Episode 124: How Integral Are Tough Skills For the Development of Product Managers?

Episode 124: How Integral Are Tough Skills For the Development of Project Managers?

In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa Perri talks with Glen Stoffel and Caryn Fried, the Co-Founders of Camp4. They talk all about tough skills for project managers such as emotional intelligence; how to deal with stakeholders; how to communicate with the rest of your team; as well as some great facilitation techniques so that you can get the work done!

Both Glen and Caryn are the Co-Founders of Camp4, an organization bringing together the world’s leading sales practitioners to advise and accelerate the growth of the next generation of Salesforce innovators. Glen is also the Co-Founder of Think it Done, and previously held leadership roles at Bluewolf, an IBM company. Caryn is both the Co-Founder and CEO at Camp4, and Co-Founded Think it Done with Glen before leaving in 2020.

The two have worked together closely for years and we can’t wait for you to hear their stories and gain some super actionable insights into project management and team facilitation.

You’ll hear Glen and Caryn talk about:

Tough skills are absolutely essential for the success of running products. Glen says that what really differentiated people during the training was how they operated once they got in the room. How were they interacting with stakeholders? What skills were they putting forward? How easily and effectively could they influence people to get things done?

Some people really struggle with soft skills, however Glen and Caryn prefer to call them ‘tough skills’. With so many technological platforms available to make us quicker and more efficient, there is a massive gap in the process: the human side. As soon as you involve actual people in whatever sales or product management process you have, that’s when tough skills need to show up. You need to figure out how to help those on your team align, agree, collaborate, be critical thinkers and be empathetic, amongst various other skills.

The one thing that a lot of businesses aren’t investing enough time in is facilitation. Oftentimes, strong product people have great visions and immovable opinions; they can see where the dots connect and have a great vision for how their customer and employees’ experience is going to work, but they can get caught in the trap of control, rather than collaboration. If you’re an executive in an organization, it’s your collaborative skills that are the most important part of getting your ideas across.

Your team doesn’t have to agree on the end solution, but if you can get them to agree and align on how they’re going to get there, then that’s how you make sure it’s done in their language. Try taking a brainstorming approach to things with them, get a bunch of ideas together and figure out a way to get them all to mesh in a strategic way.

When dealing with someone who’s a little more hostile to the end goal and is more focused on their own goals, you have to take some extra time to try and build a bridge with that person; don’t just jump to an impulsive anger, it’s all about navigating a personality.

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Resources:

Glenn on LinkedIn

Caryn on LinkedIn

Camp4

Glen Stoffel and Caryn Fried Human-Reviewed Transcript

Glen Stoffel - 00:00:00:

The reason that you got good at that conversation. What we did is we built muscle memory. Why? Because in the same reason why I picked your favorite sports team, right now, in your brain, pick the most incredible player that you can think of. They practice because in the heat of the moment, in the heat of that battle, whatever that sport is, they're relying upon muscle memory in the same way that you're relying on muscle memory to be able to pivot that angryish person back to productive. Those techniques are teachable, but they have to be practiced.

Intro/Outro - 00:00:27:

Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.

Melissa Perri - 00:01:02:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about tough skills for product managers. So that's all about emotional intelligence, how do you deal with stakeholders, how to communicate with the rest of the team, and some really great facilitation techniques so that you can get the work done, not just do the work. So I'm joined by Glen Stoffel and Caryn Fried, who are the co-founders of Camp4. Welcome.

Glen Stoffel - 00:01:28:

Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa Perri - 00:01:29:

It's great to have you guys here. Can you tell us a little bit about Camp4 and how you got into this world of teaching about tough skills and what are tough skills?

Glen Stoffel - 00:01:38:

Sure. Thanks, Melissa. So Caryn and I were both executives at a company called Blue Wolf. We grew up in the salesforce.com consulting ecosystem, and we built a business there that we ultimately sold to IBM. And through that business, we did a lot of digital transformation. And through that business, we had to skill a lot of people onto becoming consultants to be able to facilitate digital transformation. And tough skills was what we felt was necessary. Once we taught people salesforce.com as a platform, once we taught people how they're going to run a project, we realized that what really differentiated them was how they operated when they got in the room, the skills that they were able to put forward. They're interacting with stakeholders when they're trying to gain consensus, when they're trying to influence folks to get things done.

