"Product Culture in a Growing Organisation" by Arne Kittler and Christina Schreck
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XING’s product organization has grown to almost 50 product managers and product directors working in different parts of the company. As most of them work in interdisciplinary development teams and don’t sit with their peers a frequent exchange doesn’t come automatically. On stage of PRODUCTIZED, Christina presented a variety of ways how the product managers at XING learn from and with each other. Arne showed how the framework “Auftragsklärung” but also other methods lead to early alignment for overarching topics and how they help product managers gain more clarity for their own thinking and team.
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"Product Culture in a Growing Organisation" by Arne Kittler and Christina Schreck
- 1. Lisbon, 27 October 2017 Product Culture in a Growing Organization
- 2. Since we joined XING, the product team grew, …
- 3. … we formed business units,…
- 4. … product people focus on their direct colleagues …
- 5. … and sit with with their cross-functional teams.
- 6. Problem: We started to lack Product Culture to connect us!
- 10. Bring people together. Share and exchange. Grow together.
- 12. Try a method See if it works Modify or try something new
- 15. Learning Tool 1 Training Days
- 17. Learning Tool 2 Bar Camp
- 18. Bild vom ausgedruckten Survey Surveys
- 22. “Which success assumptions could be validated or falsified?” “What else did you find out about our users?”
- 25. Offboarding
- 27. Fostering a culture of experimentation
- 29. Learning Tool 8 User Feedback Coffee
- 30. Establishing a sound product community of practice
- 31. ?
- 32. Learning Tool 8 p@x Product @ XING
- 33. Learning Tool 9 North Star
- 36. Alignment The Modern Product Person’s Must Have Skill
- 37. Alignment The Modern Product Person’s Must Have Skill AVOID WASTE
- 38. Alignment The Modern Product Person’s Must Have Skill AVOID WASTE EARN AUTONOMY
- 39. The better Product Managers are aligned about the WHY and WHAT of their product, the more autonomy they will be granted with regards to HOW they build it.
- 40. A Framework for Collaborative, Bottom-Up Alignment Alignment Tool 1 AUFTRAGSKLÄRU NG
- 41. 3 Dimensions of Alignment (driven by PM) Laterally: Peers & Partners Inwards: Team Upwards: Management
- 42. 42 A CANVAS! to trigger dialogue
- 43. 43 INTENT What do you really, really want?? BILD Spice Girls
- 44. 44 OUTCOME Which needle do you want to move?
- 45. Quarterly Elevator Pitches Alignment Tool 2 DIRECTORS’ CUT
- 46. 46 90 SEC / Q
- 48. Encouraging Fruitful Escalation Alignment Tool 3 CLARIFICATION MANIFESTO
- 49. Clarification Manifesto 1. If you get stuck: trigger escalation early! 2. Present escalation jointly! 3. Be clear about what’s unclear! 4. Decision makers: Clarify, then hand it back!
Editor's Notes
- Olá, boa tarde Productized people! In the next session Christina and I will give you practical examples for what we did to maintain a healthy product culture at XING. For those of you who don‘t know XING: - Leading Professional Network in the german speaking markets
- And we are also one of Europe‘s larger agile Product Organizations Which means that we‘ve seen XING‘s product team grow from ca 10 product managers to meanwhile over 50
- Over time XING also introduced Business Units for better accountability and focus
- And as a result of this focus the product managers from one business unit would of course focus on the product managers in their own Business Unit
- And when you zoom in they would of course not sit all together on one table, but with their teams. We strongly believe in cross-functional product teams, they are the best way to build software. And personally crossfunctional teams are a great opportunity to learn & get new perspectives
- But over time we noticed we were missing a shared culture to connect us with each other. Of course we would still meet for lunch, over coffee and in meetings But at the same time we felt a bit of a professional solitude, a Product Manager‘s saudade?
