Emotional Intelligence in Product
Do you struggle to get buy-in for your product-led initiatives? Are you having a hard time convincing executives and colleagues to embrace the change? In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa Perri talks with Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group.
Show Notes
Do you struggle to get buy-in for your product-led initiatives? Are you having a hard time convincing executives and colleagues to embrace the change? In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa Perri talks with Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. They explore the key elements of successful product transformations: through his years of experience, Christian has observed that emotional intelligence, humility, and a willingness to transform yourself are key drivers of successful organizational change.
He shares valuable insights on how to build trust and read the room, in order to transform your organization into an empowered, customer-focused team.
Christian Idiodi is a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), where he advises and coaches executives, product teams, and leaders on how to build great products. With over 200 products built in his career, Christian has experience in the HR technology space, financial services, and marketplaces. Before joining SVPG, Christian led a major transformation at Merrill Corporation for several years.
You’ll hear Melissa and Christian talk about:
Emotional intelligence and awareness are critical for product managers to gain buy-in from stakeholders and executives.
Arrogance and ego can hinder organizational change and transformation efforts.
People are often promoted to leadership positions without adequate training or development, leading to insecurities and impostor syndrome.
To get buy-in, seek to understand the needs, goals, and reward structures of key stakeholders and executives.
Product managers should do discovery on key people in the organization, including executives, to understand their perspectives and challenges.
It's important to understand the reward structure and incentives of executives, and it's okay to ask about it directly.
Creating a user manual for managers or stakeholders can help product managers better understand their perspectives and motivations.
The true stakeholders of a transformation effort are usually a small group of people with high levels of interest and influence, and understanding their perspectives is critical.
Ask open-ended questions and show a genuine interest in the success of stakeholders and executives; this can help to build trust and facilitate buy-in.
All problems in a transformation are people problems, and leaders need to coach their teams to play a new game.
Success in product management is not about the title, but about the impact on the environment.
Emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room are crucial skills for product managers and executives to succeed in their roles.
Arrogance, ego, and imposter syndrome can hold product leaders back from developing their emotional intelligence and reading the room.
Building trust is essential for product leaders to establish themselves as competent and credible.
Positioning yourself as ignorant and seeking to learn from others can help you build trust and establish productive relationships.
Tailor your presentations and communication style to your audience’s preferences can help you connect with them and read the room effectively.
Organizational transformation starts with individual transformation of leaders who are willing to put in the effort to change themselves and their environments.
Successful transformations often have strong product leadership, competent product managers, and an empowered culture.
A powerful indicator of an empowered organization is when engineers can articulate their work in the same language as top executives.
Resources: Christian Idiodi on LinkedIn | Twitter | SVPG Silicon Valley Product Group
Episode Transcript
Christian Idiodi: If there's any emotional intelligence I challenge most leaders to have, is some awareness of that cycle and over us it may affect them. And so I always ask people to stand from a point of humility and have a certain kind of assumption. And the assumption I make is that people don't want to change or will not embrace a change or will not support an effort, not fairly because they are against it. That is not always my first thought. It may be because they do not know how that change will impact them, they've never experienced that type of change before, or they are in a position to lead where they are incapable of leading.
Voiceover: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another Product Thinking Podcast episode. Today we're going to talk all about how to get buy-in when you're doing big organizational change or doing transformations to more of a product-led company, and we're going to talk about developing emotional intelligence and awareness in product managers so that you can read the room and get that buy-in too. I'm joined by Christian Edioti, who is an SVPG partner. Welcome, Christian.
Christian Idiodi: Melissa, thanks for having me here today.
Melissa Perri: It's great to have you. I'm really excited to talk to you. Like I said, I was catching up with Marty Kagan in Oslo, and he was like, you have to meet Christian, having not met Christian before, and he's just singing your praises. I've seen you talk at a lot of conferences, and I love what you talk about. Your presence and everything is absolutely amazing, so I'm so excited to talk to you today and to dive into these topics. Great. Christian, can you tell us for the audience a little bit about how did you get into product management and what you were doing before you landed at SVPG?
