Adam Thomas is a product management expert, speaker, writer, and the Lead Product Manager at SmartRecruiters. Adam has spent his professional life helping teams reduce friction and craft product strategies that lead to better outcomes for their organizations. He joins Melissa Perri on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast to discuss a concept he developed called survival metrics, which enables product teams to change direction safely and quickly.
Show Notes
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Adam talk about in this episode:
Adam's professional background and how he got into product management.
Survival metrics as a concept were created by observing the process that goes into building a product. It's born out of the psychology of thinking about what the customer needs.
The mark of a good survival metric is action. The metric should be something that helps people in the organization understand what steps need to be taken and why those steps are important. Conversely, a bad survival metric has no direction - it’s more 'go with the flow', vague, and subjective.
Your company's metrics strategy is tied to the anchor of your vision and mission. This is important because it is what's going to drive your organization forward.
Survival metrics are tied to a company's culture and are developed through employee feedback. When building a product, find out what employees care about and what their incentives are. The more that product managers do this, the better understanding they would have of the company culture.
Every project product managers work on should have at least one aspect of the 'stop, pivot, and invest' concept. This will get product managers in the mindset of not just thinking about the bad, but also the good.
When Adam trains new product managers on survival metrics, he first gives them small projects to observe how they assess them. He gradually introduces the concept of survival metrics after a few weeks.
Adam shares advice he gives to budding product managers who aren't confident in their decision-making.
Succeeding in product management requires soft skills. It requires being humble enough to come up with multiple decisions and not knowing the answer immediately. Product managers run into trouble when they act on things they have little or no information on.
Adam lists the types of things that have worked to break down barriers and make product teams more collaborative.
Resources Adam Thomas | LinkedIn | Twitter
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: How many times have I know in my career? I've gone up to somebody and said, I'm glad we shipped that on time, but if I were to head one more engineer because I saw X happen, we could have got done a month earlier, right? And then your boss goes or whoever's in charge of that goes, oh, you should have just told me.
I don't know how much more than gladly giving you that, right? And you just go off, slap your head and you go, ah, this could have been, you know, I could I had an easier life, you know, over the X amount of months that I've been working on this. And so that's why I Encourage folks, don't least think about one each because it gets folks in the mindset of thinking about not just the bad, but also the good.
Right? What do we care about? And PM's often talk about. We always talk about priorities and what we care about, right? Like, it's not just the - right, it's also the positive, right? What are we willing to invest in at the cost of everything else? And so getting that on the table can really help, you know, my main point of when I think product managers should be doing, right?
Which is increase the decision Fitness of the company or team. They're on
Speaker 2: 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. Welcome to another episode of the product Thinking podcast. Today, I'm joined by Adam Thomas who's a very experienced product. Leader currently leading a very large team and growing, we were just talking about this at smartrecruiters.
So, welcome Madam. Thank you, Melissa. Yeah. Great to have you. So we knew each other from New York and then I moved out of New York and I'm sad that we don't see each other at our little agile, experience design, dinners anymore.
But tell our audience about you. I've known you for a long time. So share with them. How you got into product management You've gotten into product leadership. All the wonderful stuff you do.
Speaker 1: I am a product leader. How did I become one? So, my story starts off like a lot of folks, I tried to make a company. And so I made this company called The Gamer studio and this was way back in the early 2000s where I felt the need to build things from scratch, right. So I built my own CMS and I said, I want to talk about video games.
So I assembled a ragtag crew folks and we just built a video game site. And that be the same game site grew. I think we ended. It up around the mid, I said, kind of material campsites, just enough to like be respected. Jump it tells you things like podcasting and video early but I kind of lost my heart for it and ended up selling it after a couple of years after that, I went to S when I first came to New York and ended up at this company called dtcc, where believe her heart had stopped working on mainframes, right?
It was a Mainframe engineer for a few years and then suddenly a mentor just kind of came by and said, hey, I got this Products that I need you to, like, handle product management isn't a term. That is why we kind of thrown around then, right?
