In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers a subscriber’s question about ‘soft skills’ and why they are equally as important as hard skills.
Show Notes
Q: What would you say to someone who's concerned about their assertiveness?
Q: What resources or experiences would you recommend for people who recognize the need for hard skills as part of product, but who would intentionally like to cultivate these soft skills (empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence) as well?
Q: What would you recommend a team of product managers to do if they’re headed by a CTO who does not have time for the team, or product management know-how? Can a product team ever be successful if they are led by someone who doesn’t seem to have organizational power?
Going to the C-suite yourselves may not be the option, but how do you surface up the problem? If it's a good C-suite they should start to see that this is an issue because the team might not be performing the way that they actually expected to be. I think you can go to the C-suite to have conversations about your individual products, not necessarily the same product leader but helps surface up what good looks like.
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we're going to talk a lot about soft skills, although I really hate that term. I don't think these are very soft. But there's stuff about really, you know, your self-awareness, your emotional intelligence, how do you communicate with people?
So we've got lots of great questions lined up here. So let's dive in and answer your questions. First question, Dear Melissa, what would you say to someone who's concerned about their assertiveness and feels like they're too kind to people when it comes to deadlines and undelivered work?
Sometimes I feel like if I was much more of a doer or a little bit more aggressive on my product team, things would get done quicker. For example, if the executive comes in and questions why things haven't been done and why we are still lagging, she really lights a fire under the team. Great question. I'm going to answer that right after this message. All right, we're back and we're talking about assertiveness. So there's two words in here that are kind of sticking out to me, right? We've got assertive and you're talking about being more aggressive on things.
Now, I want to be careful with the language that we use on this because a lot of times women get labeled aggressive if they're being assertive. That has actually happened to me before. I was running a team in a startup that we were founding, and I'm just like a naturally pretty assertive person. And when I was talking to the team or trying to say what we were going to do or what direction we were going in, I had a man kind of blow up at me and tell me that I was too aggressive and that I was just telling him what to do all the time and it wasn't okay.
And that really killed my confidence a little bit. I was like, man, what am I doing that is making people feel this way? And I had other men on the team say the same thing where they were like, well, you don't really talk to us nicely. This was in Italy as well. So that barrier was a whole nother thing.
But this is happening to me for the first time, everybody's telling me I'm too aggressive, what's going on. And I'm just talking the way that I normally talk, doing the things that I normally did when I was a product manager. So I was confused.
And it was interesting because about six months later, our whole startup blew up, everything. We all like went our separate ways. It was totally fine. But one of the guys who did say that about me came back and he said, I want to apologize. I realized that you weren't really doing anything that you weren't supposed to be doing.
I was just not used to taking orders from a woman and we're friends now. We talked about it. He was like, I learned something about myself that I never thought I would learn before. I never thought I was that person. Right. And that's acceptable, right. To understand that you have that trigger, come back, apologize for it and move on.
But I want to be careful here because it's not necessarily about aggression, right. And we don't want to come off as aggressive, but a lot of people think sometimes any sort of assertiveness in women is aggressive. So let's just be careful on that for a minute and be aware of that to be aware of how that might come off to other people.
Not saying that you shouldn't do it. That's their problem, not yours for like believing that you're aggressive when you're not being.
But I believe the way to handle this, right, is being kind, but firm, right. I'm really laying out what you expect from the team, when the deadlines are, and then what are the consequences if they don't hit them, right. So you're talking about an executive who comes in. She is a woman. I'm assuming that they don't have a problem with that assertiveness because it sounds like she's really good at coming in and just being like, all right guys, let's get it done.
And everybody's, you know, hopping to it and working towards their deadlines. So I guess you have to question about like, what's the right way to handle this team and what actually motivates them as well, right? Like, what are they motivated by? Obviously some fear from the executive, if that's really lighting a fire under them, you know, that's not necessarily a healthy motivation.
I don't think that's like necessarily great, but that's one thing. But what else is motivating them, right? Like, are you communicating why we're doing things? Why these deadlines are important? What's going to happen if we don't hit those deadlines and being very firm about like what's acceptable on the team and what's not, that might be something to do.
When I used to be a product manager on a product team, we would all get together, discuss the deadlines together and then help commit to each other. And there was a lot of trust on our team that we had built before then. So that allowed us to all look at each other and say, Hey, if I don't meet these deadlines, I'm letting the rest of my team down.
