Real Talk about Empowered vs. Feature Product Teams | Chris Jones (SVPG)

Empower is a cool word but it also is it's a very feel-good word and I think people hear that and they might overhear it as uh saying look I'm empowered I'm on this team I'm going to work on what I want to work on you know I'm going to use my best judgment I'm going to you try and you work this all forward when in fact that's really not what we mean by empowered what we mean is that you are actually allocating problems onto team leadership takes an active role in defining what those problems are teams may have something to say it but leadership really ultimately is the more terminable because it's how everything actually rolls up and stays coherent so if you don't have that that's usually a sign that leadership is of abdicating its responsibility not really helping die these teams where they should be going and then as a result you got a lot of team they might be shipping a lot of stuff but what they're shipping is not really making much of a difference to anything and it's really quite disconnected from the rest of the teams all right Chris welcome super happy to have you here thanks for spending time with us really happy to be here thanks for the invitation yeah so you mar Just published a new book transformed and there's been a lot of discussion a lot of PM discourse on online for people who are not familiar maybe do you mind just

recapping the difference between what a feature team is and what an empowered team is yeah that's something we've actually been talking about for a while certainly before this book and it's one of those things that's really easy to say and sort of sounds obvious but when you start to peel it back there are some really quite profound differences fundamentally it comes down to how work is allocated onto teams are you giving teams solutions to build or are you giving them problems to solve that's the fundamental difference and then the backside of that is what are you holding the team accountable for did they deliver the solution did they do it on time get through all the requirements or did they solve whatever problem it was that you've given to them and the reason we use the term empowered is if you're doing this right the team that is given the problem really does have a lot of latitude to figure out what the best solution is and the idea here is that team is closest to the customer closest to the technology ideally should be in the best position to do something like that and if you imagine you're on an empowered team and you're given a problem to solve like we need to reduce the time it takes to on board a new customer right we've measured that it takes us really two or three days before a new customer is getting to the first hit of value from our product we need to cut that by a fourth right you give a team a task like that immediately the what that team is sort of incentivized to do is very different you don't just start building at this point like are we going to have to get some evidence that whatever solution we want to go forward with is actually going to work because ultimately we're held accountable for it working we're not held accountable that we just shipped it and put it into the market that's basically the fundamental difference between a future team and an empowered team got it so it's about kind of being given like a business problem and then doing a bunch of customer Discovery figure out what is even the right thing to build and then building it and then hopefully not just shipping a product but also moving some Metric or achieving some sort of outcome for the B business ideally yeah and I mean there are it might be a business problem it might actually be a customer problem that is sort of Upstream of some business problem and then in terms of the metrics I think a lot of people think pretty narrowly about what that means a metric might be something like look we're going to on board the first five customers for this new thing that we haven't gotten product market yet I mean that's still a metric of sort but it's pretty wide open and it's much more stated as a as an outcome what are we really trying to get to with the thing we're going to be shipping got it well let's talk more about metrics in a little bit but I want to talk about kind of my personal experience on how to sausage has been made yeah worked at a lot of different companies my happiest moments as a PM are talking to customers working with my team getting to a room trying to whiteboard out solution with my team but yeah there's been so many hours D that I spent just like different companies I was at one company where there was this like formal agile process right where like you get in a room just like scrub Masters and you do Point estimations of the work you spend like two hours doing that another company I had these meetings every quarter where you have these okr alignment meetings and like you have a bunch of PMS in your room and they have to like kind of like align all the dependencies forr I guess if like no one really enjoys doing this stuff why do you think this stuff keeps happening really many of the companies that my firm you know silicon valy product group that when we're helping companies that's about exactly this they've fallen into this and what you're describing gets even worse as companies get bigger and uh a lot of old companies have been working like this for a really long time i' heard a lot of theories about it and actually many of the big technology leaders have had quotes and things that they've said about this is that companies will start off doing the right

