Prioritizing without strategy won't work - with Christian Idiodi, Partner @SVPG

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. Today, I had not only one Christian in the call, I had two Christians. So obviously it seems like it's a quite famous name for product managers. So yeah, the other question was Christian Iodi from the Silicon Valley Product Group. Obviously, the second you talk about Silicon Valley Product Group that you're talking about quality and you know that you're going to have a quite fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. Christian, what about you? Christian was sharing good stuff. And I liked especially the end of the conversation when we started doing real talk when it comes to leadership and shame on product leadership. So I think it's worth listening in. And I just want to remind, in case you like this episode, feel free to follow us on social media like LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. And make sure you share it with the world, with your friends and with your network. Christian, let's get started. Hi, Alex. Hi, Christian. It's nice to have you in our podcast today. A pleasure being here. Thanks for having me. It feels a little bit weird that I as Christian introduce another Christian, but we need to get along with two times Christian today. I mean, tell me about it. I have no idea how I should pick the right Christian afterwards in the conversation. All the good product managers give you the same kind of problem. That's true. That's true. So to share a little bit background, Christian, you've been in products or in a world of product management, startups, companies since almost two decades. And you've worked for several positions such as a founder, as a managing director, as a head of product, as a VP product. And most important, you are currently partner at the Silicon Valley Group. And I would love to hear from you what you are doing there and what your day-to-day business looks like. Yeah, great. That's significantly different than being a product manager at Silicon Valley Product Group, where really people that curate what we've seen to work in the most innovative companies in the world. And we try to share those with other companies to convince them they can work in a similar manner or better. I think every day I'm trying to solve the problem of helping companies understand how to build products customers love. I am helping companies around the world to understand how to create value for their customers in a way that works for their business. So I am an everyday product manager of an infinite amount of customers, whether they are startups looking for product market fit, whether they are high-growth companies looking to scale and become successful, or enterprise companies that are looking for consistent innovation. I think I spend all my time, a chunk of my time, trying to convince them that they can work in a similar manner that the most innovative companies in the world use. Sounds like an infinite backlog with infinite fun for you. Yeah, product is hard. Absolutely. And never-ending somehow. That's right. That's right. I was just wondering, since you are working with so many companies and people across the globe, what do you see are the biggest challenges product people are facing these days? Oh boy, you're tempting me to jump on some soapboxes here. So many things have become consistent pain points in making this discipline more challenging than it has ever been. On one end, it's exciting to see the amount of light being put on the discipline, the importance in many organizations today, its role in technology evolving, and many champions of working in this modern product practice. However, I always say all problems are people problems. There are a couple of areas that have become really significant pain points for the discipline. One is a good understanding of what the role of product is. Two is actually equipping, training people and coaching people to be successful in that role. And three is leading that discipline overall, the role of product leadership and managers of product people. All of these things have been becoming increasingly very poor as the role has found more relevance. So most of my pain and challenge with this discipline probably stems a lot from this. Now in fairness, it's understandable why not a lot of product people have been taught by good product leaders. So many people are self-taught in this discipline. There's not a magical curriculum out there that has equipped people to be good product managers. There's unfortunately a lot of misinformation about what this role should be and what good in this role looks like. And this cycle reinforces itself. So poorly taught product people are teaching other people how to do product in a poor manner. And this cycle continues to feed itself. And most of my challenges I see have arisen from the people aspects of the product management discipline. And that goes from the role of product leadership, which is being able to find, hire and attract the right talent and to coach them to be successful. Being able to create an environment for product people to be successful by empowering them and giving them problems to solve and providing them the right context to as well. Being able to help people manage their time well and not have product people spend all their days in meetings, all of their time in meetings, rather than actually doing good and meaningful product work. So it's a lot of the people aspects of this that have been really frustrating for me over the last couple of years. It's actually quite interesting, right? Because if we look back, there was never really