You just kind of started doing that type of stuff. So I started kind of building out the experience for our users. I started doing interviews. I started managing that software development lifecycle. Next thing, you know they kind of grew and the next thing, you know, I had about five products up to and including, you know, our new initiative.
So I started working with things like a eye relatively early at the beginning of the 2010's and then got pretty bored. Because I was working in finance and that world can get very plus not is right. And so, I think it. So I decided to jump into another startup called arcade school. And I had been inspired by my MBA Journey.
So for those who don't know, India is a program started by Seth Godin. Basically it's a Leadership Retreat. And the impactful thing about it was, it was a whole brand new way of learning, right?
It was offline, but it was Very immersive. And so I ended up joining that. It really inspired as well as talking to a lot of video game friends from that are trying to join industry and some recruiters that are trying to hire for the industry. And I think it remains to this day, entry-level employment is really screwed up at these video game.
Companies, your Rockstar is your Tas and so we tried to fix it. It's been about a year doing that and shout out to West kale because she's not killing it with her company, right? Same kind of we're saying MBA folks, we're out here in the world. So So my fellow and behaviors howdy after that ended up at philosophy where I started working for Emerson.
Who he mentioned earlier started doing some work for companies like Google PWC Casper. Left their ended up as a head of product for a company called informed where I worked in Amazon World, focusing on helping third party, folks do pricing for their products.
And if you ever wondered why prices change on Amazon, buy me a drink and I'll walk you through it. It's really visiting an unfair but Amazon. What can you expect? And lastly that led me here to smartrecruiters where I'm leading the Enterprise experienced teams. Figure out how to help our customers get from high 200.
Speaker 2: That's great. So I also worked in finance when I got started I was working at Barclays Bank and I was a developer who like weasel my way back into product because I hated developing. So what are you saying that? I was like all this resonate so much with me right now and then I left and I went to be but I can't open Sky, which was a very tiny startup.
But I had an offer from Amazon. And when you were talking about the pricing stuff that made me think about it. Because I interviewed there as a product manager, but when they talked about product manager back in the day, then it was literally managing the products they sold on the website. So when I got there, I thought it was more like a software product management job.
It was like, no. Can you figure out the pricing for these Adobe software products? And I was like, oh no, this is not what I want to do. This is not it at all, but I thought that Really funny. I was like, oh actually know how some of that works as well because of that interview that I didn't really mean to take.
Yeah, like
Speaker 1: it's so fascinating to see how that has evolved you know, spending a couple years in Amazon world like it's all very automated now and it's a huge part of their strategy in terms of keeping people engaged Amazon's very much like to see no in that respect. And they've really trained it to be that way for both buyer and seller. And so, having all these learning, all these mechanisms. And having to sit there and kind of figure out these algorithms and seeing how a I gets involved in all that fun stuff. Like it's a journey and I think the biggest blue line is Amazon wins, whatever happened to
Speaker 2: the casino. So, the core right there,
Speaker 1: I'll just always wins the house of
Speaker 2: Amazon is really fascinating. So if you haven't seen online, everybody should check this out. Adam is a speaker and a writer and he makes fantastic blog post. I always liked your Concepts that you come up with but you've done some really cool writing. And one of the most recent articles, I don't know, if it's very recent, it's January, you publicly published in January.
Yeah, is about survival metrics. And when I read this, I was like, yes, this is like what were missing like we talked about success metrics so much, but Adam came up with this concept of survival metrics which I think is so awesome and so needed when we talk about product strategy and product management. So can you talk a little bit about like, what our survival metrics and how did you come up with that
Speaker 1: concept? Sure. And so just a very short definition is survival metrics, help a product team. Determine if an initiative is worth investing in more pivoting, or stopping completely and how I came up with this. Let's I spent a lot of time building products and one of the things that happens when you start building is, it's almost like a train, right?
Like, once you start making decisions, once you start thinking about what the customer needs. Once you start thinking about Revenue, once you start thinking about all these things, what started off As a project that malleable and we want to do the right thing and we want to be iterative can soon turned into something that is just yet. As I said, a runaway train where there's a bunch of bias involved, where people ultimately want to ship it because they feel like shipping it, right?
