You were directing how other people work and your job is to set direction and influence other people, and it may be on different levels. You know, if you’re in a CPO or in a proper leadership position, your scope of influence is much bigger. But even if you’re a product owner or product manager or one team and it’s just you and a couple of devs and a researcher or a designer, they’re still depending on you to have a good environment for them. So being able to set direction for them, get some wins and have a good relationship with your keys Customers and stakeholders is really critical. The other thing is, the sooner you get this, the sooner you understand this, the more likely you are to be successful in the long run. So if you you know, yes, this is incredibly important for leaders. But if you want to get to that level at some point, whether it’s as a manager or as an individual contributor, understanding this will make your road a hell of a lot easier and you have a great tool for Making, I guess, pathways into understanding this.
Lily Smith:
So now the canvas.
Randy Silver:
Yes. So the product environment canvass. So so, first of all, yes, it is a tool, and if you’ve heard me talk about tools before, I do still believe that all tools suck, but sometimes they are useful. The fundamental point is nothing is perfect. This is something that helps me. It’s my mental model and I’ve shared it with people and it’s starting to help them as well. If it’s helpful to you, fantastic. If it’s not quite right for you, please change it. I will not be the least bit offended. I’d love to hear back about what you’ve done to make it work for you. But, that said, the canvas is very simple. It’s as you can get it at outofowlscom MTP. It is pretty much exactly as we’ve talked about. It’s four boxes, essentially, with a bunch of prompts. On top are three boxes around Do you have the right priorities? Are your people operating as well as they can, and do you have the right processes? And then, across the bottom, underpinning everything, are some questions about Perception. Do other people agree with this? Do they understand it? What are the problems they have? But there’s a couple of different ways you can use this. You can use it by yourself or you can use it with other people. I think it’s better. You know it’s good if you use it by yourself, in that it prompts you to think about some things that you might not have considered. Personally, I like using it with other people even more Fundamentally, it’s because it changes the nature of the conversation you’re having. So if I’m having a Beef with you, lily, about something and we’re just talking about it to each other, it’s almost us back and forth being adversarial to each other. But if, instead, we’re looking at the canvas together and we’ve written some things down, now we’re arguing with the canvas itself. So we’re kind of standing side to side, shoulder to shoulder, and trying to work on Constructively, on how to make something better, and we’ve got things written down that we can look at and try and manipulate together and form a partnership about. So I asked people to do three things with it. I say, if tomorrow, take the canvas and spend 15 minutes filling it out for yourself and just see what you’ve got and see if there’s anything that sparks Sparks an idea of something you can do better, but the next time you’re doing a retro with your team, do it with them and you can get them to fill it out in advance and bring it all together and do a Synthesis, or you can just spend the time in the retro all filling it out and spending a few minutes on each box adding things and then talking about it, and then, lastly, at your, the next time you’re doing quarterly planning with stakeholders and you’re looking over everything, you’re looking over your strategy and prepping for that do this with them and say you know, are there things we can be doing to create a better environment for our teams? Are there problems that we want to do? So, aside from shipping value, are there some things that we want to do to work on the organization To make the way we work together better, and what’s one or two things that we can find as a priority to help us be better together over the next couple of months?
Lily Smith:
so the Million dollar question is Did this approach and did the canvas help with your awful CTO that you were working with?
Randy Silver:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, no, but not for. Not for a battery, isn’t? It’s mostly because I I hadn’t developed the canvas yet. I kind of knew all this but I hadn’t really put it together and If I’m being incredibly honest and I would never be less than incredibly honest with you, lily I’m not sure it would have helped. I’m not sure that this person and I ever could have built a relationship that we need to do. But, that said, it would have given me a way of talking about it with some of the other critical people and I think we as a leadership team, we could have worked better together and this CTO we never would have agreed that, just fundamentally, wasn’t the way, the way we’re built and it wasn’t going to work out between us. But we could have disagreed and committed and we could have found a better way of dealing with things and it would have been a lot less antagonistic, we would have gotten things out and we could have worked with other people on some of those critical things. And I think whether it worked well for the two of us is immaterial, if it worked well for everyone else around us, if it worked better for the product managers, the developers and the other teams so that they had a better chance of success. So yeah, I don’t know. I think, like I said, all tools suck. Some of them are useful. I think this would have been useful. I don’t think it would have been perfect. I don’t think anything’s perfect, so so. So, lily, before we end, I want to ask you You’ve talked to been in Every podcast, episode 2 is this? What you see is one of the the big differences between good people and really successful people.
Lily Smith:
Do you know what? I’ve never Framed it in that way before and I think it’s really, really helpful to you know to have it framed in that way of you know, trying to understand where people are coming from. I’ve certainly, like, found myself thinking in that kind of way as I’ve gotten older and, you know, as I’ve got more experience. I tend to be a lot calmer when people you know Situations in ways that I don’t expect, or they clearly aren’t getting the process, that you know the product process, or you know the reason why we prioritize things. I feel like, you know, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve I’ve kind of understood that it it doesn’t matter how good you are if you’re not explaining Stuff well to other people and you’re not bringing everyone else on the journey, but I had I’d never kind of considered it around, you know, around framing it as like other people’s perception of you and your work. So I think it’s really, really helpful to have it as a To have language around it and, you know, to be able to have that conversation.
Randy Silver:
There’s so many more conversations we could have about speaking in other people’s language rather than expecting them to understand ours, and so many more things, and a lot of this stuff has come up, I think, at the mind the product leadership conference the day before the big conference. Matt LeMay, georgie Smallwood and some others talked a lot about this stuff. It came up when we had a Tobias friend, rick, on to talk about a leadership across the organization. Is I can? So many people that was so many of our guests have talked about this in different language.
Lily Smith:
Yeah, and one of my favorite questions that I ask other people across the business Every now and then, like I had a chat with the CFO the other day and I was like, is there anything that you think that products should be doing that we’re not currently doing? And he was like, actually, yeah, there is. And you know, you have to kind of ask things in that sort of frame of mind and invite the feedback and invite the kind of the criticism and the Keep that kind of dialogue open. But yeah, it’s, it’s a super interesting topic.
Randy Silver:
Oh god, now I want to ask you it was it something that product should be, product in your company should have been doing, or is it just something that should be done period?
Lily Smith:
um, I think it was probably it was about pricing in different territories, so, and pricing sits with product in our business. It doesn’t always sit with products in other businesses. So, yeah, it was more, it was more, it was a product thing. It was something that wasn’t on my radar at all, so it was helpful Fantastic.
Randy Silver:
I want to keep going on this, but I think we’ve probably run out of time.
Lily Smith:
Hey, I meant to say that, but you all right, randy, thank you so much for joining me.
Randy Silver:
Really thank you for interviewing me for a change. This was so weird.
Lily Smith:
The product experience is the first and the best podcast from mind the product. Our hosts are me, Lely Smith and me, Randy Silver. Lou Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver:
Our theme music is from Hamburg based band POW. That’s PAU. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank 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 product tank regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith:
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mind the product comm forward. Slash product tank.
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