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Product Management

Three product leaders to learn from at #mtpcon inside Pendomonium

I've been in the digital industry for over 10 years and have worked across small and large charities, as well as my own freelance projects. I am now Director of Digital at the sector leading creative agency William Joseph. 

Having been at Cancer Research UK for the last four years, I have been able to work on high volume, high profile campaigns such as Race for Life, Dryathlon and the much-quoted #nomakeupselfie. 

In that time I helped drive forward the charity’s digital product and marketing capabilities to be some of the most respected and successful in the sector. 

I'm always excited to work with other organisations, share expertise and swap cat gifs. Give me a shout!

James Gadsby Peet

<p>In Part 3 of our Product Leadership Forum recap, you can see an overview of the remaining insights from this year’s <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtpcon/london/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#mtpcon London</a> Product Leadership Forum (if you missed them, you can take a look back at <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/i/insights-from-the-mtpcon-london-product-leadership-forum-part-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/i/Insights-from-the-mtpcon-london-product-leadership-forum-part-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Part 2)</a>.</p>
<p>(All of the issues discussed were under the <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/chatham-house-rule" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Chatham House rule</a>, so you won’t see any direct quotes, but everything reported here comes from the most forward-thinking people in the world of product.)</p>
<h2>Leading Smart People</h2>
<p>Product leaders worry themselves by thinking about things such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>“I should know all the answers”</li>
<li>“The team won’t respect me if I&#8217;m not technical”</li>
<li>“I’ll sound stupid if I ask questions”</li>
<li>“I’m an imposter here”</li>
</ul>
<p>Product teams often attract people who are used to being the smartest people in the room. Product leaders often find themselves in their position because they were the best of a bunch of product managers.</p>
<p>However, to be an effective leader, it&#8217;s no longer your role to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to help build the overall capability of the people, system, and portfolio you have responsibility for.</p>
<figure style="width: 1600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2019/10/3ec056c8-2115-4656-b3ac-82d7756648a5_Julia20Harrison20at20Mind20the20Product039s20Leadership20Forum.jpg" alt="Julia Harrison - Head of Product at Government Digital Service" width="1600" height="1066" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Julia Harrison &#8211; Head of Product at Government Digital Service</figcaption></figure>
<h4>Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose</h4>
<p>Daniel Pink’s three motivations show what you need to set up to help your team be truly effective. Give people flexibility. Help them get better at their roles. Show them why they should turn up to work each day. Inspiring visions and strategies are particularly important when giving people a purpose.</p>
<h4>Leading Through Respect</h4>
<p>You&#8217;re likely leading more people than you manage. This is leading by permission. To do so, you need to add value by bringing a different perspective to conversations. This doesn’t mean you need to have the same skill sets as those people &#8211; in fact, it’s usually best if you don’t.</p>
<h4>How to ask Powerful Questions</h4>
<p>Coaching is a fantastic way to build your leaders’ capabilities. It helps them to look at things in a new way and draws out information and behaviours that people didn’t know they had. This behaviour extends to those people you lead, rather than just the ones you manage.</p>
<p>Product managers naturally ask some of these difficult questions of their team:</p>
<ul>
<li>If we leave it, will it get worse over time?</li>
<li>Do we know what good looks like?</li>
<li>How will we know when we’re done?</li>
<li>Is that assuming everything works first time around? When was the last time that happened?</li>
<li>What’s the biggest risk? How can we learn about that first?</li>
<li>If we do that, will you feel proud of it?</li>
</ul>
<h4>How to Listen Well</h4>
<p>Questions are only powerful in the right context. You have to understand your team through all of the signals they send you to make sure you coach them in the right way at the right time.</p>
<h4>What Does Good Look Like?</h4>
<p>We often don’t know the answer to the problems we face. We normally have a few ideas about what it would feel like if we succeed though. If you want to build your team’s autonomy, then get them to decide for themselves what the indicators of success will be. These can often be built up into a set of principles for the team to work by, on any project.</p>