And so in Psychology, this is called the sunk cost fallacy, right? Where once we start investing into something, we want to see it through even if it's not really good for our ultimate goal.
So survival metrics is really born out of that psychology and Really what I've seen with product development, teams over the years that I've been doing this and how they aren't able to make decisions as it relates to the survival of a product, over things like success and wrap
Speaker 2: them. I love that concept. And you really dive into in this article to about different types of survival metrics, right? Like the different types of forms that they could actually take. And one of them is, for example, like pivoting like a pivot statement and then you've got Investments. What are those like a Since that you should be thinking about when you create a survival metric, like what's the mark of a great survival metric?
Speaker 1: I think the mark of a great survival metric is action in that metric. Should be a colonel. That helps the people as they look at it, understand what action needs to be taken and why it's important, right? So a bad survival metric would be like, you know. Yeah, if things start, you know, things go bad, I think we should change direction, right?
What does bad mean? What does change direction me? Now, why is this important to anyone right? Those things? Get quickly brushed aside because people start to go into bias territory, right? What means bad to you? Is not bad for me. I think a great survival metric right thinking about like a pivot statement should look like something around the lines of like if AWS if the AWS them is projected to jump, ten percent, more due to a production release, we need to discuss ways to lower the projected Bill immediately.
Right in that statement, there are actions, there's the concept there's a subject, right? Notice the aid of West, we know what the Delta is, or what the changes for us to start thinking about, what the pivot, aren't the pivot. And then we we actually in in that in that metric. We also have what we'll do.
We'll discuss ways to lower that protected Bill. And so, it's a jumping off point that folks are agreed to before we even begin to get into that second cost.
Speaker 2: So when we're thinking about survival metrics as it relates to like a product strategy or a strategy deployment, right? I think about a lot of things with like I've got the company level success metrics in the direction we want to go. Like, let's expand into new markets, let's like expand geographically or whatever it is to start, you know, increasing our revenue and costs of top.
Then we've got our like product initiatives that are all about the big. We were just talking about this right before we start recording. But like those big, I really liked your phrase for this like 10 to pull items that are going to be the things that we would want to go sell and get, like, customers, excited about, right?
Like those are the huge initiatives that, like moving. Buddy forward. So that's how we kind of think about those. And then we've got the future development, which I call options, right on the bottom. So each one of those usually has some kind of success metrics. How do you think about survival metrics when it comes to those types of things, right?
Like, whether it's initiatives are at the feature level or at the company level, are there different levels? Did it tie closely to the strategy? Like where do they fit into this kind of
Speaker 1: deployment? It's important to note that your metric strategy regardless of whatever metrics. They are are tied to an anchor, right? That's your vision and strategy, really your Mission Vision strategy. And so, before even beginning, thinking about how the Fidelity should look like between these kind of different sizes of releases, right?
We got to make sure that it all kind of hangs back on that anchor. And so for bigger releases like your temple releases, it's important to make sure that these discussions happen as early as possible for things like 10 poll released Since these are the things that are going to drive your company forward, right? And so because they're that thing, that's going to drive the company for they're the ones that's going to be there, the releases that are going to have the most biased attached to them.
Once you start going to things where you know your director levels, carrier directors care about or your VPS care about the things that the CEO is asking for status, for making sure that you have a story that's tied to these metrics becomes extremely important because Once that Machinery starts going kind of you're Off to the Races, which is a very different when you compare that to smaller, like, you know, kind of feature level not to be flip it.
But like, you know, we're going to change the button here or we're going to add this like different language here, right? These are things that make it certain customers excited but they're not going up to that leadership role
Speaker 2: or not like moving those things. Don't like move the company forward, really changing the thing on a button, it's usually not going to create massive amounts of Revenue otherwise and if it I was like wow did you just say something crazy like that? It was probably a good move but I don't know what you had enough fun before. So
Speaker 1: by here like you just made the change to buy here. Yeah well to buy big chains, it's very important to think about the story as these changes become more visible right as these changes to your system. Become more visible thinking about the metric as it relates to the story as it relates to your strategy vision. Mission becomes supercritical, because you're dealing with a whole lot of bias. A whole lot of people care, having been very prepared with these metrics and getting pre-approvals getting people engaged early in the process matters. So much more of a stage
Speaker 2: for sure. I like to with these metrics are not just when I talk about my strategy deployment, like, process stuff that I write about in the book. A lot of times, I talk about things like guardrails. We're going this way and this is how we define success, but then there are guards. I was about like what should we not be doing?
