Organizational Growth, Digital Product Teams and $Billion Brands

A compilation of stories and lessons learned as Head of Product @ Alchemy inside the world’s largest CPG company, and a framework for leaders and teams in stages of growth and delivery.

Alchemists @ work: learning, creating, and thinking. Alchemy is a 55-person digital group inside of P&G. Our 5–10 person product teams partner with world-class brands across categories to deliver world class digital experiences for consumers. Our digital domains span from eCommerce to iOT. We take lunchtime and Indian Food Friday very seriously.

2018 was quite a year! January to December were packed with lessons and experiences that forever shaped my perspective on organizational growth, teams, digital products and communication.

Reflecting on the year, I’m filled with pride in our teams and our culture. It is an honor and a privilege to work along the creative, passionate and wildly talented individuals we call Alchemists and our P&G teammates. I am proud of the relationships we’ve forged and the lessons we’ve learned together as P&G + Alchemy to help adapt the way brands can win digitally. I am grateful for the year and excited for 2019.

Our Alchemy team @ P&G more than doubled in size in 12 months. We expanded our footprint to Boston, co-located with Gillette. We added 7 product teams and we launched new digital products and user experiences for Olay, Tide, Gillette and Old Spice. We failed and succeeded along the way. We learned lessons and gained ambassadors for the work we’re bringing into P&G. We strengthened relationships and solidified a new artery inside P&G.

I wrote this post for myself and also for builders, leaders, stakeholders, and members of digital ecosystems. Inside are stories and takeaways for team members and team leaders in the digital space. Enjoy!

Culture

Alchemy’s culture brings a skip to my step and a smile to my face. Teams are curious, candid, energetic, kind, diligent, creative and intelligent. We raise the bar on talent with every new hire we bring into the team. This culture was no accident, and below are beliefs formed and reinforced this year.

• Culture is a competitive advantage. (Or, a disadvantage … if an organization doesn’t have the right one).
• Culture isn’t about what leaders say, but about what leaders tolerate in an organization.
• Preserving culture starts with codifying it, celebrating it, and continuously protecting it. An organization must understand what they are, and what they are not.
• Leaders should protect and continuously strengthen a culture, which requires leaders to be mindful of a wide range of things: communication, hiring and firing practices, rewards, training, recognition, accountability, criticism, feedback, promotions, empowerment.
• A “best idea wins” culture strengthens an organization. To build it requires humility and courage from members. It takes leaders and all members accepting that no one individual (including leadership) has all the right ideas. It requires members to respectfully challenge assumptions and perceptions. Respect paves the foundation for a best idea wins culture.
• Culture is built moment by moment, across functions, teams and leaders.
• If integrating two cultures into one organization, one must start with mutual respect, followed by an active attempt to build trust.
• Respectful cultures are awesome. One very easy way to create a respectful culture is to realize that teams can be creative and have fun without alcohol and crass language. Teams who socialize inclusively (i.e. not always at a bar) will create a more empathetic environment. This leadership starts at the top!

Stakeholders

Stakeholders are the linchpin to the success or failure of a product. As the gateway to launch, funding and growth — stakeholders can be your biggest allies or your most critical distraction. Teams must continually engage and seek ways to work well with stakeholders (here’s a framework to consider).

This year, the most notable sources of stakeholder “conflict” across our product teams stemmed from miscommunication and misunderstandings of agile development and stakeholder roles / responsibilities.

