Product Tonic Lab Cohort 2 — Meetup #4 — Effective executive communication for Product Managers

This is a summary of the virtual meetup session held on August 25, 2022 on Zoom, hosted by Ashley Uy (driver), Chandra (driver), Albert Hardy (guardian), and Jocelyn Ke (scribe) of Product Tonic Lab Cohort 2.

Main idea: Make your communications with executives punchier

1. Know your audience
2. Know what you are going to say (structure)
3. How are you going to say it (clarity)

Year after year, communication is ranked one of the most important (or top) skills for Product Managers. Flipping it around — when polled on which skill their product peers lack, Product Managers voted communication as #2 (prioritization skills came in #1).

Before we start, these are some terms and their definitions:

• Executive(s): members of a company’s C-suite or leadership team
• Executive communication: sending or receiving of messages to or from top leadership or senior management in a company

For our meetup, we designed this short session to introduce participants to various scenarios and complementary communication principles to make upwards communications in work and professional settings more effective. It is crucial because most organizations are structured this way, with a hierarchy — even in flat or horizontal organizations without middle management. In those cases, there would still be one or more people who can be considered an ‘executive’, who is perhaps in charge of top-level decisions and company vision.

What do you mean by effective communication?

Any form of communication (spoken, written, listening, visual, etc) that is understood by the audience for which it is intended, may be considered successful.

Let’s go through the 3 parts below:

Part 1: Audience

Who are you speaking to?

The main differences between communicating with peers and subordinates, and someone above you hierarchically are:

1. Executives have less time
2. They often require condensed, high-level information
3. Their responsibilities and priorities are different (say, from operations)

Bearing in mind these above points, it is thus important to consider these questions in the interaction:

• How much time do they have to listen?
• Do I understand their concerns and stance on the matter?
• Is what I want to say relevant to them at this point of time?
• How important is it that my message gets heard by the right people?

During the meetup, we illustrated the importance of considering this element through studying this clip from the movie “The Margin Call” where a junior analyst was required to make a brief but impactful presentation directly to the CEO. The scenario illustrates the importance of understanding the context of the situation and the level of detail necessary to communicate the key pieces of information the receiver of the message needs to know to proceed with decision-making.

Part 2: Structure

What do you want to say?

Depending on the type of message you need to convey, some approaches may work better than others. Examples of messages in workplace settings:

• Feedback
• A report or summary
• Asking for help or resources
• Updates
• Scheduling of meetings and events
• Proposing an idea or initiative
• Conversations between colleagues or clients
• Discussing or debating topics

And they can be conveyed in various mediums such as meetings, emails, phone, video calls, memos, writings, reports and in-person (face-to-face).

We want to introduce the Minto Pyramid as an approach that can be applied immediately, even though it was originally created for presentations and written communications by McKinsey consultants.

What is it?

• Created by a McKinsey consultant, Barbara Minto, in 1987
• The concept can be applied to other forms of communication too
• Lead with the answer (key point/idea)
• Clarify the points you want to make

How do I apply it?

• Start with your most important conclusion (i.e. the answer)
• Have 1 to 3 supporting main points
• Back it up with how, the processes, when, how much, data, insights and evidence

For this principle, we used this scene from the popular TV series, “Mad Men” where the protagonist makes his case presentation on why an ad campaign should play on the element of “nostalgia” rather than “futurism”, as initially proposed, when aiming to sell what we know now as a projector developed by film and print company, Kodak.

Part 3: Common communication pitfalls

Speaking well is not the same as communicating effectively, especially when the stakes are higher. Besides having structure and clarity, there are other influences that will determine how an interaction goes.

• Not enough time for the conversation
• Poor timing of your message
• Lack of understanding of the context/situation

The best scene that we thought was the best way to illustrate this lack of timing despite perfect delivery was this scene from, again, the popular TV series “Mad Men” when a junior ad manager seemingly checked off all the boxes of delivering a good pitch but was ultimately shut down by the target audience because of his bad timing and insensitivity to the listener’s intention and core values.

There is no “best” way to deliver your message.

Ultimately, it is up to the product manager to take all three parts into consideration when communicating to top executives. Being empathetic to their situation, goals, and personal values will add an additional element in managers’ ability to craft the right message with the right timing for the audience they are targeting.

On top of the structure, selecting which piece of information that will make the most impact to the target executive’s goals is just as important as preparing the rationale of the recommended action.

References:

The 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report

Attributions

This is a summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2022 that is taking place from June — October 2022

Product Tonic Lab is open source
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.