Christian Idiodi: Melissa, I often joke with people about getting into product management the way everybody got into product management. Getting a master's degree in product management and a PhD in product management now, am I the only one? Probably not. I was actually pre-med in college. I got into product management by joining a company and winning a competition, like a business plan competition, and I started to manage an innovation budget and then led product at the company.
There was really no formal discipline then, but I've done product work at a startup out in Virginia. I've done product leadership work leading a major transformation at a global company, Merrill Corporation, for several years, and that was prior to becoming a partner at SVPG. So most of my experience, I've built over 200 products in my career, some really iconic a lot in the HR technology space, in financial services too as well, and I do a lot of work with marketplaces, but today I do most of my work advising, coaching and training executives, product teams and leaders on how to build great products.
Melissa Perri: That's great. And thank you for giving some of your background there. So when I was talking to Marty, the way he built you, he was like, this is one of the most impressive people I've ever met who can really work with executives, get that by and help usher in executive change, which is so critical. And I know a lot of our listeners out there, they write into me on the Dear Melissa segments, or I've heard them go, how do I get buy in to work this way?
Right? Like, how do I convince my executives that we need to be product led? How do I convince the people around me who might not be in product management that this is a better way of working? And it just keeps going back to like that buy in phase. How do I do this? And it's all levels, executives or product managers coming into a company that needs to be transformed or they're in the middle of a transformation.
But then we also have some new CPOs who come into our organization that never had a product leader before. And it's still a SaaS company, but they haven't seen that. Or we have people on teams who are reading all the stuff that we write and going, hey, I really want to do that, but nobody else around me does.
So when you go to work with organizations, you know, you probably brought in by like a sponsor, but how do you get people on the same page and start to generate that buy in? What are the steps that you actually go through?
Christian Idiodi: I really think at the core, many people are not aware of the insecurities in executives or leaders, as well as their own insecurities. I do believe fundamentally that arrogance and ego really haunts thought walkers. One of the cycles that really hurts our current environment and that's any corporate environment is this idea that people are promoted into a role to do the role and not to learn how to do the role.
And so most people get promoted to this type of incompetence. You've never been an executive before, a manager before, you've never led a transformation before, you've never built a product before, but here you are with keys to drive it and effort or in a leadership position. And the second you become a leader or a manager, you've lost all of the psychological safety opportunity to see things like I don't know, I'm not sure, I need help.
And those things really drive an unfortunate cycle of imposter syndrome, insecurity, arrogance, ego. I am right, you're wrong. And I state this because if there's any emotional intelligence I challenge most leaders to have is some awareness of that cycle and as it may affect them. And so I always ask people to stand from a point of humility and have a certain kind of assumption.
And the assumption I make is that people don't want to change or will not embrace a change or will not support an effort, not fairly because they are against it. That is not always my first thought. It may be because they do not know how that change will impact them. They've never experienced that type of change before or they are in a position to lead where they are incapable of leading.
It's like saying that, you know, I argue that number one reason why people don't experience good coaching is because they haven't been coached well themselves. Or the number one reason they don't give good context or provide good clarity to others is because their manager or their leader hasn't given it to them. So what I typically do in trying to drive any meaningful adoption or sponsorship or effort is I seek to understand.
And in the same light, we might train a product manager to do discovery. I tell people to take it very seriously to do discovery under sponsors and leaders or people within an organization that could impact an effort. And that is in the similar light of learning. You're going in to learn. You're not going in with a position or a perspective or to influence.
Your first point or perspective should be to try to understand not just where that person is, what's going on, the opportunities, the challenges, the obstacles in their work, but to understand that person's role and position in that effort. You're trying to tune in to the what's in it for them radio station. And for the most part, I go very deep in my discovery.
I want to understand your little needs, your little pains. But I mean, I'm thinking in my head, what gets Melissa at bonus at the end of the day? What gets her praise from her manager? What actually makes her, gets her praise from friends at home? What triggers her ego? What will, you know, and if you can align the goals and the interest of the sponsors to your effort, it's very hard for people to self-sabotage, but it's very easy for people to self-preserve themselves to hold on to what they think could be risky for themselves and as individuals in their careers.
