In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about what responsibilities and roles a product manager should take on in various scenarios. She talks through working alongside a UX researcher, responsibilities around maintaining strategy when the bigger picture is unclear, and the do’s and don’ts of working under a new superior.
Show Notes
Q: When do you think a UX researcher should be involved to support discovery, and what activities should they take on within discovery?
Q: How should product managers maintain strategic fit in large corporations, especially in the midst of CEO changes, COVID-19, and new technology trends? How do you balance user-centricity versus internal business value and strategic fit? How am I responsible as a product manager to completely manage all of these vision changes versus what our senior management does, making sure our strategy is adapting?
Q: Do you have any advice for navigating the new normal [of having a new superior]?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
if you are changing your overall strategy constantly, and COVID's not the reason, right? Something like that, crazy market pressure isn't happening, that's not good. That's also telling me that strategy from a company level may be set too low. For example, like you may be communicating strategy as what you're doing with your products and not about what markets you wanna go into, where you wanna concentrate, how you might wanna be moving in those directions.
If you're missing that missing middle, like I said, it really connects those types of business objectives and business value pushes, which I call strategic intents, down to the product initiatives, which are what are we gonna do with our product? That's what I call the missing middle when it's not there. If those two layers of strategy are not synced up or one of them is gone, then you get what you're talking about, where you're swirling.
And the strategy changes a lot and it causes all the product managers to run around and try to figure out what they're doing and we're killing products left and right and we're just blaming it on not strategic fit. But the thing is.
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 in this way?
Hi, Melissa. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Melissa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we've got three great questions I'm gonna be answering all about roles in product management. How do you work with UX researchers?
How do you operate when your company's going through different strategy changes? And then also, what happens when you hire your boss? How does your role actually change? But before we get to that, I wanted to tell you too about our program called CPO Accelerator. CPO Accelerator, Chief Product Officer Accelerator, is a program for product leaders to really level them up to the C-suite.
So we teach you all about the things that you'll have to do to operate as an executive, like setting portfolio strategy and product strategy across multiple products, working with your board, working with your executive team, implementing product operations, growing your team, hiring product managers, all the things that you need to learn in order to make that leap into the C-suite. So we have these cohorts that we run twice a year in January and then also in the fall. In our January cohort, application date is coming up fast.
So you have until December to apply for that cohort. We only take about 20 people. It's a pretty rigorous process, but you will get access to some amazing fellow product leaders, and you'll get access to a group of expert chief product officers who love sharing their advice with our cohorts. So if you're interested in joining the CPO Accelerator, go to cpoaccelerator.com, check out the application, check out more about the program.
You'll get access to a great network and continue to get access to that even after the class.
And we've had some really awesome stories from our alumni making the leap into the CPO role, becoming a head of product over larger companies. Amazing to see the results. So that's why I continue to do it. I hope you'll consider applying. So for today though, we are going to dive into our questions on Dear Melissa.
First question, when do you think a UX researcher should be involved to support discovery? And what activities should they take on within discovery? I assume there's a spectrum for when a researcher should absolutely be involved to when it would be nice to have one. This is a really good question. So dedicated UX researchers tend to come in as a company scales.
Usually earlier stage companies don't have UX researchers. The product managers will take it on, the teams will take it on themselves. When you do have a UX researcher, you should really be leveraging them for their expertise, which is doing research. So that doesn't mean they replace doing research for product managers.
It means that they help and they aid them. As a product manager, you might want to partner with a UX researcher when you're doing a really big study. Let's say you have to go through all of your different customer segments, really see where the gaps are. You're doing a new strategic initiative where you're trying to reset your strategy, figure out what's coming next with the roadmap.
This would be a great time to bring on a UX researcher. What I would do as a product manager is sit down with them, define your segments, look at your personas, try to figure out what questions you're trying to answer with each of those personas, make a game plan for interviews, and then let the UX researchers go out and interview. As a product manager, you can come as well.
