What I learned at Leading The Product 2023
My thoughts and learnings from #LTPCON - APAC's largest and best Product conference.
Leading the Product is a smashing conference on all things Product. This year was the first in-person (actually, hybrid) event after a few years. Sadly, I missed the past few years and forgot how invigorating and thought-provoking these events are. It was great to connect with people again, and I will certainly do my best — and urge yo to as well — attend as much as possible in coming years.
This post is a summary of what my key learnings were (yes, it took me a while to sit, process, and write it up!). As with the rest of this blog, it represents my own views and thoughts, an attempt to clarify and sharpen my understanding of this topic, with the hopes it provides benefit to others. Whether you were there or not, I’d love to hear your thoughts about the topics discussed as well!
Note: This represents the talks I attended. You should be able to see the full agenda here: https://www.leadingtheproduct.com/conference/apac/ltp2023/agenda/.
Talk 1: Kirsten Mann - Proving the value of Product Management
The full title was “How do I prove the value of good product management when executive expectations demand we focus on delivering unvalidated features faster instead of delivering as per our roadmaps?”.
I’ve heard Kristen talk before, and she has a direct style I adore. Nothing like starting the morning with some blunt four-letter words 😉
Her talk can be summarised as: do you know how to talk to customers, without shoving your product down their throat? Start doing the same to execs. Specifically, get of your soapbox of “the right way” to do product management (no one cares about your process), and start talking in executive language (with dollar signs).
She had some more info about estimating your spend and ROI, but I’ve been using the same rough calculation for years: a small team of devs equals a budget of about $1,000,000 per year. These days it’s probably more. (You can take some industry salary averages and estimate your own team; you don’t need exact numbers from Payroll).
However, that sum seems detached, kinda like how politicians vote on a billion dollar defence budgets with a wave but argue about 500K grant till the cows come home. So put it another way. Your team (one lead @ 200K, two seniors @ 170K, two juniors @ 140K, half a QA and shared designer — plus you, of course) with salaries and a 30% overhead (for taxes, superannuation, etc) probably costs the company on the order of $1.5m per year. That’s $30,000 per week. Your two-week sprint to go and fail fast experiment with something? $60,000 down the drain.
Sobering, eh?
How confident are you now? What’s the ROI we’ll eventually get? Would you put your money behind your idea? (And as I explained before, companies usually want to see a 6x return on that R&D investment).
You can get a lot more traction with executives if you come prepared with those numbers, explain what you’re planning to spend (remembering time = money), and where do you see the upside potential of your idea. It’s part of Thinking in Bets, that will frame the investment, risk, and potential return in term$ that will be much more accessible to business leaders.
Talk 2: - Aligning on outcomes in the face of dependencies
Full title: “How do I align my efforts to deliver the outcomes in our roadmap when I rely on other teams focused on different business priorities?”
Michael’s first suggestion was to stop referring to key personnel as stakeholders, but instead as partners. As someone who strongly believes in the power of language to shape thinking, I support this idea wholeheartedly and will enact it with my team. Thinking, talking, and treating other key people in your business as partners will certainly improve relationships.
As for aligning the organisation and dealing with dependencies, the key comes down to having the whole org aligned on the same business outcomes to make prioritising across teams easy. His three rules were:
Seek to Understand: identify said partners, and seek to understand their drivers (objectives and constratints).
Seek to Frame: find a common language around your goals (think OKRs)
Seek to Align: given partners with shared goals, shift your language to “how might we” solve the common, high priority issues, with an assumption of good intent
Again with the curiosity and transparency, and using language to shift thinking — there must be something to it 😉
Talk 3: Joel Brydon - Gaining Trust
Full title: “How do I demonstrate the return on investment of the sequence of outcomes in our roadmap to gain trust and consensus across the organisation?”
Brydon works at the ABC, where the important numbers are average unique weekly viewers rather than dollars. Though the title implies ROI and outcomes, the key message was that you need to build trust by delivering small results first. Brydon talked about how trust is imperative to go far (you can go faster alone, but not as far as you would with a team), and how trust is earned in drops but lost in buckets.
He presented a framework, which echos many of the other speakers and topics:
Trust at Home: Empathy, Relationships, Transparency, and Action around you and your team.
Trust Far and Wide: again, building relationships on empathy and transparency with your
stakeholderspartners.Trust Earned: surfacing the conversation, anchoring the “why”, data-driven and joint strategy.
It’s similar to what I’ve been preaching — transparency and curiosity followed through with delivering on your word — to earn trust, combined with openly having the hard conversations, and aligning on what’s happening, what’s important, and what needs be done together.
Talk 4: Michael Sribney & Ken Sandy - team structures
Full title: “How do I structure my team so they deliver better outcomes in my organisational type?”
This and the next were delivered as a workshop, with active participation from the audience of the leaders track. Sribney shared research conducted by Brainmates on how various organisations structure their teams (product and cross-functional), and the effects it has. There were several dimensions, and as always it’s scales rather than binary choices.