So first guidance I give leaders, got to do discovery on the key people in that organization, absence the key problems. Many people are very good. It's kind of this intellectual exercise of identifying all of the problems. And you can imagine coming to a CEO and saying your baby is ugly. In some ways, you know, we can come to terms with that, but at the end of the day, it's still your baby.
There's no other person accountable. There's no nice way of sugarcoating something sucks and the leader not feeling accountable for that environment. No matter how much they agree, yes, it is terrible, but like who else? The book kind of stops with me to fix this. So I'm just saying I am terrible. People automatically become defensive.
Foundationally, take out ego and arrogance, seek to understand before you're presenting your perspective, focus on the individual, their needs, their goals, their reward structure, their incentive structure. Try to align your goals to getting them personally and individually, some sense of achievement or recognition from your effort.
Melissa Perri: I think that's so important to bring that empathy in there and I'm so happy that you said it. Now, a follow up question that I get a lot too is if you are not working on the same level as the executives, you might not have some transparency into how they're rewarded. And I think a lot of people too who have never been an executive before don't understand sometimes the dynamics of that reward structure or what's on the line for people in the C-suite when it comes to their delivery and what they're on.
So can you explain a little bit about what might be typical incentives or how can you go about to understand the reward structure of a company, especially when you're not in the C-suite or a peer of that person?
Christian Idiodi: The worst thing you can do is make assumptions about what those things are. My very first go-to is to actually ask people, how do you get incentive? What are you measured on? And you see, people often think it's such an awkward feeling. Like, are you, you're going to go inquire about somebody's bonus or somebody's measurement structure?
I always stay disappointed. Look, people truly at the end of the day, they don't really care how you learn about things. It's never in a human construct. We never judge how you learn. We actually care more about whether you know or if you don't know. That's why we kind of have a testing mentality as a society.
The only way for me to know that you know something is to test you and see what's one plus one. If you fail the answer, then I can assume you don't know what will, I never say, how did you learn one plus one? That was a terrible way of you learning it. If you can get over the hump of, it may feel awkward to go ask an executive.
Like, I would love to learn more about the compensation structure, the executive pay structure, what the bonus plan is for executives, how to get paid. I promise you to feel awkward just then, but you know the difference between then and afterwards, you will actually have some clear facts about how it's done that will inform your interaction and your dynamic with them. So my very first call out to people is, just go ask your leader.
And the way I freeze it is nothing like, you need to tell me your bonus or your compensation or your incentive structure. I say, you know, I want to make sure we succeed when we do the things we do. And interestingly enough, I am on your team. The idea about team is that we have a common goal, a shared approach, shared ways of working and stuff.
But we also want to know what the Super Bowl looks like. And I get what my Super Bowl looks like and how I will celebrate, but I want to know what that looks like for you. How do you celebrate success? And you can start with the simple ones, like individually, how do you measure your success here? Tell me about, people laugh to talk about that stuff and then say, okay, that's great.
Is this the same way your manager measures you? Let them talk about that. Is this the same way the company measures you? How do they reward you when you do a good job? Is that a bonus? What does that look like? I don't need to know the numbers or details, but it's important to know that as a leadership team, these are the three things that the company cares about that you provide, but also individually that you care about.
How would you measure your career, your success, your stuff? I am a big fan of a user manual for managers. You know, I always tell people, you might have many colleagues, many people that work for you, but in most cases, you only have one manager. It doesn't hurt you to create a user manual for that person.
You only need like, when you write the user manual for a TV, it's written. Like it doesn't really change overnight, like ready on and off what it is and how to turn on volume, but you need to know that for executives or sponsors. I don't think enough people take that very seriously. People say you can never succeed in your career without a sponsor, without an executive.
And I say, well, why don't people take that aspect of their work? The fact that regardless of what your job is, there is a manager, a supervisor, a leader accountable for your success and development that you should pay attention to, right? I will suggest to people, take the time. There are people that are true stakeholders.
That's a whole different dynamic. I think people call everybody a stakeholder. It's not the long list, the real true stakeholders. It's not 5,000 people or everybody in a company. If you're sponsoring a transformation, if you're leading an effort, if you're a product manager, this is not the list of 200 people.