<h4>Principles Build Autonomy</h4>
<p>To create safety with your teams, a framework can build confidence. You’re able to say to your teams that if you come up with a solution that meets these principles, then nothing will be your fault. If it goes wrong, it’ll be the fault of the principles rather than the individual or team.</p>
<p>Some examples of these principles include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Optimise for small payloads</li>
<li>API first</li>
<li>Be consistent, not uniform</li>
<li>Doing the right thing is always more important than following the process</li>
<li>It’s not the users’ job to tell us what they need, it’s our job to find out</li>
</ul>
<figure style="width: 1600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1d436ab2-4149-482d-bb50-ddc0e369fa63_Tony20Llewellyn20Balaji20Nageswaran20Faye20Benfield20Julia20Harrison20and20Petra20Wille20at20Mind20the20Product039s20201920Leadership20forum.jpg" alt="Tony Llewellyn - Team Development Director at ResoLex, Balaji Nageswaran - CPO at Spotahome, Faye Benfield - Product Lead at Parkinsons UK, Julia Harrison - Head of Product at Government Digital Service and Petra Wille - Product Coach " width="1600" height="1066" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Tony Llewellyn &#8211; Team Development Director at ResoLex, Balaji Nageswaran &#8211; CPO at Spotahome, Faye Benfield &#8211; Product Lead at Parkinsons UK, Julia Harrison &#8211; Head of Product at Government Digital Service and Petra Wille &#8211; Product Coach</figcaption></figure>
<h2>Coaching Smart People</h2>
<h4>Help People Find Ways to Have Difficult Conversations</h4>
<p>Through coaching, we can help people to buy into and understand the benefits of radical candour. With your own teams, you can then drive a culture of constant feedback which will help them improve their own outputs. High-performing teams know how best to give this feedback depending on the individuals involved &#8211; and understand that the same approach isn’t right for everybody.</p>
<h4>Guiding Principles Should Drive Performance</h4>
<p>As a leader, you should be able to demonstrate to every team member what your principles mean. This usually means showing examples of when they’re being adhered to and when they aren’t. These should be nuanced and open to discussion but should be clear at the end what you’re looking for.</p>
<h4>Peer Coaching Helps you Practise</h4>
<p>Setting up coaching networks in your own organisation is a great way to develop your skills. It drives conversations you wouldn’t normally have and lets you learn in a safe space.</p>
<figure id="attachment_17533" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17533" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-17533 size-large" src="//wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mind-the-Product-London-2019-Leadership-Forum-121-1024x683.jpg" alt="Faye Benfield - Product Lead at Parkinsons UK" width="1024" height="683" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mind-the-Product-London-2019-Leadership-Forum-121-1024x683.jpg 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mind-the-Product-London-2019-Leadership-Forum-121-300x200.jpg 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mind-the-Product-London-2019-Leadership-Forum-121-768x512.jpg 768w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mind-the-Product-London-2019-Leadership-Forum-121.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-17533" class="wp-caption-text">Faye Benfield &#8211; Product Lead at Parkinsons UK</figcaption></figure>
<h4>Building Trust is Hard</h4>
<p>A key component of coaching is to build trust quickly between the people involved. A few steps you can take to do this are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Show your own vulnerability with the people you’re leading. If you’ve had a bad night’s sleep, tell the person you’re coaching that it might be better to reschedule.</li>
<li>Continually tell people that what you discuss is confidential and won’t leave the room under any circumstances.</li>
<li>Finally, you need to get them to build trust in the organisation. A good coaching question for this is to ask someone to imagine if their ideas were understood by the organisation in the spirit in which they were meant. Then see what they put on their backlog or roadmap.</li>
</ol>
<h4>Active Listening Should Happen Even When People Aren’t Talking</h4>
<p>When people are thinking, they often won’t look directly at you. This isn’t a time for you to check your watch or look away &#8211; that will immediately break the trust between you. If you can hold their gaze, or show that you’re engaged but without staring at them, it’ll make people more comfortable with thinking in front of you.</p>
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James Gadsby Peet

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