In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers listeners’ questions about how to broach tricky subjects with leadership.
Show Notes
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about product teams with unequipped product leaders, ineffective usage of data, and killing products. Q: Have you come across situations in your career as a product manager where you were under the authority of people with no background in product management? How would you recommend I bring my concern about this to my leadership without coming across as arrogant?
Q: My organization struggles to use data effectively. What are some ways to convey the importance of data to leadership? And what are some achievable milestones that can be acquired to prove the value of investing in data?
Q: How can I reframe the decision to kill products so that everyone can understand them?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we've got some really good questions, some around using data, some around what happens if you actually kill products, how do you spin that into something positive?
And then other ones too, about what if people don't quite understand product, what do we do there? So lots of really good questions. And I want to remind you that if you have questions for me as well, you can always submit them to DearMelissa.com.
You'll always look through them every week, pick out some questions that have a common theme, and then I get to answer them for you right here so that everybody can hear. So let's dive into our first question. Hi, Melissa. I'm a senior product manager in a large e-commerce firm, where it's common to have senior management layers in charge of product managers like me.
Lately, I've been interacting with senior managers who have little to no background in product management. For example, they don't know about the product development lifecycle or agile, even though our tech teams follow it. As my organization grows, new senior product managers have joined internal employees who also lack product management expertise.
These are teams owning a portfolio of products and an aggressive product roadmap. While I'm happy to take on a coaching role and mentor as much as I can, this all seems inefficient and potentially risky for our business and customers, as products do not meet expectations. My questions for you are, one, have you come across these situations in your career?
And two, how would you recommend I bubble this up to my leadership without coming across as arrogant? Thanks in advance. Oh, have I come across this in my career? So many times, so many times. What you are describing is something I see a lot in larger enterprises. So what happens when companies go through a digital transformation, especially in large enterprises that were not software native, is that they decide to stand up the software team.
And what they do is they take a lot of subject matter experts or roles that don't really exist in an agile world, let's say like a product manager or an analyst, and they turn them into product managers. I got to stop here for a second, I actually find this a little insulting too, like what teams will do in these organizations, what companies will do in this organization is take senior leaders as well in a subject matter expertise function and say, okay, you could be a product management leader, you could be a VP of product. I see this everywhere.
You are not alone, my friend, you are not alone.
I work with a lot of these companies as well. And while I believe you can train junior product people, they may be more senior in their old jobs, but let's say junior product people, people who have not been product managers before for a team level function with great product leadership, it's really, really hard to train an entire organization into super senior product leaders or senior product managers if you have no experience product leadership. And this is where I think a lot of organizations get this wrong.
So this happens everywhere. This is like systemic. I see it all over the place. And it is coming from a desire to not have to lay off a huge amount of people. And I get that. I think that's a really noble thing. It's also come from a desire that, oh my God, we would have to hire like 3000 people to fill all these roles.
That would be an insane undertaking. But I also think it stems from an issue of people not understanding that product management is a skill set.
Like being product manager is not just being good at business. It's not just being good at project management. It's got its own skill set, and there's this own mastery to this role. So when you hire good product managers or you bring good product managers into your organization, even if you're going to teach them like how to build a roadmap, how to interview a customer, how to do experiments, all those are pretty hard skills.
And I believe you could teach a lot of people how to do that. The soft skills matter just as much though. How do you synthesize a bunch of data and then decide with a lot of ambiguity, which way to go, right? We just did reflections in my MBA class and a couple of people who went through it said, I never realized that product management was basically taking in massive amounts of data, synthesizing it, and then operating under extreme ambiguity to figure out which way to go.
Like, no, you will never have perfect data telling you go this way or that way. And it takes a certain type of person to be comfortable with that. Some people are just really not comfortable with that. So as you go through this transition as a large enterprise or, you know, turning into a digital company, you have to first see, are these people that we're putting into the product management role?
Do they have an aptitude for product management? Do they even want to be product managers? That's a big question. So I've come into organizations before, we've trained over 1000 people, 500 people. I've had a lot of product managers actually just opt out, say, no, I don't want to do this anymore. I didn't realize it was going to be like this.
This is awful. So I don't want to be a product manager anymore. And I thought that was a great outcome because you don't want people in these roles doing something that they don't want to do. So that's the team level product management. But like, let's talk about leadership. Just because you're a fantastic leader doesn't mean you'll be a great product leader.
