Georgie, the CPO at TIER Mobility and former CPO at N26, talks with Melissa about her experiences setting product strategy as a CPO, how to get that strategy off the ground, and why setting a strong strategy is just the beginning. Trust us, she's someone you'll want to learn from.
Show Notes
Creating great products is about the systems, processes and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader.
Melissa continues the conversation about strategy, this time from the perspective of the senior product leader. What does it take to be a good CPO? What role does a product manager play in setting strategy for the company? What’s the difference between company strategy and product strategy? Melissa poses these questions to this week’s guest, Georgie Smallwood. Georgie is the Chief Product Officer at Tier Mobility, and the former CPO of N26. She has deep insights into what it takes to create and successfully implement product strategy, and why that is important for autonomy.
Here are some key points from Melissa and Georgie’s discussion:
Your strategy is the connector between your mission and achieving that mission. It narrows your frame of work and space you can operate in, Georgie says.
“Creating the strategy is just one part of it. You have to over-communicate all the time. Everything has to come back to it,” Georgie points out.
Melissa and Georgie discuss the differing ideas around the concept of autonomy. Should there be autonomy without constraints? What is privileged autonomy?
No product strategy framework is better than any other one. What matters, Georgie says, is how effectively you use them and what you do with them.
“If you want to change the way that people are doing things in the future, no amount of data is really gonna help you; because there are some leap of faith assumptions that you need to take.”
If you want to be a senior leader you need to be an expert in something. You need both hard skills and soft skills to be effective.
Georgie answers a Dear Melissa submission.
Resources Georgie Smallwood on LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: 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: Welcome back to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. We're continuing this week with our topic about strategy. But this time, we're going to dive a little bit deeper and talk about how do we set product strategy as a Chief Product Officer? And what does a good product strategy actually look like?
This week, I'm joined by Georgie Smallwood, the Chief Product Officer of Tier Mobility and formerly the Chief Product Officer of N26. Georgie has lots of insights on how to get a product strategy off the ground, what kinds of frameworks to use, and why is it important for autonomy? So let's dive in and hear what Georgie has to say.
Welcome, Georgie. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Georgie Smallwood: Thanks, Melissa. It's nice to be here.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. So I'm excited to talk to you today about product strategy. And you've had a lot of experience as Chief Product Officer of N26 and now Tier Mobility, setting product strategy. Can you tell us a little bit about your role as Chief Product Officer and what you're responsible for?
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah, sure. So one of the interesting things about being a Chief Product Officer is that it can be different depending on the company that you're in or the type of organization. I have found myself gravitating towards companies that are scaling up, that have initial product market fit and have been quite successful and then really want to explode, right, that across the world and scale globally.
And there are a new set of challenges that people face there, but local versus global, different infrastructure. You've probably cut some corners to get to where you are, and now you need to scale those. And every time you want to change something, you figure out it's hard-coded. So those things are where I gravitate towards.
But in my role as CPO, functionally I look after product management, design, research, insights, making sure that as an organization we make the right decisions on what to focus on. And generally my role in the phase of companies that I join is to develop that product team. And that's one of the things that I really love.
It took a little while to figure out what my job was, because when you go from an individual contributor, even as a Director of Product, and you move into that C-level, all of a sudden you're not surrounded by product people anymore, and you need to kind of work out what it is that you do. Like you can't jump into the loyalty program and you can't jump into, because that's someone else's job. And so my job as the CPO is to build a brilliant product team and then point them all in the right direction so that we can be effective against the company goals.
Melissa Perri: Great. So pointing them in the right direction, what does that mean? What do you have to do to make sure that everybody's on track?
Georgie Smallwood: So that also depends. I think the very first thing that I do going into an organization is take an assessment and check where everything is at, kind of like a temperature check. And I talk a bit about it in a recent Mind the Product podcast that I did, but it's about like understanding the status of the situation.
So how much funding do you have? What kind of growth do you want to do? Do you want to do it lean? Do you want to do it distributed? What is the status of the situation? Also looking at the history. So making sure that sometimes there may have been a brilliant head of product that just left and everyone's kind of heartbroken.
