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Be the product by David Webb
- 2. As a product leader where do you invest your time?
- 3. What’s the #1 area product leaders under-invest in?
- 4. Yourself.
- 6. Work/life balance Mental health Sleep Healthy eating Being active Well-being
- 8. Self-awareness Be aware of your behaviours Identify your personal bias Know your strengths and weaknesses Consider the impact you have Regularly seek feedback
- 9. Self-regulation Limit ‘autopilot’ mode Adjust behaviours: test & learn Avoid overplaying strengths Think and act with intention
- 11. Be the product.
- 12. What’s in our product toolkit? Stakeholder management Research & problem discovery Ruthless prioritisation Vision & Strategy Goals & Roadmap Delivery & accountability
- 13. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback
- 14. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback Research & problem discovery Identify development areas
- 15. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback Research & problem discovery Identify development areas Ruthless prioritisation Prioritise self-investment
- 16. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback Research & problem discovery Identify development areas Ruthless prioritisation Prioritise self-investment Product Vision & Strategy Personal Vision & Strategy
- 17. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback Research & problem discovery Identify development areas Ruthless prioritisation Prioritise self-investment Product Vision & Strategy Personal Vision & Strategy Product Goals & Roadmap Personal Goals & Roadmap
- 18. Use your product skillsfor self-development Stakeholder management Regularly seek feedback Research & problem discovery Identify development areas Ruthless prioritisation Prioritise self-investment Product Vision & Strategy Personal Vision & Strategy Product Goals & Roadmap Personal Goals & Roadmap Delivery & accountability Hold yourself accountable
- 20. David as a product… Vision: “As Chief Product Officer, David is known for nurturing the next generation of product leaders and scaling businesses.”
- 21. David as a product – strategic vision
- 22. David as a product – goal horizons Now • Prioritise self- investment • Build personal brand Next • Cement product leadership experience • Turn Product Managers into product leaders Later • Successfully scale businesses • Achieve vision of becoming a Chief Product Officer
- 23. David as a product – goals (OKRs)
- 24. David as a product – strategy
- 25. David as a product – roadmap
- 26. Two forms of self-investment; well-being and product managing yourself. Be deliberate about practicing self-awareness and self-regulation. Vulnerability leads to vulnerability. Turn your product skills inwards; be the product. In summary...
- 27. Time for you to reflect When did you last invest in yourself? Have you been vulnerable with your team lately? What do you look like as a Product? Can you turn your product skills inwards to develop yourself?
- 28. questions?
- 29. Please complete a 2 minute survey to help me improve: http://tiny.cc/davidplc Time to take my own medicine…
Editor's Notes
- Welcome everyone, like Gavin, I too have personal experience with mental illness with loved ones, friends and colleagues. It’s important we continue the discussion, let people know it’s OK to not be OK and to seek professional help when required. Today I’m here to share my personal story of self-investment. My goal is for you to invest in yourself more and put your product skills to use.
- Let’s face it, we’re busy people and we’re constantly juggling priorities and jumping from thing to thing. As a Product Manager you’re in demand and things only get more complex as you progress into a product leadership role.
- At nib I participated in a 6 month internal leadership program and lightbulb went on in the first 2 hours…I hadn’t been investing in myself. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to come to this realisation but it is what it is. If you invest in yourself and you improve then that will automatically translate into better experiences for your teams and those you interact with. Who knows you may even build better products for your customers.