I'm talking five. Take the time to understand their level of interest against their level of influence in what you're doing. Take the time if they have a high level of influence to understand, create a user manual on them, to understand what drives them, what invests them, how they are compensated. There is nothing wrong with just going out and asking them.
That's a great one on one. A great one on one with them is not like, give me an update or a status report or help me fight this fire. It is, I see you. I see your value here. I am on your team. I want you to be successful. So tell me what that looks like. I have not met any leader that will shun that kind of conversation.
Or look, they're actually more impressed with that dynamic because they spent a lot of time talking about themselves and somebody else truly cared about making them successful. So if you do that, you set yourself up all the other conversations much easier after that, because you're looking at it through the lens of that interview. So of course there are different metrics by different companies that you can look at whether it's equity compensation, performance, different companies use different formulas for rewarding or incenting leaders or getting their targets.
But there is absolutely no better, no clear aware of getting this information than inquiring from a leader.
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Melissa Perri: I've never also been met with anybody who's like, no, I'm not gonna tell you that or that's bad, right? Like, yeah, like you said, you care about that person. I think that shows so much empathy for their position and that you wanna help them, help them be like the best they could be and get their bonus and get all those things.
I love that. So let's say that you've got an executive in this situation and I see this all at large companies and you've worked at some really, really large companies especially when it's going through transformations. So we've got executives, they have been not leading in a traditional product company.
They've been leading a financial services company and now they're adopting a product-led way or something like that. I work with a lot of banks. So my head goes there immediately. But let's say we've got all those executives in the top space. They hear about this great product-led focus and technology is changing the games and they wanna get to more of a product-led place.
You go and you find out their incentives and you hear about the revenue incentives and all those things, but they don't quite rock product and they don't understand why they need to understand product. And I run into this all the time, right? Which is, hey, no, product is something that the teams do and they work with the engineers.
But we don't have to care about that as executives and the middle leaders and the VPs or anybody like that. That's not us, that's just what the teams do. They just do those things. How do you start bringing a focus to the executives, to those middle leaders that product management is not just for the teams, right?
How do you start to get them to understand that their jobs need to change? And how do you fight that inertia too, where they might be technically doing things that they weren't doing for the last 20 to 40 years in those roles and now they have to do new things?
Christian Idiodi: I'm glad you are feeling the pain like you've had this exact scenario. I am connecting with you on this, Melissa. It's a very, and one of the things that I think we share philosophically, I always say, with Maddie, you can kind of see many executives. Smart people, they read all the Harvard Business Review journals and articles and they see all of the performance of Take Enable company and the groups of all of these companies and all of the startups.
And philosophically, they all say, yeah, we want to be like that. Of course, we want to work fast. We want to do that agile thing. We want all the things to be up and it sounds great. We should do it. There's always underlying question of like, why don't most companies work like the best companies consistently?
And I think when you dive a little deeper, you realize it's truly because most of those leaders have never experienced working in those types of companies. They have no barometer for what good looks like in that sense. Things have been working well for them. They've been doing this for 30 years. Everybody gets speed, life goes on.
They've led in one way. It's like everybody understands like command and control is not great. Even if you ask a leader that is doing command and control, they will tell you that. It's like, but you are doing it. It's like, I don't know any better. My manager commands or controls me and look at me. I'm successful.
I did well. So I can command and control the next person. So foundationally, first of all, I come from the school of thought like, let's assume good intent. These leaders, they want the outcome from what this change will be. They're like, yeah, we've had this product led stuff. Go do it. You know, I don't know what I need to do about it, but I'm not going to get away.
I cannot understand it. Truly what's happening is that they do not know what they need to change. All are equipped to do what they need to change to create that environment for this to succeed. If I come in with that mindset and I always coach people around this, then your job kind of changes from time to, you know, convince and influence and you're realizing like, I'm going to coach a skill in these people.
If we're clear about why we are making the change, because we want to get opportunities we cannot before. We want to respond better to our customers. We want to grow up. This is great. And I say, well, product management, actually one of the techniques I do is absolutely ignore the idea of product management and what it means, because those things feel very foreign.
It's almost like my department is called, you know, marketing or sales. That's the our problem. And so I kind of describe it to executives like they are choosing to play different sport. And I say, look, for many years, maybe the sport you have played, maybe it's a project management sport. I might say you're playing hockey.