That is something that you need to take into consideration when you're developing the team. You also need to understand where the company is going, right? And this happens especially in hyper-growth organizations, which are kind of under five years old and they've been really successful, is that you need to change the game all the time because you're playing an early-stage startup game, which is very different to a later-stage startup or Series B, and then you get to Series C and the scale-up game is really different.
But because it all moves so fast, you can't play a Series C game with a Series B plan, right? So you need to kind of look at all of that and make sure that everything is okay. And so that's kind of what I do going in because then you can understand, okay, where are the points that we need to focus? What are areas that are okay at this point in time?
And what are areas that we need to build up because we're just not going to hit our goals if we don't focus on those areas. And that's kind of the assessment that I do going into an organization and then pretty regularly on about a yearly basis is just like, where are we at now? And maybe there's a gap somewhere that we haven't seen and we need to kind of zero in on that team or that area for a period of time to bring it up to speed.
Melissa Perri: Great. So getting that lay of the land, right? A lot of it sounds like you're assessing what is the strategy of the company and then it's your responsibility, right, to build that product strategy. So how do you define product strategy and what do you see as the difference between that and the company strategy?
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah, so coming into organizations, and I've been coming to a few classic millennial over here, more often than not, I have to say there isn't one or there's one that is different depending on who you talk to in each organization. Now, as kind of tech companies have become these heroes, we see a lot of purpose, mission, value-driven organizations. But even in some of those, there's still not that connector to the actual work.
And so the strategy is the connector, right? So you can have an amazing purpose, but you can't measure a purpose and you can't track success against a purpose. You need the connector, which is, okay, so what are we going to do? And how can we decentralize decision-making that people know kind of what they're making a decision against?
And more often than not, and most companies I've been in, especially in the Series B phase, the question from the product managers always, well, what's the priority? Because we never have enough capacity and there's always a million things. And of course we want growth. We also want revenue. We also want this.
And what's the priority is like a CPO's worst question. Because firstly, there's hardly ever an easy answer. And secondly, it must mean that the person doesn't understand the direction that the company is going. And you can have a really clear mission, but we can solve that mission multiple ways, right?
So take here, for example, this is a seriously purpose-driven organization. And I mean that sincerely because I've been in so many companies that have a big mission on the wall and internally kind of, it's not really resonating, but it does. And everyone is there because they believe in that mission and that purpose.
And the purpose is to change mobility for good. But you can do that lots of different ways, right? And it's important to identify how you're going to do that as an organization. And so we have a very clear company strategy, which is we're going to change mobility for good. And we're going to do it by being the best partner to the cities, right?
And that's really important because all of a sudden that narrows the frame of work and the frame of space that you can operate in. And so then that is great. If you walk into an organization and that's there, fantastic, because then the product strategy is the next step, right? Often you can go into an organization and there is no company strategy.
And more often than not, that will fall to the CPO, because especially in internet companies, tech companies, more often than not, they're product led or they desire to be a product led organization. And so as the product leader, whether that's the senior product manager, because that's the most senior product person, whether it's the head of product VP or CPO, it's your responsibility to say, okay, I get what you want to do. I get your goal, but how are we going to do that?
And like what space are we going to play in? What game are we going to play? And then what are we going to do about that? Because you need to layer it down or the teams are going to get excited about the purpose. And then the ambiguity of not knowing like which direction to go in is going to result in one of two things.
Either they're going to flounder and everyone's going to feel really busy and not get much done. Or you're going to have this team of amazingly talented, driven, ambitious people, and they're just going to go in every direction because without kind of a way to go, they're going to create their own. And then you have lots of different classic picture of the autonomy without constraints.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. Oh man. I've seen this so many times where it's like, we just say go that way and everybody just starts to swim in all these different directions. And then they're like, no, I said that way.