thing being you know really just rapidly customer focused and the right people doing the right sort of thing but then when things begin to scale they feel like in order to hold on to that magic they need to start putting processes in place they need to make this they're trying to encode what they did before in order to make it repeatable or Worse they're trying to take somebody else's process say okay if we do this is actually how we scale and it gives them just a fundamental sense of control and predictability in fact though you know as I'm sure you found it really um runs the other way the you know the other thing is actually happening um but this can run really deeply like it goes all the way back to how projects might get financed you know something it's green mited money behind it team is formed up around it and automatically you're in this state of just looking at process so some of it has to do with the control and predictability stopping trusting the teams that the teams are actually going to do the right sort of thing that lack of trust may be deserved it may not so yeah there's a there's all sorts of reasons and it's a hard thing to get out of I think the okr one might actually have its own problem when I've seen that

happen like when you're just going through all of this okr lockup and how are we going to get this exactly precise and get these things to align with one another that's usually a sign that leadership hasn't done a very good job of setting product strategy or setting product Vision when you've a bit more of a top- Down idea of where things are ultimately going it makes it a little easier to get the okrs rationalized with that top level Vision or that top level strategy isn't there everybody's just kind of in the weeds and mucking around trying to get things to line up in a way that makes sense ex exactly and I think like I have this saying that like once you hire like I don't know couple 100 PMS things are just getting kind of crap crappy at the company yeah kind of this like inertia to just like Amor process and stuff right so you almost have to like as a leader I don't know what kind of coaching you give to your clients but like you almost have to like periodically like weed out some of the stuff like hey is this does still make sense or not right yeah no that's exactly the case and I wouldn't say I it's really common I will say it's really common when you do get to that kind of scale that these things really do show up but I don't think it's inevitable and that's really one of the ideas behind that book there are ways to prevent this from happening and it does really rest on the leaders and the leaders keeping focused on what the real thing is what is the important thing yeah we might need some process here and there to do things but process is in service of the real problem or the real goal which is serving our customers there's a great Jeff Bezos wrote about in one of his letters to the shareholders was talking about what Amazon does in order to remain a day one company and not flly into becoming a day two company and one of the big aspects of this is to really be wary of he called them proxies and what he meant is something that's not the thing something that's standing in place of the thing the real thing is rapidly serving the customers the proxy is the process and when people start to look at process as their job then it's standing in between this thing that the real thing and I think good leaders really keep that in mind and they're ensuring that the company is not sliding into that sort of situation exactly so like along similar lines do you mind also kind of defining what kind of like a feature Factory is and like in the back of my head I wonder if the problem that a lot of these large companies is it because they're a feature Factory or because there's like not shipping at all because it takes like six months to ship anything yeah do you want yeah I actually think those are two different problems I mean I think if you're really just buried in the type of process that you're talking about and worse yet you've got a Cadence and a process that says we're going to ship every quarter or even worse than that there's just a lot of stuff that makes anything difficult to ship when you've got a bunch of teams that are operating as feature factories churning out as much stuff as they possibly can usually the problem isn't shipping you can get a lot of stuff into the market when that happen it's just that what your ship doesn't really make any difference it doesn't move any needle in any appreciable way and that can come from a couple of different places one of them is that there really is no coherent strategy that's holding it all together you've got basically each of the feature teams in this Factory are trying to address all of the Business Leaders who are hitting on them saying I need you to build this and then this other business leader says I need you to build this and there's nothing coherent holding the thing together the other one is this is a little less common but you know we do see cases where there are empowered product team they genuinely feel empowered and they really do have the ability to work on the solution that they want to but they go further and they're Al given Reign to work on whatever problem they want to work on and in those cases you get again you get a lot of work that's just disconnected from each other there's no power of the leverage of the resources that you do have toward towards something that's going to move the needle so in the latter example it's almost like the teams are empowered but they're kind of heading different directions because there's no unifying strategy is that what you're saying yeah maybe over empowered might be a way or just sort of overhearing that word empowered I mean empowered is a cool word but it also is it's a very feel-good word and I think people hear that and they might overhear it as saying look I'm