Maybe you're shadowing them, maybe you are running the interviews sometimes. You partner on this, you trade off on it depending on what you see fit. But in this case, if you let the UX researcher take the lead on a lot of this, they might be able to gather so many more insights while you're still working with the development team.
You can poke into those insights, but they should be really refining them, turning them into a concise document, highlighting the most important issues, most important problems, showing you snippets of the feedback as well, like anything that they recorded with the users, giving you transcripts so that you can see the results and then start to make decisions.
In Products Labs, when we were running deep dive insights, we would call them, our user researcher would go out on behalf of like the VP of product or sometimes like a new chief product officer was coming into these companies, do a big sweep of user research, anywhere from 10 to 20 customer interviews, distill that down into key insights that would drive roadmap related discussions, and then put them into a document and present it back. And this was awesome because it allowed us to focus on building what we needed to build while they were going out there doing the study, but then gathering all the insights, seeing it firsthand from the customers, and then also figuring out where we need to drill in more, do some follow-up research and go on with that. So that's a great way to utilize user researchers if you have them.
If you don't need to do a really big deep dive like that, you're just doing general research, user researchers are masters at their craft. So as a product manager, I'd sit down with them, be like, here's the interview questions I plan on asking, do you want to refine them with me?
What other methods could we use to actually test these things? How could we gather this information? Like maybe work with them to figure out different ways you can get that feedback. Maybe it's not all just customer interviews, lots of different things you could do like card sorting exercises or many other things to actually get the answers that you need.
That's when you rely on a user researcher to really give advice there. So when you think about like when they need to be absolutely involved, I think if you're ever gonna do a really big research study, go out there, like I said, to inform the roadmap, do a big push. Yeah, you should definitely go find somebody who knows how to do good user research so that you make sure that you're not wasting all of your time and your energy and getting the wrong results, which I've seen happen a lot.
I've seen people go out to do these big studies and they don't learn what they need to learn because of the quality of their questions. So that's when I think they need to be involved. When is it a nice to have, go all the way down on the other side of the spectrum.
Maybe you just need like a small little piece of feedback. It's pretty tactical. You can watch a couple of users that you know about to see how they do it, gain some insight. Maybe it's a nice to have at that point, but you might not necessarily need a user researcher there. But I would think of when is the risk high that we learn the wrong things from our users when we go out to do user research?
And then that is where I would bring along a user researcher because they can actually make sure that all of your lines of questioning and the things that you're getting out of it are gonna be the stuff that you actually wanna learn. So that's how I would think about it. Fantastic role to partner with product management.
User researchers are fantastic. They're really good at their craft. And if you do have one, definitely utilize them. Bring them along, tag team all your research. It's so much better to have many eyes on research than one pair of eyes because you might find other insights that other people didn't see or they might find insights that you didn't see.
So definitely utilize your user researchers if you have them. Second question. Dear Melissa, how should product managers maintain strategic fit in large corporations, especially in the midst of CEO changes, COVID and new technology trends? I'm coming from a financial institution that has separated its innovation group from its business.
And in the last few years, a large number of products were stopped due to a lack of strategic fit, including my own product. The bank has a very loose definition of strategic fit referring only to fee income, customer engagement, data and competitive advantage. How can we balance user centricity versus internal business value and strategic fit?
And how am I responsible as a product manager to completely manage all of these vision changes versus what our senior management does making sure our strategy is adapting? Really good question. There's a couple things in here that I wanna call out. One, you shouldn't really separate this innovation group from the business group.
I don't think that's typically a wise move unless you plan to completely rebuild everything that you have and you wanna incubate it like a startup and the rest of the business doesn't have any of the expertise needed to actually execute on that.
Only time where you wanna take that innovation group and go like put it in a corner. Otherwise, what happens is you start to innovate over in the corner, but you don't know if the rest of the company can actually adopt and utilize that once you reach product market fit there and you wanna spread it or scale it across the rest of the company. So I don't like separating out innovation groups into like a completely separate, not defined by strategic strategy that the rest of the business does.