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah. Oh, I thought you said that way. Yeah. But even once this is the other thing, like creating the strategy is just one part of it, right? You have to over communicate all the time. Everything needs to come back to it. Every meeting, start with what you're trying to do, how you're going to do it, make the metrics about that. And I kind of got to a point where I think that I need to think I'm being excessively on repeat and at that point I'm probably communicating at the right level.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's good. I like that too. It's really about, you know, communicating with purpose and I like to say communicating with intent, right? At those different levels to make sure that everybody understands we're doing this because of X, Y, and Z and we're going in this direction because of X, Y, and Z. But layering in those constraints helps to make sure that everybody's going the way that you want them to go and not just these ways that they think they should be going.
Georgie Smallwood: And I think we often get like sidetracked, especially in like young tech companies with this gilded cage of autonomy, right? And autonomy is super important, right? You need to be able to make decisions so that you can have an impact and you need to be held accountable for things so that you can rise to the challenge.
But it's not autonomy at all costs, right? And no one lacks autonomy without direction because I mean, except for like founders, right? They love autonomy without direction. That's why they start the company. But without the focus and without the kind of direction that we want you to swim, then how can you be successful because you don't know what you're being marked against, right?
It's just like, I'm really busy. And that's where we get into this busy culture. If we know what direction we're going and you know the decisions that you can make within that strategy, then busyness doesn't count. What counts is impact.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I love that. And what I found too, when we start having conversations about autonomy, and I think maybe you've seen this too, there seems to be two camps, right? There's the leaders who know that we have to constrain people a little bit, but then I've seen a lot of younger people on teams that are learning agile, learning about, you know, these different ways of working and they're screaming like, Hey, no, we should be coming up with all the ideas of what to do.
We have to be autonomous. So if you tell me what to do as a leader, you know, that's not autonomy. You're not being agile. You're not really embracing this type of culture. So it seems there has to be some kind of balance, right? Like between being too specific and like, Hey, put that button over there versus being too broad and letting everybody go in a million directions.
How do you find that balance set in between as a product leader where you can be intentional, but not so super specific, where everybody's like, Oh, you just told me exactly what to build.
Georgie Smallwood: I think this is a really big challenge and I don't know if it's just at the moment or it's always been this big of a challenge, but I liked your word intentional, right? Because the organization has to have an intention, right? And I think that sometimes we forget that this is a business. It's not a playground.
It's not uni. It's not an accelerator where you get to try heaps of different things. This is a company, a business that is employing a couple of hundred, maybe thousands of people, and we need to produce business results, right? Now, no CPO is in the role just to make money, right? We're all there because we believe that technology or whatever product it is that we're building can have an impact on our consumers lives.
And if a CPO is not there thinking that then the product's probably not going to be successful because it has to have an impact and it has to mean something. And the consumer first or the product led or however you want to call it is a thing because we know it makes companies more successful. It's not a thing in itself or for the sake of it.
And so being a consumer first is good business sense. It's a bit like having females in leadership positions. It's not because we think that everyone just needs to be 50 50. It also makes really good business sense, right? Otherwise like no one would do it. They should probably do it a little bit more, but and I think that we as product leaders need to make that really clear, right?
Is that we believe that as a product organization, we can make this company more successful if we do things the way that we know we're hypothesis driven, we're outcome driven development. We research our ideas. We don't shoot the gun before we've figured out what the target is, but we don't do those things because we think that we're better or we're the right ones.
And this is, I think the entitlement of autonomy is wrong. And we do it because it has a better outcome for the company, because in the end that's what they're there to do. Otherwise we should go and work at an NGO. And so I think that's really important to talk to your team about and make sure that they understand what we're here to do.
And then we can build a development against outcomes. And if you follow OKRs or you, however you do it, but those things are just tools to create a better business outcome. And I remember when I was talking to Tia about joining, I was talking to Matthias, who is the co-founder and CTO. And I really loved it because we were having a conversation about this because it really is something that comes up in all tech companies.