the product manager role or product roles in the history. And a lot of people have grown into it. And one would say, now as today, like we have schools that teach it, we have boot camps, I mean, like them or don't like them. But there is actually a lot of like hype also on, okay, people want to become product manager. But what I hear from you is that sometimes this is also broken because the people who teach it actually aren't those self-taught people who don't have the right experience. Yes. Where did they learn product management? The best product managers I have met have learned from great product leaders. I have not met this found a single curriculum, a single path that has helped equip people. And there were some of the things I don't put up managers to go get because they need to add some specific skills here that the best product managers, they represent the customer the most. They have a deep knowledge of the data, the deep knowledge of their business, the industry and their product. They're able to add value to the organization by working collaboratively with design and engineering to solve problems in a meaningful way. It's a part of all of these soft skills. When the role has been defined as validating an idea, or the role has been defined as gathering requirements, then we have trainings where people walk in a factory to deliver what the business wants, that to solve problems for customers, the way that works for a business. So first of all, you have to look at the nature of the training or the program to make sure philosophically, they would understand what the role is first before you double down your investment in it. You mentioned that there are many people who haven't been taught by great product leaders, plus the fact that it got worse over the years from your observations. So I'm just asking myself, what needs to happen to actually flip it to the other way? Because from my point of view, I see also a lack of understanding or also empowerment on leadership level in companies for product management. Yeah, I think you're really pointing to the core of it. First, this discipline has to be better defined within an organization and starts with the role of technology, moving from being a necessary evil to being an enabler of creating value for customers. And first, the business has to understand that foundationally, that the job of technology here is not as a cost center, not as something we must do just because it's cool or because that's what everybody does, but this is how we solve problems for our customers. And then the discipline of product management is one that is empowered to help us leverage technology to solve that problem in a meaningful way. So if that has been addressed, then the most important role that is a non C-level position is the leader of product people, because now they are responsible for building a strong product management discipline, a strong unit, and coaching and equipping them to be able to deliver against those values that they are promising the organization. First, the discipline has to be well understood within the organization, then it has to be well supported, and they need the right kind of leadership to support it. So that's the key for this to shift, is that organizations double down their investment in product leadership. First, they have to have the right mindset, then they invest in the right leadership, because the role of leadership is to create the environment for product teams to succeed. And let me imagine also a little bit like your role whenever you work with an organization and whenever you work with a company, like how do you actually bring this knowledge in or this expertise in? What do you need to do to get the right mindset into the company and to help them find the right people and invest into the right people? A lot of what we teach is heavily around culture and mindset. We don't try to teach process or techniques or agnostic to process in that way. But if you think about the pillars for the most innovative companies in the world, first is how they approach risk, they tackle their risk up front, they do discovery before they do delivery. Second is how they work together, they work collaboratively, they don't work in handoffs. The product manager, the designer and the engineer, they all work together as one to define and identify the problems they want to solve and to discover design and delivery solution to that problem. And finally, they are very focused on results and that is core to these companies. And so when you think about those foundational teams, I try to convince companies that there's nothing that stops them from working in that manner. Actually they are in a unique spot because those companies don't have that. Great products come from great product teams and great product teams are made up of ordinary people. These people must be coached, they must be supported. So on one end, I try to be very clear about the difference between the most innovative companies and the rest. And then I try to walk companies through what they need in their environment to be successful at working in that same manner or even better. And in many cases, we're talking building a strong product management discipline, we're talking about coaching teams, we're talking about providing clear context to a vision and a strategy. We're talking about building a culture of learning, a culture of experimentation, working truly collaboratively together and really being focused on results. I love the sentence discovery before delivery. That's definitely something we have talked already a lot in our podcast. But also the step in between, which is the prioritization, is