You take a problem, take money, you give it to a bunch of people to fix it and you get an outcome on output that you measure people on. And I say, well, I hope you recognize that this whole product led idea, you are choosing to play different sport. You're choosing to say, rather than telling people what to do, I'm going to give them problems to solve.
Rather than funding projects, I'm going to fund people to solve problems. Rather than measuring outputs, I'm going to measure outcomes. These are some of the foundational differences in the sport. And to play this new game, you need a different team. You haven't played atlantic, but you need a different team.
You know, we probably call those people product managers, designers and engineers and stuff. But I get it. That's one thing that has to change. We have to start from a different team. The second thing I have to tell them is, you play on a different field. The environment is different. You were playing hockey, now you're playing basketball.
You're like the athletic people, sure, they can play basketball, but I tell them, you know, it's hard to convince a two-footer that they can dunk the ball. You may need to equip the team differently. One is playing on ice. One is playing on a different type of ground. And I'm saying that's the environment that you as a leader needs to provide.
And I see your job is a little different because we are playing a different sport. You might need different tools. You might need different staffing. So we need to hire different people. We need to coach them differently. We need to provide them context through a vision, a strategy, but most importantly, the environment has to change for them to have a chance at winning.
And this is where I need your help. And I don't want it to be fuzzy about what does your help mean because I know you already support this because you said to me you want the outcome. So I want to be clear about what your help means. The job of a leader is two-fold. You want to provide clarity on the context and you want to provide a culture, the environment in which we go do those things.
As a manager, you need to staff the team, coach the team, and align them to objectives. So I can break that down for you. And I want to be clear about where I need your help. So what I do with that is I try to put it in their head in some way that they can connect with so that it doesn't feel like personally they've done something wrong or like there's something they need to think so they are broken in some way.
I'm trying to say we all made a choice to play a different sport. None of us have ever played this sport before. Like you don't show up on the first day of basketball and start doing all kinds of dunks and moves. You're going to travel a little bit, bounce the ball wrongly. This is the kind of coach I want to give you and I want to provide for you because I want to set us up for success.
I'm hoping more leaders can do this kind of stuff. It's almost the impatience with it. They want the results, but not the work to actually get the results. You just show up on game day and like, why are we not shooting three points as well? It's like, it's our first time holding a freaking basketball.
So I create that mental control from a leader and I use it in different ways. However, it resonates with them. And I try to have them embrace the idea of like, okay, what do I need to show up to get good at? I say, well, you know, this product management thing is this different ball game. We should learn about what it means and what good looks like.
The other aspect of it is, you know, you probably hear me say all problems are people problems. Almost every CEO has somebody in their environment that they trust with decisions. They trust with coming to deal with data customer centric or data informed. They have a good knowledge of the business and the industry.
I always use that person as an anchor in transformations. I will go to a CEO and I say, hey, would you trust Melissa to make a decision on the next product we do at the next? Oh, geez, oh, you know, that person is always somebody you've had the CEO talk about. And I say, that's a product manager. And they say, just try to imagine what your business will look like.
If you had little Melissa's on every little team, driving the decisions that we make, helping you, there's a level of trust and comfort you have because they represent your business well, they represent the customer, they are data informed. And once you can get a leader to kind of make that connect to construct, then they start to realize like, oh, the reason I don't like product management is I don't believe in it is because I don't have a Melissa in it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a really good point. Honestly, I haven't thought about it that way. It's just, I know from doing some transformations myself too, it's really hard to get somebody to understand product management until they see good product management. And in a lot of the larger companies in the banks I've worked with, they're so reluctant to hire anybody in who's done it before, right?
It's all, no, we're just going to train all these people who've been here for 20 years or 30 years and teach them how to be good leaders or not even train them. They'll just be like, they're the leaders now. I run into more often than not, but I have found that success in more of the growth stage companies or the SaaS companies I work with, where CEO may have never had a great product leader before, but as soon as you show them what one is capable of and get them a good one, they're a convert.