empowered I'm on this team I'm going to work on what I want to work on I'm going to use my best judgment and I'm gonna try and you know work all forward when in fact that's really not what we mean by empowered what we mean is that you are actually allocating problems onto team leadership takes an active role in defining what those problems are the teams may have something to say about it but Le ership really ultimately is the one accountable because how everything actually rolls up and stays coherent so if you don't have that usually a sign that leadership is kind of abdicating it responsibility not really helping guide these teams where they should be going and then as a result you got a lot of team they might be shipping a lot of stuff but what they're shipping is not really making much of a difference to anything and it's really quite disconnected from the rest of the teams yeah I find that even like a great company there is like a mix of empowered teams and teams are not empowered like just from personal experience there are some teams where like they either have a bunch of negative customer feedback I mean their goals so leadership has to really step in and really help them you know get back on track so you can argue that they're not in power but they kind of put themselves in that situation right yeah and then just like two more there's like there's a team there's teams where customers love the product and like the goal seem to met so leadership is like okay these guys seem to know what they're doing so let's leave them alone and let them iterate and like build great stuff but I think even in those teams I personally had this like it's easy just it's fun to work with a customer just iterate and build stuff in your product area but it actually requires more maturity to actually try to reach out to other product team and try to figure out okay collectively how do we ship something great together because it's just Tak more time it's kind of more annoying to do right right so that yeah I really I like how you framed that up because you captured sort of the two extremes there there's the one where got a leader and they they've had all the best intentions around getting a tee empowered and then something goes wrong and they step in and they put their hands on the wheel and they start steering and saying we got to do this and basically under stress they revert to that command and control style of management and that's a leader that probably could use some coaching in how to really actively lead but not necessarily take control and then the other extreme that you spoke about is the leader that's just basically saying look these folks have got it going on I'm going to step way away and get out of their way and maybe even be not really that close to what it is that they're actually working on that's a problem as well what we need is the leader that really knows when to lean in and how when to step back and a lot of it has to do with asking critical questions at the right time uh but also you may actually as a leader you may have to steer a team in a Direction that's different than they wanted to go than they think they should go and that is your responsibility as a leader because you are sitting in the place that has the perspective of all the teams or at least a much larger collection of teams and it is on you as a leader to ensure that there is a coherence to where all this stuff is going and if you're just like a PM

leading a product team like how do you move from being micromanaged by a leader to a place where you're in a good spot where the leader trust you maybe they check in once in a while and you're not surprised like some people get surprised like their project could all of a sudden get canceled by their leader or something like how do you yeah video all this stuff yeah well this one's a two-way street right that some of this is on the leader and individual contributor product manager but one of the biggest pieces of advice to the individual contributor product manager is you've really just you've got to get to a place as quickly possible where you are as smart as anybody else in the things that you need to be smart on and that's specifically your customers or users whoever it is whatever your team is responsible for that kind of customer or user if you're the product manager that team it's your responsibility to be the recognized Authority on this and that means that somebody anybody has a question you're the person that they're seing out to answer that question usually when somebody's new to a job there's going to be a lot of people who know a lot more you know that CEO is going to know a lot the VP of sales so it's on you to really get to the place where you deserve a seat table so that's one dimension of just really getting there and that's going to help build that trust with your manager but there are other things as well there's of course there's the data there's the product data how well things are working you should be the recognized expert on that as well you may have some support from a data analyst or a team there but doesn't mean you can't you you're off the hook for knowing that stuff knowing the business right knowing who the stakeholders are within the company that are not part of the product organization maybe it is the people in sales and marketing finance or maybe you're in a regulated industry and you need to have a relationship the compliance people who understand all of this so as a product manager you really need to be in that suit as well so it's a lot and you can't just if you're an individual contributor you can't just demand that people trust you have to be worthy of that trust and being come from really having deep knowledge of all of the things that I've just describing yeah that makes a