And we're talking about autonomy and the term he coined for me was it's privileged autonomy, right? So it's a bit like trust, right? Like you earn the trust and then I trust you. Now, you could be someone who gives trust and then it gets taken away. That's fine. But it's the same thing. If you earn autonomy by proving that you can do what you say you're going to do and you can perform against business outcomes.
And so I really like that as a concept.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that sounds great. I love that. Privileged autonomy. And I think, too, when people think about autonomy, they get this conception that it means I can do whatever I want, right? Rather than what it really is for in companies, which is people can make decisions without having to ask for permission on every single little decision they have so that we can scale and actually move faster. It's not just about doing whatever you want.
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah. And I think that's the bit right. And it seems to be it's either autonomy or it's not autonomous. And it's not that at all. What it is, is let's do the best thing for the business. And we hired really smart people. We would be really silly if we didn't give them a space to thrive in and to get creative and to make decisions. So let's set the strategy so that everyone knows exactly where we're going. They know what their role in it is, and they know what the expectations are of them so that they can try and smash those out of the park. And that is autonomy in a business.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's perfect. So we've got to enable this space as product leaders for our people to be able to make decisions, but in line with our business goals. Do you have an example of a space or direction that you've given your teams the right appropriate level that allowed them to make choices or figure out what's the right way to go, but you didn't feel like you're telling them you've got to put that button in the corner over there and turn it red?
What's that level? What's that right direction? I feel like you said it too, it's the hardest thing to get down, right? Like, how do we juggle that? How do we make sure that we're not too constrained or too open?
Georgie Smallwood: It depends on your environment, honestly. I've been in roles where I know what I would like it to do. I know what I would like to do if I didn't have a boss and I didn't have, there was no, you know, board. There was no goals that were set for the year. There were no promises made without my input, all of those things.
But those things are the reality of the spaces that we work in, and so we need to take them into consideration. So how successfully you can give people really clean spaces to operate in does depend on your environment. Ideally, what you do is, I like a top-down, bottom-up approach, because I do believe in direction, because we need to move so fast as organizations, because consumers are changing so fast, and so we need to try and speed up.
We don't necessarily have time to be a fully bottom-up organization in any of the companies that I've operated in. And so what I like to do is, firstly, if there's no company strategy, like work my backside off really quickly with the executive team because it's always there. It's just rarely written down in a way that people can understand.
So I get that first. Often it can look like a product strategy, depending on the organization. And then what I like to do is work out, like what is the general direction that we're going to go in? Are we going to play the monetization game? Are we going to be the freemium game? How are we going to do this from a product perspective?
Because what game you're playing changes everything as far as product is concerned. And one of the worst things that you can do is not define that, because then you're going to build things that actually cancel each other out. So you need to pick that. And I think that is the role of the CPO, is to work with the executive team and the people that report into them or are in that next level to say, okay, like, what are we going to do here?
What game are we playing? And then what you want to do is work with your direct team, right? And say, tell us what you know. Say we're playing the freemium game, right? What have we got? And there are lots of different frameworks out there for this part. And you can just Google product strategy framework or company business framework.
There's a million, right? I promise you they're all equally the same. So there is no one better framework than the other, because the only thing that matters with these frameworks is what you do with them and how effectively you can use them. So it also depends on the type of company that you're in, the kind of framework that might resonate.
For tier, we used what I call the mountains framework. So we had the company strategy, which I drew. If you know anything about me, you know, I'm not very good with actually writing words down. I tend to just draw on my iPad. So the company strategy is like the mountain range. It's the Alps essentially.
And as a product function, what mountains do we need to climb to be successful in that mountain range? And so I sat with my direct reports and we worked out that we needed three, right? There were three. One was about ridership and the consumers actually on the vehicles and the experiences that they were having.
One was about our partnership with the cities and what they needed for us to be the best partner. And the other was how we can internally enable every team to be as good as it can be. So there were three mountains that we needed to climb, essentially. And this is important because having a clear idea of where you're heading is essential for the teams to then build plans or have hypotheses and experiment and test things.