And I think we get that wrong in a lot of organizations. I see large enterprises spend a lot more training their teams, their team level product managers, and investing absolutely nothing in their leadership levels. And if you don't do that, you will fail. Like if you can't teach your product leaders how to be product managers or understand exactly what you pointed out in this question, right?
Your product life cycles, agile, how to talk to customers, how to do customer discovery, how to make a good product roadmap, and how to set product strategy, your teams are not going to be able to do what they need to do. So that's a big issue. So yeah, I see this all the time. And how do you bubble that up to leadership without coming across as arrogant?
It's going to be really, really hard. I think one of the tactics that you could do is start to ask leadership for the things that you need, right?
You say, well, I need to be able to make a product roadmap. What's our strategy, right? What's our vision? Where are we going? Is this success? Like, here's some success metrics that came up with my product. Do you think that's success? What are our overall goals? Where is the business heading? Like start to ask them the questions that you would expect them to fulfill.
Should we sunset this product? If they're like, I don't know what sunset means, be like, well, you know, when it comes to the end of its life cycle, I don't think it's going to be as great. We can migrate them over to this other products, like start talking to them about that. Because what that does is it starts a conversation about what they may or may not know.
If you're asking all these questions and your product leaders are not able to answer them, they'll start to look for answers. So that's something that I would look at. I would just ask them more for the things that you need to fill the gap rather than just being like, wow, you have no idea what you're doing.
Nobody in product leadership does. Because as a senior product manager, like that's above your pay grade, first of all. Like I wouldn't want to be in your shoes and trying to go bubble that up.
That's why people bring me in at like the C-suite level to go tell people they don't know what they're doing. I still get so much pushback even in my position. So I can't imagine doing that as like an individual contributor and trying to bubble that up to leadership. But I do think you start getting people to ask the right questions.
And that's where I would start. I would say, what do we believe is going to be our vision? What do we think success looks like? What are our goals? Start asking for the information that you need. And when people realize that they can't effectively answer those questions, hopefully, they're going to start looking around for answers and try to fill the gaps that they need to fill.
Or management's going to look to bring in some other people who have good expertise in product management to help balance out your leadership team. So a little bit of a rant there about what enterprises do. But yeah, you're not alone. This happens everywhere. And there's only so many steps that you can take to fix it from your position.
And I think you do have to ask yourself, do I want to work for a company like this?
Or do I want to move on? You also have a potential, though, of maybe becoming a leader in this situation. If you know what you're doing, it sounds like you have experience. Can you start filling in some of the gaps and getting visibility with senior leadership to show them that you can do that? If you do it in a way that doesn't come off as arrogant, that's a good opportunity for you.
Get to know your leaders. Help show that what you're doing is helping your leaders. Be like, oh, I built these product visions. I think this can help us in X, Y, and Z. Make them look good. They're going to want to promote you. So that's another way to actually play this as well is by figuring out how you can navigate this politically, and maybe you yourself can become a product leader.
That would be great. All right. Our next question.
Dear Melissa, my organization struggles to use data effectively. Everyone agrees it's important to make decisions based on data, but actually getting the infrastructure and resources has been slow. We've got our app analytics coming in, but it's messy, and only a few less relevant metrics are automated.
I have so many ideas on how data can supercharge the product function on everything from A-B testing to deciding where to focus our attention, but I fail to convince leadership to invest in the work needed to become data-led organization. What are some ways to convey the importance of data to leadership, and what are some achievable milestones I could shoot for to prove to them the value of investing in data? Yours, analytically stunted.
And I hope everybody creates like fun little names that they can submit this to. I love that. That's total Dear Abby style. That's what I was going for. Oh, I've got a couple of ideas here. So biggest thing is that if you're communicating why we need data to leadership as it helps you, but not that it helps leadership, they're going to tune out, honestly.
Leaders want to know what's going on. They want to be able to make decisions. How can you take that data that you want implemented and spin it so that it helps the leaders, right? I was working with a CEO who had no idea what was on the product roadmap because we didn't have good communication at the time.
There was no good way for him to go find it. What did he do? He dove into JIRA and started to look through JIRA tickets. And I was like, get out of there. Don't go in JIRA. This is not for you. He was like, if I have no information, I'm like, well, what type of data are you looking for? And like, what do you want to measure?
And he's like, well, I need to understand more about like what's on the roadmap. And I want to understand like how that's going to, you know, evolve into revenue and cost issues and all that. So he's looking for that data. And in order to predict that, I was telling them that we also needed to have user data in the products so that we could see if people were using things because usage leads to money in this case, right?
