Navigating (Product) Culture

Or how to plant seeds for success as a Product Manager (and in life)

In our festive edition of Product Mondays we focused on how Product Managers, can understand and navigate company culture to become a successful product leader. Below you’ll find a summary of the session.

We all agree that being a PM means you help your company decide what products to build and why,helping engineering teams deliver those products. The first things you may learn as a Product Manager is all the tools and methods, the domain knowledge and all the different aspects of business — technology — design.
But as usual, the devil lies in the details, knowing these things are essential but no guarantee for success. What makes being a PM at times very difficult is that anything negative in a company culture likely surfaces through your role. You did not deliver the product on time / in scope / missed customer needs, right? You did not manage to motivate your team enough, made the vision clearer, communicated more effectively?
Thus, an important key to success is to know how to navigate your company culture. Every culture has its own rules you need to learn, understand and master. Some companies are more difficult at times to navigate than others, but there is always something you can change and do differently to motivate and lead your team more effectively.

What is culture?

Culture is the foundation for your company. It’s not the values on the wall or a piece of paper, it’s the little things. It’s shaped by whom you hire, fire and promote. It’s shaped by how you write and respond to emails; it’s shaped by how you execute a project; it’s shaped by whom you have lunch with and whom you share information with. As such, culture cannot be designed and enforced but we have the power to nurture it day by day, for good and worse.

What is product culture?

Product Managers these days seem the hot thing. No matter which startup job openings you look at, they hire product managers, not project managers, team leads, or business analyst. But not all the companies who hire product managers are actually product companies or have a product mindset. Product culture means:

• Focus — the customer is at the center, not a business or sales department
• Structure— there is no “IT does this, sales does this”, technology is not the necessary evil that never delivers but everyone works together to solve the problems customers are facing
• Discovery — no stakeholder hands requirements to you for development but you identify and solve customer needs together
• Process — agile does not mean the engineers have standups, it’s a mindset of the whole company — lived by everyone in any role
• Responsibility and Accountability — success is measured by outcome, a product team has the means to change their approach to achieve results.

Your role as a PM is especially difficult if you discover your company as an IT-mindset and you as PM are in-between the lines to make sure your team is building the right thing. Knowing how to navigate your company culture, no matter what size, maturity or mindset is crucial for your product success.

Navigating (product) culture

1 Understand culture — manage your first 90 Days

• Don’t sprint. Listen first. Especially if you join a startup, expectations may be that you need to execute right away. This may be less true in larger companies where you’re given more time to learn. But no matter which environment, it takes around 90–180 days to get really settled in your role and gain trust. This time is a unique chance to talk with as many people as possible to understand what’s bothering them and what’s motivating them, how things are being done, how each and everyone would describe the company or team’s values and vision. Don’t miss this opportunity.
• Ask questions. Many. Again. Knowing to ask the right question is a key PM skill, but especially so in your first days. Ask as much as possible to learn about your product, your users, the organisational setup, processes and culture. At some point you may feel like you should already understand things and you shouldn’t ask this or that question. But don’t stop asking until you are 100% certain you understood everything. This is your foundation that you build on later. It also helps the team and everyone around you feel comfortable raising questions.
• Understand decision making. As a product manager, you don’t manage your team, you champion them and the users. To be successful at doing so, you need to quickly learn how to manage up, not only down. Key to that is to understand how decisions are being made in a company. It’s not so relevant how mature the company is (startup vs. grown-up), rather the structure and mindset. Is it hierarchical or bottom up? Is it authoritative or consensus-driven? No matter what the answer, you need to find your way to influence it.
• Trust your fresh eyes. Especially when you’re new and you’re learning so many things, it’s tempting to think you don’t have yet much to contribute. But that’s not true — you bring something really unique, a set of fresh eyes on how things are being done and may not be the most efficient way to do things. People who have been with the company for longer may not see those things anymore. We don’t recommend changing things right from the start (remember, listen first) but you can for example start reinforcing the good behavior you wish your team would do more of. Over time, you’ll build trust and can introduce the change you want to see.

2 Nurture culture — establish your leadership

• Dare to care. And celebrate. Especially if you work in a fast-paced environment, it may seem at times we don’t have enough time to focus on non-tangible things. We rather care about the status of a project than the status of a team. It’s the little things that can make a huge difference — thank someone who did something unexpected, champion the ideas your team had, and celebrate also the small wins and make them visible. You’ll be surprised how much this may mean to a single person. But stay authentic, everyone has their own leadership style.
• Assume good intent. There is always a reason why a person acts a certain way or wants a specific thing done, so it’s worth investing some time to understand the motivation behind a specific request or tone of email — written communication is so easily misinterpreted. This is especially important if your team or stakeholders are not all at the same location or you work in an international, diverse team. It’s also worth noting that it helps being aware of your own biases and emotions for frictionless communication.
• Pick your battles. And data.There may be times in your career that are really tough and you feel like in order to succeed you need to fight so many things at once. But as humans, not machines, we don’t have endless energy so it’s important to focus on the battles that are worth fighting. Things that you have the ability to change, problems that will make a measurable difference for your team or your users, things that are really core to your beliefs. No matter how you choose the battles, don’t let your emotions lead the way.
• Create distance, regularly. As product managers, we’re never done, the task-list is endless, the emails keep floating in, deadlines are approaching. It’s easy to get trapped into working more to get things done. But the truth is, working harder is not a long-term solution. Make sure you find the right balance to create distance for yourself and your team, physically and emotionally. For yourself this may means meditating, running or boxing. For your team, even if the roof is breaking, make sure your team members have time for things they care about. Whatever it is, you and your team will be happier, more motivated and way more creative which leads to better products for your users.

Last but not least: Relax. Your job is not your life. A cultural misfit is not a personal failure — if you get rejected in a job interview, if you decide to leave or are asked to leave a company, if you as a manager need to let someone go, this may lead to more rewarding and unique experiences and opportunities in life you may have never envisioned before. And at the end of days, when you’re say 80 and look back to your life, what do you want to see in your very own museum of life?

With Product Mondays we want to to foster practical knowledge exchange between product managers on relevant topics that affect our work on a daily basis. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our next sessions! We also welcome speakers, please get in touch if interested!

Thanks to Janet Horwell from GoodChat.Design who facilitated the workshop and to BCG Digital Ventures in Berlin to provide their location for us!