And they can do that within that space. And so what we did set was the mountain range, the mountains, and then we said to the teams, how are we going to climb these? Because we could do it lots of different ways. And that's your job. Your job is to tell us how we're going to climb these mountains. Our job is to tell you that these are the three mountains we're going to climb.
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Melissa Perri: It sounds like there's a lot of metrics and data that go into defining what those mountains are. How are you pulling that information? What are you looking at as a CPL throughout the year, throughout the quarter, throughout the month to help inform what those should be?
Georgie Smallwood: So one of the benefits of being the CPL is that I have the research and insights team which is hugely beneficial because I think if you try and build a strategy against existing data, so like weekly active users or monthly active users or cohort data, you're only getting a past view of performance. And when you're building a strategy, you have to think, you know, 12, 18, two years out. It's funny, when I first started, it was like 18 months, three years, five years.
I don't think I've ever seen a five-year strategy in a tech company, but that's fine. And so you have the information that you know and the behaviors that you've seen from a data perspective, but you also need to understand, especially if you're working in a, what I call a pioneer product. So if you want to change the way that people are doing things in the future, no amount of data is really going to help you because there are some leap of faith assumptions that you need to take.
And so you need to let data inform those. It's almost like the data creates the sketch and then the research team does the coloring in. So making sure that they fill in the qualitative side of the information and the attitudes and the behaviors. But also in my experience, when you're trying to build something that is going to change the way that people do things in the future, whether that's banking or whether that's traveling in the city, often the consumer doesn't know what they're going to do in the future.
And I mean, if you talk to someone about what they want from their bank, they will tell you 90% of the time, better interest rates. And so it's important that you have people around you who can think forward and can say, right, well, based on what we know, we think one of two or three things is going to happen. And then we need to take a bet because no one ever has enough capacity to build for every eventuality.
And that's where you work out if you're a really good product manager or not on how many bets in your career you've gotten close to pulling off.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's good. So thinking of bets and seeing how good of a product manager you are if you get those bets right. It's a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. But it's also informed pressure, right? Like you're not making bets because you're just like wagging your finger in the air. Like you should be basing it off the research that you said and the intuition and what you're observing. So I never really thought about that before, like the mark of a great product manager being how many bets you get right or how many bets you can prove wrong quickly maybe so that you can find the right one.
Georgie Smallwood: Like. This is the other part. I spoke last year at a conference about product leadership and how there's a lot of books and you should read lots of them, right? What I don't recommend is that you read one and you think that this is the way to do something, because it's like any career, right? It's like the more experience that you get, the more tools you add to your kit and the more mistakes that you don't make a second time.
And so you're going to get better at it, just by sheer data that's going into your brain and things that are informing your decisions in the future. So there is an element of time that's needed, and this is where I think we need to make sure, as you're developing your product team, that they understand that that time and experience, like I've done roles for multiple times, but in different verticals or in different areas, or with different founders or with different companies, and each of them has had to be successful in a different way. And each of them I've failed at something new, and hopefully my aim is just not to fail again doing the same thing, because that would be silly.
I should have learned the first time.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a little growth strategy right there for your career. Throw yourself into as many situations as possible because that's how you keep the depth of your experience going. Yeah, and there's something to that too in product. When I hire Chief Product Officers for companies, we always get into this debate about do I need like a subject matter expert for this who's done let's say like banking for the last 20 years or do I need a product person for this?
And like you just mentioned, you've worked in a bunch of different verticals, a bunch of different companies. Like what's the glue about product that you think stays similar across all of those things, right? And if you're a leader trying to hire a product leader, what should they look for to know if that person has good product experience where they might not have as much vertical experience?
Like what do you do with that product experience and all that different verticals?
Georgie Smallwood: So as I said, I've worked in lots of verticals, but one of the things that I gravitate towards consistently is the phase of the organization and the types of challenges that they're facing. So even though I've worked in B2B software, advertising, banking, and now mobility, they're all products that we're trying to change consumer behavior, right? So they weren't trying to be a better solution of an existing behavior.
