Winning Together: Blueprints for Collaborative Success – Product at Heart 2024
You’ve probably heard the expression that product is a team sport (and maybe you’ve even said it yourself from time to time?). And while this is a useful analogy, it’s important to translate it into practical steps that guide your everyday work. What can you actually do to ensure you collaborate with others, both within product, design, and engineering as well as your cross-functional partners and leaders?
This was the question we considered during the “Winning Together: Blueprints for Collaborative Success” themed session at Product at Heart. Other themed sessions this year were Rethinking Value Creation, Product Operating Models in Practice, and Realizing Your Potential as a Product Manager.
During a series of three 20-minute talks in the Blueprints for Collaborative Success session, we heard from:
Emmi Meurling, Chief Product Officer at Wunderflats
Niamh Jones, Senior Growth Product Manager at Pendo.io
Bruce McCarthy, Author and Founder of Product Culture
In this post, we’ll be sharing the highlights from each talk. If you’d like to explore any of the topics in more detail, be sure to check out the recordings from each session.
Emmi’s talk: Unlocking Collaboration: Compassionate Tactics for Product Success
Bruce’s talk: Stakeholder Management: The Most Important Skill That Nobody Teaches
Emmi Meurling: Unlocking Collaboration: Compassionate Tactics for Product Success
Here’s a scenario that may sound familiar: After you’ve spent a ton of time on discovery and crafting your perfect solution, your stakeholders come to you out of the blue with top-down solutions, sudden scope changes, and a constant questioning of our delivery speed. This turns into a frustrating and unproductive debate. As a result, you feel like you don’t have what you need to build great products.
Emmi Meurling has been there. And for years, she tried to solve this pattern with education. She explained, drew models, presented frameworks, and quoted experts. But it didn’t work. Emmi realized she desperately needed to change her approach.
“Looking back on the collaboration that was successful, I realized the solution was not to explain a model in a perfect way. The solution to unlock collaboration starts with compassion,” said Emmi.
Empathy and compassion: The building blocks to collaboration
To ensure we were all on the same page, Emmi began with a few basic definitions:
Empathy is when we feel with someone and we can acknowledge their emotions. It’s genuine understanding.
Compassion means having empathy, plus taking action to help.
“For good collaboration to flourish, we should connect with empathy and move things forward with compassion,” said Emmi. For the rest of her presentation, she promised she’d share some tactics that have worked for her.
Start by improving your relationship with your stakeholder
The first obstacle that stands in our way to great collaboration is a bad relationship with our stakeholders. Emmi asked us to think of someone we don’t have a great working relationship with. Can you picture this person? How do they make you feel? And what do you do in response?
Emmi said she once worked with a very intimidating business leader. She didn’t like him and dreaded going to meetings with him. She felt that he was pestering her about why they couldn’t deliver faster and he didn’t listen to her explanations about tech debt or other priorities. He just wanted the feature to go live. Emmi got frustrated and very defensive, which didn’t move their collaboration forward. Maybe you can think of someone you have a similarly strained relationship with?
Fixing these bad relationships starts with empathy. Emmi said it’s important to understand what motivates and stresses your stakeholder. Find out how their success is measured. And don’t stop there—take the time to get to know them outside of work. Can you find any common ground where you can connect, whether it’s related to being parents or having a shared hobby?
Unite on a common goal
“Instead of focusing our success on individual departments, we have to unite on the common goal,” said Emmi. She has a tool she likes to use for just this purpose, called The Problem Canvas. Filling out The Problem Canvas is a group activity—everyone brings their insights into the problem you’re trying to solve, including why they believe it’s happening, who they believe is affected by it, and how big it is.
“Instead of debating solutions, we use our data and insights about the problem to ideate and co-create the best solutions for our problems as a team across different departments,” said Emmi. “Now we can work towards a common goal.”
Communicate compassionately
Now let’s fast-forward to delivery. This is where compassionate communication really comes into play. Emmi shared some suggestions for how to tailor your product release message to your audience.
Emmi’s personal favorite method of communication is the product release Slack channel.