Melissa Perri - 00:02:27:

Yeah, and those are so critical for product managers, too. So we were talking a little bit about before we jumped on here, and I was telling you how some of the biggest questions that I get from people are like, my executives just don't get it. How do I convince them that this is the way to go for product management? Or sales is coming over and telling me that I just have to build these things. How do I tell them no, that I control all of this? So all of these kind of relate back to the top skills in product management. And when we talk about skills in product management over the last why I'm really fascinated about this is over the last decade we've gotten really good at doing some of the practical product management skills. Like we've gotten great at writing out stories, at doing prototypes, at experimentation about data analysis, about all those individual hard skills. But where I see people really struggle now is that other side, which sometimes we call soft skills, but you guys are calling them tough skills. And I was so excited to talk to you because I feel like there are a lot of product managers out there, a lot of product leaders who really need to learn how to develop these things to be able to get their work done across the aisle in an organization. So can you tell us a little bit about what are tough skills? If you had to list them out or talk about what makes something a tough skill, what does that look like?

Caryn Fried - 00:03:50:

It's so interesting because we're talking about product management and we were talking about consulting. And I think at the root of it all is the same thing as technology keeps stepping it up and getting easier. It's clicks, not code. There's better platforms available to make us quicker, faster, maybe more efficient or effective, but not necessarily always more efficient. So there's a gap and that's the human side. Wherever technology process and people come in place, as soon as you put that the people I believe tough skills need to show up right in order to help people align, agree, collaborate, become critical thinkers, be empathetic for the end result, ask great questions, be an active listener, facilitate change in an organization. Those are the things that only at the speed that a human is willing to engage in is the speed in which you're going to be successful. Build the best product and don't have change management it'll be shelved. Not agreeing on the roadmap. No one's going to move forward. These are all so critical underlying everybody's success as people elevate and move forward in their career, as you mentioned, their technical opportunities to code, to design, those are all leaving as they're elevating. These tough skills are really what's going to make the difference eventually into leadership, eventually into somebody as a thought leader and writing and talking about why an organization should go through a transformation or adopt a change or produce a product. All of those are really top skills and nobody is really looking at them realizing that those are the critical things for success here.

Melissa Perri - 00:05:40:

Yeah, all those things that you mentioned are things that I think are critical for product managers to learn. But I see them become even more important right. As we get into these leadership positions, like we were talking about and where I train a lot of Chief Product Officers, I hire a lot of Chief Product Officers. Sometimes I get hired in to replace Chief Product Officers or VPs of product. And to me, those tough skills are almost the thing that makes or breaks whether they're successful or not. It's their ability to do that facilitation across the aisle to get those things done. So if you're a product manager, let's say, and you really want to be a leader, you want to be a Chief Product Officer one day or any kind of leader, and you want to develop your tough skills, I find that some people don't even know how to start, right. How do you actually assess your skills and figure out where do I need help? Is there a framework to this? Is there a way to be like, here's the core requirements of tough skills and how I can actually see if I'm good at them or not?

Glen Stoffel - 00:06:41:

Yeah, let's go to that word you use, facilitation, because I think within there is a really interesting place to explore. And as you're growing from Product Manager towards a CPO, say, if I were to advise companies around the planet, the one skill they're probably not investing in that they should be, it's facilitation. And oftentimes strong product people have great visions, really strong opinions. They can see where the dots connect. They can have a great vision for how that customer experience is going to work, how that employee experience is going to work. But you can get caught in a trap of control versus collaboration. Take my vision and the higher I get up, oh well, they're just going to take my vision because now I'm at the executive table and I would say nothing could be further from the truth. It's actually your skills of collaboration that become even more important for you to get your ideas across and for your ideas to take on the tenor and the profile of your customers, your employees and the rest of the executive team. So that it's our idea. And that requires facilitation. And maybe Caryn, if you want to give some of the foundational skills that sit within there because there's a motion of facilitation, that is the magic. Like when you run into a discovery session or a stakeholder alignment, right? That is a beautiful session, that is a facilitated session. But there's some foundational skills that are building blocks to that that maybe we could start to unpack as a foundation.