something that I hear more and more product managers, I don't want to say complaining, but see them struggling with because prioritization gets even harder due to, first of all, the extremely fast changing world. And I think these times, absolutely nailing it. But on the other hand, stakeholder requests, strategic changes by the management, leadership decisions that are popping out of nowhere. So what would you say are the best ways to make sure that I, as a product manager, prioritize as good as possible? Yeah. Great question. Look, I think I get that question every other day these days in terms of giving me some prioritization metrics or some framework for prioritization or some rubric. This is because no product manager ever has had anybody come to them and said, Hey, can you build me something and do it three years from now? And everything is important. Every idea is important. Remember, I said that the job is not to validate certain ideas. The job is to solve problems, is to discover a solution. It's our job to turn whatever features you've been given or solutions to build and make sure we understand the problem. Now, the predominance of these requests for a prioritization framework or a prioritization rubric or something reflects, again, a poor product leadership, right? The reason I don't do prioritization types of things is because my priorities are made clear by my vision, which is articulating the problems I want to solve and for who within a time period. So again, I'm not suggesting all the other problems are not important. I'm saying in the next five years, these are the problems I want to solve for these people. That's what a vision is saying. I'm placing my bets that these are the most important problems I want to solve within the next, this time horizon. Now, the next piece after that is a strategy. Not what I want to do, but how I plan to solve those problems. Your strategy, by very definition, is telling you what you're focusing on. And in turn, it's also telling you what you're not going to do to as well. I've already said, these are the, let's say I pick three problems to solve in my vision. My strategy is now saying the first of those three problems I'm going to solve will be this. Then the next problem will be this before that problem. So I have now placed my bets on the sequence in which I want to solve those problems. Now, I'm not suggesting every other problem in the world is not important. I'm just making it clear it's not important right now. That's what strategy is. By the very nature of doing that, I've already prioritized. Now the next thing I have to do is to communicate those strategic priorities to my team. And I might use a team objectives or a framework like OKRs or something to do that. So if the problem I've said I want to solve is to improve customer retention, I am handing that problem off to the team. It is now up to the team to discover the best way to solve those problems. You can't prioritize those things because you haven't discovered what is going to solve the problem. It doesn't matter if you prioritize the list of stuff. If it doesn't solve the problem, it doesn't matter. By nature of discovery, we are trying to figure out the best solution to the problems we've been assigned. In some ways, I typically look at this as a poor reflection on leadership when product managers struggle with prioritization because that means they haven't provided the right strategic context to help the teams make a decision about what problems are most important right now. And that could be reflected in a strategy, in team objectives, or through any of the other strategic context elements. So this is always what I tell teams. Strategy by definition is choosing what not to do. That's the problem. And speaking about like also the leadership aspect as well as each individual team's importance for the strategic direction, I think I'm just remembering also one of our last interviews that we had with Jill, which was more around like strategic design and the importance of design in, for example, shape the strategy and maybe even finding the right problems that we need to prioritize. So where do you see the balance between top-down and bottom-up when it comes to strategy definition and vision for the product itself? This is a leadership responsibility. Part of it is because there has to be alignment, right? If you're a CEO and you say, this year we've got to grow revenue, how do you know you're going to grow revenue? What do you do? Maybe you go to your head of sales and you say, hey, grow revenue. Sell more. That's right. Sell more. The head of sales says, I'm going to come up with a sales strategy to grow sales. If you go to your head of product, your head of product has to come up with a product strategy to create more value. So sales is all about capturing value and product is about value creation. Now the way that those things cascade down is, as a CEO, if I have a product manager working on growing revenue, then I know where somebody is working on growing revenue. Same way I have a salesperson trying to sell more, then I know somehow we're going to sell more or we're trying to sell more. So in some ways, leadership has to be aligned and it has to come all the way down to the team. If not, the team is disconnected to the important priorities of the organization and the business. When you're creating your team objectives, the leaders are telling the teams what the important problems are and the teams are coming up with the solutions themselves. So there's a little top-down, bottom-up type of process in here where leaders are talking about the problems that are most important and