So he was like, oh yeah, I want that. I want all the data. I want to see what people are using. I want to know, you know, if it's going to lead to more revenue or if we just have churn or if people aren't happy or anything like that. So this was helping to fulfill his goal of being able to communicate well to the board and to the rest of the executives about what was working, what was not working, make decisions off of it.
And I think that's what you have to lead with. Like how does your data for what you need to make product decisions bubble up into helping leadership make strategic decisions? Because they're all connected at the end of the day, right? The more people use different workflows and they are happy with it, the better the retention will be.
If they're not happy with it, you want to understand that because it can lead to churn, churn revenue costs. Like those are all things that leaders actually care about. So telling them that you can help predict some of those metrics early on so that you can make some course corrections in your product is really going to get their attention.
So that's where I would start with that.
Now, what are some achievable milestones I could shoot for to prove to them the value of investing in data? Try to think about what you can get data in quickly. Like obviously if you're going to measure retention over time, that's going to take some time. But if you can measure usage and products or maybe take a product or a project that the company is really passionate about, like they think people will use it, anything like that and see if you can just get some data around usage or metrics or anything like that and then start to convey if that's helping to achieve the strategy back to leadership.
Like take something that you're currently working on. I wouldn't start with trying to put data everywhere because that's a really hard sell. It's going to be a huge project. Break it down. Maybe there's something that people are uncertain about. Can you start there? Can you start getting data about something that's highly uncertain?
You make it a little bit more certain, figure out which way people are going. Then you've got an audience. Now that you have an audience, people can start to see the value of it.
You're answering questions that you're actively answering. That's probably going to get a little bit more buy-in. So start small, just like we would in product, right? And iterate from there. And I would test your messaging and just find something that people really care about right now. And if you can use data to help inform that strategy, show people how valuable it is, you're probably going to get buy-in for the rest of it.
But the key in all of this is showing how data helps senior leadership. Not just you, but how does it help senior leadership? And now we're on to our last question. It says, hi, Melissa. I'm six months into my new role and my two major accomplishments are the deprecation of two of our company's products.
These products were costly and diverted our team's attention from real opportunities. Killing products isn't always perceived as a win to all. How can I reframe these decisions so that everyone can understand them? That's a fantastic question. I really like this one a lot. So if you think about killing products, they were costly, they diverted your team's attention.
There's probably a cost associated with that, like you just said they were costly. How much money were you spending on that, that you just saved the company, right? I love talking in ways of saving companies money because they all get very excited about that. Winning in product is not just shipping new things.
A lot of it's getting rid of the lack of focus. So can you start to quantify that? We killed these old products. They were diverting our attention. They were really costly and our customers weren't using them. So now we're simplifying it, making it easier to build on top of this code base. We're making it easier to market and message to our customers, like all of that is a win.
So I think a lot of this is about the attitude that you put on it too, right? Like if you think that it's not a win to all, everybody else is going to think that it's not a win to all. But you just told me like you just saved money and you just helped focus people. So that's your story. By killing these products, we were able to save the company X, Y, and Z money.
Also now we're able to go over and focus on building these new products.
Whereas, you know, before we were going to get bogged down with all this old stuff that nobody cares about. So we got rid of it and now we can get heads down and start working on this other stuff that's going to provide immense value, right? It's an opportunity cost thing. So how do you talk about like lowering your cost of delay, right?
The money that would go into that, how do you talk about like saving money? How do you talk about where you could focus? How does it free you up to get into other opportunities? Also think about who's the audience you're talking to, what do they care about? If you're talking to other teams, how does it help out other teams?
How does it, if you're talking to the CEO, how do you talk about how you could spend more time on better opportunities, more growth opportunities? Like all of this is about spinning it towards a specific audience as well. But I think this is a huge win. Congratulations on killing these products. It is a hard thing to do.
A lot of companies don't want to kill products, but you did the right thing. And it sounds like your team's going to get to do a lot more fun stuff now. So that is really bright.
So that reaches the end of our Dear Melissa for this week. Next week, we have Brian Buddha on our podcast and I'm very excited. Brian and I are old friends. We worked at a couple companies together. And he's going to tell us all about how he helps transition companies who are not really product focused into building a product mindset.
And I've seen him do this a bunch of times with teams coming into teams that didn't really have product managers, leveling them up. The people that he has coached have gone on to be awesome directors of product and VPs of product. So he's going to share all of that secret sauce with us next week. So make sure that you subscribe to this podcast so that you get notified when that drops next Wednesday.
And please submit all of your questions to DearMelissa.com. I can't wait to read them.