And that's what I particularly loved reading things like the stop or the pivot type of metrics that you had in here like those are guardrails and I never liked really explained in the book. What that meant I just was like, I was things that you should, you should look for in. Did you know, it was just not something?
I was able to get to in the amount of pages I had, but to me, I'm like reading your things. And I'm like, yes, this is what I meant by guardrails, like nobody's doing an initiative or building a feature because usually not initiative where it's like reduce our Amazon costs. Like, you just said, right?
It's like we're building this new feature. We're building this new tent pole or something, but we can't actually do that. If it starts to cost more to actually have that future than it, does you get the revenue from that feature? And that's why I think these are perfect because we never stopped actually think about that.
Like what would make this feature? Not be feasible or we could be making tons of Revenue off of it, but that doesn't mean that it's actually worth while
Speaker 1: it ties perfectly. The work you've been doing in product Ops, right? Who cares? If a feature exists and looks beautiful and works. Well, if it's going to drive your company to bankruptcy, right? It's and so, installing guardrails like this or survival metrics that really speak to the survivability or the margins of whatever that we're pushing out.
Gives people an understanding in a really simple way, what those guardrails are and why they're important. So that when you're going around telling the story about this feature, When you run into those guardrails, it's not surprised that we need to slow down and figure things out and be you already have that Colonel to the story, right of what is going to drive that next change because as you, well know, rule number one is, always, do not let people find out, right? Because that's when bias really starts to jump in and take over.
So, as long as we're continuing telling the story, right? We're continuing to push his metrics out again, people can start to understand those Rails and aren't afraid of them?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, when you're thinking about developing these two, right? Let's say you've got part of your strategy where we actually did validate that. We want to go after this feature, we start to build it. When do you start to think about your survival metrics and how do you come up with them? Right? Because some of them, I can see people just not even thinking of right to get there. So, like, what's your process for, really sitting down and going, this is how I developed my survival
Speaker 1: metrics the beautiful thing. Thing about survival metrics, is it something that builds with the company? It's tied to company culture. It's tied to how the company thinks, right? How they operate, not how they aspire to operate, but how they operate. And what I mean by that is the way you get these metrics is that you go out and you ask a couple of questions.
They try to get at what are the things that people care about as it relates to whatever we're building or just whatever their incentives are as they go out and do. Job. You know, 925 I so some questions are, what are some non negotiables for your team? What are some non negotiables for the company? Or what are some markers that you need to see to commit more resources to this initiative or how much are you willing to let this initiative cost us?
And these questions can take a whole bunch of spins in different paths depending on who you're talking to. If you're talking to a finance person or knobs person that's a completely different answer to how much are we willing to let this initiative cost us then if you're talking to an engineer, During lead or director, they're thinking in terms of resources the other is thinking in terms of money.
And so as you start to build out what this map looks like, some of the things are going to be project dependent. Hey we want to make sure that this is supposed to be a revenue generating profit profitable project versus things that. Okay this is an investment. We don't mind kind of letting this be a loss leader for a bit but the other things that you're going to pull out our things that are company-specific, right?
So your team's or your He's real values, are going to start to pull themselves out the more projects you do this with right? For example, an article, I talked about how company that I'm using bobko. Eventually they get to the point that they know that they do not want to use third-party sources in terms of pull out data, right?
That may not come out. The first time, it may come up the second, third fourth, fifth sixth time and now you have an actual value that your company lives by. And so again as you use this more and more and more, right and get To this kind of flywheel effect when you start to understand the culture of whatever the company that you're working for or this or what you're doing.