teams are being accountable by saying, this is how we know we are going to succeed at solving this problem. And it's important that happens because that creates a sense of accountability. I know many senior product managers who are struggling with the missing vision or the missing strategy that needs to be defined at some point from the leadership level. And there are a lot of smart and brave people who try to do that work and who are wanting to make the step towards leadership team, but it doesn't always work because leadership teams are busy or they believe they have to do it, or they even believe they don't need to do it. And I was wondering, what would you share with those people, with those struggling product managers, what they could do to convince the leadership team to start focusing more on strategy? Yeah. Look, it's almost like this. It's the same thing I see sometimes with discovery. I tell companies like, every company does discovery. It's just web. Right? You know, you will eventually discover if your idea sucks. You eventually discover if it's good to sell. You eventually discover how much you make, if you can build it, if people will like it. You're going to discover all of those things. It's almost the same thing with the absence of a plan in some ways. The real world is a little messier when it comes to how it approaches, how businesses respond. Unfortunately, like I mentioned before, most leaders have never created a business vision or a product vision or a product strategy before, and this is very overwhelming and scary for them. Right? It's like, oh, it's my job to create a vision. I don't know where to start. And then they also get pressure from an executive team or a board, and the board is, we need to create a strategy for our company. And nobody's taking action, and some board member will say, look, I used to work with one of my other companies, and they brought in a big firm, you know, one of those big names, and they came up with an elaborate 10-year vision, strategic plan. So the leaders are like, yeah, let's go outsource it to a big firm. Now- Or let's create a business plan. That's right. Let's create a whole elaborate strategy and vision. Now, it makes sense because if you think about it, if it fails and it sucks, you can blame them. You can be like, yeah, it's not my vision. This was created by that company, and if it works, you can be like, I was smart enough to bring in somebody to help us create a strategy. Now, these people have now delegated their responsibility of taking insights and knowledge and understanding of the business and translating it into a strategy to some other third party from the outside to come in and tell them how to solve the problems, that they want other secrets in which they should tackle the problems that they want. It's a very common pattern. So what I tell product managers is you've got to find some safe space with your manager and don't shame them. Recognize the fact that many managers have not done this before, and even if they've been in an environment where they have done it, they did it with some third party group or some outside party, they have never really created a vision and a strategy. And so you want to partner with them to do one, and you want to talk about why, and you want to say, look, we want to be led with context, not by control. The more we have an understanding of where we are, where we're going, what problems we have to solve, the better our solutions will be. And as a leader, we are looking to you to provide that clarity. Why are we here? Where are we going? What problems do we want to prioritize to solve and how do we plan to do that? And there are many tools and techniques we use for creating this. It is less about, I have the perfect strategy and it is well articulated and it looks pretty on a presentation and stuff, and more that as a product manager, I understand the important problems that we should be solving. If you would, if you would have shared that tip five years ago with me, I would have had less stress, I can tell you. But I like the idea of sitting down in a safe space and trying to convince your boss or your supervisor or your leader to work together on that and emphasizing the importance. I think that's a big takeaway, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely something that I think is missing a lot. And even a lot of organizations where you would expect that they have like clear direction because like on the outside, they seem to have a good product and so on. If you look a little bit like closer or under the hood, sometimes there is just like lack of strategy. That's right. They can write their strategy in reverse, you know, after the fact, hey, how did you make it through the pandemic? We had no plan, which was a plan. We just responded to anything that happened in the world. And that's often, and it's perfectly okay for people to know that strategy is often the hardest thing for a company to do. It's going to change. You're going to respond to changes in your marketplace and industry, absolutely, a company very quickly. And it's a living, breathing type of thing. And so the best product managers understand that they are really helping their leader where they can bring insights and qualitative, quantitative data around technology insights and all of these to help them, you know, help inform their strategic decisions. And I feel like that's like also what it comes down to when we think of how the top down, bottom up kind of collaboration should work because, and also looking at different maturities of a company, very early, you might not have a lot of information. So you might have a certain