lot of sense I talked to some senior leaders and their advice because recently there's been a lot of cutback on managers and people are trying to get promoting into like senior ic's and someone told me that like it's become a really senior I you got to be the subject matter expert in your area you gotta be like the go-to person in the company right so I think that's very good advice exactly and that's I like thinking about it that way because it's something you can just you can introspect you can ask yourself like if you're manager am I that person do people seek me out from my knowledge about the customer do they industry and what the competition is doing here and if not and you're never going to start there right we don't hire people with that knowledge ahead of time the whole point is that you have to come that domain expert as quickly as possible but if you're not there on any of those then find help and that's part of your manager's job your manager is there to provide that access to help you get in front of the customers that you need to help you understand how to access the data to get some shape of what the industry looked like so yeah I agree with you another good hack I found is like just to like a lot of companies have a few customers that already matter right that kind of drive a lot of Revenue or something and if you can build a good with those customers the CEO talks to those customers so the customers are saying good things about you but you don't have to spend all your time trying to commin CEO the customers will tell the CEO like hey this PM is job yeah I like that I mean obviously that yeah that's a great hack you align yourself with that core customer Advisory Board yeah you're going to be speaking with the same voice as those people that's a little fraught too there are definitely some traps you can fall into there especially if that group of reference customers is not necessarily representative of your broader Market you need to make sure that you're not over indexing on just that group but I do agree with you I mean if you've aligned yourself with the parts of the business that the executives in your company are aligned with that is a really a good way to build trust awesome so let's kind of go back talking about outcomes over outputs right so I worked at meta for a couple years and meta is a great company right the

execution is off the charts but when I work there a lot of PMS they were measured basically based on can they achieve their metric Target for the quarter right and it leads to making like really bad tradeoffs like oh I'm just going to stop you this product let me just put a big banner on the feed to get a bunch of users com in so I can meet my target so I guess how do you kind of like I think met is one of those things that's like a pro right it's like very convenient to measure things right but it can't totally go overboard so how do you find the right balance here yeah no I think you're absolutely right that is kind of metrics run a monk uh there it's one of the reasons why I think okrs like okrs by themselves are not going to solve things but this is one of the sort of promises that's supposed to be there right that you've got the measurable quantitative metric the KR but there's always the O right the O is the objective stated in pros this is what we're trying to do and this is why this is important by the way this KR is just a proxy and we might actually put another proxy in there and we certainly don't want to craft the KRS in a way that people can game it and really just artificially Drive the metric you've lost the plot again so that I agree that's not a good thing I think that's something that's gotten a little out of hand we also actually Advocate my firm Advocates those types of outcomes those types of metric being shared by a cross functional team so it's not just the product manager owns the metric or and then engineering owns these other metrics and things like that it's that you're trying to create those okrs in a way that there's a group collaborating against them trying to figure out what the best thing is there that's a bit of a different dimension I suppose you could still find that bad behavior in a team kind of collectively gaming on that metric but in general in kind of the setup like that's something that I would always look at if we're just putting those metrics on People based on their functional job as opposed to onto a cross functional team yeah that that's like another pet PE of my man like I heard from somewhere that like PMS are responsible for setting the product Direction engineering manager responsible for delivering the product and then designs responsible for what for like making a product beautiful or something like right I don't know I just feel like one just sign everybody up for the same product goal that they're trying to achieve like yeah that's exactly how we do it uh and how we talk about it you have that cross functional team collectively they're going after that protocol and just saying it that way you can start to see the benefit of doing something like that actually compels people to collaborate right there is actually now like a like an economic incentive for people to be working together because they're all in that same boat they're all responsible for that same outcome so for example you're an engineer on a team like this and you kind of see the team what the outcome is and you see the team barreling towards something and you as the engineer a little suspicious like I don't think that's going to work like is that really going to move this have we done enough Discovery experimentation before we go and spin up a bunch of stuff and spend a lot of resources so let's make sure that we know that like when you put those okrs on the team on the collective team those types of conversations start to happen when you don't do that and when you've got each person responsible for their own thing they're not talking right there's no intended to talk so yeah I agree with you yeah exactly and how