They were really trying to pioneer something for the future. And so having that consistent experience and that is something that I can do, right? That I have experience in doing or depth of experience. The other one is regulation. So coming from banking to mobility, lots of people were like, that's really weird.
Why are you doing that? But if you think about it, I enjoy working with constraints and banking is the ultimate constraint, right?
Melissa Perri: You're the only person I've ever heard say that. I love that. You're the only person I ever heard say, I love the constraints and the regulation, but I love that about you. I love that.
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah, okay. That's, I think maybe I have to, to be successful in these places, but it is a hard edge of the page. It's not Greenfield's creation. You have an A4 piece of paper and you can, I want you to draw a rainbow and you can use a black pen and a red pen, right? So figure out how to do that. And I enjoy, I get creative under those constraints.
And so banking was intense from a German regulator perspective. Mobility is not dissimilar, right? So they have different types of constraints, but consumer safety is a major constraint. It's not a negative thing, but it's something that you have to consider in every single thing that you do. Also city licenses, getting winning tenders, all of those things, parameters that you need to understand so that you can then work within and potentially, you know, learn to where you can color outside the lines and do that.
So when you're thinking about a subject matter expert or a product person, I think what you need to think of when you're looking for a product leader is what's the most important thing and what's your gap? Because you need to fill your gaps. And I say this to a lot of product leaders who are moving into more senior positions and especially the women that I mentor, we talk a lot about imposter syndrome and not feeling that we have the skill or the experience to do the job.
No one does, right? And this is the thing that we have to really face is that, like, I don't say that you can put your imposter syndrome to bed because I have it, everyone has it. But knowing your gaps and then doing something about them is something completely different to imposter syndrome. So I know, and I'm happy to be open about it, like, I'm not the best numbers person in the world.
I understand I've been doing this for a long time, so I have a good understanding of what it needs to be, how I need to see the information. But the first person that I gravitate towards when I started a new company is the financial business partner and the head of data analytics. And I put them next to me and then I make friends with them and I say, okay, guys, I need to make decisions that are informed by what you guys do, but I need the information this way so I can make decisions quickly.
And that is not a weakness. I used to think that it was, and I remember taking a job and saying, I'm really sorry, but I really need a financial BP. But now that I am in this position where other people are saying it to me, I'm like, that is a smart thing to say, right? Because no one can do every single thing that they're going to need to do on a yearly basis.
It's not physically possible, but you can build the right team around you. You can ask for the right support so that you can make as large an impact as you possibly can.
Melissa Perri: I hope every CEO who wants to hire a product leader has just listened to that and understands you don't just hire a CPO. You got to hire the team with the CPO so they can get the job done. I think that's so important. So when filling these gaps, a big gap that I always hear from people who are trying to become a CPO or come into a product leadership position is the gap of figuring out how to do product strategy. So before you became a product leader or if you got thrust into this, how did you start learning how to do product strategy?
Georgie Smallwood: Yeah, by practicing. So I think it was practice. I think when I started my career, I mean, product management wasn't a thing, right? I was an ops manager. First I was a media coordinator. Then I was an operations manager. Then I was an ad tech manager. They were all product positions, by the way, in the new world.
And the way that I naturally gravitated to solving problems was to understand what the problem was. And then I would just figure out a solution to it. And I, for many years in the early part of my career, I didn't really consider myself a functional person, right? Regardless of what my title was. And like a lot of product managers, I found myself in a position where I kind of knew everyone in company because I always would seek out information.
And I found that lots of people started coming to me to ask questions and even if I would just point them in another direction. And I loved that role, right? I was kind of, you know, 10 fingers in a thousand pies. And the negative sentiment of that would probably be, I was like the ultimate generalist and I hate the word generalist.
And so I gravitated towards product naturally. After I went on maternity leave, I was coming back to work and I had this breakfast meeting with a mentor of mine. And he gave me the most abrupt and helpful feedback that I've probably ever had in my career. And he was kind of, you know, scenario coaching me.