What should your product release message include? Emmi suggested the following:
A visual or video
Customer impact
Business value
For whom is this live and when?
Tag the stakeholders who are directly impacted by the change and link to all the rest of the information.
Remember: Don’t bore anyone with a long message! Short and concise messages are more likely to be read and shared, promoting awareness and alignment.
Let go of your product ego
The product ego is another obstacle that prevents collaboration. Emmi said she often sees PMs getting caught up in a defensive debate and discussion about doing things the right way and exactly by the book instead of looking at that common goal that everyone wants to achieve.
“Sometimes we have to do something that goes against our product expertise for the sake of the greater business success,” said Emmi. “The compassionate thing to do is: let go of your product ego. Don’t care more about being right than being successful.”
Don’t forget to practice self-compassion
Finally: Remember it takes time to fix bad relationships and collaborate well. Don’t despair if you try some tactics and they don’t work out well.
Be compassionate to yourself. Some of the ways you can do that are by celebrating your progress. Take time to look back on what you’ve achieved on a regular basis. Don’t just always look forward to the end goal.
To close out, Emmi reminded us that our models and tactics can only take us so far: “We work with people after all.” Leading with a compassionate mindset will allow you to move forward and win as a team together.
A big thank you to our visual note-taker Eva-Lotta Lamm for creating this sketchnote of Emmi’s presentation.
Niamh Jones: From Silos to Success: The Power of Cross-Functional Collaboration in Driving Product Success
Niamh Jones didn’t always know she wanted to be a product manager. She happened to be in the right place at the right time and the founders at her small startup asked her to step into a product manager role.
And in the years since, she’s had plenty of opportunities to experience all the ups and downs of this profession. For Niamh’s presentation, she shared some of the steps of her journey and the tools that have helped promote collaboration outside of the product team.
Starting to look beyond the product team
Niamh spent some time mapping out the product based on her understanding of it. But when she spoke with customers, they helped her see a broader perspective, which included other resources and interactions with other teams. This led her to understand that product success should be defined more broadly than she’d initially thought.
Later on, Marc Abraham came to speak at ProductTank Birmingham and Niamh learned about systems thinking for product people. Niamh said this led her to broaden her perspective even further about what the product was and what product success could mean.
For example, the product team was thinking about things like adoption, engagement, and stickiness, while customer success was looking at net promoter scores and retention and sales & marketing and support each had their own metrics.
“All of these metrics are absolutely the right things to be measuring—we need to know the answers to all of these areas,” said Niamh. “But we weren’t aligning around a single goal.”
Finding a cross-functional partner: Customer success
As Niamh continued to do internal discovery, she realized that the customer success team was looking to understand customer health in a similar but adjacent way. And the goal they were driving toward was similar but it had enough difference and nuance that the work they were doing wasn’t combined or working together.
Once Niamh realized this, she worked with the customer success team to decide a single success metric: a product engagement score (PES). This metric combined adoption, stickiness, and growth of their customer accounts. They identified the indicators inside the product that meant a customer was more likely to stick around or more likely to churn. And with this information, they developed the PES number. “This took a lot of iteration and learning across the board, but we defined a shared goal across product and customer success, which meant all of our initiatives were shooting toward this goal,” said Niamh.
One helpful guideline: Focus on outcome over outputs
With a solid partnership with customer success in place, Niamh started considering how to build similar partnerships with other teams. She realized that everyone has a huge volume of tasks and activities that make up their everyday work. You can see just a small sample of these in the slide below.
But rather than focusing on those tasks, it’s important to have a shared common goal. How do you know if any of these things you’re doing are successful and driving the right impact for your business?
Niamh said it’s helpful to use the framing of outcome over outputs. An outcome is a change in customer behavior that drives business results.
Using the analogy of a sports team, Niamh said, “They have a shared goal. And it’s the same for us—we all have a different part to play in getting to that goal, so instead of all chasing the ball or everyone trying to shoot a goal, we know what part we need to play and what that goal looks like for us and we can ultimately start to win together.”
