Episode 100: Answering Your Most Asked Questions of 2022
We’ve made it to our 100th episode of the podcast! Melissa celebrates by tying up the year with a full review of your most frequently asked questions. Common themes included transitioning into a new role, communicating with leadership, how to divide product work amongst different teams, and many more. Listen in as Melissa summarizes her advice on each of these big topics, and then shares her product predictions for 2023 (including a conversation about why winning in a recession is largely connected to good product management). Happy New Year to all of our listeners!
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, product Thinking listeners today. We have a really special dear Melissa for you because it's our 100th episode that is insane. I started this podcast in January, 2021 as a way to help answer questions and spread advice with a further reach than just 1 0 1 conversations, or the dms I was getting through Twitter or the, you know, one off inbox drops. I got through my email and since then I've answered over 150 of your questions on product management through Dear Melissa and I've had some amazing guests such as Barry O'Reilly, Georgie Smallwood, Teresa Torres, Jeff Gothelf, John Cutler, Josh Seiden, and Marty Kagan, which were some of our most popular guests. We've covered so many topics and in honor of our 100th episode. I wanted to recap some of the most frequently asked questions and look at those themes and what they say about product management and what I'm observing about product management.
Through all of your questions. Our most popular topic had to do with transitioning into a new role. So a lot of you have written in and said, I am going from IC to product director or leader for the first time. What do I do to become a more effective leader? A lot of the rest of you were trying to break into product management or move from user research into product management or development into product management, or even outside of development into product management. And what that's telling me is that we are having a lot more legitimacy with our discipline of product management. Uh, when I started coaching over 10 years ago, uh, in helping people understand product management, you know, people used to fight with me about whether or not it was a real role or whether or not we needed product managers. Can't the developers just figure out what they wanted to do?
And shouldn't leadership just tell people what to build? Now we're seeing a big change with that where people realize that this is a really critical role for organizations and if you want to build great software and you wanna build great products, you need product managers to help you figure out what's the right thing to build. So with all of these, uh, questions I'm getting about transitioning into a new role, I'm definitely observing that I'm observing you, uh, finding your footing and product management, uh, finding the organizations really understand what good product management looks like and that makes me really happy. So I'm happy we're actually changing the way that we approach our discipline. I'm happy that more companies are finally recognizing product management and I wish you all good luck in your searches because we need better product managers and we need great product managers out there in these organizations to help shape the future. The second most popular topic was about finding alignment throughout the organization. And this is such a common problem I see when I go into organizations and work with them more deeply. And it's not just about finding alignment within the product teams, but finding alignment outside of it too. It's about how do we get sales, product, marketing, business, finance, everybody right on the same page? How do we prioritize what we're working on? And a lot of that has to do with product strategy, right? A lot of it is looking at how do we not just prioritize our roadmaps and figure out what to build, but why are we building it from a company perspective and how do we align on whether retention or acquisition is our most important problem to solve? How do we align on whether we wanna go upmarket or expand geographically? And which one is more important there? Many organizations have so many things that they could be doing or want to do, and it's about finding out which ones are going to win the most. So a lot of this has to do with communication, right?
Sitting down with the rest of your teams, uh, crunching the numbers to figure out which way we should go, talking about what it will take to reach those goals, to do those objectives. Um, it's a lot about building those bridges throughout the organization, talking to them and introducing cadences that will allow us to work better together. And this is why I'm also really big on product operations and why Denise and I are writing, um, the next book on product operations, which will be out in 2023. We're hoping, hoping the first half of the year, still writing, but we're getting a lot closer. And this product operations function is meant to really help you find alignment. It's meant to help bridge the gaps between the different areas of the organization. Um, make sure that sales is getting the feedback to product, helping to introduce the cadences of when we meet, to look over, you know, what are our priorities?
What are our strategic intents for the business? Um, do we need to change anything? What's our roadmaps look like? Are they all aligned? Are they all still on track? And how do we measure success? So I believe that we're gonna see a lot more, uh, product operations teams as well coming out into organizations in the near future as people try to solve these alignment issues and get everybody on the same page. The next big topic was communicating with leadership. Always a tricky one, right? How do I convince my leaders that we need to focus on product management or how do I convince my leaders that we should be going this way instead of a different way? Communicating with leadership is really all about empathy, and we're starting to see a lot more, um, executive presence in product management, a lot more chief product officers, which is good. Uh, and because of that, we're getting more representatives at the C-suite who are talking to leadership about product management. So we're seeing a lot more leaders understand product management, understand why it's important, but of course we're not all there yet. So what could you do if you don't have that experience talking to leadership or communicating with them or trying to, you know, sway them
To your side? You really need to remember that you have to empathize with leadership. You have to remember like their goals are not exactly the same as your goals, right? You're gonna be worried about, um, user adoption, getting them into your product and helping them go through these workflows and solve these jobs to be done. Your leaders are worried about the financial outcomes of the business. So the more that you can connect the dots to what you are building back to financial outcomes and how they further the business, the more leadership is going to start listening to you. And that's a big piece of what I advise for our next biggest topic, which is what's your advice for new chief product officers? Again, fourth most popular topic that we heard and one of the big questions on there is, what do I need to do to set myself up for success?