And that's also a motivation, right? Like wanting to be a part of the team, wanting to work together, wanting to make sure that we don't let people down. So that might be a tactic to take as well. How do you build trust on the team? How do you set clear boundaries about what's okay and what's not okay with the quality of work and what the deadlines and the undelivered work.
And then also how do you communicate the consequences, right? What happens if you don't hit those deadlines? Because it shouldn't just be on you. It's not like your whole team misses deadlines. Oh my God, you as a product manager or the person who's in the whole, that's not acceptable, right? It's the whole team.
And I think you have to communicate that to them as well. A lot of people think it's like the product manager is the one throat to choke, right?
I've heard this saying a lot. Everybody hates product management who are not comfortable with that, but it's not right. Like you are not responsible for a lot of other people and delivering work if it's not, you know, your responsibility to actually do that work. So you can do everything right and they can just not live up to the expectations.
So now I think you have to communicate with the team, like we're in this together, right? If you don't hold up your end of the bargain, I'm going to hold up mine and I'm here and I'm committed to this team and I am doing the things that I need to do. And we're going to all commit to these deliverables together.
All these deadlines, all these deliverables. Now if something crazy happens and we miss these deadlines, all right, let's have a conversation about it, but it shouldn't be okay, right? If we can't set deadlines that are reasonable and that we can actually hit, then something's going on, right? Like we're not doing our jobs well.
So why aren't we doing our jobs well? So that's one question. And then two, if we're doing this all together and we're all committing to it and we make reasonable deadlines, but you're just not hitting them and there's no external circumstances or anything that's like that blows up in your face or you have to do this other work, that's something that's on you.
It's not necessarily on me, right? The team might not feel responsible for that work. And I think that they have to. So you've got to figure out how to shift that responsibility, how to talk about like, it's all right if we do miss deadlines and we're all communicating about it and it's for a good reason, but it's not acceptable to commit to your team and commit to others and then just not deliver work.
I think that's really what I would look at. So it's kind of being kind, establishing trust, but being firm and setting boundaries. I think that's important. And if you are not getting results that way, it might be time to bring in the executive or the person who's managing your team. Like the different leaders around there and talking to them about it because product managers do not lead through authority, right?
They only lead through influence. So if you don't have direct responsibility of these people, and I'm kind of reading this and I'm like, I'm wondering if you're talking about developers, I'm wondering if you're talking about your whole, like your director and you run product management, I can't really tell from the question.
So let's say if you're a product manager and you're talking about developers, not delivering their work, establish a trust, set boundaries, make sure they're feeling accountable to the team, right? And not just like you're the other person over here, just giving them stuff, right? Build that trust. If this is a product team that you are responsible for, right?
And you're the direct manager, then you set the consequences, right? If they are not delivering their stuff and they're not doing a good job, this is where we bring in personal improvement plans. This is where we start to talk to them about what's expected of a product manager. And we help communicate to them that if they can't do these things, and it's, you know, just their fault, it's not like we have external circumstances here, they might need to find another job, right?
I think that's totally fine. If you are in a manager in that position, because if people don't respect you and respect those boundaries, they're not going to listen to you. So you do have full power over this. And the only way that you're going to be successful is to have a successful team. So I would look at your team, establish trust with them, communicate boundaries, communicate, you know, the consequences of them not like reaching these deadlines, making sure there's nothing that's like out of their control, preventing these things from being met.
And trying to establish like, where is the problem, right? Where is it coming from? What can I do to actually help in my position? And you know what, there might be bigger problems, it might be like systemic issues in your organization, right? Maybe they can't do it because they can't get in touch with customers.
Maybe they can't do it because the development team is being pulled off to go to, you know, different projects or bugs or anything like that. Like I dive in there first, and then I go back and do the things that I listed. All right. Second question. Dear Melissa, thank you for launching the Product Thinking Podcast.
You're welcome. Mondays might still feel like Monday sometimes, but Tuesdays are a real treat. I'm very happy to hear that. So my question is around empathy, self-awareness and emotional intelligence in general. In an earlier episode, you mentioned that you personally improved upon those traits compared to earlier in your career.
I wonder, how did you do that? Do you have any stories to share? What resources or experiences would you recommend for people who recognize the need for hard skills as part of product, but who would intentionally like to cultivate these soft skills as well? Fantastic question.