They're like, this is amazing. This is fantastic. I am sold. I like that approach of what you're doing, where it's like, take the person that this person, the CEO trusts or this leader trusts and have them be like, that's a good product manager. But how do you get the buy-in, I guess? What if that person is like, doesn't want to be a product manager?
What if they're like, oh, this product leader thing is not for me?
Christian Idiodi: And that's great because they are doing product management work. I care less about their title. I care more about the impact in the environment and that's what the leader is measuring that person on. So in many cases, the best product managers at most of these larger enterprises are the leaders of product managers like VPs, the executives, the SVPs.
It is an absolute unfortunate thing, but it's the reality in that they are always in all the meetings, they are always making all the decisions, everything goes through them. So it's actually easier for me to narrate to a CEO and executive, like, yeah, Melissa is your chief operating officer, but look at all the decisions she makes every day, all the meetings she makes every day, all the stuff she makes every day. And I say, in the best team, that same kind of context or information and stuff is all the way down in an individual on the team level.
And that person is called a product manager. What I want is a Melissa at that level. And the best thing Melissa could do is not to be in all of those meetings, making all those decisions, but to create 30 Melissa's for your organization as product managers. My whole idea is if I can convince a leader to see the benefit of product managers through a person's lens, like, all right, if I really had 30 of those, my life would be easier.
I will have less stress, we're gonna win in that way. And I say, well, you know, the best companies have figured out that to win the spot of solving problems for customers, if that day will create 30 of those. It's not enough on the discipline when it doesn't work. Most of the time it's like individuals or you've not experienced a good one in that sense.
So you're absolutely right. You will meet people that are great at design. I'm great in my job, I don't want to do it. And I say, yeah, but you are doing it because you're in every meeting, every decision, you are pro versa, everything that company runs through, you know, you're on every major project, you're driving every niche of it, you are doing it and you're gonna burn out.
You know, I'm giving you a secret to scale it, a secret to start, we're gonna scale with leadership. We're gonna create an army of mini me's in that sense, good for you, good for the company, good for our customer in that business, different mindset.
Melissa Perri: That's very cool way of looking at it. And I appreciate that a lot. So we've got some of these people in these organizations, especially the larger organizations who might know what they're doing. They've either read about product management, studied it, they're practicing it, or they come in from somewhere else.
And they'd make a great product leader, but I keep running into the issue where they can't read the room. I've seen this a lot in junior product managers and executives too. And it's one of the biggest things I see holding back some awesome product leaders. Like they might get to director or VP, but they just can't get into the good graces of the CEO, or they're just not accepted into the executive team.
They're not seen as an actual executive, like a big leader of the organization. And that lack of emotional intelligence and understanding a lot of the stuff that we're talking about holds them back from getting the positions that they want. How have you seen, you're very good at this, obviously, reading the room, talking about all the stuff that we did.
What's your advice for people who are struggling with that to understand why it's important, but then also to get up to speed on how to do that, how to read people, how to understand them?
Christian Idiodi: That's a great question. I think I started by talking about arrogance, ego, and insecurities, imposter syndrome, and people promoted into a point of incompetence. It is painful for me to watch. I didn't understand that I was good at this until I started to feel the pain of watching people struggle with this, like on the other end as an executive, and like watching people in the room, I'm like, this person is missing the whole point here, or they just completely missed this.
I kind of mentioned before, people don't care how you know, they just care that you know. Almost every executive environment, almost every leader, it's almost like a test for people. Your PowerPoint presentation, you can, and unfortunately, people are showing up for a test. In an exam, they didn't get a playbook, a reading guide, a study guide for, and they are surprised that they are feeling in that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's the deal. I always advise and coach people to position themselves from a stance of ignorance, like you don't know anything. It's the most awkward feeling for leaders and executives or product managers which are meant to be born with competence, and why I'm driving this is a trust factor. At the core, there are different types of trust.
There's character trust, caring trust, communication trust, but competence trust is the big one in our environment that people used to judge us. Can you do the job? Do you have the skills to do the job? Do you know what the job is? Are you delivering at the expectation or the level we want in the job?