Honing your ability to influence without authority
As a product manager, you may not have anyone directly reporting to you, which means it’s important to learn how to influence without authority. To grow these skills, Niamh shared some ideas from author Daniel Pink’s book Drive. The keys to motivating people at work are to create an environment where they have autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Niamh said that outcomes underpin this. Teams need outcomes to be autonomous and make decisions. When teams know what they’re working towards and what impact it will have, this also creates a sense of purpose. And we can think about mastery in terms of both mastering our craft and maximizing the success of our product and our company.
“If we can understand from the individuals inside our team what is going to drive them, we can then start to translate our outcomes into language that connects with the outcomes of the individual goals that they are trying to achieve,” said Niamh.
Putting it all together at Pendo
To help illustrate these ideas, Niamh shared some of her experiences at Pendo. For example, customers need to install Pendo in order to unlock value from it, but the installation process can be a hurdle. Installation requires you to take a snippet of code of Pendo and to put that inside your application, which is not something someone from their core customer profile often does.
To try to overcome this challenge, Niamh brought together a cross-functional team and started to map it out, curating all the insights they already had. Bringing the team in early had an outweighed impact, because it rallied them around the outcome and unlocked creative solutions from that pool of diverse thinkers.
As they move into building new features, each one will have a dashboard like the one shown in the slide above. The dashboard includes both qualitative and quantitative measures so everyone can see how they’re progressing and how customers are responding.
Remember: People don’t care about the drill—they care about hanging up the family portrait
There’s a common refrain in the product world that customers don’t buy a drill because they want a hole in the wall; they buy it because they want to hang up a family portrait.
Sharing a specific example from Pendo, Niamh said that customer-facing teams were trying to understand this—what value were customers looking to get out of Pendo? And while they’d set up a way to capture this information manually, once customers logged into Pendo, they’d all have the same generic onboarding experience. This felt like a missed opportunity, so they started looking for a way to create an onboarding experience that’s complementary to what customers are having with their customer-facing teams.
Their abstracted hypothesis was: “If we could understand the core functionality that would help our customers with the outcome that they had specified they wanted to use Pendo for, then this will have an impact on the outcome that we’re looking to drive as a business.”
The slide above shows this functionality—a customer can personalize their experience by selecting their primary goal with Pendo.
And this is a brand-new release. It had just come out a few days before Niamh gave her presentation, so she anticipated going through several more iterations in the future. But it’s a step closer to helping Pendo customers “hang up the family portrait” rather than assuming they want to drill a hole in the wall.
To bring her talk to a close, Niamh reminded us that products shouldn’t be built in isolation. Look for your broader team and try to find those potential key stakeholders that you can collaborate with. “Having those shared customers should be at the heart of everything you do,” said Niamh.
A big thank you to our visual note-taker Eva-Lotta Lamm for creating this sketchnote of Niamh’s presentation.
Bruce McCarthy: Stakeholder Management: The Most Important Skill That Nobody Teaches
“I’m going to tell you a story about failure,” said Bruce as he stepped on stage. He recounted something he experienced as a first-time PM, when he’d been hired to make product #2 at a company that had done pretty well with product #1.
While Bruce spent time learning about his customer and doing background research, it wasn’t until it was too late that he made a critical observation: He had put a lot of effort into determining whether they had product-market fit, but he’d completely neglected product-organization fit. This meant that when he was ready to launch his new product, he had no support from sales or marketing. He’d forgotten that his team extended beyond just engineers and design.
Throughout the rest of his talk, he promised to share some tips and tools that would help you work with your extended team to achieve product-organization fit as well as product-market fit.
You don’t need to be good at politics. You just need to be genuine.
For many of us, the word “political” can have negative connotations, even in the workplace. But Bruce explained, you don’t need to be a slick political player. You just need to be a genuine person who just shares your goals with everyone around the organization. Being genuine comes down to really simple things, like your word choice.
As product managers, when someone comes to us and says, “I want this feature,” we’re taught to ask why in order to find out what problem they’re trying to solve. But, Bruce reminded us, you have a choice when you ask that question. You can communicate different attitudes and levels of judgment with your word choice, tone of voice, and body language.