A lot of it was trial and error. I realized that I was like hitting my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to like move a team in one direction. I had a really complicated CEO I was working with that didn't really, didn't, we didn't really work well together. And I started to look at these things.
And at first, you know, my instinct when I was younger was to blame other people. And I was like, oh, this person's hard. This person doesn't get it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I started to hit like a series where I was having difficult conversations with people. I was having problems that were repeated and I looked at it and I said, man, if I want to be successful, I have to change.
What am I doing wrong? So I started to look at like, what was my behavior? What was I, you know, what was I doing? How was I presenting things? What were the, what were the things that I was doing that may be causing this? The emotional intelligence thing is really about like, understand reading the room, right?
And whenever I did presentations or whenever I was presenting to executives, I read people's facial expressions.
And I also watch your body language and I try to figure out like, are they getting it? Are they engaged or are they not? And then based off that, I try to change my tactics. It also takes some of like getting to know your audience when you're talking to them as well. For example, like I worked with some CEOs who fancy themselves like product geniuses and you have to play into that ego a little bit, but then also be firm enough or know how to like sway them in a certain direction that you need to go and go in.
Right? So for example, I worked with one CEO who thought we never should talk to customers and I looked for ways to prove that that might not be right. Right? But I did it in a kind way, not like a, you're a jerk, right? You have to, you have to kind of like figure out what are they going to respond to?
What are the things they actually care about and then present it in those types of ways. So it's a lot of getting to know your audience, a lot of getting to figure out who they are. And that's where that empathy is, right? Like that's what empathizing is.
So if you're good at empathizing with your customers, you have to empathize with your stakeholders as well or other people. One of the biggest ones, I guess, stories to share is, you know, when I started consulting, I was very much training teams and I wanted to get into training executives and working more with executives, which is something that I've been doing a lot for the last like five years. But at the beginning, you know, nobody saw me on that level.
They were looking at me as like, I'm the person who trains teams, right? I don't have to talk to them. So I had to figure out like, what are the executives actually care about? How are they being judged for success? What are their problems? And start to position myself in a way where it's like, I can help you solve these problems.
And that's a lot of the self-awareness, emotional intelligence that we're talking about, too. And I think this helps in a day-to-day product world as well. You have all these stakeholders you have to rally, you have all of these developers you have to get on board, you've got all of these marketing heads and salespeople and all these people you have to like get this buy-in with, including your customers, right?
And I think the biggest part of this is trying to figure out like, what do they care about? And also, what are their day-to-days? So that's what I would say, like, a lot of empathy there, a lot of just figuring out what other people care about and finding trends in that and seeing like what messaging works.
We did an episode with Brian Buddha earlier this year. And he has a lot of great advice in there about this, particularly, Brian's one of these people who just can like, I've watched him at two places, Athena Health, Signify Health. He's got this magnetism to him where like, he'll take some of his biggest detractors and make them his best friend.
And in that episode, he shares a lot of those skills as well. So I would go back and check that out if you're interested. Otherwise, other ways that you can learn this, again, a lot of trial and error. This is what I did, like figure out a lot of your positioning here. How am I talking? Is that working?
Is this getting through to certain people? What do these people care about? I don't know a ton of books on this subject, but I think like, how to win friends and influence people is one that's always recommended.
I found that very useful about really figuring out how to engage with other people, how to get them on your side, how to like bring them along. I think that one's pretty great. So I would check maybe that out. If you're in trying to figure out negotiating one of the best books I ever read about negotiating, which is again, a big product management skill set.
Never split the difference. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. So if you can read that, you will start to understand like how to navigate some of these hard conversations, especially when you have some people on your side, like, you know, fighting for these features to be put on your roadmap. You don't really want to go there.
That book might help you with those too. And onto our last question, Dear Melissa, at my company, the person heading up products seems to have problematic or dysfunctional relationships with most of the C-suite. It's now made them reluctant to do a lot of senior stakeholder management or strategic work past a single product line.
There are lots of stories about previous arguments and evidence of a lack of mutual respect.
As a solution, the product team were moved under the very busy CTO. However, the CTO just doesn't have time or product management know-how. As a team of product managers, what do you recommend we do? It seems like a faux pas to just go directly to the C-suite ourselves. Can a product team ever be successful if it's headed up by someone who doesn't seem to have organizational power?