Caryn Fried - 00:08:14:

Yeah. So also something really interesting that people don't always differentiate between is presentation and facilitation. So I like to always start at that point. If I'm presenting to you, I'm the subject matter expert and I am speaking 80% of the time and I leave ten to 15 minutes at the end for questions. And of course I'm going to provide these answers I'm the subject matter expert. When I'm facilitating, 80% of the time I'm collecting information from others, and only 20% of the time am I really just setting context and creating space for collaboration to happen. So in that 80% of the time, what am I supposed to do?

As a facilitator, I have some serious ground rules. Number one, I have to set the tone. I have to remain neutral. I have to remind everybody what the goal is of this. I have to check as many egos at the door or manage the group dynamics that's pulling some people forward and asking them questions. That's pushing some people back, continually reminding people of what our agenda is and the expectations and the outcomes that we're all collectively working towards. I have to guide and control the conversation, but not stifle it in any way. So these are pretty dynamic personalities that you're going to want to be inclusive of. And there's some very easy techniques. And I say that in the way. One of the best ways to hear everyone's voice is give everyone a magic marker and a postit and everyone has the same amount of postits. All of a sudden we've delineated and flattened hierarchies pretty quickly. It's also really important to remain neutral. I can't really think that Melissa's idea was the best idea and then Glen's, so so I didn't create a neutral zone. Everyone has their opportunity. There'll be other facilitation techniques that we can use in which maybe we'll vote or prioritize those ideas. But as a facilitator, I can't play favorites. A neutral and objective opinion is where I need to go. So actually people find it it's easier for me to facilitate something I know nothing about. I'm just open-eyed and curious.

The toughest thing is, as you're growing in your career and you become the CPO, you know a lot about it and you have strong opinions. And so you have to check yourself and hold that out so that you've created this space where other people can have the opportunity to share ideas and be in alignment. So another thing that a facilitator does in that 20% that they're allowed to speak is ask really good questions, the power of a question, not leading an open one. You set it up with enough context and then you let it roll. So facilitation really is a series of activities led by great questions.

Melissa Perri - 00:11:02:

So to dive into that a little bit more too. Where I see people struggle is sometimes they end up in facilitation mode and then they never come back to having their own opinion. So how do you balance, right? Like if you're let's take this for example. You're the Chief Product Officer. You don't even have to be that high. Like, you're a product manager. And I've seen a lot of product managers do this, where we tell product managers over and over again that they're facilitators. I tell them this a lot. So they go out, they go talk to sales, they talk to all these people, they gather all their opinions, they gather all their ideas. And then what they do is they end up coming back and sometimes not making decisions about what those ideas are or learning how to sift through the ideas that are out of context or not relevant to come back to what the objective is and to focus. So how do you advise people on understanding when they're facilitating versus when they're leading versus when they have to do decisions? Like in what context should you be facilitating and then when do you come back and say, here's how I put my own expertise on it, or here's what I do afterwards?

Glen Stoffel - 00:12:11:

Yeah. I think part of what you're trying to get the organization around is not agreeing on the end solution. But if they can agree on the rules of engagement, of how we're going to get there and if we can get them aligned around the criteria that we're all going to use to make decisions together, that's the magic of how to make sure it's done in their language and you're pulling them into it. So, for example, one of the facilitation techniques we use, and I think I heard you talk about this in your 100th episode when you were talking about stakeholder alignment. You talked about acquisition, expansion, retention, sort of a classic like, where are we going to put the focus on the business? And therefore that might be determinant of how we're going to drive the product and the requirements. That frame is a really powerful frame and that's a technique that we use. It's called the acre model. Acquisition, expansion, retention and cost savings. And when we facilitate that session, we initially do it in a very open format, very brainstorming. Okay, what does everybody think the most important thing is that we should do to acquire customers, grow customers, expand customers, save money across all of those facets. And what you expect in the facilitation technique is a bunch of post notes and a lot of brainstorming and everybody's ideas get out on the table.