And this is really why I started CPO Accelerator, um, which has been going strong now for just over two years. And the biggest thing that we talk about here is communicating with leadership and making sure that you're seen as part of the executive team. So if you are a new chief product officer, my biggest piece of advice for you is stop thinking of yourself as a product manager and start thinking of yourself as an executive. And remember that your most important team is the executive team. That doesn't mean ignore your product team, absolutely not, but make sure that you're spending an appropriate amount of time with them, but also with the executives and building the bridges between the executives because that's where you need to operate to get the work done. Your work does not happen all at the team level. It happens at the executive level.
And you need to be lifting yourself up to really focus on setting the product strategy, being a leader there, making sure that the systems are in place so that your teams can run. Not in the weeds, you should not be like, you should not be looking at any code. You shouldn't be like fiddling with wire frames. That's like too low level for you. You really need to be lifting yourself up and thinking strategically. So that's my biggest piece of advice for new CPOs. Finally, our last topic that came out as the most important topic, um, that I've heard from you is who's responsible for what surrounding product development. So I'm getting a lot of questions about how does ux, user research, product development, all of those pieces actually work together and where do we draw lines? And my answer to this question a lot of the time has to be that we collaborate together, right? There's a lot of different roles surrounding UX design, user research, product, um, you know, development sometimes more on the design and product side. Where do we draw the lines? Where do we, where do we have these, you know, delineations between my job versus your job? And while that's important to scope out, I think it's more important to remember that we're all in here to build a great product. So how do we work together to do that product is always gonna be looking at balancing the business needs with the customer needs.
UX should always be looking at how do I advocate for the customer development is gonna make sure that it's all possible that we can do these things and help to suggest new ways that we can use technology to achieve our goals. We need to remember that we're all here though to deliver some value to the user. And if we keep our eyes on that and we collaborate and we decide how can we most efficiently get all of this stuff done, these conversations stop being so poignant, right? It's not they're taking my job or I should be doing this, or I wanna talk to customers and I should be allowed to talk to customers. Yeah, you should all be talking to customers. If you're building products for people, you should be able to go talk to customers that you're building those products for. And it should not be only user research talks to customers or only product talks to customers or only ux like you all need to understand and empathize with your users.
So you need to sit down as a team and figure out what are we going to do to make sure that we get this product out the door so it can solve the problems of our customers. And that's what you should think about when it comes to responsibilities. So these themes that keep popping up, um, what it's also telling me is that, you know, we've come a long way. Uh, I've been talking about product writing about product, like I said, for almost about 10 years. And I'm happy to see more people transitioning into the role. I'm happy to see more organizations understand what product management is because you know, five years ago even the question was like, why do we need product managers? Or what is product management? But now it's how do we do product management? And that is incredibly powerful. This is really telling me that we are seeing some, um, standardization, some, uh, advocacy for product management in the organizations.
We're seeing a lot more of leadership understand why this is important. And looking ahead, I believe product management is important now more than ever. Why? Because we got the recession scaries, uh, product management is so important in a recession and product management is so important in a recession. Why? Retention is key and a lot of retention comes down to product management. One thing you have to remember though, about recessions two, is they don't last forever. On average they span about two years and we don't even declare that we're in a recession until we're six months into it. So now we got a year and a half to look, to look out and say, how do we keep getting money so that we don't go outta business in two years? Because one day the budgets will come back, but it might be hard for the next couple years. That's okay, this happens. We get recessions all the time. So what do we need to do? We need to really double down on our product and make sure that we're building the right thing. It's easy to get distracted and try to do everything and especially in times of good health. And when the economy is surging, we hire everybody and we have 8,000 things on our roadmaps and we wanna really, really, really just like build all the things we could do because we believe that will lead to growth. Right now we gotta get highly analytical and figure out what are gonna be, what's gonna be the things that allow us to really survive this recession and come out on top. So I want you to think about what is a playbook and what are the things that we need to do during a recession to make sure that we are a healthy company and we can survive? The first thing you need to do is maximize retention. And to do that, you need to dive deep on your core value propositions and make sure you're delivering that value every day in the best way possible. So look at your product. What is the crud you can get rid of? What are the things that are not valuable? Streamline it.
