Nurturing an Innovative Product Culture by Reonomy Lead PM
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Main takeaways: - Recognize the difference between routine and innovative work, and alter your management style accordingly - Leverage the factors that drive creativity in your product team to create even more innovation - 'Forgive and remember' - the best way to deal with development setbacks
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Nurturing an Innovative Product Culture by Reonomy Lead PM
- 1. www.productschool.com Nurturing an Innovative Product Culture by Reonomy Lead PM
- 2. Join 40,000+ Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. CERTIFICATES Your Product Management Certificate Path Product Leadership Certificate™ Full Stack Product Management Certificate™ Product Management Certificate™ 20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS
- 4. Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 5. Bryan Shao T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
- 6. Nurturing an Innovative Product Culture Bryan Shao
- 7. Innovation = Ideas + Implementation
- 8. Innovative Work ● High Variation ● High Failure Rate ● Optimized For Experimentation
- 9. Routine Work ● Low Variation ● Low Failure Rate ● Optimized For Efficiency ● Common language - standardization
- 11. Key Takeaway: Tasks are routine or innovative. Jobs are not.
- 12. Why is this important for product managers ● How you manage the team depends on what kind of work they are doing ● Managing this wrong can result in: ○ Low productivity ○ Low morale ○ Nothing Shipped ● Communication is KEY
- 13. Team Structure - Which is Better? Credit: Manu Cornet
- 14. The 3 C’s ● Concept ○ Product vision, strategy, planning ● Capabilities ○ Skills match, talent development ● Culture ○ Norms, behaviors
- 15. The 3 C’s Flywheel Concept Capabilities Culture Innovation
- 16. Symptoms - Concept Deficiency ● Unfocused roadmap ● Unusual talent mix ● Internal Politics
- 17. Symptoms - Capabilities Deficiency ● Slower execution ● Over-reliance on ‘super-stars’ ● Higher incidence of burnout
- 18. Symptoms - Culture Deficiency ● Poor talent quality/high turnover ● Inadequate Leadership ● Lack of Diversity
- 19. Key Takeaway: By focusing on the 3 C’s, you can create a positive environment to spur innovation
- 20. OKRs ● Objectives and Key Results ● Specify the goal, how you know you are done. ● NOT the how ● Andy Grove - ‘High Output Management’
- 21. The Ugly Baby and the Hungry Beast ● Nurture Ideas, until ready to build ● Learn more from direct usage ● Not necessarily ‘Agile’, nor ‘Waterfall’
- 22. ‘How does your organization handle failure?’ Diego Rodriguez - Former Global MD of IDEO
- 23. Key Takeaway: ‘Forgive and Remember’
- 24. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management Training Courses and Corporate Training
Editor's Notes
- If you’re interested to connect with other Product Managers, aspiring PMs, or those within tech, join our Slack community of over 40,000 professionals. It’s a great place to network and to find interesting content. We host a weekly AMA through our Slack channel on Tuesdays from 11:15am - 12pm PST. We have also recently launched the Job Portal where you can find the latest Product Management opportunities! As members of the Product School community, we'd like to provide you with these resources at your disposal.
- Product School’s Product Management Certificate Path comprises of 3 part-time courses for professionals with strong technical or business background who want to further explore Product Management at software-based companies. During Product Management Training you will first learn Product Management fundamentals to understand the software product lifecycle and what it takes to successfully transition into a product management role. You’ll then be trained to retrieve data, understand its value and make impactful decisions with SQL, data visualization and Tableau. Learn to understand your users to deliver exceptional UX/UI design and develop a robust digital marketing plan. During the Full Stack Product Management Training, you will deep dive into the technical knowledge to enhance your ability to work with agile teams. Finally, Product Leadership Training will elevate your product knowledge to become an effective Product Leader. You'll do an in-depth analysis on how to implement best PM practices on a strategic level to significantly impact your company’s portfolio and revenue. Learn the soft skills to manage product teams and manage stakeholders to deliver performing products.
- As well as individual courses we provide corporate training across the world! If you’d like to upskill your product team this is the best option for you. We have trained employees from multiple companies such as Deloitte, Salesforce, JP Morgan, Bank of America amongst many other companies across all industries.
- Tonight's talk is “ [TITLE] ” with [NAME]. Welcome, [NAME].
- Give quick background - tech over last decade and PM for half of it. Different use cases. Why topic is important - building products and features is focused on creating change, hopefully for the better of customers. I’m not an expert
- From Stanford’s Leading Innovation course Product Teams need to focus on both. Ideas can come from anywhere - customers, other functions, design, engineering Nothing wrong with only having ideas - consultants make a lot of money doing that. Putting those ideas into action is the key differentiator. Execution is often what makes or breaks your product efforts.
- High volume of ideas, and you don’t know what’s going to work. Example - science in academia works. Create a hypothesis from existing data and previous research. Test the hypothesis - publish results whether you’re right or wrong.