- That‘s when we notice we had to actively work on our product culture. And so one of the learnings for you is that you should not expect your Product Culture to adjust itself once your organization growths. Product Culture needs active care!
- Today we want to talk about how we tackled two very important aspects of product culture. How do we make sure that we keep learning from each other and get better every day? How do we align our activities across our growing organization? But first let‘s hear what Christina can tell us about learning
- Learning for Product Managers is not really like classic learning in schools. We are adults. The standard Product Manager is already very motivated and performance oriented. We read books, we go to conferences, we want to get better in our daily work. So in fact, what brings us forward is all about bringing people together and growing together.
- Probably all of you work with the build measure learn cycle from the lean startup.
- But actually you can apply the build measure learn cycle also to a product organisation for learning. Try a method or tool, see if it works and if people want more of this, if not modify it or drop it and try something new. And I‘m gonna show you now a variety of the things we tried.
- Let‘s start with a thing that did not really work for us: a learning marketplace We saw that all of us brought in different experiences and techniques. Some had used some special tools in previous jobs, some had read already tried new ideas from books. So we set up a simple profile for every Product Manager to claim which topics he would like to learn more about – and which ones he could offer as a class or workshop. It went as it sometimes does with such things: You explain the thing, make sure you have a good example, get it going. Then send a reminder. Then send another reminder. Then realize that somehow people don‘t make use of the possibility. We assume that the original learning marketplace didn‘t really work out for us because the format was too loose.
- So we pivoted. And out of the marketplace we developed training days and a bar camp
- At XING we have certain themes for a year. This can be things like small screen (so not just native mobile apps but also web usage on mobile devices) or Freemium (XING offers a Basic membership and several paying Premium memberships). A team or group of people that feels particularly strong about the topic or has the most knowledge organizes a full day workshop for all Product Managers. Often UX people join as well. Parts of such a training day are done in school style…
- … but we always make sure to include many collaborative sessions. On the one hand this prevents people from expecting to just lean back and wait, on the other hand we saw really good results when people worked together on a task that usually don‘t collaborate in their daily routine. Also, this is a huge chance to have all Product Managers united in one room and work on a topic. Usually we do the team work in small groups, then each group presents their results and then a classical dot voting follows.
- The other thing that we made out of the failed Learning marketplace is a Bar Camp. We organized a full day as a mini-conference. Each session took 45 minutes and there were 2 sessions in parallel so that people could choose according to their interests. We treated topics like story mapping, some UX research methods we had tried, like so called Diary Studies or Design Sprints. Also we asked the UX colleagues, User Care and Analytics to contribute so that we had a large variety to offer.
- After the sessions we usually send around a very simple survey to learn how people liked the day and what can be improved next time. For the Bar Camp 100% of the participants stated they we should definitely repeat the format. Of course we will do this, so that we have now established a fixed element in the yearly training planning.
- XING regularly meets with other product companies such as Spotify to exchange insights on working modes, discoveries and processes. We discuss how the organisations are set up, how Mobile development is handled and so on. We have a list where people add companies they are interested in meeting or where they already have a contact. Also we check if meeting a company could be combined with a conference or training in another city. It‘s then usually a small group of people that meets with the other company. What has been proven most successful is letting people talk who have more or less the same level of experience. What for example Spotify told us and what we found pretty interesting is that because of the questions we asked they started reflecting themselves and thinking even more about their own organisation. For the next year we plan to marry 2 of our activities, that is do a Product Bar Camp together with 2 or 3 other companies. A mini conference so-to-say. Maybe there are some amongst you here who want to try the same in Portugal.
- A while back our CPO had set up a quarterly meeting with each Product Manager where the Product Manager would prepare answers to a couple of questions about research or experiments that have been done. We realized soon that these contents are actually interesting for all Product Managers. We had seen that the more our organisation grew the less we were aware of tests results from other teams or what they had learned in qualitative research. While Product Managers and CPO decided that the quarterly meetings feel a bit like making a report and stopped them we kept the 2 main questions:…
- With the answers to these questions I now send out a Learning Newsletter every few weeks. Each Product Manager shortly explains what he tested and learned. Also there is an „editor‘s pick“ of the 3 most astonishing results. What I found nice is that after each sendout I received emails from colleagues from other departments asking to be added to the email distribution list.