- Well-being is the traditional path to self-investment. I’m not here for that – go online I’m here to introduce a second type of self-investment that I think is just as important as well-being... product managing yourself
- As product people, why don’t we apply our product tools to self-development? If you’re anything like me you’re outward focused and rarely turn your attention inwards. My goal today is to explore PMY as a concept with you and explain why we should all start doing. I’ll start by sharing things that I’ve found useful in my journey…
- PMY starts with self-awareness. At LTP on Tuesday Rod Hamilton from Culture Amp talked about “don’t fall in love with your own ideas”. I think this translates well to self-awareness as it’s easy to have blinkers on and not see our flaws & behaviours. A personal example is that one day I received feedback that after listening to what someone had just said I would play it back to them in a succinct way. It was my way of saying “I’ve heard you”. But to my surprise it made the other person feel as though I downplayed the importance of what they just said. I now know to be conscious of this and to take a bit more care when playing things back to do it in a way that is still succinct but more respectful and considered to make the other person feel like their contribution is valued. The best part about self-awareness is that unlocks ability to “self-regulate”
- I’ve found that if I’m more self-aware and have things front of mind then I’m more likely to self-regulate and catch myself before saying something silly or repeating a behaviour I’m trying to kick. An example of self-regulation as a leader is knowing the answer but not providing it. Giving people enough time and space they’ll work it out on their own, or even come up with a better solution. It also means that they could fail but hey that’s okay too. Speaking of failure, it’s time to switch gears to a super important aspect of self-development…vulnerability
- I’m a naturally open person and after analysing my 360 degree survey feedback, I presented it to my team, thanked them for their feedback and told them the 2-3 areas I wanted to work on. What I didn’t realise at the time was that they were surprised by this. Why would I air my dirty laundry publicly? Reason: a) they knew what I was working on and b) I was inviting them to call me out and keep providing me with feedback if I look like I’m not improving the areas I’m trying to improve. Indirectly this improved my individual relationships and in turn my team shared more with me. Aligned to the mental health piece, my message is that if you can be vulnerable and demonstrate that it’s okay not to be perfect then others might open up and be vulnerable themselves. It’s a bit like a snowball effect and it can go a long way to creating the culture of psychological safety that everyone talks about. That moves me on to the second half of my presentation…
- I’m here today to tell you that like it or not we are all products. <pause> Even Gavin is a product… I believe we’re not programmed to think that way. After all we’re typically not sales people and don’t like self-promotion. But if I’m successful in this next part of my presentation then hopefully you’ll agree that we can benefit from thinking about ourselves in this way.
- As product people we have the best jobs in the world with amazing tools at our disposal. Let’s have a closer look at how these tools can be used for self-development
- Sounds obvious but how often do we go out of our way to source feedback from our teams, peers and stakeholders? Without regular feedback, how do we know if we are actually improving?
- Why is it that we love solving problems and are good at discovering and finding solutions for them, but we don’t always know what are own personal development areas are?
- Why is it that we pride ourselves on prioritisation but rarely prioritise the most important thing? Our own self-development… Yes, we are busy people but if self-development was really important to us then we’d put it at the top of our backlog and not keep pushing it to the bottom of the list.
- We’re strategic and love critical thinking so why is it that we build companies, products and teams but we don’t build ourselves? Quick show of hands, how has a personal vision? I’d like to challenge you today and suggest that if you don’t have a personal vision, now is the time to take action.
- Great, so we have a vision and strategy, what are our goals and how will we get there? Or do we have goals but no vision or strategy…?
- Last but not least, we get stuff done, so why is it we don’t always hold ourselves accountable for our career aspirations? Okay let’s get into the good stuff and dive into David as a Product…
- Well…I’ve done some research and apparently I’m a high-end jewellery line in New York (www.davidwebb.com)… Okay on a more serious note since finishing up with nib recently I’ve had some time to think about my future. What do I want to achieve and how will I get there? So here goes…
- I’ll take you through my vision and how I’m going to achieve it. Photo by Akshar Dave from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/monochrome-photography-of-person-on-dark-room-1299417/
- The next few slides are example product artefacts I’ve produced for “David as a Product”, primarily using Aha. I encourage you to make time and do the same. It’ll hurt your brain in a good way and help you step back and work out what it is you want to achieve and whether or not you’re heading in the right direction to get there.
- Here are my high level goals, presenting today helps support the first two
- Hopefully you get the idea…
- So let’s recap what we’ve covered today. It’s okay to be selfish and spend time on our own development. If we improve then the people we interact with, including our teams, will benefit. I’ve introduced what might be a new concept for you; the notion that you are a product and that you should start product managing yourself. To product manage yourself the first step is to improve self-awareness and practice self-regulation. Being vulnerable is important. Everyone talks about wanting to create a culture of psychological safety but how often do we demonstrate this by putting ourselves out there and showing that we’re not perfect either? As product people we have an amazing toolkit that we should be using for self improvement. Which brings me to the end and your homework…
- I’d like to wrap up by giving you a few questions to sleep on… Thank you. Thoughts/questions? https://unsplash.com/photos/Uq3gTiPlqRo
- Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/odxB5oIG_iA