Technology and the speed of innovation is only moving in one direction.
Faster.
In a world of iterative development, continuous improvement, agile methodology, two week sprints, micro-service architecture, autonomous deployment, etc. – it is taking a more skilled, organized, and vocal product leader to ensure success of product delivery and ultimately customer value.
There are hundreds if not thousands of critically important conversations a product leader needs to navigate at all levels of the organization. I continue to observe that the combination of when, where and with whom these conversations take place has a significant impact on a success.
What’s more is that each conversation needs to have a slightly different cadence, flow, and focus for it to produce value. For example the conversations your team is having on a daily basis in the trenches should look much different than the once a week check in with your executive team.
Below are some of the strategies and best practices I continue to observe as product leaders strive to mobilize organizations to build and deliver truly valuable products and experiences for their users.
In the Trenches – Node Architecture
This is the battleground where every conversation and interaction has a direct impact on how effectively your team is able to execute. From your morning huddles to the countless desk check ins and micro-transactions happening on a minute by minute basis. This highly interactive node architecture is what determines your team’s daily velocity and the end value of the work being done.
Constant Flow of Information
Your team is working on a number of small stories and tasks that will ultimately contribute to a meaningful output for the business. The ability for your engineers to work autonomously is critical to sustained effectiveness. All communication within your team should be open and transparent. Questions, push back, objections and suggestions should be encouraged in every transaction – no matter the size or importance.
This open communication culture is what will power your team’s high performance engine in the trenches.
Encourage Autonomy
Achieving autonomy and independence with your team won’t fall into your lap. You must intentionally weave this cultural behaviour into every conversation and celebrate when your team proactively leads with this behaviour.
There needs to be a constant positive reminder that everyone on the team is responsible for asking questions, striving to understand the bigger picture, and seeking clarity at every decision point.
You as product leader need to be the shining star of this behaviour.
Remove the Waste
Due to this firehose of interactions & decisions in the node architecture it is possible that within the course of minutes a decision has fall off track or been blown out of scope. Develop your ninja skill at sniffing out these deviations at every corner and practice the graceful art of corralling the team back on track.
However just being the shepherd is not enough. Each time this happens take advantage of the coaching opportunity to help your team understand “Why” there is a laser focus around each story or objective.
The goal is that over time your team will start identifying these deviations on their own and re-aligning right at the node of interaction.
High Performance Squads
Moving up out of the trenches we start to look at the weekly flow and rhythm of your team. How effectively are you as a product leader moving between the trenches and weekly flow? Does your team understand the difference between node architecture and weekly flow – do they intuitively know when to divert conversations from one to the other?
Begin taking time daily and weekly to intentionally pull everyone up out of the trenches for a breath of fresh air. Re-iterate the current theme of work and continue the journey of sharing the Why and What that defines your team.
Start with Why and What
From a 2 point story to a 20 point epic your team should understand why every single piece of work is taken on. No, this does not mean taking an hour getting into granularity and specifics.
On the contrary, your ability to effectively paint the vision in broad strokes defining purpose, business value and impact will be the most effective pursuit of getting the team on board.
Encourage Questions and Feedback
Don’t be mistaken. Just because your taking the first stab at painting the vision doesn’t mean you are the exclusive owner. Going down this path is a slippery slope to disengaging your team, quickly followed by a loss of autonomy and ownership.
Every story you take on should be up for questions, criticism, and suggestions. The dark side of this equation is scope creep and de-railed planning. It’s your job to find and facilitate the perfect balance of dialogue with each initiative.
Themes and Flow
You know what’s coming up on the development roadmap better than anyone else in your team. The ability for you to translate this into small themed sprints of work is an important step that can be easily missed. Translating a 6 month vision into several dozen 2 week sprints takes skill and finesse – your team needs this.
As you’re preparing your team for the next sprint, remind them of the broader vision but spend more time on discussing how this specific upcoming piece of work will play a critical role in achieving the outcome several months down the road.
Influence & Partnerships Across the Organization
If you’re constantly in the trenches and working within your squad, you’ll miss the vitally important task of looking up to see the forest from the trees. This is where your visionary roadmapping skills must blend seamlessly with the ability to see how that roadmap will impact the entire organization.
If you choose one place to be proactive in your leadership and communication – developing partnerships with other departments should be at the top of your list.
Don’t take these conversations and partnership for granted. This is where your greatest influential leadership muscles must be flexed.
Clear and Explicit Communication
Clear, concise, and explicit communication is a must when bringing together cross functional or dependant teams within the organization.
There is a very distinct reason for this.
The leaders of other teams you are bringing together will have their hands full juggling important balls and putting out fires in their respective groups. While the work you are doing will have profound downstream impacts on them, these leaders are focused on what needs to be done today and won’t have your dependencies on their radar.
Your job is to set the appropriate context including a description of the scope of work relevant, how and when it will impact them, and the decisions or outcomes that need to be reached while you are all at the table.
You may have dependencies and partnerships with one team or many – it’s your job to bring the right people to the table and facilitate the discussion on how you can work together to achieve the desired outcome.
