Episode 127: Answering Questions About Digital Transformations

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about digital transformation, including how to set up a successful digital strategy for a Fortune 500 company, how to keep your digital transformation under control without pushing it too far, and how to transition product owners into product managers.

Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here, and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.

Q&A:

• Q: Hey, Melissa, I've worked for a new team that has managed to resist adopting the heavier parts of Scrum and Agile as we mature and grow. We've been pushing the boundaries and simplifying our approach based on modern product design and development practices. That said though, I'd love to move away from having dedicated product owners because I firmly believe, and I think you do too, that the PO is more of a role that should be shared versus an assigned title. My goal is to shift our POs into PM roles, assuming it's a good match to their interests and skill sets. So, looking ahead, what are a few things that we should be thinking about as POs start transitioning to PMs? What risks should I anticipate? I don't know that this won't be an overnight transition. So what are some good ways to evaluate the performance of our POs until the transition can finally happen? Thanks for everything you do!

• A: So this is a great question and one that I think is relevant as we're talking about what a product manager is out there in the world today. So if you haven't heard, it's been all over Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you are a product manager, this could be concerning. But Airbnb did a big conference a couple of weeks ago, and Brian Chesky said, "Hey, we're getting rid of product managers," to which everybody said, "Oh my God, we don't need product managers anymore." And all the designers, of course, were like, "Yay!" But product managers started to panic. What he actually said was, "We are trying to go more towards a product marketing role with the product managers," and I think this ties into what we're talking about here with product owners versus product managers.

• Q: Hello! First off, I just want to say your podcast has been really helpful in honing my product management skills. I've gone from a product manager to a lead product manager role. And now, I am a digital product strategist. My question is about building  a digital strategy for a Fortune 50 company. And what I mean by that is we seem to lack a digital product strategy right underneath the corporate strategy, the enterprise-level strategy that can tell our business units and leaders how to build and engage members digitally. You have marketing folks creating their own digital experiences. You have other organizations going off and partnering with different vendors to create digital experiences for our members but never working with their internal digital teams and product teams to see if we should build it within our existing digital platforms or even innovate something new and keep it within our brand. Thank you so much! Looking forward to hearing your answer.

• A: Now, this is a common thing for companies that are going through digital transformations. A lot of times, we leave strategy to the last thing. I see this happen a lot. I've been involved in a lot of them, especially with Fortune 500 companies. I worked with a tonne of Fortune 500 companies. So do not be discouraged. This is the next learning step on your journey. Typically, what happens is we go out, and we train all the product managers. And then we realize that we don't know which way the product manager is actually running. So there's nothing to tie that corporate strategy back into what the teams are doing. And then we get into arguments with leadership about whether are we building the right thing? So you are at this point. This is what I would do in those companies.

• Q: A year ago, I joined an older enterprise business undergoing digital transformation. While many product leaders have elements of the right vision, the whole product, org read, inspired just before I got here. They're trying. There's still a lot of need to change the way we work. I get plenty of positive feedback and excitement about the changes I'm bringing from my prior roles at digital native companies. But I'm also experiencing some tense pushback from certain groups. I know transformation will ruffle some feathers. But how do I know if I'm pushing too hard? Should I give up and go back somewhere where I fit in?

• A: I can really empathize with this question because, before I started consulting, I was a ruffer, and I ran into a lot of problems. But then, as a consultant, I ruffle all the time. I ruffle feathers. That's what I'm hired to do. But you gotta do it carefully. And I have learned my lesson because I have ruffled too many feathers before, and I've made people angry. So from multiple years of doing this since I've been consulting since 2014, these are my tips when you get in, and you start to evaluate a new company going through a transformation, and you see people not doing things they're supposed to do.

Resources:

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today we're gonna be talking all about digital transformations and we've got three questions around that. One's gonna be on how do we transition product owners into product managers? Another one is about pushing too far when you're actually going through a digital transformation. And then we've got one more on doing a digital strategy for a Fortune 50 company. So I'm excited to dive into those. And I do think we're gonna be talking a little bit about a hot topic of Airbnb Product Management stuff while answering the first question. So let's dive in there and see what our phone caller has to say.