Then what you do is you introduce a framework for making sure that you could trade upon those as a currency that an idea can be compared against another idea for purposes ultimately of prioritization. So what you do in the facilitation techniques, you start pulling up a poster node and you go, okay, who wrote this one? And they'll say, oh, well, I think we should do nothing but add a whole new product set to our existing product set, just extend. And somebody else says, I think we should go into new markets. Okay, two different ideas. How do I compare those two ideas? One person started to say, then you start asking, well, let's say crosssell is the thing that somebody's promoting. Where are you going to do crosssell? Who are you going to enable crosssell? Are you going to do that with your inside salespeople, your outside salespeople, your call center, your contact center might not even be trained to know how to spell crosssell. Can they really do it? So all of a sudden you've got, you need to talk about the who. And if we did that, how much is it worth to us to do it, what's the business impact? And so what you're doing is you're starting to shine light on the frame and then we get them to rewrite them and each one of these things has to have a who. It's for the business impact, how it's aligned with the strategy. And again, if it's a social organization, it could be how it's aligned with their social mission. But again, you can elicit the frame. That frame is the magic that you hang everything off of because then now they have a currency with which to trade. And so your own opinion in there.

Okay, you could certainly have your own postit notes but really what's going to come out of that is the organization's opinion and a common way that they can decide upon priorities. That's maybe a long way of sort of getting around to your question, but let's see what it leads you to think about that we might have missed there.

Melissa Perri - 00:15:11:

Yeah, no that's great. So what I'm hearing too is in order to go into those meetings though, where you're facilitating, you need to have an agreed upon prioritization framework. You need to have which we talk about a lot in product management and there's a ton of different ones. I particularly like things like Cost of Delay, that's a great one that I keep recommending to people. But then we also need to have good data that says we have something to show how we're going to rank these things based on our opinions and we need the right people in the room to do that. And then once we have those requirements, then we're able to go facilitate, hear everybody's opinions and then use it to get to common ground.

Glen Stoffel - 00:15:51:

And that is prioritization. So now that I've got these tradable items, now I can shape my vision. Product manager and I can say based on the facilitations we did, all the interviews we did now because you have the organization sort of around it, you have their language, you have it tied to the business outcomes, you have it tied to the strategy of the company customer employee experience. Now I think the product manager CBO can shape it, can have their opinion. So when they present back to the organization, hey, this is what we all got together and discussed. This seems to be our priorities as a team aligned with our strategy, align with our employee experience, our customer experience. And yeah, they're definitely going to bring their own ideas to that and they probably knew some of what was going to happen as a result. It's not all going to be a surprise. It doesn't all come out in the room. Some of it's already you already have a shape, a reasonable shape. What you've done is really solidified that shape with the voice of everybody else in it. That's the line of how to get your own, I guess, ideas in there that you were asking at the beginning of that segment.

Melissa Perri - 00:16:51:

Yeah. So one thing that I've seen happen and I've heard this from other people too, in these situations is that we might have somebody who's very wedded to their idea, and they're trying to put it into the framework, but they don't like the framework, and they might try to blow up the whole framework because it doesn't match their idea. I'm sure everybody has worked with some kind of stakeholder who's just really gunning for their thing. What do you do in those situations where you've got somebody who's a little hostile and not working towards the meeting or towards the goal of these companies and instead like working more towards their own goal? Right. And not seeing the overall picture?

Caryn Fried - 00:17:26:

As a product owner, you probably do know some of the dynamics in the company, you know, where that pitfall might be sitting inside of. And so as a facilitator, by remaining neutral, that's not the time to if it's happening live and in person in front of a lot of people, you remain neutral. That behavior will be seen by many people as disruptive. And I think if you know that going in, taking time to build a bridge between you and that person, showing them what it is, it's going to take some extra time. Building a bridge always does, perhaps even helping them write it so that it becomes that's just navigating a personality an objection. But if the process is fair that we're working them through, I think, again, that's their level of understanding. And we always have to deal with everybody's personalities. So I would just try to catch it live and in person. It's almost like Glenn and I have had this almost it's an attack and you're almost frozen.