Ooh, this is a tricky and a very interesting question. Thank you for asking it. I've seen this before where like product leaders have been rejected by the C-suite because they don't get along with them or they're not playing ball or that person is just like not used to cultivating relationships at that level or really looking at that.
And you can't get anything done if you don't cultivate those relationships as a product leader. So I know what situation you're in. I've seen it before. The question is like, what do you do? Can a product team ever be successful if it's headed up by someone who doesn't have organizational power? No.
The hard fact is no. And this is why we advocate for chief product officers, because you need somebody to fight for the product decisions on that level.
You need somebody who really gets it. And like you said, the CTO doesn't get it. And that's true. Sometimes we have great hybrid CTOs, CPOs, and that's fine because they're representing both equally. But in this case, you know, you don't have somebody representing product management. So you're either going to have a technology leading product, which is not great because you'll just build a bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter.
Or you'll have sales leading product, which again is not great because you're going to just be building things that don't scale to many different customers. So no, I don't think it works that way. So we got to solve this problem. What do we do? Going to the C-suite yourselves may not be the option, but how do you surface up the problem?
All right. That seems to be the bigger issue. If it's a good C-suite, they should start to see that this is an issue because the team might not be performing the way that they actually expect it to be. I think you can go to the C-suite to have conversations about your individual products, not necessarily this product leader, but help surface up what good looks like and then have them be, you know, questioning, is that product leader actually doing that?
Or is the team just trying to work around it? How do you start to show what could be possible and get buy-in for the things that you aren't able to do? That might be the tactic that you want to take. So one of the things could be really trying to surface up questions about why you don't have a big product line vision, right?
Like a multi-product line vision to the senior leadership. What is the vision here? I think you can go to the C-suite to ask questions like, Hey, I just want to know where are we going? Like, what do you think the vision is for this company? Because I just haven't heard it communicated very well. I'm trying to make sure that X, Y, and Z product is really solid and it's meeting our vision.
It's going in the right direction. Where are we going? Right? Like what are we doing here? I think it might be helpful if you come present to the team or something to talk about that. You might want to go to sales and ask them about customer commitments and requirements. You can show interest in other areas and get the buy-in of the C-suite yourselves if you show that you're trying to do things well, right?
But ultimately you do have to ask yourself, is that going to work? Or are we just not able to really produce under this product leader who just doesn't want to do their job, right? Who's scared to do their job because it sounds like they lost respect. It sounds like there's not mutual respect going around with the C-suite.
And at that point, you know, that person has to be removed or leave so that somebody else can come in to lead it. I haven't seen it actually turn around unless they can figure out how to go get buy-in. But if they don't want to do the work, it's never going to really work out. So what can you guys do to help surface up the questions that you need answered to the C-suite?
You don't have to go and like complain about your boss. I would not do that. But it's not about going to the C-suite and just being like, oh, my boss sucks. We need another boss. Anyway, it's about trying to surface up the questions that you need answered to do your jobs well to other people in the organization.
That might start a conversation of them going, why isn't your VP of product telling you this? And that might help surface up the concerns to the right people.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, you have to decide how long you want to wait it out. It's true. Like you're not going to be successful if you have someone who's heading you up who doesn't have organizational power and doesn't want to build those relationships. Like it just does not work. You need to build those relationships as a product leader.
So ask yourself, how long are you willing to wait? Maybe try to start those conversations with other teams to show that you are doing the right things. And you're trying to work out those relationships yourselves and really like help manage those and get the buy-in from the teams. But ultimately, at the end of the day, if you feel like things are not going to change and this person isn't going to leave or they're not going to be replaced, you have to ask yourself if that's somewhere that you really want to stay.
So that's a really hard question to answer. I've seen it happen a lot and I don't want you to waste your time somewhere if you feel like you can't get your things done, but it does make everything easier when the product leader is really engaged with the C-suite and bringing that buy-in and having those trade-off conversations and like working that stuff out so that you don't have to.
So that's another thing to look at. Like it's not your job to do senior stakeholder management. So if you want to do a great job, I don't know if this is a place for you unless somebody's willing to do something about this product leader. So that's it for our Dear Melissa this week. Very excited for you to keep submitting questions to DearMelissa.com.
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