I've never seen it work. I have seen lots of people do it, but I've never seen it actually be successful. An example of one financial institution I saw do this though, they had everybody kind of running all these experiments, trying to find these different innovative products, building them, getting to a certain point.
And then there was no buy-in to actually utilize those in the rest of the company, so they would die. And that's how things get killed, like your product, I'm assuming. Now, also you're saying the strategy keeps changing.
Like for COVID, totally understand that. Everybody's strategy went out the window. Whatever roadmap you had planned in 2020, it was gone in March. No company was spared. So that I can understand. But if you are changing your overall strategy constantly and COVID's not the reason, right? Something like that, crazy market pressure isn't happening.
That's not good. That's also telling me that strategy from a company level may be set too low. For example, like you may be communicating strategy as what you're doing with your products and not about what markets you wanna go into, where you wanna concentrate, how you might wanna be moving in those directions.
If you're missing that missing middle, like I said, really connects those types of business objectives and business value pushes, which I call strategic intents, down to the product initiatives, which are what are we gonna do with our product? That's what I call the missing middle when it's not there.
If those two layers of strategy are not synced up or one of them is gone, then you get what you're talking about, where you're swirling and the strategy changes a lot and it causes all the product managers to run around and try to figure out what they're doing and we're killing products left and right. And we're just blaming it on not strategic fit. But the thing is, customer engagement, data, competitive advantage, fee income, like you're talking about, that's not a strategy.
Those sound like metrics to me. That doesn't sound like a strategy. I don't know if your company actually knows what a strategy is, like what a good strategy looks like. And I don't think they have one from what you're telling me. This is one of the most common things I see when I enter companies, especially large companies that are learning how to innovate with software more.
They don't understand how to set those directions at the company level and then break it down into high enough level initiatives and product where you're not changing course every single day. So for you, right, like what do you do as a product manager to mitigate these changes?
I think you have to keep going back and asking them why, right, like why are we changing that? What are you trying to achieve? Well, when I go into companies and I see this as an issue, I start at the top and I start to ask them about their business objectives. I'm like, what customer segments do you wanna target?
What are we trying to grow in our existing customer segments? Are we trying to go into new ones? How would you prioritize that? What's more important? Let's say I executed on this roadmap and at the end of the year, it comes out and we're leading in this customer segment. We've grown that, but this thing over here was jeopardized.
Is that success? Right, like start asking questions just to try to figure out and pull it out of leadership about what they measure success with. When you have that, then you can start to make strategic decisions about the product on how you're going to achieve it. And you can write that up as the overarching company level.
Now that stuff shouldn't change unless you get hit in the face with something like COVID. Like that stuff should stay pretty standard year over year for a couple years at least so that you can then make the technology decisions on the ground floor, working with the developers that will help push you towards those big business metrics.
So as a product manager, though, you say, what's my responsibility in managing these vision changes versus what senior management should be doing? Like your product vision should stay pretty stable. The company vision should stay pretty stable. If they're changing those all the time, that's a bad leadership team.
They don't know, I think, what level they should be operating at. So I would push back and say, all right, tell me, like, don't change this vision. Tell me what the outcomes are that we're trying to achieve here. Can we all commit to these objectives and these outcomes and where we wanna go? Based on that, this is where I think we should prioritize our product initiatives.
These visions will stay the same. This one might be tweaked or changed. That's how that should all flow. And when new technology trends come out, you can look at that and say not, hey, we have to embrace AI because AI is a new hotness. This is what I hear every day. Or, hey, crypto's out there. Let's embrace crypto.
It's more like, all right, to achieve our strategic objectives as a company and the outcomes of where we wanna be, can we harness these technologies to provide more value to our customers or to do our business in a different way that makes it better? That's how we should be looking at new technology trends. Not, hey, let's just jump on the crypto bandwagon because it's cool.
