- JJ Rorie
Common Challenges in Product Management
Updated: Jun 21, 2022
Episode 020: Chad McAllister
"Another {challenge} that I suspect we can all relate to is a lack of understanding of the organization strategy. And this isn't particularly surprising. There's the old executive consulting habit that you might come into the executive team and say, okay, everyone, write down on a piece of paper what the strategy of this organization is. If there are seven people in the room, you get seven different opinions, right? "
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Episode Transcript
JJ: Hello and welcome to Product Voices. Today's guest is one you've probably heard many times over the years. Chad McAllister is the host of the popular podcast Product Mastery, now formerly known as the Everyday Innovator. He's author of Turning Ideas Into Market Winning Products and the founder of Product Mastery, now a leading product management training firm. Chad, welcome to Product Voices.
CHAD: Oh, thanks, JJ. Such a pleasure to be on your podcast and having seen you make contributions to this product management space as well over the years.
JJ: Well, great. That means a lot to me coming from you. Thank you, Chad. I've enjoyed learning from you over the years. So really excited to have you here. So we're going to be chatting about challenges that you're seeing with companies, companies in their product management world. And as we know, product management is a wonderful discipline, but it's also somewhat complex or at least lots of moving parts. And so challenges abound with companies trying to optimize product management. So let's just set the stage there. Tell me a little bit about what you're seeing. We'll go into detail a little bit later. But what are your observations about what's going on out there with companies in the product management space?
CHAD: Yeah, absolutely. And just to set this up a bit long time ago, this was like 2007 when I kind of got into product management and rapidly was learning more about it. I just finished up a PhD innovation to help me frame some thoughts about that. I started training some individuals on TV product management ideas and how we can do a better job. And I found out a few years later, some of those people would call me up and say, hey, you know that thing that you help me with? Can you come help our team, our group now. And that has evolved into what I now call the RPM experience, the Rapid Product Master experience. And it's a virtual experience for over nine sessions. So usually nine weeks, we meet for an hour and 15 minutes, typically with product managers. And I'm taking them on a kind of a guided journey for them to largely learn themselves, take ownership of a body of knowledge to be better product people. Right. Better innovators, better product managers. And in that process, I get to see I'm kind of doing this ethnographic research as we go, making observations about how they talk about their products, the things that they know, the things that they don't know. And at the very end, I give them a report. In addition to this experience we've had together to identify the key areas that I think they should be focused on to really make improvements going into the future. That's what this comes out of right now. I have the pleasure of having conversations with product VP at times about their challenges as well. But I put together kind of an aggregate of the common problems I run into over and over with organizations. So we can talk through some of those.
JJ: Yeah, let's do that.
And by the way, for those listeners, we're going to link to that resource that Chad has created as well. So you'll see that on ProductVoices.com, as well as link to his website.
So, yeah, let's jump in. Let's talk about some of those challenges that you're seeing, some of those common things that are popping up around the organizations you work with.
CHAD: Sure. So one that is a recurring theme is not having much of a customer focus, actually. And usually these are medium to large organizations. And as any organization scales and grows over time, we tend to emphasize the things that made us successful. Right. So we get really good at optimizing our operations. And over time, that typically means we create some barriers or we just kind of lose how we got to where we were. We kind of lose where we got those original ideas and understanding the customer's problem. And it's not too surprising then to expect, even as product people, that we kind of get a little less in touch with the customer than we were initially. Right. And they're earlier days of the organization. And this has been a recurring theme in many organizations that they're just relying on sales or other parts of the organization to really help have customer insights. And there's a very simple thing that I've done. And I stole this completely from Story brand, which there's a marketing framework Don Miller originally put together. And you can find details on that, no doubt Storybrand.com, I suspect, but it's simply to lead with the problem that you solve as opposed to what you do.
So, for example, if we're at the dinner party and you asked me what I do, I could say I can have two hats. I'm a University teacher and teach classes in product management. And I also do coaching for companies at times on the same topics. And that might be the end of our conversation. Right. It's like, okay, not a lot there not particularly exciting. But instead, if I say something like all companies, all organizations have some product or service they provided. And it turns out most of those organizations want to do a better job delivering value to their customers. And I help them do that. Well, now we kind of have an open loop, a story that has started that you might lean into a little bit. Right.
JJ: I love that.
CHAD: My advice then is and this is so simple and you do it in five minutes, and you should think about it. You're yourself listening to this, how you might reframe if you are at that dinner part, how you talk about yourself. Because in most organizations, if I'm talking to an engineer, they might say, well, I'm an engineer in this department and work on these things. I'm a software programmer. We're working on AI right now. Instead, if you start getting everyone in the organization, especially around product work, to lead with the problem that they're trying to address and reframe what they're doing, you start shifting the culture to be more customer centric and this really simple, subtle way. Right. To lead first with the problem your customer has and then how your work contributes to that. And it's such a simple thing you can do in five minutes. But it's a great way to start getting people to think more first in terms of the customer, as opposed to maybe their development or engineering work they do.
JJ: It's still surprising to me or at least startling to me that so many of us and I absolutely put myself in this bucket fall into that trap of not talking to customers enough, because there's not a single person that works in product management that doesn't inherently know that it's about the customer and that we really do have to understand what their problems are. But it's still so easy to fall into that trap of staying insular and only looking at our operations or only relying on the salespeople feedback and not really getting out there. So I love that simple kind of trick to kind of force our minds to think back to the problem and the customer.