- Example - if you go to a fast food place and everyone had their own way of making a burger for every order, it would get pretty chaotic The way to make the burger, at least that specific recipe, is a solved problem. Re-solving the problem each time is very inefficient.
- Not the best picture, manager of a car factory building cars Vs. Product manager working in a startup Toyota and Kaizen - after WWII where anyone in the plant can stop the line for any reason or to make any improvement. It’s actually one of the forebears of the lean management methodology Loop back to the burger example - improving the process to cut down assembly time to 2 minutes. Building a product - pretty innovative, testing new ideas, but what about your deployment process for shipping features to production? Or planning? Whether you use Agile or Waterfall or anything in between, to not have an established plan or process is dangerous
- Key point to highlight: every job in the world is comprised of both routine and innovative work. The split varies, but understanding that no role is truly innovative only or routine only. All roles, no matter what level, allow people to exercise both of these skill sets
- Set expectations for what is rigid, and what is flexible Whenever I mention communication is key, I always get feedback that you can optimize information flow with the way the team is structured or organized.
- So let’s look at it. Essentially variations 2 types - flat or hierarchical. Which is the best for innovation? It’s very easy to say hierarchical is not good for innovation but arguably Amazon have done some very innovative things, e.g. when they created AWS. It’s very easy to say flat is good because startups generally have a flat structure throughout and that is where communication is at its most efficient. However the statistics tells us that 9 out of 10 startups fail. Team structure is a good first step, but is not the defining factor in driving successful innovation
- My first book recommendation of the night - Hit Refresh Satya goes into detail about his journey from being an engineer to the CEO of Microsoft, and the personal and professional challenges he faced along the way. One of the things that stood out was his approach to making product roadmaps and executing on initiatives, which I think he credits to his predecessor, but is this idea of the 3 C’s.
- Mapping this visually, you can see that the 3C’s are dependent on each other I really like this model because a lot of the initiatives I’ve seen fail are deficient in at least one of the 3 areas. Let’s look at how you can tell if one or more of these are missing in your product team or organization
- This is one of the most impactful deficiencies to have since it is at the start of the flywheel. It’s a snowball effect. Example - I knew of a startup that had a freeform strategy, allowing different product teams to freely experiment in any dimension they saw fit. While this was enjoyable for the teams, they never really went anywhere. Lots of different products.
- When you are deficient on capabilities and nothing else, this is actually not the worst situation to be in. If you have a focused narrative but you need to scale your capabilities to execute, this is a common situation to be in especially with post seed stage startups. The good news is that everyone is generally passionate and enthused about achieving the product goals. Bad news - due to it’s place in the cycle, this can have a negative impact on your culture. Example - a startup that was growing fast had company objectives which doubled every year, but was running very lean. Key positions were left unfulfilled which placed a greater burden on existing staff. Everyone doubled down, but it’s not scalable by any means. Job design is extremely important - normal distribution of talent.
- A culture deficiency is a sneaky one and one that is often overlooked by leaders in tech companies. Culture is formed from the worst behaviors that leaders are willing to tolerate There are countless examples here of negative bro culture, discrimination etc. But more subtle examples include tech companies that maybe forget which elements of a role are innovative and which are routine, e.g. unjustified micromanaging of innovative work, or inversely having no assistance or support for routine parts of the job.
- By recognizing where your team or company is deficient, you can start to make changes to change these elements for the better. What can you do when you notice one or more things missing? Again I’m not an expert but I’ll share some things that I found to be useful.
- Using OKRs ensures full company transparency on what you’re trying to achieve, and can form the basis of making a relevant anchor for your product team to rally around. If you think about it, this is a lot like a project milestone. At a point in your product journey, you compare whether you’ve met the objective by measuring the KPIs of the objective. A lot of companies do it this way, in that they figure out what they want to build and then align OKRs to that deliverable. Rather, it is more like an upside down milestone. Milestone marks progress along a defined project so you know where you are. Okr defines the marker by which you build your project around.
- Looking at capabilities, I won’t go into whether Agile is better, Waterfall etc or anything like that. But what I will say is that the way the team treats routine and innovative work needs to be managed carefully. I think the best analogy that captures this notion is by Ed Catmull in his book Creativity Inc, where he muses about his time building out Pixar to be the creative force it is today. Give time to nurture ideas - you can block time for the whole product team to work on a problem, and Sprint by Jake Knapp shows how you can run mini-brainstorm sessions to achieve fast results in innovation by letting people focus on the task of innovating. Sometimes it is a strange concept - I’ve known companies where they did not want engineers to be doing anything other than coding, so having them part of ideation in this way was considered weird. But I think it’s a necessary and important part of setting context in the product team, and we should fight for this level of collegial involvement.
- Finally on the element of culture, I love this question. How does your organization or team handle failure for what kind of work.
- Feel free to speak with me and I can point you in the right direction (explain where to apply). Or you can visit www.productschool.com Have a good night!