That's how we have to think about all these things that come up. We have to align it back to our strategy of where we wanna go as a company and then make decisions about the product roadmap about where they might be able to fit in. That's how we need to handle it. And as a product manager, you're not in charge of the company vision.
You're not in charge of the company strategy. If you are getting that, I would try pushing back. Like I said, try really digging into what those outcomes are and trying to communicate how your roadmap is gonna achieve those outcomes and how you're making decisions in face of new information to change your roadmap to still get to those outcomes faster.
Hopefully that helps you with that.
But definitely a big issue that I see everywhere is just a lack of really clear strategy. Last question, dear Melissa, after 11 years in product as a senior product person, always figuring things out for myself, we've just hired a CPO to work above me. I was very involved in the hiring process so I'm excited to work for her and she has solid experience working in startups like ours, Amazon and Microsoft.
Do you have any advice for navigating my new normal? First of all, congratulations. Like awesome that you hired a boss above you. Even when you've been doing this for so long and figuring it out for yourself, if you wanna get to the next level, if you really wanna learn more, you should look for people who've done this in different ways or in other ways or have more experience, right?
This is a great opportunity for you because you've figured it out for yourself but now you're gonna see how somebody else does it. You can compare notes, you're gonna get mentored, you're gonna get leveled up and then you can go be the most senior product person, the CPO at another company one day.
So the fact that you have the foresight to do this, the fact that you helped with the onboarding process and helped to find her, that's awesome. What should you do though? Remember, like you don't get to make the shots anymore. They're calling the shots, so that's a big thing. Remember, like this is now your boss, they're gonna set the strategies, they're gonna give you direction and now you have to go figure out what's the best way to meet the direction that they give you with your parts of the product.
So it's gonna be different. It might be uncomfortable, right? Because you're probably making all the decisions before on your own and now you've got somebody above you who's gonna be taking on a large part of that. It can also feel much better too. I don't know about you, but I've seen in a lot of situations when people weren't ready for that level yet, weren't ready for the CPO level, but they were playing it, they were stressed out.
They were like, I don't know how to do all these things. I wish I had somebody to learn from. So take advantage of that, right? See how they set strategy.
You are probably gonna be their right-hand person because you've got all the domain knowledge. You've been there for a very long time. You used to be the most senior person. Form an excellent relationship with that person. They're gonna teach you everything. They're gonna need help. Good CPOs know they won't do it themselves.
They need to involve the whole team. So make sure that you let her know you're at her disposal. All the knowledge that you have, you're gonna try to give to her. You wanna help, you wanna learn these things. And I also would be clear about what you wanna learn from her. Like, I'm excited for you to come in.
I really would love to learn how to set strategy across portfolio level. I wanna know how you interact with executives better. Here's where I've been struggling. Like, take advantage of that. Take advantage of having somebody there to learn from because that's gonna make you a better chief product officer in the future.
So I think, one, take a step back and realize you're not calling the shots anymore. Don't try to, just concentrate on your piece. Two, make sure that you form a really good relationship with the CPO.
And three, make sure that she knows what you need to learn and that you're involved in those things so that eventually you could be the CPO at the next company maybe, or a company after that. And you've learned from somebody who's really good at it. You've watched them, you've studied them, and now you've gained those skills as well.
All right, that's it for Dear Melissa this week. As a reminder, again, if you're interested in CPO Accelerator, if you wanna learn how to get to the C-suite, like our last question here, go to cpoaccelerator.com and apply before December. We would love to have you in the cohort. I'm looking forward to reading all of those applications as well.
In the meantime, if you love Product Thinking Podcasts, please submit all of your questions to dearmelissa.com. We go through these every week, pick out those questions, and every other week, record a Dear Melissa episode. So can't wait to see all the questions and things you are thinking about. Go to dearmelissa.com to submit them, and then also subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss out every Wednesday when we launch a new episode.
I'll see you next time.