Unfortunately, people don't even know what that level is or what that expectation is. And so what I tell people to do is you've got to do some heavy lifting in the beginning to build trust. People do not know that you know things. People do not know that you're competent at things. Your competence, in some cases, unfortunately, the bigger the company, is not as important as what is perceived.
So you can be like, I'm the best in the world. If I don't think you are, you are not the best in the world. The bigger the company, the more critical that is. So my master technique for tackling this is to go and learn. Is I go to Melissa and I say, teach me everything you know about the company, the business, whatever it is, or teach me how you present, regardless of wherever that testing forum is.
Even if you like I need to present on where the company is going on our strategy, I will go to leaders in one on one prior to that meeting. And I'll say, you know what? I'm going to be talking to teams in this meeting about the strategy. How would you present it? What are some things you look like? Now, what am I doing with this technique?
Two things. One, it's important that I'm learning and understanding how you like to see things, your perception and stuff. But the second you teach me something, I will get over two psychological hurdles. One, you can no longer question that I know, or if I know, because you taught me. You're like my teacher and you passed me in class.
You know, I know that I taught you, so I know that you should know, fairly enough. Two, I have automatically by doing that, I've created a dynamic that's in a relationship. It's like a teacher-student relationship. The interesting thing about a teacher-student relationship is that that throws dynamic is very safe.
If I mess up in public, what would the teacher come and do? Let me help you. Let me fix it. Let me show you. But if I am thinking about you are meant to be competent, you're meant to be the best, now I'm in a position to judge you and stop. I will grade you, but I cannot publicly shame you because I am responsible for teaching you.
So once you can fix that dynamic, it feels like work to people, but I have never found a scenario where this has failed to yield very positive results if you do the work. Because it might take a lot to build a trust bank and it only takes one meeting to lose it with a CEO. Like, oh my goodness, they didn't have any data about this.
They don't know anything about the business. What's off is not when they're not gonna say Melissa is terrible. They might be like, oh, product management is useless. It's just one bad person and the whole discipline is a mess. Oh, you know, designers are not great. So I tell people you've got to do, it only takes like once, once you build that dynamic of trust and you're like, huh, I didn't really like how they presented that, but that was what I taught them to do.
They will be defending you in a meeting to other people that may not be happy. They'll be selling you. Oh yeah, Melissa is very good at this. Why? Because they are representing your technique. They are representing your voice. And you see those things come in, in the meeting or in the dynamic that you feel very connected to them.
So truly, truly important. You got to get rid of the arrogance and ego in this discipline. The amount of products I have built in my career and the success I've had building products over and over again has come from extreme ignorance. From being in a position of, I do the same thing with my customers.
I don't know you. I don't know your needs. The more I know, the better I will be. If I can take your voice, your strength, I do that with my stakeholders. I do that with my team. Now, does that mean I'm not competent or I'm not smart enough to figure things out and stuff like that? No, I'm just a little smarter to figure out that I do not know.
The best way to present is the best strategy. No matter your data is you lose the room when you cannot connect with the room or read the room. And reading the room means you know those individuals in the room and you know how they like to be read to. I've been in meetings where I know that there's one strong person that I cannot reach and stuff.
I prefer the whole meeting with that. And I'll say, hey, I understand you all are used to seeing or but I'm gonna see the nice PowerPoint, but I'm gonna play a video because Melissa loves videos. And so you all bear with me while I do that. Now, everybody's gonna laugh at that because they know Melissa.
You're like, oh, and you took the time to connect with Melissa and Melissa is gonna feel like, okay, this video is just for me. But it only takes one bad experience to change that dynamic. So you've got to do the work.
Melissa Perri: It's very great advice. So when you're working with executives or in these areas and priming them for change and digging in, is there ever a situation where you're like, this is hopeless? I can't get through to them. Where do you feel like these ticks are? I know it's such a dismal thing to say, but like-
Christian Idiodi: All the time.
Melissa Perri: Okay.
Christian Idiodi: All the time, don't feel bad about it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah.
Christian Idiodi: And you can understand those dynamics. There are many cases in which you might always be like, oh, or you could just see somebody blame everybody else. I always go back to that first anchor of like, maybe you don't know, maybe you're not sure, maybe you're ill-equipped. I don't just assume like, evil intent, you don't want good.