about like this trend towards teams getting smaller right like before I was a prodct manager I was in product marketing and it always felt crazy to me that like product manager would hand me over to product and be like hey Peter go craft like some messaging for my product I mean isn't that your job to craft some messaging so like I don't know there's this kind of trend towards collapsing the T stack towards people wearing more hats again like at a startup yeah how do you I mean I person think this is a great Trend but like how do you think people can no I do I mean it's within reason right I mean it's not that everybody's responsible for everything I mean we do have some particular things that particular roles are going to be more concerned with or less concerned with but just knowing from the start that we're collectively trying to solve a business problem that's really one of the things that unlock it's a it's one of the Innovation unlocks because you just get the benefit of cross functional people collaborating on a solution together so yeah we've advocated an operating model like what you're describing I've also heard it described this was I can't remember where it is a couple of companies ago somebody described it as hiring athletes as opposed to hiring Specialists you might want to have somebody who's a specialist in one thing but it's that t-shaped person who really is broadly skilled and can apply a broad set of skills to much more generalized problem makes a lot of sense yeah so let's

talk about some like specific company examples just to bring some of the stuff to life a little bit more we can talk about let's talk about Airbnb first right so like I think it was like a year ago or something like Brian chesty came out and said like you got rid of the PM function or something but in reality he just added PR marketing to the PM function and I think Marty wrote some sort of response to some of his management styles but anyway like imagine you're like Brian trying to keep Airbnb alive after covid dropped the revenue by like 80% or something like how do you like is that the right environment to empower your PMS or like what's the right way to kind of Empower them to actually keep your company life yeah well so I kind of heard there's sort of two topics in there the first one is what Brian chesky said about product management and honestly like there's sort of the actual job titles and then there's the roles and things that are going on and we've always described product management within the context of these teams they're responsible primarily for customer value and business viability so whatever solutions that team is producing the team is collectively trying to find a solution that works but the product manager is really going to be advocating ensuring that there is genuine value that's being transmitted to whoever the customer or ether is and whatever we're doing is going to work for all of the relevant aspects of our business whether it be go to market or compliant or you whatever internal you brand existing Partnerships of that kind of stuff that is really the domain of the product manager and if you are erasing that role within the company if you're taking that out as a job title somebody still has to be responsible for the things that I just said right their value and viability are still issues there so it may shift to somebody else whether it's shifting to a product marketing person whether it's shifting maybe the designer is picking up some of that stuff so the fundamentals don't change it's just how you're doing out respons ability for those risks across the people within the team that was essentially kind of how we framed what he was saying there now as far as the other part of your question dealing with this exential threat of the pandemic quite honestly the operating model that we talk about in the book that you mentioned at the beginning thing that involves these teams the thing that involves product strategy that's precisely the thing that allowed many other companies survive this exact event that you're talking about we in fact we profile a couple of companies in that book on how the fact that they had moved to this sort of model allowed them to innovate their way through and deal with something that fundamentally changed their customer experience and in some cases even their business model so what it comes from though is you're it's that it's what we were talking about a little bit before we don't over delegate and over autonomization figure something out or a couple of them are going to figure something out there still is a considerable amount of leadership and top- down energy put onto those teams to get them moving in the right direction or the same direction and it comes in the form of a product vision strategy that is this broader strategic context within which teams are going to innovate and yeah as I said we've got some examples of just that we don't profile Airbnb but we profile some companies that have some similar Dynamics and faced some similar threats when the pandemic came down can you talk about this model in a little bit more detail or like what are the key components of this yeah so a product operating model we've been talking about this for a long time the term product operating model is something that the industry seems to be coalescing around in the last couple of years or so we've really adopted that and it's not the kind of process and stuff that we were talking about before and it's not even really a framework it really just a way to think about a set of principles if you look at the companies that are operating this way they'll use different words but if you interview people within these companies they'll kind of say similar things in terms of the processes that they use they might have or sorry in terms of the principles that they follow um they may go about putting them together in very different ways internally how Apple does product it's really different from how Airbnb does products Amazon does product but the fundamental concepts are there and it really divides