- To make sure we are aware not only of interesting internal findings but also don‘t miss out on external research we created an internal group on xing.com. In the group we share and discuss interesting articles, facts and figures
- You have probably all heard about onboarding and that it‘s crucial for the new colleagues‘ success. But have you ever heard about offboarding? Product managers are specialists for their area. They know the business, the customers and work closely on executing the company strategy with their team. When a Product Manager leaves a company there is the risk that much of this valuable knowledge gets lost. So when preparing for leaving a company one promising way is to approach this like a product manager: have your customer aka your successor in mind and try to provide him with the best handover. Make sure to check your onboarding elements as the offboarding should address these points. One of our former colleagues wrote an interesting article about offboarding on Medium, we put the link on your handout so that you can read about the tips in detail later. https://medium.com/@theowalcott/how-to-offboard-as-a-product-manager-7b12d5c7fec2
- Probably all of you know the problem that there are so many research methods and canvas that you never know which one is the right one for your case. We have that too. To help us Product Managers and to strengthen the collaboration between Product and UX our UX department set up a nice little book, the experiment handbook. They describe various methods and give good examples. We brought 5 copies of the handbooks. The fastest ones can get them here after our presentation. And it‘s also available on amazon.
- The User Feedback coffee is an instrument we can really recommend to every company. It‘s like speed dating with your users and it works like this: 4 users are placed in all 4 corners of the room. Product and UX teams that want to show a quick prototype or test a smaller feature get 15 minutes with each participant. When the timer rings the teams rotate so that they have spoken to all 4 users within one hour. It‘s a very cheap test method and it‘s really valuable to get first impressions and directions from real users.
- In 2015 our CPO has set up an initiative he named pax
- No, it‘s actually Product @ XING
- You don‘t need to read through all the details on the screen. Basically p@x is a project to improve the work of the product organisation as a whole as well as of every single Product Manager. Principles for our product work have been set up, like „Build for outcome“ „factualise, challenge assumptions“ or „embrace responsibility“. Each principle has sub-tracks that we aim to fulfill. 4 people per quarter take care of the p@x project and develop it further. We have monthly p@x meetings, followed by a joint lunch.
- One part of these monthly meetings is the Kudos. Product Managers can give a kudo to a Product Manager colleague who did a good job according to out internal values and the north star. The reward is then a 25 Euros voucher for Amazon or other companies
- For the p@x project we do quarterly surveys to see where we feel we are already doing quite a good job and which areas we should improve. 2 of those that came up regularly in the beginning were „Stahlkraft“ and alignment. With Strahlkraft (fantastic German word) we mean presenting our company and our work to the outside world – yes, Arne and I can tick the check mark for that one now Presenting what we do is very valuable for us because we get a lot of feedback that we can then incorporate. So again, if you try one our the things we are presenting or have other feedback for us please do get in touch The other topic our product organisation wanted to work on is alignment. And Arne will tell you more about that one now.
- Indeed I want to talk to you about alignment now. I STRONGLY believe that in times of growing complexity the ability to create alignment is a super important skill for Product people to have!! So please listen! ;O) Why is Alignment so important? -> it‘s important for two reasons:
- Alignment avoids chaos and waste. What you don‘t want is to find out shortly before the release that people had completely different expectations of what to build, And you don‘t want stakeholders to rush in last minute and tell you that what you build is not what they expected With good alignment and having people on the same page you can avoid this type of chaos.
- But alignment is also in our interest if we want autonomy. And who of us doesn‘t appreciate a high degree of automomy?? Automomy is not something you can claim or can expect to be given because you are the „CEO“ or your product. That‘s bullshit. Autonomy is something you have to earn through good alignment.