First Sender

Hey, Melissa. I work for a new team that has so far managed to resist adopting the heavier parts of Scrum and Agile as we mature and grow. We've been pushing the boundaries and simplifying our approach based on modern product design and development practices. That said, though, I'd love to move away from having dedicated product owners, because I firmly believe, and I think you do too, that the PO is more of a role that should be shared versus an assigned title. My goal is to shift our POS into PM roles, and of course that's assuming it's a good match to their interests and skill sets. So looking ahead, what are a few things that we should be thinking about as POs start transitioning to PMs? What risks or gotchas should I anticipate? And I know that this won't be an overnight transition, so what are some good ways to evaluate the performance of our POs until the transition can finally happen? Thanks for everything you do.

Melissa Perri - 00:02:10:

So this is a great question. And one that I think is relevant as we're talking about what is a product manager out there in the world today. So if you haven't heard, it's been all over Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you are a product manager, this could be concerning, but Airbnb did a big conference a couple of weeks ago and in it, Brian Chesky said, hey, we're getting rid of product managers in which everybody said, oh my god, we don't need product manager anymore, like they're gonna just go away. And all the designers, of course, were like, yay. Product managers started to panic. What he actually said was, we are trying to go more towards a product marketing role with the product managers. And I think this ties into what we're talking about here with product owners versus product managers. And I wrote up something about it on LinkedIn, so I'm gonna tell you what my take is on it here. When you're thinking about product owners out there in the world today, the product owner role came out of Scrum. It's extremely tactical. It's sitting with the developers. It's telling the developers what to do. It's kind of like feed the engineers type role and a lot of product management that you've been seeing out there has started to evolve into that. It's been the, let's write a bunch of user stories and feed the engineers, right? Like let's get into the nitty gritty with them and tell them what to do. I don't think that's extremely valuable product management. That might be controversial, but I don't think that's product management actually at all. Because if you go and you look at what product management was and what product management should be, it should firmly sit between the business, the customers and users and technology. It's not just about technology. It's not just about being in the weeds with the developers and telling them what to do. It's about trying to see how we can commercialize our product, get more money, solve problems for our customers through software. That's what the software product management role is. Now in SaaS companies, it's always been that way. And especially SaaS companies that did not go through some kind of Agile transformation and adopt Scrum. These people had product managers. Those product managers were responsible for figuring out how do we increase retention through our software? How do we go after new markets through our software? How do we solve these interesting problems? And all the way down on the team level, yes, you would be working with the developers, but you wouldn't be sitting there telling them what to do every step of the way, right? You are collaborating with them where you're going, hey, here's the problems we're solving. You're working with the designer to figure out what solutions are gonna be built. And you're going back and forth with them and breaking down and prioritizing how we think about solving those problems in logical ways. You're thinking through the requirements of what needs to be happening, but a lot of what are we actually doing on a day-to-day basis, I believe, can be left up to the engineers if you trust them and the designers. If you trust them, if you build a really good relationship with them, you should not be sitting with the developer telling them what to do every day. That's not your job. And product management has a lot of job components to it, right? Like we need to be out there discovering what the customer problems are. We need to be understanding how the business actually works to figure out how we lock in all these new software components and keep the business running. We need to understand technology to know what kind of order we can build these things in. Is it really hard? Is that a big problem or a small problem to solve? It encompasses a lot of work. But when we look at the product owner role, a lot of times it's just about the tactical piece of break down all of these things into user stories and give it to the developer. And I know for those of you who do like Scrum out there, I'm not trying to bash Scrum. I'm saying this is how that role got developed. And this is usually where the learning about product management ends. This role, this product owner role, did not come out of great product management. It came out of a necessity to prioritize what we need to be building. And now we're starting to get more of the pieces of product management pulled into that product owner role when you go to learn about it, but not all of it. Not all of it. So usually our education is limited there. And what happens is if you have all of these super tactical roles that are just feed the engineers. and you're not bringing these people up to think strategically, you end up with a ton of people in these roles, first of all, and they become almost like project managers, not even product managers. That is not an effective way to scale. If you want to scale your company, you want to build great software, you hire extremely smart people, developers, designers, and product managers, but you raise those product managers up to be a little more strategic. And you still need them to be working with the developers and prioritizing what we're building, but they're not going to sit there and just feed them user stories. They're going to go out and do an analysis on what we should be building. What's our ROI for actually doing these things? What kind of order should we be implementing this in? What are the actual needs of the requirements, right? Like, what do we have to have? What's a must have? What's a nice to have? And that's how we really should be approaching our work. So as you're going out on this transition and trying to get these product owners and product managers, It is very important to start to evaluate them along the way. You want to make sure that these people can think strategically. You want to make sure they can actually make hard decisions as well. So it's not just about, hey, can we build X, Y, and Z? It's more like, should we be