into kind of three broad categories how do you build how do you solve problems and how do you decide which problems to solve and what I'm talking about is like this is companywide right so how you build most people if you understand anything about this stuff that's usually the place that you start this is getting into shipping a lot more frequently coupled releases cicd a lot of monitoring and instrumentation and those sorts of things your deployment architecture right so the stuff that most people think about like when they might do an agile transformation the next category that one is how you go about solving problem and that's where you and I started this conversation on empowered teams versus feature teams are we giving teams problems or are we giving them solutions that they need to go and ship and all the various behaviors that come Downstream from that what does product Discovery look like what do teams look like how do you staff them all of that so that's kind of the second area and then the third area is really more about the product strategy like okay we got any number of problems to be working on how do we really provide the right sort of focus and insight on that so that we're going to actually move forward in a really cohesive way so and there's work usually that needs to be done at all three of those levels Dimension if you're taking a company and moving it to get more consistent with this type of operating model yeah it kind of reminds me of the understand identify execute process that like Facebook these other companies follow I think going back to the airb I think it's a fact that like Brian himself is not going to be able to do all the customer Discovery for NRE details of each part of the strategy that like a bunch of PMS or designers or whoever can do right like to me to me at least like the customer disty part of things is like one of the most important pieces that a PM does or it's supposed to do so I think that's a really strong argument like Brian can tell a PM to make the fees more transparent or something on the website but like the PM will have to go and talk to customer and figure out exactly how to do that yeah you know I think all of this still works I mean the there sort of what's going on at the team level and what you're just describing is very much what's going on in the team level and then there's what's going on at the leadership and management level so that the teams are kind of doing the right thing so and what you were describing there Brian would be living much more in the realm of product strategy these are the areas we need to focus and it really as we start obviously not going to be him by himself but this is how we want to start to decompose this in a way so that as we set these teams off against various objectives we're going to be able to achieve this product strategy meanwhile advancing us toward a longer term vision and so yeah that's a lot of what we've been talking about actually Through The Years kind of what happens at the level of the team leadership got it what about let's take another example

what about like Google right Google 5 years ago or even now you can argue it's the company that a lot of pmss want to work for a lot of people but as you can as you've seen they've seen some challenges to shift towards Ai and people who have been there complaining about how there's too many layers now there's too many little thif thums it's it's kind of like a country of a bunch of states that want to go in their own Direction and then it's kind of hard to yeah so I guess maybe let's start at the executive level like what do you think goog needs to do to fix this and kind of move F faster yeah this is a tricky one I can't really speak to any firsthand knowledge of exactly what's going on at Google with regard to Ai and it changes so quickly I mean they just recently had an event where they you know rolled out a lot of their plans and their strategy on the infrastructure and the cloud and how that all plays with AI and quite frankly it looks pretty together and they've been really working on this for a long time some of the criticisms that I've heard especially when chat gbt was rolling out and Gemini and all of these sorts of things was had to do with a little bit more of an abundance of caution within the team and what it meant to unleash a lot of AI in a way that responsible and accurate and ethical and all of that stuff and they made some missteps there but that fundamentally there has been a lot of advancing here again though I'm not really speaking from a place of direct knowledge so I'm just kind of piecing This Together from the outside I would not short Google on this I really think they're going to come out as one of the they already are but I think they there's a really good chance they are they're going to come out in a very good place on this whole thing but in general I do think your question really still makes a lot of sense because many companies do find themselves in a deficit like what you've described you've got a lot of foms groups that are pursuing things that are independent there's nothing that coherently putting them together uh a lot of it has grown up around the orb chart and where leaders have been put and you know they have their