- The better a PM is aligned about the WHY and WHAT, the more autonomy he will be granted with regards to HOW exactly to build it. And THAT’S what we want, right?! So over time we developed some tools to help us get better aligned.
- One tool that we have established to help Product People and others create alignment goes by the beautiful german Name of Auftragsklärung. Some of you may have heard about the framework before, so please excuse if some of what I‘ll talk about is not entirely new to you. What I really like about Auftragsklärung is that it is collaborative and that it‘s bottom up – and as such it‘s different from most other alignment methods who worry how bosses can best get the teams that report to them to align with what they want. Auftragsklärung changes this approach and puts the product person in the driver seat to go out and earn alignment
- Upwards: Make sure to clarify what your superiors and important stakeholders expect from your initiative Laterally: Make sure that you are all on the same page when you collaborate with other teams Inwards: Make sure that your team understands why they are coming to work every day So how do you bring all these people on the same page???
- Of course... With a canvas! We have found that a canvas can really help – not because the world needs yet another canvas The canvas helps to trigger a dialogue and it FORCES you to ask the tricky questions early on We don‘t have time to go through all elements of Auftragsklärung today, but I will pick the two most important ones.
- One of the key questions to get clarity about is the Intent. Bungay calls it the Spice Girls question. This seems to be the most simple question, but it‘s the toughest one if you try to agree on it keep it short. Typically you‘ll sharpen it through several iterations asking yourself and everybody else the question over and over again. and aim to fit it into a tweet – and oldschool 140 character one.
- I think it‘s meanwhile common sense for Product Managers that if in doubt OUTCOME is more important than OUTPUT It‘s important to be clear which needle you really want to move – and ideally not as brought as „Activity“ or „Upsells“, because for instance at XING we probably have 100 initiatives contributing to user activity. And because you want to be able to see if you are on the right track it‘s important to define how you want to measure this and what your ambition level is. For the ambition level it‘s the same as with the output: At an early stage it may not be very precise, but it‘s important to understand what‘s in people‘s heads. Otherwise you run into the risk that once your product is launched you are super happy about the 10% increase you achieved, but your CFO is disappointed because he expected it to be a 10X increase.
- A much more simple „Tool“ was established when we realised that often people just found out to late what was going on in other departments. Sometimes two teams tried to tackle similar problems and could have saved time if they had known earlier. Remember: Alignment is about avoiding waste! And if people don‘t yet know that there‘s something they should know about they won‘t go looking for it in Confluence or Jira. You have to talk to them!
- That‘s what we we do every quarter. We have a meeting that all product people attend. FIRST Each Product Director brings a simple poster and talks for 90 seconds about the main initiatives in their area. This means that in about half an hour everybody in the room has heard about all relevant product initiatives.
- More important: second part: time for all product people to step closer + talk The aim is not to get full clarity on everything, but to let people realise that they need to talk. We believe that as a result there are less surprises and less waste.
- One thing that can happen during alignment process is that you cannot come to an agreement. And that‘s OK: Alignment is about creating CLARITY, not necessarily about making everybody happy. Sometimes even if you seek alignment, you will run into conflicts you cannot resolve on your level. Conflicting goals What should not happen: Block any further progress. We strongly encourage to see escalation as a good thing, and use it as a means of getting to decisions and alignment quickly.
- - Avoid blocking yourself or others by pending decisions Agree to disagree – and then take it one level up! Be clear about what‘s unclear Clarify the boundaries, but leave all the resulting detail decisions with those in charge. Learning: It takes time to get used to escalating easily, but I find that if you take the drama out of escalation it can really help to move faster.
- We hope that some of the things we showed you seem promising for your organization. We are really curious to hear your feedback.... And lastly a personal note: I will be moving to Porto for next year to help build up XING‘s new office. So I‘m more than happy to connect with those of you from Porto!