It confirmed for me something I’ve observed from watching many companies and re-org exercises — an organisational structure is an exercise in trade-offs, in optimisation. It is trying to best solve the highest priority problem the company faces currently. And like everything in product management, this is a continual exercise that will need to be adjusted as the landscape changes.
It’s similar to an approach I’ve privately used: thinking of my teams as a ‘product’ for a ‘buyer’ — the rest of the company — with constant learning and adapting structure and ways of working to suit needs. I particularly liked the comment from Julian Boot (a participant) on how he anticipates upcoming challenges and slowly pushes the teams towards a new structure, to avoid the shock of drastic re-orgs.
Talk 5: Laura Cardinal - Building Resilience
Full title: “How do I strengthen individual and team resilience in constantly changing environments?”
Laura presented — and walked us through — the PERMA framework: Positive Emotions, Engagement (flow), Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. You can find a good article about the framework here. The idea was to identify those triggers and behaviours both on a personal level and for our teams. She presented resilience and the lack of it feels like and and how it looks from the outside.
The important take away is that resilience can be identified and built up. Moreover, while you can have a resilient team-leader without a resilient team, the reverse isn’t true. Bluntly, you’re no good to anyone if you’re a mess, so take care of yourself first as well as trying to care for your team.
As one participant put it, there’s no “work-life balance”, there’s just life. You need to ensure that you can handle it, because resilience is the key to handling uncertainly. If something’s gotta give — and some time it does — make sure it’s the right thing that can later bounce back (ie career). Prioritising self-care is a timely message that can’t be repeated enough.
Side note: I’ve been through burn-out twice before learning the lessons. If you’re feeling lost, overwhelmed, or in need of support on how to handle such situations, please reach out and we’ll talk. This offer is perpetually open to anyone. (I mean it!).
Talk 6: Rachael Morley - Empowered teams
Full title: “How do I work with my leaders to make empowered product teams work in the real world (not just in product keynote land)?”
The last talk of the day was by the inimitable Rachael Morley about a hot topic of the day. As with anything and everything in product management, empowerment of teams isn’t a binary thing. It’s not as simple as you may think, and — coming from Morley who built whole empowered product organisations — isn’t necessarily the best thing either.
I always preferred the term “enlightened” teams, in the sense of cross-functional teams who understand the customer and user context and needs, the business constraints and goals, and can generate solutions that benefit all.
When prospective PMs ask about “empowered teams” in interviews or mentoring sessions, I always ask back about their experience of actually working in such an environment. Did they get the buy-in from the engineers? (I’ve seen too many of those who are happy to code, and don’t want to be ‘empowered’ to go out and talk to users 😅). Or if they’re so keen on running product discovery, then how much experience do they have in doing cost/return analysis and put their name to the numbers? (See notes about Kirsten Mann’s talk above).
Empowerment is a scale. To paraphrase Marty Cagan, discovering the problem is critical but don’t forget to spend more time on discovering the solution. Go back to Joel Brydon’s talk, about earning trust through action and delivery. Understand what are the business needs and goals, and what are the personal goals of the people on your team, your business partners. The more you align and deliver, the more you’ll be trusted, your opinion valued and opportunities offered. Don’t expect a magical wand of empowerment, not unless you go found your own company — because it’s about equivalent, in terms of both freedom and responsibility.
Instead think about it in terms of growth, of enlightening your team with customer context (as much as they can join you on the journey), and of being open to receive strategic guidance in the form of business context (rather than climbing on the soapbox). As Morley puts it, “Intentional Collaboration Creates Empowerment”, where this is based on a realistic frame built upon a learning mindset, on leveraging experience, and being situationally responsive.
The MCs: Kent Weathers & Adrienne Tan
Special thanks and acknowledgements should go to Adrienne Tan (Brainmates CEO) and Kent Weathers (Brainmates CPO) — as well as Nick Coster (co-founder, mostly behind the scenes this time) and the rest of the team. Their words, guidance, and insights throughout the day into what it means to manage products and to lead companies were invaluable. Product Management, let alone product leadership, is a hard discipline with constant challenges.
While at the leader track I’ve missed the very promising talks by
(“How do I ‘do product’ when every organisation does it differently, every guru has a competing framework, and others say frameworks don’t even work in the real world?”), Amir Ansari (“How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands?”), and Robin Zaragoza (“How do I know when I am the problem slowing down the delivery process? (Hint: it’s not a data problem.)”). Feedback from friends who attended them was overoverwhelmingly positive and thought-provoking. Luckily there’s the season pass, where I can watch all sessions on replay (and so can you! highly recommended).I’d love to know what you think! Were you there? What insights did you glean from the talks and the event? Anything you’d like me to expand on? Please comment or reply!
(And I wasn’t joking about the burnout. If you are struggling, please reach out to me).