kingdoms and running their own little businesses uh but there's not been sufficient emphasis placed on product strategy that's that third dimension I said deciding what problems we're going to work on how do you get that stuff actually coordinated and in some cases it's an issue with how the companies are organized right if it's sort of structurally built in and in some cases it just depends on the leaders themselves they don't have enough incentive to collaborate with one another they're not being given objectives at that high business level that actually encourages these things to be dealt with in a much more holistic way so but yeah as far as Google hard to say and I'm sure your listeners and readers all have an abundance of opinions here yeah no I think you bring up some really good points I mean I think most of the readers and listeners here are going to be more people in the product team as opposed to like some VP or something right so yeah maybe let's take it from that perspective then like going back to what we talk about before Engineers designers PMS pro team this want to deliver a good product they want to grow their career and they don't want to get stuck like the thing about product strategy is especially large companies it could easily get stuck in like product review hell just like making decks all day

right and like going through reviews of like directors VPS just like yeah just keep getting stuck doing all this stuff and you don't have time to actually execute or like talk to the customer so how do you I guess at the end of the day if you can give some advice for these prod team folks to find themselves in a good spot to actually kind of be able to enjoy their job like yeah well so I'll take one more run at the strategy side of things we don't Advocate that the phenomenon that you just talked about we don't really necessarily equate strategy with lots and lots of decks and lots of consensus and lockup and process and things like that I mean it's really quite simple for us it's much more about choosing uh a relatively limited set of things that you're going to focus on and that by the way can be a just by itself a very profound step and this is one of the things where Steve Jobs has a great quote and he says is most people think that focus is about saying yes to the things that you're going to focus on so that's not what it means at all what Focus means saying no to the potentially hundreds of other really great ideas that are out there that your company could be pursuing so taking a stand at the leadership level on the areas of focus that comp that teams can be pursuing and being pretty ruthless about not letting things get too far outside of that area of focus that's one of the things that we're really looking for there so as far as an individual engineer I think if you're trying to find a place to work whether it's a company or an individual product manager for that matter you're trying to find a company or a place within the company but just looking for the areas that run the way that we're talking about the type of empowerment that I've been talking about the pro the teams are fundamentally given problems they may have some ins I don't what those problems are but their job is to find the best solution to those problems that can be an incredibly rewarding level of empowerment right it and it's one that not for the least of which is it usually is the sort of way that leads to a lot better success in terms of products so if you on the other hand are finding yourself in a place that's buried in process or if you've got a manager who just doesn't really get how this stuff works and really wants to go into command and control it's going to be hard to fully change that from the bottoms up you may be able to begin to chip away at it one of the pieces of advice I give especially for product managers is anytime your team is given something to build given a feature to build or given a road map to execute on try and bring into the conversation

the topic of the outcome like okay great you want us to ship this feature what does success look like and success is not you ship the feature on time success is that we're going to get at least 20% of our existing customers to adopt to try this out within the first month and of those ones who try it out 90% of them are going to keep going with it right we've got a maybe an adoption and a retention metric that we're going to go for and that's a place to start so it's like okay I'm going to build this thing you're asking me to build but I know what success looks like and even that is going to create some level of empowerment when you take it to the first level you're not even getting the solution you're only getting the outcome and team is able to really figure out what that solution would be yeah I think sometimes success is actually like if you have the maturity and I made this mistake in the past where I was very focused on a success on my product but I wasn't thinking about hey if like a million users adopt this product is actually good for the company or not like is this the most important thing the company should be working out right now right and sometimes you need to have that maturity to be like actually you know what the thing you're giving me the product or the problem you're giving me is actually I don't think is the most important thing to do right now yeah well that's a good conversation to have then with your leader and a good leader a good manager is going to have that conversation with you and they should be able to articulate to you why they believe it's important you can articulate why you believe it's a problem and you may not actually get to consensus end up agreeing with one another but at least you're understanding the logic behind it it's not a Because