Melissa Fried - 00:18:36:

Exactly. And I think that's what I hear from people. I've witnessed it myself. Like I've been in a room of executives just screaming at each other where it gets super hostile and you know this one person is going to blow it all up and stir the pot going in there. But they're probably in a leadership position. They're probably have been allowed to get away with those types of things. So now you are trying to figure out how do you get your work done when you've got this kind of antagonistic character over here? So you mentioned like building a bridge, which I totally agree with. What are the first steps to building a bridge with somebody like that? And in some of these situations, maybe they were like hostile to you at the beginning.

I see a lot of this in product management more because it's that giving up control. So, for example, this happens a lot with sales leaders. As soon as you bring in a head of product, they're like, well, we were calling all the shots and now we're not. And they get a little upset. Their autonomy for dictating the product roadmap was taken away, their control was taken away. They start to be a little hostile. Some people are not, but this does happen pretty frequently or in large transformations in organizations as well. The leaders are being told like, you don't have software decision rights anymore or the way we're going to change some stuff. So you're probably not going to have the same scope that you had before. How do you work with those people, right? Like, what's the first step to really taking a personality like that who comes off pretty hostile to you, angry in the meetings, doesn't want to work with you uncollaborative and trying to build a bridge with them.

Caryn Fried - 00:20:09:

You pointed out something that's so powerful before we get to how to deal with that individual is you understand, you just had so much empathy for that sales leader and you actually know we are going to find these people along our journey. Don't be surprised while we're going down this path that there's going to be an angry bear. Okay, so you actually just educated people knowing look for this, look for this in every one of your meetings and do whatever you can to prevent it, right? So carry the whistle, do whatever. But more importantly, you were so empathetic about that this person is used to X, Y and Z, and now there's a change. What do you want to do about it? And I think even when attacked in a meeting, you would tip your head and you would feel something for them because you understand where they're coming from. You don't agree with their behavior, but you do understand where they're coming from. And that change is difficult, that this is scary. I wouldn't necessarily have a therapy session with them right then and there, but when you're coming from an empathetic place, your reaction and your mode I think changes a lot. I'll pass it to Glen. Let him give you

Glen Stoffel - 00:21:15:

I would have two lenses of this that are going to take that is like the top game and the immediate, like, in your face game. Let's deal with the in your face game really quickly because what we were talking about is getting emotionally hijacked in a meeting. We've all felt it strong personality type, strong opinion, probably very senior leader, just barreling through something. And by the way, they could be angry about something and have every right to be. So we can't just dismiss it offhand that they're not right. Even though they might be being a jerk or being a little angry or taking out a different way. They also could be right about the opinion. It could be sound strategy. So we have to be able to we have to be able to parse that apart. Melissa, I bet in your career, you got very good at the following thing. Angryish stakeholder called you up, and by the end of that conversation, you had pivoted that back to productive yes or no.

Melissa Perri - 00:22:11:

Yeah, that was learned on the job too, right?

Glen Stoffel - 00:22:16:

Many of us learn that the hard way.

Melissa Perri - 00:22:18:

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the big thing that I try to tell people is, like, I didn't start off knowing this. I actually used to be a very antagonistic person. I was younger in my career, right? Like, early days in my career, I thought I was right and everybody was wrong, and I thought people were generally stupid. That was my attitude, at least, even if I didn't firmly believe that in my soul. But I came up that way, and I learned that that's not the way that you get things done. And I have a lot of empathy, having gone through a lot of change myself and working with organizations, doing these large transformations like you guys have been doing, too. I see so many people imagine I try to say it, but imagine you've been working somewhere for 40 years, and one day somebody comes in and says, hey, we're going to do a digital transformation. And that job that you got really good at for 40 years and you might be close to retirement. That job's different now, and you have to go back to the drawing board and learn an entire new skill set. You're like, well, I put in my 40 years. I've got five years to retirement. Why would I want to go back and learn how to be a product manager, right?