Make sure you have a clear sense of what you want to get out of these conversations as there will be a tendency for the scope to creep and stakeholders to ask questions that may not be relevant to the conversation and outcomes at hand.
Tight Knit Leadership Alignment
If you’ve effectively made it this far, there will be an inverse relationship between the influence top management has in your success and the time you need to spend with them.
In other words, it is your responsibility to keep these meetings crisp and concise ensuring the key decisions are raised and acted upon. When you do this well you empower the top leaders in your company to clearly see what levers need to move to allow your team to move forward most effectively. Providing this clarity and confidence will result in more things happening quicker with less time needed between you and management.
Clarity and Explicit Requests
Be prepared for these meetings. Let me say that again – be prepared for these meetings. If it takes you two hours to feel fully confident and ready to facilitate the conversation – do it. Each and every time.
Your job is to distill the hundreds if not thousands of conversations and data points you’re digesting into one salient decision point. You then need to communicate this providing adequate context without deep diving to your executive leadership stakeholders. If there are topics that are running smoothly, don’t waste your leader’s time letting them know all of the great details – if you’re instilling trust and confidence in the tough decisions they will know the other pieces are moving along smoothly.
Before you step into the boardroom you must know the outcomes and decisions you want to walk out with. Everything in your leadership meetings should revolve around these key decisions, dependencies, and flags. It is your responsibility to clearly and explicitly articulate the outcomes needed to move forward.
Summarize each meeting
I close each executive huddle with action items and follow ups for myself and any other members in the group. If you meet on a consistent basis this gives you a timeline to have action items completed by. This also gives your team the confidence that the critical issues are being addressed and will be acted on with progress to be expected by the next check in.
Put yourself in the shoes of your leaders for a minute – they are likely running around from sun up to sun down covering the widest spectrum of conversations, and issues on a daily and weekly basis. Your check in meeting may only represent 1% of their weekly volume.
Building this very consistent cadence, flow, and action driven process around your leadership meetings is a way of hacking your leader’s muscle memory. After the first few iterations your leaders will come to the table prepared and fully engaged because they know exactly what to expect when they sit down and that things will have progressed forward by the time they stand up – which they also know will likely be in the realm of 5 to 15 minutes without a minute wasted.
The Juggling Act of Product Team Leadership
Everyday feels like a rollercoaster.
Bouncing from daily team huddles and micro-decisions with my engineering team to discussing future dependencies with other developments teams and having tough partnership conversations across the organization.
It’s a flurry. A mad scramble. And I often times find myself taking a very intentional moment standing outside my next meeting room pausing for a deep and still breath. A full reset to acknowledge what needs to take place in this next interaction. Understanding that the pace, flow, process, and outcomes may look very different from the 5, 10, or 15 interactions I’ve just had in the last hour.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Technology and product leadership is a challenging and complex dance of alignment, influence, visionary entrepreneurship and tactical relationship building.
If I’ve taken anything from my experience thus far it’s that in this field there is a learning and growth opportunity around every corner. Every conversation and interaction provides immediate feedback for you as a leader and product owner to get better.
My greatest encouragement to you is to seek out these learning opportunities and treat them like gold. Incorporate this dynamic of continual learning into your daily iterative flow. Open these learnings up to your team as frequently as possible.
It doesn’t take long for the tens and hundreds of micro-lessons a day to add up to something very special.
The choice is ours.
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Living Life by a Simple Hypothesis
Sometimes I think we overcomplicate things in life. I find that when I live in tune with the hypothesis below, I am happy, fulfilled and feeling as if I’m doing my best work in the world.
I am at my best when striving towards a pursuit that intrinsically motivates me, is aligned with my values in life and challenges me beyond my comfort zone.
I refer to this state as “The Deep End” of life and I aspire to access this environment for as long and frequently as possible. Why? Because the opportunity it provides me for deep, paradigm shifting learning and growth is unrivalled.
I believe that over the long game of life — years and decades — this learning and growth compounds to create exponential value and results.
So far so good? Hopefully you can think of an experience in your own life where you have experienced the rich learnings from a dive way out of your comfort zone in the Deep End.
There’s one problem I have encountered with the Deep End, it is not actually where we capture our greatest learning and growth.
Let me explain further.
How We Learn: The Present and the Future
I believe our most significant learnings don’t actually arise when we are immersed in the present experience — but instead come long after, when we are intentionally reflecting back on our adventure in the Deep End. In my experience, 90% of my most valuable learning and growth comes through the act of pausing to reflect after the experience itself is over.
Had I not spent the time to intentionally sit down and think, reflect, journal, meditate and mentally deconstruct my experience – that learning and growth would remain trapped in my subconscious and eventually lost.
In a world that increasingly is too distracted, addicted to devices, ego driven, and without foundational framework or guide for living – we are losing sight of the art of learning.
Now let’s take a look at what we’ve learnt from the science.
Learning and The Conscious Brain
Our brain’s are incredible.
They are the reason we are here, standing upright, talking with others, and the dominant species on this planet. The brain has adapted and evolved over millions of years to help us thrive in this world.