strategy that again, will change based on the input that you get from the people on the ground to talk to the customers, to see what the feedback is. So maybe your main problem that you prioritize, and now we're prioritizing even like in the strategy and in the vision, but maybe it's this one goal that you said was like, this is the first problem that we want to solve isn't the right one because you figure out it's actually something else that makes people behave or ask for this specific thing. That's the big backlog we talked about at the beginning, right? Maybe even for leaders, I see that they have to deal with the fact that they're working with a big strategy backlog that regularly needs to be adjusted. The product managers, they're having bi-weekly sprints and they have to update the sprint backlog every two weeks. So why not the leader too? Yeah. Well, and that is, that's, that's what's key or what's missing around this is the reason teams backlogs are super big and healthy because leaders have not done the work and it is hard work, but that is what the work of leadership is. You have to place the bets, right? And that's what strategy is, placing these smart bets, these informed bets. You're saying this is more, this is important and this is not important. And the teams now take those problems and go discover that in the absence of that, everything is important. Why not? I'm on a team, I can do anything and everything is a possibility. And that's so hard to manage, right? Multiply that by, if you're a leader of product people and you have 10 teams, you know that. And it probably, I can just like also say for a certain period of time, I maybe give the importance to really figuring out the problem. And that's my goal for the next quarter to like really have a good understanding of the problem that we should solve next. That's right. That's right. And in some ways, that's what kind of insight you want. When I see companies give teams very broad goals, it's because leaders have not done the necessary work to understand what will help, because if I understand what will actually help us accomplish that goal, then I can give that to the team, then give the team the very broad goal. Hey, grow revenue, go do whatever you like to grow revenue. Or I can place a bet that if we invest in X, Y and Z, if we solve this problem, we will grow revenue. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Christian, to wrap up this conversation, and I'm a hundred percent sure that every product manager or product leader who's listening in is listening because he or she wants to get feedback and wants to improve. So what would be the number one tip for every product lead and for every product manager that you would share these days to make sure they stay on track with their work? Oh boy. Take your time. I'm much harder on product leaders and managers and product people than I am on product managers. Then go as hard as you like on product leaders. I'm fine with that. I mean, I'm going to call both of them out in different ways here because we've gotten really comfortable. I think I have started calling out product managers on what work is not when it comes to product management. I've said before, a meeting is not responding to your email, it's not responding to your Slack channel or your Teams channels or all of those things. I know they sound like I'm super busy and product managers, champions of busyness in some ways. And we are unfortunately drowned in meetings or in email or Slack every single day. And this is eroding from our focus on really what the job is. I've argued that this is probably the most meaningful job, the ability to go solve problems for other people in a very healthy, meaningful way. Nothing should be more rewarding than that. What a great gig. However, if you're not waking up every day and collaborating with the smartest minds in your building to solve those problems for your customers in a way that works for your business, you're not doing product work. Probably doing project management. You're probably working 18 hours a week, but not going anywhere, not getting really much done. This job is about solving problems. It is exciting to wake up every day with permission to think about what problems your customers might face and leverage your organizations, technology, business expertise, and the smartest people in your company to help tackle those problems. You have got to prioritize creating the space to think and do that work. That's my first key for product managers. And I tell them that all the time. Don't fool yourself that you look at your calendar and you had 40 meetings and you responded to 30 emails and you did all of this and you're like, I'm super busy. I'm a successful product manager. You're probably a mediocre project manager. The job is solving problems. So that's the first piece for product managers. For product leadership, shame on us because we are not creating the environment for these teams to succeed. We're not creating the safe space for them to work truly collaboratively to really do that kind of meaningful work. We are asking for status updates and reports. What features have you delivered? What have you done? And we're screaming at them and emotionally abusing our teams and all of the stakeholders that they did not make happy or meetings that they missed or reports they didn't write. We've lost sight of what we are meant to do. Create an environment for these people to succeed. It's almost like also product leadership, which is the reason why product managers are like put into the project management kind of corner. And why also the whole space of product like starts like