So I work with people like that every day. And I learned that it's not just from telling them, you have to do it this way and listen to me, that you get things done. It's by really empathizing with them and finding common ground and understanding where they're coming from. I would be very upset if somebody came in and blew up my job at that point. I would be like, Come on, I'm almost done here. I got to go enjoy my retirement soon. Why do I have to kill myself for the next five years? I think that lack of empathy happens a lot. But I do think learning empathy, people ask me, they're like, how do I learn how to empathize? And I think that's one of the biggest things product managers we say product managers need to do, right? We say empathize with your customers. And I don't see people empathizing with their executives or empathizing with their stakeholders or empathizing with the change management that's happening and how those people feel about it. But then I also hear people who are like, oh, should we have to? It's like, yeah, if you want to get things done, you kind of do.

Glen Stoffel - 00:24:24:

And in those moments, right in that heated moment. Let's put a pinpoint on that where the person is going to get emotionally hijacked, right, and be on their heels when all they're there to do is really solve a problem and something they believe in, which is the way to move the company forward with product management process and a discipline instead of habits. The reason that you got good at that conversation and I got good at that conversation the hard way over time, what we did is we built muscle memory. But why? Because in the same reason why pick your favorite sports team right now in your brain. Pick the most incredible player that you can think of and then ask yourself a question. Why do they still practice? They practice because in the heat of the moment, in the heat of that battle, whatever that sport is, they're relying upon muscle memory in the same way that you're relying on muscle memory to be able to pivot that angryish person back to productive. Those techniques are teachable, but they have to be practiced. Professional teams practice and well, actually, I should say many professionals teams don't practice in our space, but they should. They could. And those are teachable techniques. They don't all need to be learned the way that you and I might have learned them and Caryn might have learned them with the hard way over a lot of conversations.

Caryn Fried - 00:25:36:

I'll add to that that a lot of times as people are moving up in their career, they have that technical capability and just when they really need it, they think they're going to dive into these skills and pick them up. But these skills are actually developed. You can't just apply them as needed. Right? There are frameworks, there's muscle memory, as Glen was mentioning, it takes practice. And so people get out of equilibrium and they go back to what they are accustomed to doing and want to do, because this is an unknown and these are skills and muscles I haven't used yet. So if you're already there, you're behind. You start at the foundation level and a critical conversation or identifying themes or starting to build up empathy starts now just with awareness and then the desire to learn more about it, and then the ability to do it, and then gets reinforced. So there's a lot of things that people could be doing. And Melissa, you mentioned this and I had a critical point in my career. I was always client facing, running projects, doing digital transformations. I loved it. I loved working with my clients. And at a particular point in my career, I was asked to come in house. I was like, who's going to be my client? And I realized my executives are my client, my employees are my client. I had the best client. I loved their culture and I got paid by them. Having an internal client is someone you would cherish and they. Are going to be there for the long run. So, yeah, that's really worth being empathetic to. Those are your partners. Those are the ways that this company is going to move the needle in the right direction. They're worth the investment and clients may come and go, but your team is not.

Melissa Perri - 00:27:23:

That's a really great analogy for that too. So if you want to practice these types of things, like you want to practice empathizing with people, understanding where they're coming from. Let's say you're early in your career and you're like, I just heard Caryn, I'm developing this because I really want to be a VP of product one day. What are the steps you could do to get started? How should you be thinking about this on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, to kind of hone your skills and reflect and see if you're actually progressing and getting better. And how do you know if you're getting better?

Glen Stoffel - 00:27:54:

Yeah, we deliver public courses every Tuesday, but there's plenty of other people who also do that. I would say find a place where you could learn the techniques and practice them, but then it becomes really important. How do they stick? Because that's really what's foundational in what you're asking, right, is what are the habits right, that they can stick? And a lot of times that comes down to a couple pieces. One is if those types of skills are a priority in the organization and they're identified as such, then how do they show up? How do they show up in a project retrospective? How do they show up in a six month or biannual employee review? Right. Those skills, they need to be spoken about and how do they show up in a mentorship capacity? If you happen to have that right, it's about giving those skills. Voice within those fixtures, those ceremonies within the organization is a big piece of it. And then very personally, it's like you need to talk about it with the people that you trust and tell them, hey, I'm working on this. When we get out of this next meeting, could you give me feedback and make sure that that and again, if that's a cultural tenant already, that feedback is a gift and that's built into the culture, great. You're just playing into something that's already there. If it's not, find your small set of people, let them on the inside and tell them you're working on these things. But it has to find voice after they learn it and they practice it to make it really stick.