• Process and communication breakdowns are very solvable with time and attention.
• Successful teams supply clear roles, responsibilities and accountability to stakeholders and team members. If stakeholders change, review and update stakeholders to ensure that the right people have the information needed.
• Teams must have the right stakeholders in a room for success.
• Time spent upfront in a kickoff session (even if it takes several days) will lead to a more positive working relationship with stakeholders and team members throughout the product lifecycle. This valuable time will save hours of miscommunication, swirl and frustration throughout the engagement. The kickoff will be most successful with full participation, no excuses.
• The beginning of a new quarter is a good time to hit the soft reset button on a team. During this time, teams can refresh and realign on roles, responsibilities, what’s working well and what could be improved.
• If a key decision maker is missing from a key decision meeting, the product team will face swirl in the coming weeks.
• Not involving the right stakeholders early or often enough will very likely derail or delay a product effort.
• Stakeholders need frequent, candid, simple updates and pictures are helpful. Some considerations include: data dashboards, roadmap visualizations, customer journey maps, wireframes, personas, or even copies of engineering code to help a stakeholder visualize the activity tied to progress. If they don’t understand it, the team is not explaining it clearly enough.
• Bad news doesn’t get better with age! Stakeholders want to help. While “high five” updates celebrating team first-downs or wins are important, equally important are communications where a team communicates delays, at-risk and blockers with specific calls to action to a stakeholder for help. Call stakeholders out by name — ask for help where help is needed.
• Artifacts and progress should be surfaced routinely to stakeholders.
• In an agile world, stakeholders must be actively involved. Decisions are made quickly and a team must be able to move forward from a decision and start to build. Passive stakeholder involvement is not useful engagement in an agile world where teams must react quickly to oncoming changes and create meaningful solutions timely.

Interviewing and Hiring

Hiring is one of the most significant jobs on a leader’s plate. Hiring should be done carefully, mindfully and humanely. Vetting and selecting team members to join an organization puts one in a position of power to change lives and to shape an organization. It is easy and dangerous to let implicit and unconscious bias infiltrate thinking. If left unchecked the organization will be shaped and formed by the collective biases of a vital few members in a position of power.

• Organizations hire people, not resources.
• Standardizing the criteria for a position in an objective rubric can help a team understand how to rank a candidate. It also helps quantify and objectify the conversation in an attempt to weed out implicit bias. A team could use four simple quadrants with a 1–5 ranking such as Leadership, Technical, Communication and Interpersonal Skills. Leave room for overall strengths and weaknesses, and you’ve got yourself a fine hiring rubric.
• Google Hire is a useful platform for smaller teams. It’s easy to organize meetings and transparently share feedback on candidates.
• Interviews by committee, with cross functional team representatives are very valuable. This can help defend against biases and provide a richer perspective on a candidate as well as strengths and weaknesses.
• An efficient way to make a decision on an interviewee is to meet immediately following the interview. This way, perspective is fresh and distractions are low. Managers can run a quick straw poll in the interview room post-interview to gauge the team’s feedback. Thumb up, down or somewhere in between. Then give the team a chance to talk it through.
• Rejections notices should be sent quickly. This allows both parties to move forward without delay. Plus, it’s a humane way to handle relationship.
• A take-home challenge explores a different dimension of a candidate’s thought process. At Alchemy, every function (design, engineering, product) and position level (apprentice, junior to senior, etc) completes a challenge as a part of the hiring process. The results are presented to the team and the team weighs feedback into the hiring decision.
• The best way for a team to get diverse thinking is to hire diverse talent! There is no way to manufacture this other than as an organic by-product of the people within your organization.
• Diverse thinking thrives in an environment where opinions are valued, listened to and implemented.
• Employee milestones are important! For most employees, yearly anniversaries are a valuable celebration and recognizing these can help people take pride in their work and feel appreciated.
• 30-, 60-, 90-day reviews are valuable. They provide a great opportunity to understand whether a new employee understands his or her role in the organization, and whether or not they have the tools to be successful. Employees want to know how they can succeed and if they are making strides towards success, or how to improve.

Product Development

Product development lifecycles vary, yet there are similarities in principles for building valuable products.