If you can show genuine human curiosity, you’re more likely to get a genuine answer instead of a defensive one. Try to approach conversations not in a judgmental way, but in an empathetic or compassionate way.
People love the opportunity to share their own perspective
When you approach the conversation compassionately, you open the door to human conversation. And Bruce reminded us that as product people, we already have the skills to do this.
It helps to consider your conversations with stakeholders as customer interviews. Remember that it’s generally not a good idea to ask a customer, “What do you think about this product?” Instead, you take the time to learn about their context, their challenges, and what success looks like for them.
When you find out what good looks like to them, this makes it easier to see if you can draw a connection between their goals and your goals.
Put effort into being dependable and taking ownership
You can’t just be all talk—you have to have follow-through, too. You have to be someone that other people can trust. And you can achieve that by taking ownership.
Bruce said there are various levels of maturity in taking ownership:
At the very least, you’ve got to execute well, delivering on your promises. But this is not enough by itself.
You also need to involve your extended team (sales, marketing, finance, etc.) every step of the journey. Have them be part of the team that crafts the plan, so it’s not your plan; it’s our plan.
Be proactive.
Mitigate risks.
Take responsibility for results—even if they don’t come out the way you hoped. Understand why things didn’t work and come up with a plan for fixing it. You are the leader of this whole virtual team of people across the organization. Act like it.
Define shared objectives to guide your roadmap
Having a roadmap that’s based on shared objectives is one way of ensuring that you stay focused. Once you have this in place, if your CEO comes to you with a shiny new feature they want you to build, your whole team will be more likely to say no and do whatever they can to avoid this disruption.
Bruce recommended a few techniques to help you agree on these shared objectives. You need to uncover any hidden disagreement or conflict in a process called “mining for conflict.” This term comes from Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. A few ways to mine for conflict include:
Throwing out a really obviously bad idea.
Inviting everyone in the room to come up with one thing that could go wrong.
Asking everyone to do a quick vote on their hand: holding up zero fingers means they have 0% confidence and all five fingers means they have 100% confidence. “If you don’t have all fours and fives around the room, there’s some conflict waiting to come out that you need to try to uncover,” said Bruce.
Understand that the reporting org chart is not the same as the influence org chart
“I remember I worked as the head of product for a SaaS company and I reported directly to the CEO. I figured if I made the boss happy, then we’d be good,” said Bruce. “Not quite. It turned out that even if I had complete agreement with the CEO, if the CFO didn’t like the idea, it didn’t get funding, so we couldn’t put people on it or get anything done. And if the CFO had an idea that I didn’t think was any good but he wanted to see it happen, somehow people appeared.”
This experience taught Bruce that the power players are not necessarily what you see in the lines and the boxes and the titles in the org chart. In fact, the official org chart is often misleading.
To understand the power dynamics within your company, ask yourself: which department is the leader? Or is there someone with a vague title like “Partnerships” or “Strategy” who has a lot of influence over your CEO? Bruce refers to these people as “CEO Whisperers.” It’s important to pay attention to them because even if you don’t report to them directly, they often have the power to veto or approve entire projects or initiatives.
One tool Bruce recommends to help you navigate the power structure within your company is the Stakeholder Canvas. In Bruce’s book Aligned, you can learn all about the Stakeholder Canvas and how to fill it out.
Remember: There’s always something you don’t know
To close out, Bruce reminded us to have empathy for the other people we’re dealing with because we don’t know the whole story. “If somebody is advocating for some idea really strongly and their reasons don’t make sense to you, there’s probably something you don’t know,” said Bruce. He suggested starting by checking yourself—are you tired or distracted? Is there something going on in your personal life that’s making you have less patience? If that’s not the case, maybe the problem is on their end. But either way, starting with empathy is critical.
Finally, if you’d like a copy of the slides from Bruce’s presentation and bonus content from his book Aligned, scan the QR code below.
A big thank you to our visual note-taker Eva-Lotta Lamm for creating this sketchnote of Bruce’s presentation.
Want to dive deeper into Blueprints for Collaborative Success—or any of the topics from Product at Heart? Make sure you check out our blog and video archive!