Caryn Fried - 00:29:18:

I would add to that this journey, this other half of the equation that we're talking about really does look a lot like emotional intelligence. So here's a couple of things that you can check. Are you getting triggered? Are you blaming others? Do you feel like you don't have control because you're pointing fingers at different parts of the organization? If they would just they should by the way. If the word should is showing up, it's an indicator that we need to become more flexible. Are you annoyed? Do you have the feeling that you're always right and everyone else is wrong and above all other costs? That's what we're going to go with. I just want to be right versus get the results. We have to put that down in order for the company to get what they want. And can you start looking at the bigger picture? This is not about feature and functionalities inside of the product. It's about the company moving in this bigger direction and meeting its business objectives. And if you can start thinking that way and then branch out, read an emotional intelligence book, take a test, find out where you are on a scale from one to ten.

We teach this really good framework where we check in one being an absolute terrible day. Melissa, we are not out of bed. We're in the fetal position. Ten being the best day. We're probably not working where it's like we are in flow. This is the best day ever and we're toggling somewhere between that and before I go into a major meeting, I check my number 15 minutes before I'm going to meet with Melissa. This is me becoming self aware. How can I be my best self? How do I know I can facilitate? I have to be above a five. If I'm not, go for a walk, go drink some water. Don't be angry. These all sound like just such personal things, but they tap into the best possible version of yourself and that's the type of skill. These skills are tough. No one's playing that game that Glen's been practicing every day unless you're going to be in peak performance. So I think this level of awareness, see how many times you're triggered, see how important it is to be right, those are going to be things that are going to help you at least identify that you might want to make the change because really this change is about them.

Melissa Perri - 00:31:29:

Yeah, I love that framework to really think about that. And I do think if you sit there and reflect and especially when the types of questions that I get from product managers like, oh, my salesperson just wants me to do the roadmap, I can tell that they were triggered because they wrote to me. So it's probably a good awareness. If you are writing to me and complaining about somebody, it's probably that you're triggered. But some of them do have good reasons to be triggered. Some of it is in a dysfunctional workplace. But if you are working in a dysfunctional workplace, right. It sounds like the first step is to kind of empathize with the people around you and try to figure out where they're coming from to create it there and then. I always advise people, though, if change isn't really going to happen or you tried it and you did approach it from all these standpoints we're talking about sometimes it's best to leave and go find another place where you can actually work. I don't think anybody's staying here beat your head against the wall trying to change everything forever. But if you practice these types of things with the facilitation techniques, the empathy, the emotional intelligence, it can help with a lot of these conflicts that people actually have.

Glen Stoffel - 00:32:30:

It might also help you be clear that place isn't for you. And that's okay. By the way, that's awesome. That type of clarity, when you rock that into your next interview and you say, I'm looking for this, this and this skills wise, job wise, but also this is what I need culturally, this is the type of people I want to roll with. Bring that clarity in an interview. And at least that's the way I always hired. I hired for attitude, aptitude, culture, fit. We'll teach you the rest of the stuff.

Melissa Perri - 00:32:56:

Yeah, that's great. So we talked about facilitation, we talked about emotional intelligence. Are there any other tough skills that we did not touch on today?

Glen Stoffel - 00:33:04:

I would just say, like, I want to go back to that. We talked about that frontline emotional hijacking, but that was off of your question about how do I get people aligned. So I just don't want to treat that front end issue. I do want to get around and above and to the side of that person to use the broader corporate charter to get them in line. And so to me, there's facilitation techniques. What I would say if you're moving on that progression, as you said in the 100th episode, the third thing, that sort of progression for product manager to CPO, and I'm going to have executive presence. The thing that I would be looking for to be asking is what is the strategy of the company? Can they articulate it in 35 words or less? Because there's some framework sitting there about what the strategy of the company is. And if everybody agrees that we're going to be a 200 million dollar company by 2018, by offering this to these customers, organized this way with this unique process, if everybody knows what that is, and everybody's agreed to that, every time that you're talking about where the product management function fits into that, you're pointing back to the corporate charter. You're pointing back to a really clear strategy statement that the executive team came up with together, having somebody facilitate that for you. Again, if you're the CPO, you could do it. If you're a gifted facilitator, that's where I try to take the charter from the top. Because then by the time that cascades down to that meeting, you already have the executive alignment around where we're trying to go as a business. Now you're trying to answer the question, what do we think the most important things we could be doing from a product point of view in order to achieve that and that might help put that person in line. So that's just some thinking around, particularly up at the Chief Product Officer level and how their executive engagement could be enhanced. I would make sure that there's a really tight strategy that's written and everybody knows what it is and agrees to it.