And also you start to build out kind of what the difference is speaking to what we were talking about earlier between these large tent pole initiatives, what are the survival metrics that tend to pop up there, pursues initiative versus features and everything in between
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Have one of each? Is it like some of them lend towards stop? Some of them went towards
Speaker 1: invest when it comes to each of these things? I like for teams to think about at least one H because especially as it relates to invest because it's easy to talk about things that how to stop things or why to stop things are either pivoting but the investing. That's right. Can also Be just as important.
How many times have I know in my career? I've gone up to somebody and said, I'm glad we ship that on time. But if I were to head one more engineer because I saw X happen, we could have got done a month earlier, right? And then your boss goes or whoever's in charge of that goes, oh, you should have just told me.
I want to know how much more than glad to give you that, right? And you just go off, slap your head and you go ah this could have been, you know, I could I had an easier life, you know, over the X amount of months that I have been working on this. And so, That's why I encourage folks. To least think about 1H because it gets folks in the mindset of thinking about not just the bad, but also the good.
Right? What do we care about and PM's often talk about. We always talk about priorities and what we care about, right? Like, it's not just the - right, it's also the positive, right? What are we willing to invest in at the cost of everything else? And so getting that on the table can really help, you know, my main point of what I think product managers should be doing, right? Which is increase the decision Fitness, Of the company or team that
Speaker 2: they're on. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and I also like that structure even for like training new product managers about the things that they don't often think about. And I know you are in the process, you just told me about onboarding eight new product managers, which is pretty impressive that you found eight.
So I can just park it right now, which one I feel like everybody that asked me had a higher product managers. Should I go ask you that now? Because I have not found a product managers freely out there but that's pretty cool. So, You're bringing them in. How are you training them? Like on Survival metrics.
Like what's your process for onboarding people and getting them up to speed with your way of
Speaker 1: working? Well, first, I gotta shout out Kate Lido. I think her work is phenomenal on this stuff and not a self brag, but I do have a little bit of me in the book. I have a column sum for hooray, for Kate, duration me don't pick up hiring product managers. It's a great book. Inkay was
Speaker 2: honor podcast too early on and she did mention you, too.
Speaker 1: I'm around. So I think I'm boarding is difficult, right? Because not only, you have to figure out who your p.m. is versus who they presented themselves to be a versus the company needs and versus what the company thinks a product person does, right? And so as a product leader, you're constantly kind of dancing around this.
However, there are some Bedrock things that are important to you. Survival metrics is one for me. And so, as I bring on new PM's, this is usually A New Concept to them. They may read your book and thought about guard rails, but like how do you operationalize that? And so what I tend to do is I set aside time and give smaller projects where I can start to look at how they assess these things.
Because as much as I love survival metrics, honestly do not care about how you get to the place, right? As long as you get there, I assess how you're thinking, right?
How is a p.m. thinking about these things? And after the first kind of three weeks, three to six weeks once we started to get into a regular Cadence of Hey, this is me. We have a one-on-one Cadence going. You're starting to get in with your team's. Starting to understand your try adjusting, do all that work.
Then it becomes a time to just introduce this concept slowly. Right? So that by the end of the kind of like first quarter that I'm with them, they're starting to think about prioritization and these guardrails in that way. And so the reason why I used to just jump into things like this very early as a newbie product leader.
You know Pat will be practically a bad light
Speaker 2: because right. Like one
Speaker 1: thing I think you Sighs. Once you start onboarding enough PMS, if they have just a world of things to get into, whenever they're joining your company. And it's a lot easier to gain trust from the things that people are screaming about them for right being helpful there, right versus trying to make many you use as you're trying to, like Create and Craft your team culture.
So, take the time to take time, get the critical things out of the way first help them solve whatever fires because PM's never really, it's very rare for PMS to just land in places. Where everything is just hunky-dory and everybody's happy super rare. If you have found an environment like that stay for a while because I'm telling you it's wild out here and really just as a product leader really just kind of take them on slowly.