I Said So sort of thing there you may at first blush not believe that this is good for the company but after the conversation with the manager you may come around and say all right I see that logic I might not be fully convinced but there is something there yeah and just to fall on the previous thread like what happens if you're a product manager or someone kind of currently stuck in that product review heal stage right where like you maybe it's the CO's Pet Project or like maybe they don't try trust you how do you systematically rebuild that trust like is just overc communicating or me moving away you're talking about how do you begin to move away from a really process oriented team to one that's a bit more empowered let's assume that there's other teams at a company that are actually empowered so it's not just like toxic company it's just yours that's been disempowered or something okay yeah well yeah that means trust has broken down for some reason right that leadership doesn't trust your team to do it and I think in the immediate term doing as much as you can to have outcomes be part of the conversation so it's not like okay stop giving me Solutions and only give me problem you're not going to do that but what you can do is say all right I do need to understand really at the business level when is this thing going to be successful what is about this so that's one of the things to do is just shifting that conversation and then the other one is kind of back to what I said if you've you sort of lost the trust it might be because you as a product manager aren't the expert on the customer you data you don't really know deeply what's going on in the business so kind of going back to those fundamentals that I talked about and getting yourself to that level I think is another way to rebuild trust and also maybe just having the honesty like cuz sometimes when you laun something and people hate it or like the metrics aren't quite there people would like to hide this information from leaders and it usually doesn't work out so just having to honestly just like share that stuff openly and tell public what we doing to improve well yeah so I mean there's a lot of things that can lead to that particular situation the first thing I would probably question as a leader if somebody presented me that was why did we not do more to understand that this could have been a risk was there more product discovery that could have been done to highlight this why were we surprised by this and there may be a very good reason there may absolutely but then the next question is okay so why do we think based on everything we've done both in product Discovery and product delivery why do we think this is not delivering the numbers that we were hoping and a true fail failure would be there's no Insight in there well we just don't know we took our best shot and it crapshoot it could gone either way and it went badly like that's a bad answer right because you can't do anything with that but if there's an Insight in there as to why this thing didn't work well we celebrate that and we make sure that we bank that insight and we you know are taking advantage of it for the next thing that we do but it is a bummer when you get all the way to building something and then you're surprised by how it's adopted or how it's retain usually as I said that's usually a failure of product discovery which I think is like the most important part of product management I mean I'm biased but yeah you and me both so

last question Chris we talk about how to feel empowered in a company but how do you feel empowered in your career right like I think Tech goes through Cycles I mean you've been around the block and so have I like every couple years there's like big layoffs or down downturn you could be doing a great job and you just get totally laid off and then your livelihood is gone so how do you build a career where you have more control and feel more ulated on that yeah I mean this is probably going to sound obvious but always have to keep your network up and it's not just for these downtimes something that you can lean on but your Network's going to help you it's going to provide advice it's GNA you know provide mentoring and coaching in some cases so just if you're not inclined to do that and there's a period in my I'm fundamentally kind of introverted and there are period periods where it's like yeah I'm not really doing that great of networking I would just give myself a little MBO or a little okr on it and like okay this week I'm going to make sure that I reach out to at least three people from my historical Network and whether it's just an email or maybe trying to set a lunch a checkin on how they're doing not necessarily any big agenda but just kind of keeping that Network alive and that's the single best thing you can have when there is a downturn that you're top of mind for people or other people are you and yeah it just gives you a sense of empowerment that's not entirely rooted within the company that you're working at yeah that's really good advice I mean that's why I do this these interview like we just had a 50 minute conversation I got to know you I'm glad to have you in my network now for exactly this reason yeah dude when I hear the words empowered or like feature Factory or some of these words like I feel like after I had this conversation with you I understand all the nuances a lot better now and like you kind explain it very well and just hearing the words in power can trigger some people so I'm really glad that we had this conversation kind of like sharing the actual real how the sausage actually get made great thanks Peter great to meet you I really appreciate the opportunity all right man yeah we'll definitely touch I'll end an interview here yeah thanks cheers