And he was saying, okay, so, you know, what are your skills? And I was super proud because I'd practiced what I was going to say. And I was talking about how I was really good. I understand tech and I can speak business so I can be the person that gets the right outcome. And, you know, I'll always find a way through and I can do this.
And I've done, you know, CRM migrations and, you know, DFP and ad tech. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's like, I don't need anyone like that, I don't think. And I was like, but you do. Like this man had hired me multiple times. And I said, but you do because, you know, how else would you have got this done?
How else would you have got this done? And he said, Georgie, when I look at my company and I think, what do I need? I don't think I need someone who can understand tech and translate it for the salespeople. I say, I need a sales manager, a product manager, a BA and a customer call center operator. Which one are you?
And that was a really hard question for me. Not because, A, because I didn't really know, but B, because I also didn't really want to pick. And I think that one of the things that good leaders, and I'm very magnanimous of myself to call me that, but there's a natural skill there. The mistake that often we make, especially early in our careers is that that's enough.
It's not. And, you know, those are skills that now I can use and they make me much more effective in my role as CPO. But before I had to identify functionally, I had to be a product manager who loved working with consumers in regulation environments, right? I had to be something. And there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to think of your career in that way.
And those soft skills are super, super important. And we need to push them in organizations because we don't see enough of them. It's a bit like the autonomy thing. You can't just have the soft skills. If you want to be a senior leader in organizations, you also need to be an expert at something. And so when you're looking at how you want to develop yourself, you should think about what your skills are from a hard skill perspective and a soft skill perspective and make sure that you've got some ticks in both boxes, because that's the bit that's going to get you through.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's great advice. I actually, I want to hear your advice for people who are trying to start off there too, trying to start off with product strategy. I got a question through our Dear Melissa submission for the podcast, and this person says, Dear Melissa, I've been a product manager for 10 years, always had small startups with product teams of less than 10 and reporting into the VP of engineering, but still seem to struggle to get out of the individual contributor track.
I'm confident I have the skills and knowledge to be strategic, but feel like I end up with too much IC work on my plate, so there's no time to demonstrate what I'm truly capable of. What should I be focusing on as my current company scales from 2 p.m. To 6 p.m. By the end of the year? What would be your advice for that person?
Georgie Smallwood: So I think firstly, time is the one, is the biggest constraint that we all have, right? So if it's important to you to move into strategic conversations, then you need to make time for it, right? These things don't just happen. No one is going to ask you to build this product strategy. That doesn't happen.
I think it's important to prove first that you can think holistically that you're not just an individual contributor. And what I would start with, I think the easiest thing, especially as you scale from 2 p.m. To 6, is that there's going to be more topics being worked on by those p.m.s. And one of the things that as a company grows that is the most important element to keep is the communication in the organization.
And so as that senior product leader in the organization take out two hours every week to write a product newsletter about what each of the teams are working on and distribute that in the organization, right? Strategy starts with thinking holistically and thinking bigger than what we're just doing on a day-to-day basis. So take those small steps and communicate what's going on in product outside, and then people will naturally come to you and say, oh, that's really interesting.
Can I talk to that person or can I be involved in this thing? And you can say, absolutely. And then you can help to facilitate those conversations. And all of a sudden, you are doing that very first level of product strategy, which is connecting functions across the organization to what's happening in product.
And I think that the worst thing, which is a very common thing, is if what happens in product is a black box and people don't understand what's going on in there, if you don't understand something, you can't respect it and you also can't endorse it. So getting the rest of the organization onside would be my first step.
Melissa Perri: Great. Fantastic advice for all product leaders. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast, Georgie. Where can people find you or connect with you?
Georgie Smallwood: You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. My Twitter handle is Georgie Underscore Smalls. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. But I hover around on Medium sometimes and I post quite a lot of things. So have a look. I'm also a mentor at the CPO Accelerator with Melissa, so you can check in there as well.
Melissa Perri: Yes, join us there. Thanks so much, Georgie.
Georgie Smallwood: Cool. Thanks, Mel. Bye.
