How to Accelerate into Product Leadership (4/4) : Balance
Following the kick-off on our path to product leadership on 20 Jan 2022, adaptive skills on 10 Feb 2022 and career on 3 Mar 2022, we followed-up with a deep dive on 24 Mar 2022 on “How to Accelerate into Product Leadership : Balance” presented by #ProductTonic Community.
We had 52 registered from the various communities of practices like PM Huddle, Product PH, Product Management SG, UXSG, UXMY, UXPH across Southeast Asia.
Self-guided slides are available at https://bit.ly/ptl-24mar22-productleadership-balance
We had a good mix of folks who spent their time coaching other on the product role as well as some who focused on shipping products.
The 4 part series had been designed with the intention to dive deeper into the personal journey of product people who are seeking a role in product leadership. We helped to frame the Path/Adaptive Skills/Career/Balance into an impact map of WHY/WHO/HOW/WHAT to be used as a compass in the individual journey.
During the session, we shared about the tension in coaching and shipping with an emphasis on Leadership and Management.
We found that Product Leadership Success often consists of being able to set direction and understanding the capability of your organisation/teams.
If Leadership consisted of Direction = Vision + Strategy, it meant doing well in:
- Product Vision & Principles
- System / Organisation / Team Topology
- Product Strategy
- Team Objectives
- Storytelling
- Ethics
And Management could translate into
Capability = Competence x Capacity
Competence = Communication x Skills x Experience x Information
Capacity = Resources x Efficiency
This meant doing well in
- Coaching
- Training
- Mentoring
- Staffing
Product Leadership Success = Direction x Capability
Shipping products would then be about balancing Product Design, Engineering, Product Management.
That is a lot to tackle in any given week! Sharing from our experience, we also found that with many meetings filling our calendars, it was common to see that:
- Most work week calendar is almost 100% filled up for meeting others
- There is little breathing room for self-care
- There is little time to get post-meeting action items worked on
- Mentally and emotional exhaustion with people working after work hours trying to catch-up
We shared a learning from R3 retreat facilitated by Michelle Ow that “Only when we are recharged, can we share our energy with others, and in the work we do”.
We took some time to reflect on our calendars to determine what was our individual short term / medium term and long term focus areas before moving into small group sessions to practice listening and asking some clean language questions using AgendaShift’s From Obstacle to Outcomes [FOTO] format. This useful game structure provides us with a set of clean questions to help generate possible outcomes from obstacles we are facing. Learning to listen is a great skill for leaders especially for those working in the product arena!
What did the group learn?
- Don’t have to feel bad/anxiety for stepping out of comfort zone and do what you need to do as a PO
- Thinking of the obstacles in a more structured manner and having a realisation on the big picture
- We are naturally eager to go into problem solving mode when sometimes, what the other person is asking for is a listening ear
- Having a framework to ask questions to tackle obstacles to get the desired outcomes
- listening is an under appreciated PM skill. the more you do this, the less you jump to solutions
- Holding back from giving advice is HARD!
- some blocks are not too difficult to overcome/ address
- Sometimes you need to dig deeper to find out the real cause of the problem
- The structure is rather helpful in organising thoughts
- The questions help reflect more
What was surprising?
- Everyone is having the same issue
- It’s surprising difficult to reframe and structure my thoughts and resist offering solutions
- everyone has almost similar angles for advise/ remedy
- Hard to structure questions if you don’t have a framework to follow
- Everyone is having some “unspoken” obstacles which cannot be easily explained to listeners
- Hard to not offer solutions
What questions remain?
- When not to use the tool? (or what do we need to care to use this tool successfully?)
- what if the rot is at the top? above my pay scale to address
- what if the problem is caused by factors outside of your control?
- what if the listeners do not let you finish your sentence and keep wanting to interrupt?
WHAT behaviours do you wish to embody AND value do you bring to the products / companies you wish to work with?
- Provide time and space for listening — i.e. for others to reflect and express themselves
- put myself in the shoes of the speakers before giving advice no matter how irrelevant the topic was being shared
- Spend more time and effort to sort hiccups as they appear, versus letting it grow
- safe place to share idea for the better outcome
- Calculate the variables and take them into account
- listening more :)
- Having more reflective time and have open conversations
- investing time/effort to people management, than merely problem solving
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Interested to take part in PTL Cohort 2 starting in June 2022?
Check out Product Tonic Lab landing page and stories https://linktr.ee/producttonic
How to Accelerate into Product Leadership (4/4) : Career[facilitated on 24 Mar 2022]
Self-guided slides are available at https://bit.ly/ptl-24mar22-productleadership-balance
This series was first prototyped at Product Tonic Unconference 2021 as a topic “Designing your Product Leadership journey”.
#producttonic #producttoniclab #southeastasia #productleadership #productmanagement #skills #skillsdevelopment