building X, Y, and Z? Or should we be building something else? They're having hard conversations with stakeholders about priorities and about trade-offs. They're able to push back. on wrong ideas or ideas that they don't think are great. They're always asking, what should we get for our business and for our customers if we build this? What are gonna be our metrics? How do we measure success? Those are the types of things that I really would be looking at. And that's the type of thing that you don't see sometimes with product owners. You don't see their ability to push back. You don't see their ability to take a couple steps back and strategically understand the whole landscape. Product managers are curious about the business. They're curious about the customer. They're curious about the technology, but they put that all together. So that's what I would really be looking at when you're making this transition. It's easy to get stuck in product owner roles because a lot of it revolves around outputs, right? We start looking at how many user stories people are writing. They can get into the weeds of just sitting by themselves and writing down things and prioritizing it within a bubble. That's some gotchas I would look for. You wanna make sure that as people are transitioning from product owners to product managers, they're very outward facing. They're around the business. They're not just spending their whole time with the team, but they're going around the business and learning. They're learning about their customers. They have very curious questions, right? Curiosity is such an important trait of a product manager. So they're curious about how things work, how the business works, how we make money, how we're thinking about evolving, what our vision looks like for the future. Those are some of the things that I really would be pushing. Now, when you're making this transition, you asked about some gotchas as well. You want to make sure that you're not just adopting specific frameworks without understanding the context behind those frameworks for the product managers. When you think about learning in product management, there's actually many different levels of learning. There's hierarchies of knowledge that we actually go through when we teach product management. When you're looking at frameworks and what people do when they're first introduced to product management and learning product management, is they gravitate towards very specific processes that they want to use and replicate. They're not really putting a lot of thought behind why are we doing those things. Great example, prototypes. people say, okay, first you gotta go out, understand the problem. You're gonna do your user research there, right? Then you're gonna scope the problem, then you're gonna design the solution, then you're gonna go test prototypes. You see a lot of entry-level product owners and product managers, but people who are junior in their careers start to gravitate towards tools like prototypes and use them at the wrong time. Give you a great example. Worked at a company where I was training a bunch of these product managers and one comes in and says, hey, I'm gonna build five prototypes and show them to all of our customers and let them pick out which components they wanted.ch. You wanna make sure that people are using these tools at the right time and they're getting the training and the context behind it. It's not just about following one specific framework. It's about understanding why that framework works. That's the biggest “gotchas” when you're starting to transition from product owners or really junior product managers into senior product managers, people who are competent and independent. They're going to be looking at these tools as a means to an end. Something that can give them a little bit of structure, help them make their case, help explain it to the rest of the team, and it's using the right tools at the right time. So those are things that I really would be looking for.  I said, what problem are you solving with that prototype? They had no idea. They're like, oh, I don't know, I'm just gonna show them a bunch of different options and let them pick. No, that's not great product management, right? That's not what we're really trying to get at here. So instead, I sent them down and I said, first we gotta go and cover the problem. The right way to do that is by looking through data and then going to do user research? Are we helping people understand the context behind when they need to use things? Are we introducing them to how our business works and helping them get up-leveled on that knowledge? Are we talking to them about things like finance? And are we sharing how the financials in the company works so that they can actually calculate ROI, right? You need to make these things transparent, and you need to arm them with data and tools and teams to allow them to go out there and actually figure out what we should be building. But that's really the scope of what product managers do. And as you think about things like Airbnb or this difference between product owners and product managers. I want you to think about where product management came from. And it came from consumer product managers, consumer good product managers. And a lot of people made this case when I posted on LinkedIn. And if you think about consumer good product managers back in the day. They used sales and marketing and branding to be able to grow their products, which were like toilet paper and tissues, right? That's the tools that were available to them before software. Now we have software, now we have the internet. That's the tools available for us. We need to still leverage that business mindset with that development mindset of how do we make a great product, but we're using software as our strategic driver, right? That's our tool that we're really looking at. Yes, we still need some marketing, we still need some sales in there, but that's what shifts our perspective as a product manager is the tools that are available to us. So I do believe that as we see product management mature and become more readily available in different companies, we are going to see them move a little bit more into this commercialization aspect of the business. And that doesn't mean that they're going to become a product marketer. I don't think that's going to be only marketing. I think you still firmly need to sit between business tech and the customer, but what that means is that people are going to be using software and need that technical knowledge of how software works to grow their products. I do think it's a business role. I do think it's focused on the business. I don't think it's only business. I still think you need tech, but we need to make sure that we're not hiring or training product owners in only tech. And we're also not hiring or training product managers in only business. We need people to straddle that line. So I hope that helps. 

Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code Thinking, to save at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations. All right, next question on the phone line today.

Sender 2 - 00:14:12:

Hello Melissa. First off, I just want to say your podcast has been really helpful. in honing my Product Management skills. I've gone from a Product Manager role to a Lead Product Manager role, and now I am a Digital Product Strategist. My question is, all about how to build a digital strategy for a Fortune 50 company. And what I mean by that is we seem to lack a digital product strategy right underneath the corporate strategy, the enterprise level strategy. that can tell our business units are leaders, how to build and engage members digitally. You have marketing folks creating their own digital experiences. other organizations going off and partnering with different vendors to create digital experiences for our members, but never working with their internal digital teams and product teams to see if we should build it within our existing digital platforms or even innovate something new and keep it within our brand. Thank you so much. looking forward to hearing your answer.

Melissa Perri - 00:15:42: 

Great question. Now, this is a very common thing for companies that are going through digital transformations. A lot of times we leave strategy to the last thing. I see this happen a lot. I've been involved in a lot of them, and especially with Fortune 50 companies. I've worked with a ton of Fortune 50 companies. So do not be discouraged. This is the next learning step on your journey. Typically what happens is we go out and we train all the product managers. And then we realize that we don't know which way the product manager is actually running. So there's nothing to tie that corporate strategy back into what the teams are doing. And then we get into arguments with leadership about are we building the right thing? So you are exactly at this point. This is what I would do in those companies. You need that corporate strategy, but that corporate strategy needs to be prioritized. Are we trying to expand into new markets? How do we want to grow? Where do we want to be in the next 5 to 10 years? That vision needs to be really firm. And then what you do is you click down and you go into the portfolio product strategy. This is also why it's important to have very good product leaders because those people are putting these things together. Now, This can differ how this manifests depending on what type of company you are. Now, if you are a very large enterprise that has multiple business units and those business units never interact with each other, you don't have the same customers, it's completely different and we don't want to leverage software between them. you are going to look at each one of those business units as its own little portfolio strategy kind of separate. And in this case, you might not need a Chief Product Officer to go across all of the business units. Now, if you do want to leverage things between those business units, you want to build a platform, let's say, to share customer data, because we might have a customer that does a business account over there, and then a retail account over there, let's say if you're a bank. Now you're going to want to think of yourself more like a platform, in which case you do want a strong Chief Product Officer to look at this portfolio platform strategy. And what do I mean by the portfolio platform strategy? I'm not talking about the tech strategy. CTOs do that, very, very much need as well. The CPO is going to be thinking about how we get more leverage across the whole business by building technology that can help us deliver value to customers faster. And that's the portfolio strategy. So it talks about how the infrastructure of technology helps us deliver value better, what it should be like as a customer to experience all of the different Products we have and why that's better for our business. So you're gonna wanna mock that up. You're gonna wanna figure out what that portfolio strategy is. And then you're gonna click into each one of the products that you have. Now, you might have multiple products under each one of those business lines, in which case you're gonna have to do kind of like a mini portfolio strategy for there, but you're gonna wanna look at each one of those products that you have, and then do the product strategies for each one of those. And that connects it back up to the business. So in order to do this, you do need a bunch of data. You need to get a bunch of product leaders in a room together to talk about how you could be leveraging things across different business units. You're gonna wanna do an analysis on who your customers are and what type of company you are to decide where to start. If you are operating like an individual business within one of those business units, you make your portfolio strategy for that. You don't worry about the rest of the business, and you just keep going that way, right? So you're just clicking down one level and going that way from the corporate strategy. Bye. But you also want to take into account here is where strategy becomes important is if you have shared resources and prioritization across the business. So if there's any places where you do have shared resources, you want to make sure that your strategies are extremely prioritized across everybody who would be vying for those resources so that you know what's more important to the business. So that's really where you're going to have to go up and down and try to figure out. What do we want to be at the end of the day from a business perspective? Are we one platform with multiple applications on top of it and treating ourselves that way? Are we individual businesses under this corporate umbrella? That's totally fine. It's up to you. I do believe that a lot of businesses can be leveraging platforms across your organization to share data and make things more powerful. And especially as you start to think about AI and these new technologies that are out there, it can make us run much more seamlessly. You're going to want to decide if that's right for you. So that's the first thing that you need to do when you're starting to think about a product strategy for a Fortune 50 company. What type of company do you want to be? How are we leveraging software? Who's going to run that portfolio product strategy? And if you don't have one person right now to do it, but you know you want to go in that direction, take all the product leads across all the business lines and throw them together. And that's going to be your joint initiative. But one portfolio strategy. And then in each business line, there will be multiple product strategies that these people will oversee. So you're going to want to roll that out. You're going to want to make sure that you have good data so that you can actually evaluate what you should be doing with it. You want to make sure you're involving the tech team so that they can tell you if it's possible to even do it or how you should be thinking about leveraging software. If you don't have people who understand tech really well, that's where you definitely bring in your tech leads as well to help. When a lot of Fortune 50 companies, we go through digital transformation. Many of the product leaders don't have a lot of software chops. They can learn, but you got to pair them with the tech people there. So that's why it's important to bring them in there too. But you're going to want to think about how do we leverage software to get to our corporate strategy? That's the whole point of a portfolio strategy. That's really what is going to connect what the teams are doing back to what the corporation wants to achieve and how you're going to make money. So I hope that helps. Again, if you don't have one person to oversee this, make a team, right, to oversee it, but make sure you get a portfolio strategy down. Make sure you have product strategies that align to that. Make sure they're prioritized. Make sure there aren't initiatives. You should only have like a few initiatives at the top. Otherwise you're gonna have initiatives at the bottom. And that doesn't make any meaningful progress. So I would really start there and think about how you wanna grow through software, what software can do for you and your business. And that's gonna be the thing that's gonna help you connect it. 