The idea like the onboarding process I think in general for new p.m. is like six months, right? Think about it? Next time, scope, as opposed to like two weeks a month, even that first quarter
Speaker 2: when you're thinking about like, your new product managers and you're trying to assess So like, where their minds are at early on? How are you telling if they're making the right decisions, how are you knowing? I've worked with a lot of Founders. I work with a lot of people who always ask, like, how can I tell if my product managers are good, right?
And I find that a lot of times to the blame the product managers, but there actually are good, right? They just have no idea how to actually look at the decision making quality and it might be that some of the problems are actually happening further down the line and the development or further Upstream. Stream in the decision-making.
So what's your advice for people who might not be really up to speed about? This is a decision-making, like what do you look for in your team to say? Like, yes, this person gets it, maybe they need just a smidge, a coaching, right? But they can actually make great decisions.
Speaker 1: I look at two things. One, what information are they Gathering when it comes to making a decision? What I'll ask someone to do is kind of break down your last decision for what winning who did you talk to? And I'm trying to get the outcome kind of out of it, right? Because That could have been luck either way, good luck, bad luck.
And so I want to look at who they talk to you. Haven't they come to that decision? What were some of the alternate routes that they thought of right? If somebody's not thinking about, you know, option, b option C are probably not thinking about the decision, right? And then also, what did they not want to do?
How do they come up with that anti list of thanks, right. And generally kind of digging into those questions. Usually in an informal setting, right? Like I don't do this during like 10 once I just said if we were Walking, but it's supposed covid, right? I'm on the phone and we're kind of walking, and talking, right, let's talk through if they're giving a lot of thought to the decisions but they're kind of making, they can do better at like framing or they can do better at communicating things to people or like, if it's a technical thing, then it's like, okay, let's go.
Let's get you some coaching, that's something we can fix, right? But if they're think of themselves as like king of the world, or I'm the decision person, right? Or this is my favorite time, but I Yo man people come to me, make the ideas and I execute then it's not going to work, right? Because you come from the cowboy School of product management and I don't have time for helpless
Speaker 2: like that. Yeah, that becomes like an ego thing. That's like a personality thing where it's funny. Like I've been interviewing so many people about the podcast, so many different product leaders. And that is the one thing that keeps coming up. Like, I look for people who are curious and I look or people who are humble, right enough to come up with multiple decisions and maybe not know the answer right off the bat.
And I think that makes such a world of difference for succeeding in product management and it's something that we don't really look for in the soft skill Department. Sometimes. Like, we people who don't know how to hire product managers start to gravitate towards people with the bigger bravado and the quick to act - right.
And that's where you land yourself in trouble because they'll Act on things that they don't have information on and we end up with a bunch of product. Managers your ego, Maniacs, who don't question their decisions on who don't go into really exploring all the options that you're actually talking about.
And looking at things like survival metrics from an angle of. Maybe this isn't the right thing to do and how do we know if it's not and when do we actually take the time to stop and consider that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's so, so, so, so critical. I'm joking about Cowboys but like that's kind of how they act. Right? Like, you know, there, they rolled in mrs. Helm Town, being the company. They have their pistols on their hips and their to create order right there. The new sheriff in town, right? The wrestling through 10th. Like, I don't know, where this metaphor is going anyway, other than
Speaker 2: Justice, it's just is like they're the
Speaker 1: Clint Eastwood type right it all figured out and so you know, mention these types in the past, right? Like even if they come across, has the genius product manager, his They got their last eight releases the road and perfect right. There are bodies in their wake, right? Like people weren't going to talk to that customer.
Success manager that has to manage the Fallout of that sales person that like has to scream kind of internally as they wait for this genius, the come across and give them the word from high, they're not really cross collaborative. And right now as product, it's more complicated, we don't have time for this anymore. There's a lot more regulation to have.
There's a lot more people interested, their new voices, No points of view and to be honest, most software developments bad, right? So if you want to, you want to make something better. You have to embrace the new way and that's mostly cross collaborative and a PM's, not going to get there if they have too much pride and ego.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were just talking about those two with the sales team and how the sales team is always the bad guy to the product managers, right? And they are like, oh, they're awful, they're just, you know, selling ahead of the road map. And they just tell everybody everything, they don't want to work with us, like how do Get your product manager is to be more collaborative with the sales team. Like, what are the types of things that you've seen work to help break down those barriers besides, like not hiring Cowboys?