• The consumer is paramount. Teams who focus on the consumer and build solutions accordingly, win.
• A product manager holds a unique lens within an organization. As the voice for the consumer, the product manager has the purview into the consumer’s needs along with the ability to shepherd the choices and priorities for product development and the voice of reason for stakeholders to validate decisions which are made.
• Organizations need product managers willing to diligently and consistently pursue the right choices for the product. This will result in conflict, as the right choices are not always the popular choices.
• Product teams should be missionaries, not mercenaries. One way to move from mercenary to missionary is to build a “yes, and!”, product team — a team focused on allowing best idea to win.
• Behind every successful product is successful design. Thoughtful user experience design is a critical and inimitable advantage for any digital product. Product managers are key to elevating design by empowering designers on a product team.
• Agile is not a replacement for quality. One of the key agile tenets is working software as a measure of progress. Quality assurance should be baked into process on both design and engineering, from handoff to stakeholder alignment. Pre-launch activities like “go-green” criteria can help codify what is in scope and what is out of scope for launch and can help bring clarity to assumptions for the product team and stakeholders.
• In agile, launch should be viewed as an activity on a continuum of the product lifecycle. A product launch is not a campaign, with a dedicated start and stop. And a product launch likely will not be a resounding success on day 1. The value of agile is the tightly aligned, highly integrated loosely coupled team empowered to learn from the product performance and continuously evolve based on how the product is performing in the market, and based on consumer needs.
• Design sprints are useful paths towards efficient failures or flawed successes based on divergent and convergent thinking to solve problems. Sometimes it’s not as easy to get stakeholders to commit to a 5-day schedule. As an alternative, we’ve launched Jake Knapp’s 3-hour brand sprint several times, and have found it to be an effective gateway to ease non-product people into realizing the effectiveness of design thinking methodologies and the value of the process overall.
• Product teams must deliver! Shipping usable software frequently is critical.
• Minimum viable product means many things to many people. Product managers should clearly spell out assumptions and reinforce continually, with a preference towards the more minimally viable vs. perfect.

Communication

• Leaders should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.
• No matter how frustrated one may be in a meeting, it’s never ok to yell or disrespect the person one is frustrated with.
• Take a deep breath.
• If one ends up yelling, an apology can go a long way in mending the relationship or at least in respecting the other person.
• Feedback is a gift. Leaders should continually give feedback — positive and negative — to teammates (from a position of caring deeply and challenging directly). Read more about this theory in Radical Candor.
• Weekly town halls bring an organization together in a casual, light-hearted setting. We hold ours on Friday. These don’t have to be intense sessions — the intent is to bring everyone together routinely and give a platform for authentic, transparent conversations about the goings on of the organization, teams and people.
• Affirmations boost spirits, help people feel appreciated and build goodwill. Baking these into an organization’s culture can go a long way.
• There is no replacement for face to face communication! Especially when it comes to multinational teams. Teams should build this into the structure routinely.
• Don’t underestimate the value of a quick “all hands” meeting with a team. If you sense confusion, low morale, tension, or any type of emotion brooding on a team — act swiftly and call an all hands meeting to address the thing publicly and transparently. Give your team a chance to ask you questions, get things off their chest and hear from you (and/or other leadership) to get a healthier perspective.

Leadership

The shift from individual contributor to team leader can be a thrilling and sometimes paralyzing journey fraught with uncertainty, pride, reassurance, and more uncertainty. Across all levels of leadership, most face the imposter syndrome. New leaders can find footing by courageously sharing opinions, routinely reflecting on progress, deeply caring for the team and consistently delivering on the goals set forth.

As an individual contributor, one is actively focused on leadership by continuous improvement and delivery of the “product” they’re responsible (designs, engineering code, product delivery). As a leader of individual contributors and teams within an organization, your product is your people. It’s your job to set a consistent tone for the organization, to celebrate the wins of your team and to knock the hell out of your team’s barriers. Some reminders on leadership:

• Respect is earned.
• There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
• Healthy teams build successful products.
• Teams require attention and intention.
• “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do” (Steve Jobs). Hire smart people, create an environment where they can be successful, and let them “tell you what to do”.
• Teams need leaders, not victims.
• Consistency in leadership is important.
• 1:1s are a great way to connect with direct reports in a meaningful and focused manner. Here is a link to an agenda and my perspective on 1:1s.
• Leaders can create opportunity for leadership on their teams by empowering team members to own things end to end.

Remoteness

• If an organization employs remote teams, the central hub should always think “remote first”.
• Reliable methods for video calls are enabling for all parties involved.
• Record meetings in case remote workers are not able to hear good sound quality live.
• Encourage the remote office to establish their own cultural processes.
• Teams should regularly check the pulse of remote team members to ensure that remote team members are feeling heard and included. In some cases you might feel like you’re working twice as hard (and you probably are) to keep remote teams top of mind. It’s worth it.

Here’s to an even more productive and impactful 2019!

Happy New Year.

If you have any questions about the above or want to chat these topics, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.