adjusting to it. And that becomes the role description. I'm just like pushing the tickets through. I'm just like project managing. And that's why also new product managers may be like why the situation is worsening, as you're saying. Spot on. It's just reinforced by product leaders. We don't even set new product managers up for success. We literally hire them and tell them, go deliver a new feature and do it tomorrow. And they're like, I don't even have a clue. Nobody trusts me. I don't know anything. But I have to act smart because I'm in a role called product manager. So I'm not going to make up stuff and tell the team what to do, which continuously is not going to work. I don't even have a clue. Nobody trusts me. I don't know anything. But I have to act smart because I'm in a role called product manager. I don't even have a clue. Nobody trusts me. I don't know anything. But I have to act smart because I'm in a role called product manager. So I'm not going to make up stuff and tell the team what to do, which continuously erodes trust that I'm now a factory worker, just doing what people said, then solving problems for customers. I actually also hope that founders and CEOs are listening to this episode and start questioning also on their product leadership and how their product leadership should work. Or maybe even if they themselves give the product leadership enough space to solve problems and to not only execute, right? Because I mean, that's also where it starts. Don't be shy about that. CEOs are the worst culprits of all of this stuff. Executives are the worst culprits. And look, in fairness, I always tell CEOs, the best product managers, they know the customers very well. And many CEOs who tell me, that's why I tell the team what to do. I am like the best product manager. I know a lot about the customer and the business and all of that. I say, you know what? You're right. You are the best product manager. But if you're doing product management, who is doing CEO? Who is creating an environment for teams, providing clarity about where we're going, supporting the business group, helping with the business strategy, driving? Exactly. You cannot do boobs very well. Something is suffering. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we should almost have an episode also on the job description of a CEO, right? Absolutely. Oh, yes. I know CEOs that are the better developers than the developers in the company, or the better designers than the designers in the company, the marketers, right? Yeah. Yeah. All of it. And I tell them, there's not a problem with all of that stuff, but I guarantee you, nobody's doing CEO. Because there's no way to be the best designer in your company and to be the best CEO. Those two jobs are just, by definition, not in the same page. Different thinking kind of hats, right? So you're absolutely right. It is so consistently true in many of these organizations. CEOs are just jumping and telling their teams what to do. Go build this. And then it disappears. And it's chaos and turmoil in the mix of stuff with teams. And so there's a lot of these patterns, I think, that unfortunately just have been culturally reinforced poorly in many organizations. And sometimes, actually, it might even be true, right? Sometimes maybe the CEO is a great designer, and that's why he's there. Maybe he was a great developer, and he built a company, and that's why he's there. But then either they start adjusting to the new role, or they hire a new CEO and focus on what they can do best, right? Absolutely. Because you can't do everything. That's smart wisdom there. And it's nothing... I truly have to encourage CEOs all the time. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong in saying, you know what? I love doing this product stuff. I will become a head of products, or I'll become a part of the design team, and stuff like that. And I'm going to hire somebody to do that. Because probably the reason your team is suffering is because they are waiting for leadership from the CEO, everything that is in your head, but no other person does. You also see it in a lot of startups that are successful, because the CEO is the best product manager. Which is also a big problem, because that's something that I have just noticed. It's nice if the CEO is the best product manager. But the problem is, you are growing, and you are building a team. And if you are the best one, but the other ones are not as good as you, or if you can't teach them to become as good as you, you're failing your leadership role. Yes, yes. You are the best product manager nowadays, no CEO. And if you're a good product manager, but not a good product leader, you're not coaching other people to be good as you, you have a stale organization. You're now growing, and there's only one good product manager, and that's you, you know? Good luck with that. I think, Christian, that was a great closing. And I think we closed the first time a podcast episode with shame on us, shame on product leadership. But I hope everyone who's listening in today takes away what the gist was behind what Christian was saying, actually. So ask yourself, first of all, if you are doing what you have to do as a product manager, by understanding the problems and making sure you're going to solve them, and as a leadership, to empower the people to do great work. And as a CEO, by being actually the CEO. Yeah. Amen to that. That's right. Christian, it was great to have you here, or Christians, it was a pleasure to have you both here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great conversation. Awesome. Thank you, too. And wish you a great day. You too. Bye-bye.