Kevin Simlar and Robert Hanson, authors of “The Elephant in the Brain” make an argument that it is in fact this very ability to learn “post-experience” that has differentiated us from all other species on this planet. As we developed this capability hundreds of thousands of years ago to store and analyze past experiences we could update our set of actions to better optimize for survival. More on this shortly.
The facilitator of this capability for conscious thought and decision making is called our pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Whenever you are engaged in active thought — focusing on a new task, considering a set of decisions — this is your PFC at work. Unbeknownst to us, our brains have already done a lot of work in the milliseconds leading up to us forming a conscious thought. The main task is the parsing and prioritizing of millions of raw data points being collected by our brain via the brain stem at any given point in time. Before that conscious thought takes place our brain has already culled and stored 90% of the data it received and formatted the remaining 10% for our conscious processing in the PFC.
Here lies the gap.
When immersed in the present moment, we only have access to the information our brain deems most important to navigate the immediate decisions at hand.
This results in the “surface level” learnings and insights seen in the iceberg visual.
So, what happens to the 90% of information we don’t consciously get access to?
Accessing the Iceberg of our Subconscious
One of the most simple heuristics that has helped me understand how to access the iceberg of wisdom and knowledge hidden within our own subconscious mind is this:
As long as we are mentally preoccupied with an activity in the present, we cannot access our the iceberg of subconscious knowledge.
In other words, whether we are pursuing a goal in the Deep End of life, drowning in thoughts of stress and anxiety, or immediately jumping from one task to the next without pause — we are forgoing the opportunity to learn and grow from the depths of our subconscious.
Sidenote: Dr.Matthew Walker, author of “Why We Sleep” suggests that this also has a significant negative impact on our ability to fall asleep quickly and get deep restful sleep. By foregoing opportunities to pause and reflect throughout the day, our brain’s are forced to begin this activity just as we are laying our head down on the pillow.
Reflection & Inquiry
While we are only just beginning to understand the neuroscience of our brain’s processing of subconscious information, we have intuitively known the art of reflection tens of thousands of years how to access this information. The answer is simple and as a result is often overlooked.
Pause. Be still.
Quiet the mind.
Find Flow.
Rest. Recover.
Reflect. Inquire.
Slowing down, stillness, a quiet mind
A prerequisite to accessing the wisdom of our subconscious is the quieting of our conscious Pre Frontal Cortex powerhouse. This is one of the incredible benefits to breath-work, mindfulness meditation, and frankly any other activity that causes us to detach from our conscious thought — eg, going for a walk where you are simply focused on the awe of Mother Nature that surrounds you.
Non-Performance Flow States
Finding ‘Flow States’, or more specifically the act of being fully immersed and focused on a task that is intrinsically motivating, engaging, challenging and rewarding is another way to stimulate our subconscious processing. Inherently, Flow States are partially subconscious by nature (to access a Flow State you must have practiced the activity enough for our brain to have laid some “unconsciously competent” neural wiring) and don’t need to be performing a sport at an Olympic level. For example the walk described above (walking and general navigation being two of the activities with “unconsciously competent” wiring — can provide the right person with a Flow state). When it comes to using Flow States as a vehicle for subconscious processing I think it’s important to make the distinction between Performance Flow (intentionally using Flow to access a Peak Performance state) and Non-Performance Flow (fully immersed and engaged in an activity without the intention or requirement of Peak Performance).
Sleep
It turns out that REM sleep, occurring in the latter half of a full 7+ hour of sleep night (not to be confused with 7 hours in bed), is where our brains begin making ‘new’ connections between different streams of raw data that have been captured in the previous day. Compromise on sleep and you automatically lose this super hero power.
Reflection & Inquiry
Iceberg metaphor as it relates to conscious and unconscious learnings
There’s something about the iceberg metaphor that is staying on my mind. The most recent thought is the idea that every experience, adventure and journey we go on in life has the potential to represent significant learning and growth. Whether the outcome is good bad or ugly it actually doesn’t matter. As we walk through the experience we have access to the top half of the iceberg, the 10% of conscious learning that comes from the immediacy and present experience of whatever we’re going through. The problem, however is that it takes longer for our subconscious, which is capturing 90 to 95% of the information that we don’t consciously process to make sense of what we’re going through. This bottom half of the iceberg, the 90%, can only be accessed through intentional reflection, inquiry, And self reflection over time. When we choose to raise from one thing to the other, or to avoid the challenging self reflection that may come with failure, negative stories or deep scary vulnerabilities we lose and forfeit the opportunity to capture the 90% of growth and learning that we could otherwise apply to the long-term trajectory of our lives.
Where to from here?
If you want some help establishing your foundation, upon which you are able to jump into the Deep End, I would recommend taking some time completing this free Human Performance Assessment I have developed as part of the Human Performance Project.
Once your direction is set and you are up the High Dive or off into the Deep End, it’s important to build in intentional reflection time at different periods.
I founded The Human Performance Project to equip humans, teams, and groups with the roadmap and tools required to pursue audacious goals, dreams and aspirations in the Deep End of life.
You can learn more about this work here.
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