Alright, last question. going to a Brighton. Dear Melissa. A year ago, I joined an older enterprise business undergoing digital transformation. While many product leaders have elements of the right vision, the whole product org read inspired just before I got here, they're trying, there's still a lot of need to change the way we work. I find I get plenty of positive feedback and excitement about many of the changes I'm bringing from my prior roles at digital native companies. But I'm also experiencing some intense pushback from certain groups. I know transformation will ruffle some feathers, but how do I know if I'm pushing too hard, too much ruffling? Maybe should I give up and go back somewhere where I fit in more? Help. Ooh, I've been the ruffler before. I can really empathize with this question because a lot of times I, okay, so before I started consulting, I was a ruffler and I ran into a lot of problems. But then also as a consultant, I ruffle all the time. I ruffle feathers, that's what I'm hired to do. But you gotta do it in a careful way. And I have learned my lesson because I've ruffled too many feathers before and I've made people angry. So from multiple, multiple years of doing this, I've been consulting since 2014. These are my tips. One, when you get in and you start to evaluate a new company going through a transformation, and you see people not doing things they're supposed to do, You want to be gentle about it. You don't want to call it out. You want to first reward the progress that they have made. Like you said, they're trying. They're red inspired. They're really trying great. Reward that, right? Acknowledge it, say, I know you guys are trying hard. Two, you want to paint a vision for where you want to go, and you want to make sure people are on board with that vision. So a lot of times we'll start with the nuts and bolts of what product management should do, but we don't talk about how it goes all the way up through the company, right? We don't talk about how that actually changes roles for sales and marketing and for everybody else around it. And when we don't paint that picture. You could be doing things that you know are right, but nobody's aligned because they don't know where we're going. So they don't understand how those actions connect back to a larger vision. And then they're also probably scared because they're like, what's this mean for me if we're going to do this new product management thing? I don't even know. So think about that. and empathize. So you want to listen? You wanna make sure you're listening to people. You wanna empathize with their position. And you wanna tell them like, I know where you're coming from. This is really great. Hey, can I make a suggestion on where we should go this way? Can I make a suggestion on us trying something else? You want to approach these things gently, right? And you want to come in and say, I do have some firm ideas, but what are people ready for? Are they ready for a lot of change, or are they ready for a little change? Let's say that you are heads down working on something that's really important. Let's say it's like going to change the whole company, right? Something big. You don't want to be changing everything immediately. And you don't want to be pushing for people to change when things are at high stakes and high pressure because it's going to make people scared. So you can do small changes that you know will work going that way. Or if you have buy-in from the leadership, you can make a lot of changes if they're gonna put their foot down and say, let's go this way. But if you're trying to do this from a bottoms up approach, it's very, very hard to change everything when there's a lot of pressure on the line. So. acknowledge that. I can see that you're a senior product manager reading this. So I know that you're not the Chief Product Officer. It's very different for leaders and I would have very different advice for leaders. But this is what I'm saying for people on teams who have the knowledge and see that people aren't working around them the way that they used to work. Acknowledge that things are wrong, make a note of it, but figure out what you can change. If you try to change too many things at once, people will get very stressed out. So you don't want to do that. Two, you want to get buy-in for trying these changes, and you want to tell people what it's going to do for them as well. You want to make sure that they understand that this is going to help them achieve their goals. So everything that you put out there, you put it back into their goals. Now you can tell when you're pushing too hard, when people start leaving you out of conversations, they don't ask you for advice, they're not coming to you for help. That's a really good indication that you may have gone too far. Maybe you approach it with these people. You go back and you say, hey, I may have been pushing this too hard and I realized