And it's like, maybe you don't know better in some ways. I will see this. Some of the most impressive transformation stories I have come across have come from places and industries I did not expect. Meaning on paper, you have a day I worked with a big agricultural company and I'm just like, no, yeah, no, it's like hundreds of years old, you make agricultural equipment for farmers.
And we are like, those people have been here for 45 years and 30 years. And my children's children have been here. And you're like, you want to become a modern tech company and do stuff? Yeah. Just mentally in your head, you're like, I have doubts. I have serious doubts. But then you meet people. And going back to my point, they are humble, they are eager to learn, they are self aware to understand what they do not know.
And you feel excited about the journey. But those people you see them in meetings saying, I am not really sure how to make this work, but I want to make this work and I'll be vulnerable about it. And I need you all to help. Boy, I've seen some of the most amazing transformation journeys come from that.
One of the best arguments I had is that organizational transformation starts with individual transformation. Leaders, executives, they have to transform themselves before they can transform the organization. I think if you go with that playbook, you start to approach the work a little differently. But you're absolutely right.
Have I made recommendations to CEOs that they've got to fire some people on their team because they're... Absolutely. Have I made recommendations to boards that to fire their CEO because their CEO is not the person to lead? Absolutely. But it doesn't come from the point of me initially assuming that they're going to fail or they don't mean it.
We've coached this person. We've seen this. Your journey is significantly going to be more difficult because this individual cannot grasp these concepts, cannot support it, or is resistant to doing the work to do it. And not saying they're not a great person, maybe they're just not a great person for this effort.
In that sense.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, so what I'm getting from you and what I'm hearing is a lot of this success on these transformations start with the leaders willing to transform themselves, looking at their jobs and saying, hey, I'm gonna put in the effort, so let's all put in the effort and willing to do that work. Is that what you see as the difference between successful transformations and not? Or is there other factors that you've seen really play into that too?
Christian Idiodi: I mean, there are several factors. I do see the fact that you called out about the executive buying or starting at the top or at the CEO level, not outsourcing the mindset of it. I recognize what they have to do in changing their language, changing their behaviors, changing the environment to enable this to be successful is consistently true in the most successful companies.
The CEO or the top executive is the champion of it and they are doing their own transformation to support it. Obviously strong product leadership is key because they are responsible for staffing and coaching a competent team as well as providing context to a vision and a strategy on that journey. Competent product managers on the team is important, but you need good leaders to hire, train and coach those people and to retain them too as well.
You need to have an empowered culture, so how you work is important. So there are many elements in this that if you ask me what have you found to be consistently true in those transformations, I could point to some of those elements. Interestingly enough, when people say, if you come back two years from now or three years from now, how would you know that we're doing a good job on this journey?
I love Bill Campbell always argues the most important things, an empowered engineer. I always go to an engineer and I say, what are you working on? And if the engineer, sure, they can articulate what they are building or working on, but if they can connect it to an outcome, if they can talk about it in the same power or magnitude as a CEO, like, oh, we're here to change the world, we're trying to drive customer engagement, we're gonna be the best company.
When you hear that from an engineer, the doer in an organization, it means that this kind of this flip, kind of an empowered organization has happened. The connection between the person that leads all the context and strategy and the person doing it is very strong. Bigger companies, there are many, many layers between that top person and the actual person putting in the code.
And when you start to see that that person put in the code, articulate stuff like that leader, you have transformed that environment and that's very powerful.
Melissa Perri: That is definitely something to look forward to. I think for a lot of companies out there. Well, thank you so much, Christian. This has been great. I've learned a lot from you and I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm sure everybody out there is listening now too. Pretty excited to maybe go use some of these techniques and get their buy-in. If people wanna learn more about you, read about your blog post or get in touch for some work, how can they reach out?
Christian Idiodi: Please visit us on svpg.com. You're welcome to follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter as well. We share newsletters fantastic to get some of these updates. We're always happy to talk about this more and more with anyone.
Melissa Perri: Great. And thank you all for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. Next week, we'll be back with another Dear Melissa where I answer all of your questions about product management. So make sure you go to dearmelissa.com and submit those questions to me and I will see you next time.