Melissa Perri - 00:35:00:

There's usually not, which is a lot of the work that I do. But yeah, that's a really good point. Without a common North Star, without that vision, without that strategy, you can't facilitate anything. You're just going to be spinning your wheels because you have nowhere to converge to, no common context about what you're going into. So a lot of work has to happen before you just jump into the room. I like that. Also, the other thing that you mentioned, too, that I wanted to dive into a little bit was you mentioned the word executive presence. And we do see that come up a lot for how people evaluate leaders, how they're looking at anybody in the organization. Really as a product manager, there is some kind of level of executive presence that they're looking for from someone. What does that mean? What is executive presence and how do you hone it?

Caryn Fried - 00:35:47:

Some of the things and again, it's a skill that gets developed over time. I don't think all of a sudden you flip a switch and you become an executive. So there's a level of confidence. And that level of confidence is to be able to articulate and clearly define what it is that you're speaking about. I think once you want to understand and unpack that, like, what does confidence look like and sound like some of the simplest things but it's running effective meetings, it's having a purpose, it's driving to an outcome. And at the higher level, those meetings are more and more expensive. They shouldn't be just run like the wild, wild west. I know that people's time is important and I'm going to drive to this outcome. I have a specific agenda. The prep work. When Glenn says the word we rock into a meeting, it doesn't mean we just showed up. Like there was equal amount of time to prepare for that meeting. If you're going to facilitate it or if you're going to run it effectively, understanding how to flex to people's communication style so that your message lands more neutral. It's not offensive or aggravating in any way. All of these skills, Melissa, that we were mentioning before about being empathetic, that is also a leader in clear communication.

Melissa Perri - 00:36:58:

Great. I think that's very nice concise little list that you can actually look at there. And like I said, I do think product managers, even from your earliest days, your junior product manager, you're getting in there, that's something that you could start honing because you do have to get up there and present to people. You do have to manage those rooms. You do have to bring all these stakeholders together. So the more you start honing your executive presence now, the longer it will go for you as you try climbing that career ladder, too. So for those of the people listening and they say, hey, I've got a team and I want to teach them some of these skills, or I'm an individual product manager, I want to hone my emotional intelligence or learn some tough skills, what can they do to learn more about Camp4 or reach out to you? What kind of work do you do with companies and individuals?

Glen Stoffel - 00:37:42:

Yeah, so broadly around tough skills, I mean, the first thing I would suggest is we do Tough Skill Tuesdays and we've got four great modules, nice tight video, goes out ahead of time so people could just learn the concepts. Because the key piece, as I said earlier, is practice creating a safe place. Once you learn those concepts, just practice them, try them out, try asking great questions, try telling a great story, try flexing to that challenging communication style person that was trying to emotionally hijack you. Try it in a safe environment. So our Tough Skills Tuesdays is a great place to start that. But we'll also put these frameworks and these trainings into broader talent engines for organizations who are trying to do these things consistently, who want to set up their onboarding, who want to set up their technical training, or again, or these client facing consulting trainings.

Melissa Perri - 00:38:33:

Great. Well, I hope if you've been listening to this and you are a leader looking for maybe some different training through your community of practice for product management or just to bring in somebody to help your team, you do reach out to Glen and Caryn. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. We will link to everything that they mentioned in our show notes. If you go to productslabs.com or the productthinkingpodcast.com, you can find it. Thank you again, Glen and Caryn, for being here. And thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll see you next time.