Make it more powerful. Look at that value. Figure out ways that you can enhance that value. Go out, do some user research, talk to your customers, see where their heads at are at, and make sure that you deeply understand why they are buying your product. And you wanna make sure that that value proposition is delivered on every day and you are putting all of your power into making that value proposition better. That's important. So double down on your core value, make sure that you're expanding on that and not going into, you know, guessing games about things that are just gonna distract us or distract our customers, which will dilute our value proposition. Second, you wanna make sure that your product is not just a nice to have, but a necessity. If it's a nice to have, that budget will get slashed first, but if it's a necessity, you're facing competition, which is better.
That's about winning, right? So think on this, how do you understand what it takes to make your product a requirement for your customers to make it so that they can't live without it? Again, back to the user research, back to understanding your customers and how they work and, um, why this value proposition is really, really important. Third, since budgets are getting slashed, also think about pricing and packaging. How do you price and package your product? And it's not just about slashing prices, I'm not talking about discounting everything here and there. It's about making sure that the, the value realization of your product matches a price.
And then also think about how you might get creative with the pricing and packaging to make sure that you hold onto some of these customers. Now you may be selling something that is wildly expensive and the customers just don't have the budget for it, but they would like to keep using you in some way. Maybe you offer a down market product that keeps them on board for the next two years, something that they can't afford to pay with because once those two years are up, maybe you upsell them back to the full product. Maybe you get them using it. You allow them to stem the gap. You don't give them everything for a lower price, you give them a down market product, you figure out what you could put into that that will keep them there. Instead of having them churn, go find something else and then maybe stay with that forever.
So you wanna really think about creative ways to introduce things that could meet your customer's needs in these challenging times because they're getting budgets cut too, and they probably don't want that, right? Nobody who's working at a company is like, oh, I really love that my budget is slash and I can't use this product I've been relying on. So think about how can you help them? How can you, uh, position yourself in ways that will keep them with you as a customer, as a logo for a little bit longer? Lastly, you also wanna think about how to introduce new value to make your proposition stronger. So let's say you double down on your core value proposition and you did everything you could to make that super strong. Fantastic check we did that. What are other things that you could do to introduce more value, new value to make that proposition stronger?
How can you make it again, more of a necessity? Um, what other problems could you solve? The more problems you solve for a customer, the stickier you become. So that's important there too. So looking at all of these problems, they're all product problems. And I believe winning in a recession really comes down to great product management. You're not gonna close the sale in the same way you did before. You need to rethink your approach and respond to what your customers need. That means good product managers are more important now than ever. And the companies who understand product is not just a tech function and telling the developers what to do and keeping them busy, but also a business function are gonna be the ones who come out of this in better shape than the rest.
And if you were laid off during this time, I know a lot of these large companies are, you know, cutting budgets, cutting costs, laid off a bunch of great product managers out there. Please know there are plenty of companies out there looking for great product managers that need help. You're gonna land back on your feet if you were working at a very large company, try looking for the mid-cap companies who will need your expertise. There are a ton of them out there who hired very junior product managers. Um, they don't have any mid-level product managers. They need some help. They're hiring, they're looking, they're still expanding, they raised enough money to survive this and they know that. So they're still looking for help and they know that they have to deliver product. So try maybe looking for something different than you did before. Um, lots of people out there understand the importance of product management and they're looking for some help. So you might need to rethink your approach, um, to where you wanna work. Uh, you might have to just look out of your comfort zone a little bit, but there are plenty of companies out there, I promise you, who are hiring great product managers. Over the past few years I've seen so much progress in our companies finally starting to understand why product is important, but we're still working on it. You know, it's not over. We're still getting some of the same questions that we did five to 10 years ago, but
They're less, I'm seeing less frequent asks of these questions. I'm seeing people ask more strategic questions, more how-to questions, um, things that really show that a lot of the industry is understanding the importance of product management and that makes me super, super excited. So I hope that makes you excited too, because we have come a long way and we still got some ways to go and that's all right. But as product managers in this profession, we are finally coming into our own. We are finally getting the standardization we need. We're finally getting the acceptance widely into these organizations. And if your organization isn't there yet, that's okay. It's coming, right? Make sure that you keep fighting the good fight. And if you feel like you're hitting a wall, go to another place that does respect product management. I always say that when you hit a wall, sometimes it's just time to leave and find somebody who really respects your value and what you bring to the table as a product manager.
And there's plenty of companies out there that do that. So keep fighting the good fight and I wish you the best verse 2023. And I wanna thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast and I hope you will stick with us through this next year. We've got lots of, lots more questions for you. We've got lots of new questions to answer coming up and many, many more guests for you to learn from. So please, uh, write in your questions to dear melissa.com. Let me know what you're thinking for 2023, what your approach to product management is, and I look forward to talking to you next time.