that in my last company, we work differently and I wanna work, the way that we work here. Like I wanna help introduce some things that I think will make us better, but I realized that I can't neglect what you've been through and what your history is here. So can you help me learn? Can you tell me about things that you've tried before and why it doesn't work? Can you give me the people dynamic slow down of what's going on here? Tell me what's at stake for us, right? Tell me about our leadership and our pressures and different things like that. Make sure you understand the people dynamics because at the end of the day, the ruffle of the feathers comes down to people. Like people are gonna get upset. because of human nature, not because you told them the right thing to do, right? They're gonna get upset because usually there's some other dynamics that are actually happening. So change is slow and you want to make sure that you're only introducing things piece by piece that works. The other thing too is that you know what you're doing and you're a senior product manager. If you can just show people what good looks like and not try to change everybody else around you, show people what good looks like. Don't ask for permission, just do it. they're gonna start to go, hey, I wanna work that way. And they're gonna start to come to you. So you have a unique position here where as an individual contributor, product manager, you can just do the work, get your team on board, worry about them. If stakeholders are coming towards you and asking for things or reprioritizing, you might make them a little upset by saying no or pushing back or doing these other things, but just use your diplomatic powers and influence and protect your space and just nail it. And the more you nail it, the more people will see that they could work like that too. And they'll start coming to you instead of you trying to push it on them. So. At this point, maybe take a couple steps back. Focus on what you can control and do that. and then as the appetite. increases for you to introduce more things, put a little bit out there. Put a little bit out there. That's not gonna ruffle the feathers. That's what I would do if I was on a team. Should you go back somewhere where you fit in? That's a personal question. One. If you think people have a good appetite for change here, and maybe you just need to tweak your approach a little bit, this could be a great learning experience for you, and you may get a lot of credibility, and you may get some really good leadership skills out of this that will help build your resume, give you opportunities to go somewhere else, right, in the future. Promotion opportunities totally would promote somebody if I saw them doing great work like this. If you feel like you can't get anywhere and you can't do your job, that's where. I would start to look at maybe going somewhere else. But if you can do your job and you feel like if you protect your space, you're going to be a fantastic product manager and you're going to outshine everybody. Do that. Show people what good looks like and then offer to help and see if they're curious. See if they want to learn. That's really what I would look at. But it's a really hard one. I've ruffled feathers. I was an Individual Contributor, Product Manager at a company that did not do great product management once. And I came in and I said, you're all doing it wrong. And I got really mad and I butt heads with the CEO hard. And he was like, can you just be a team player? I'm like, that's fair. I would not have done that. now. I learned from that that I needed to build credibility first within the company before I could implement change. I knew not to just go trash talking everything that they were doing and respect where they're coming from. It's a successful company. Two, start making suggestions, lie a little low, make suggestions here and there on things that would improve. And then two, I just did my work and kicked butt. And that showed people I knew what I was doing and that there's other ways to do and work. So don't go running in there. Don't be like, everything sucks here. Can we do it this way? Pick your battles. That's what I really would look at for ruffling feathers. And then figure out how do I get people so excited about this that they want to come to me? really the key there. You want to be pulling them towards you instead of pushing your stuff on top of them. So I hope that helps. All right, that's it for Dear Melissa this week. If you have any questions for me, please go to dearmelissa.com. Leave your questions, leave me a voicemail. I do prioritize answering voicemails, so it's the fastest way to get an answer from me. But I look forward to hearing what you are talking about every week. So please drop me a line there and subscribe to the Product Thinking Podcast if you're enjoying it. We'll be back with another guest next Wednesday. I'll see you then.