Speaker 1: Well, I think one of my roles as a product leader, is to build Bridges to these other organizations, right, regardless of where the culture is, where, when I land there, my job is to go get coffee with folks, start to interrogate like, why things are the way they are. Why aren't we working cross collaboratively and then start to build? Out a process or ways for people to connect because once I start having these coffees and you know, these coffees range from, you know, your VP is your c-suite, you down to your.
I see you said of find out these projects that people are working on and then you start find out targeted places that you can move people. Hey, you're the p.m. for Project X well Project X, you know, the salesperson become a manager for Project X. It's been looking for, you know, some, you know, in a permanent, she'll be super happy.
If you just go over there and just just talk to her. For a second. All it takes is a small conversations, right?
And back to that non cowboy thing, I think even if a PM has been trapped in the culture where it's very siloed, they start to see their value and what they can add, some other teams that starts to create this effect, where things become former cross collaborative, as opposed to sales to sales ahead of the roadmap, engineering is not doing enough marketing. Doesn't really Feed Us good leads. So like I said, we're not really getting what like, all these excuses that'll come up from different teams are about the Current teams when you have your internal product meetings, right?
They probably don't talk. I can almost guarantee you. They don't talk. And so, I think if you're a product leader in that space, if you hear people complaining about the sales team, may, you know, what you should do, you should not jump in to that complaining. You should probably go to the nearest sales like leader that you can find and just go, hey, I'm Adam nice to meet you.
I'm the product leader 4X. Yeah, I'd like to talk to you about what's going on, how are things and so Eventually you'll find out where like sales people aren't sociopaths. There aren't really like people are trying to go do a good job. Most of the time. The only thing that you need to do right now is to just create that bridge. Let's go say hello. It'll do
Speaker 2: wonders. Yeah. Do you recommend to, like involving the other teams and setting survival metrics is you mentioned, like, pops can give you the insights. Like, what's your product managers? Do to be collaborative
Speaker 1: there. I think at first driving one-on-one conversations, with these Different stakeholders. Because it's going to be a trust-building exercise, a trust-building exercise, because if they see, especially when you start doing presentations about progress and people start seeing their needs in it and thoughts reflect back to them before they have to ask.
They go oh that person product person. It care do that together as a team all of a sudden their team thinks very highly of your team and that's when you start getting that trust maturity and from there you can just involve each other in the process, right? It gets really easy to just go and walk on by and say hey, we talked about I still like cops about uws cost, is that changed?
Let's go get a coffee and talk about like kind of what are your initiatives for this quarter as a team and let's make sure that gets reflected back into what we're building.
Speaker 2: Think that's great advice for product managers to help step out and meet the rest of the teams and make sure their metrics are solid from every perspective to. So thanks so much for being on the podcast. Adam, if people want to read more about your work and your blog post, where should they go?
Speaker 1: This should go to the Adam Thomas.com I promise you, I am
Speaker 2: I'm not a narcissist. I couldn't get Adam time to Psycho. The atoms on the stock. Calm also Twitter, of course and I have a sub stack like every other product leader. So you'll find me at the Adam Thomas that subset.com and all these links. I'm sure will be in the show. Yes, a will be. So thanks again.
Thank you for tuning into the product Thinking podcast and Emerson. I hope you're listening to this so you can see us name. Drop you a billion times. We'll see you next week on Wednesday with another episode of dear Melissa. I'm not a narcissist. I couldn't get Adam time to Psycho. The atoms on the stock.
Calm also Twitter, of course and I have a sub stack like every other product leader. So you'll find me at the Adam Thomas that subset.com and all these links. I'm sure will be in the show. Yes, a will be. So thanks again. Thank you for tuning into the product Thinking podcast and Emerson. I hope you're listening to this so you can see us name.
Drop you a billion times. We'll see you next week on Wednesday with another episode of dear Melissa.