CHAD: One organization that made this more apparent to me very long term organization I grew up with, and it's been around a long time. And I asked after we did the RPM experience for them, what was the key change that you've seen as a result of this? They said the guy that brought me and said, Chad, you know, we're a bunch of engineers, and we used to talk in engineering specs all the time. We get together for our meetings and talk about engineering specs. Now all of our meetings begin with the customer. We're talking about what are the customers needs? How are they changing, what are the problems, what are the trends impacting them? And that's what we needed to see. And the simple way is just kind of reframing the work you do is a great way to get there. That's one key takeaway I hope listeners can put into use right now.
JJ: I love that. I love that it brings to mind something I heard recently from a friend and colleague, Baraa Safaa Ali, who's a product leader at Amazon. And I think he posted it. I don't think it was a conversation that we had, but he was talking about how Amazon has a kind of a culture or a thing that they do in all of their meetings, and they leave an empty chair, and that empty chair is representative of the customer. And so if the customer was in that room with us, what would they be saying to what we're thinking or what we're doing? Are we centering ourselves on them, or would they even understand what we're talking about? Are we getting too much on the solution now? Of course, sometimes we have to talk about the operations and the solution side of things, but if the customer were in the room, would he or she still be able to understand that it was about them? So I think that's a cool way to do that as well.
So what other challenges are you seeing out there in some ways that companies are handling them?
CHAD: Another one that I suspect we can all relate to is a lack of understanding of the organization strategy. And this isn't particularly surprising. There's the old executive consulting habit that you might come into the executive team and say, okay, everyone, write down on a piece of paper what the strategy of this organization is. If there are seven people in the room, you get seven different opinions, right. From the executives on the strategy. So everyone recognizes strategy is challenging, but typically organizations have some direction they're going in and ideally strategic objectives around that direction. Right. And that's how we communicate throughout the organization. This is what is important to us right now. And right now might be for the next quarter, maybe a little bit bigger picture for the next year or something. But there should be some strategic objectives in place. And as product people, it's really helpful for us to understand what those objectives are. And often I find we just don't know them. Right.
Again, in one organization this came up and everyone in the virtual group here was looking at each other. Well, I haven't seen anything. I haven't heard us talking about our strategic objectives. Nothing. Right. And so one of the guys decides that he'll go talk to the appropriate VP afterwards to find out what this is. And she's just amazed, like, how can you not know? We talk about them all the time. And so maybe there's just the disconnect in the organization. They actually do exist, but they're not getting down to everyone that needs them, particularly product people, because our work, we always have choices to be made in which projects get started as well as what we tend to emphasize. And the better understanding we have of the strategic objectives really helps us to align resources in the organization. If we can get everyone pointing the same way together and working together and say, hey, we're doing this because of this strategic objective. Oh, I get it right. That's going to be part of my performance review. I understand how this is aligned. That makes sense to me, as opposed to some other reasons why we might be taking something on. So if we know what the strategic objectives are, we should be showing them. And I like the idea of frequently in our product team meetings of reminding each other, here's the strategic objective that this project is aligned with, that it supports. This is why we're doing this to the point that might feel really repetitive, but it's so easy to not have that connection made and to not recognize how your project takes shape in the bigger picture of the organization.
JJ: Yeah. You know, I've been on both sides of that. And it's funny as you talk about that, I kind of laugh to myself because when I was the product manager, I didn't have a clue what the strategic objectives were. Right. And so of course, I'm thinking, gosh, our executives, our leadership, they don't know what they're doing.
And then when I was a leader, I thought I had communicated that very clearly. And like the VP said in your story, how do you not know that? I've told you 50 times, right. It's kind of like the old everybody thinks they're a good driver and everybody else is a bad driver. How could that be if everybody else on Earth is a bad driver but not you? So it's kind of the same thing. It's like we think as leaders, we're communicating the vision, the strategy, the goals, et cetera. But you can't communicate that enough.
I agree with you so wholeheartedly in terms of repetition and in meetings talking about the vision statement and talking about the strategic goals and really tying it back to this is aligning with and we are doing this so that we further the strategic I think that's really a great advice, but it also just takes an intentionality. Right. It seems so easy, but in the midst of our work, we don't do it enough.
CHAD: Yeah. It's just like the first one. Right. That's really easy to reframe the work you do in terms of a customer's problem. And this one is. Yeah. Let's remember why we're doing this project. It's to solve a customer problem, and it's related to this strategic objective. There must be a reason why we're taking this project on as opposed to someone else who may or may not be better suited. It should align with some of our core competencies and what we're about as an organization and why we're doing it.
JJ: Exactly. What's another one that you've seen?
CHAD: Okay, so this does get back to your customers. And this is a thread that goes through a lot of the work I do is to remind people that we need to be solving customers problems and fall in love with the customer's problem itself and not our solutions to that problem. And often, as I have this group together, imagine being in a virtual room, or it could be a physical room, or maybe we have ten different product managers and maybe a couple of people from marketing your strategy and a couple of engineers or this nice cross functional group. And those product managers aren't typically working with each other. Right. So they're on different projects, different parts of the organization, and they're sharing their experiences with each other and learning from each other. Usually there's someone in that group who has a great story about a time that they were on a customer visit and kind of even maybe randomly, ad hoc, they made this discovery.
The customer showed them their product that they bought from the company, and they made some modifications to us. Like, oh, you know, we found this makes it easier for us to use if we just changed it this way or the physical product. We built a case for it because we have times that it needs to be protected from the elements, from the weather or more mobile or something. You get this insight from the customer and you go, wow, what a great opportunity that is. And we need to both be sharing that when it happens. And one sharing learning out of it, because what we learned certainly helps that product team that's involved with that product. And secondly, sharing it with other people involved in product as a great example to remind us that we need to be looking for new insights and not taking for granted that we just have the answers. Right.
And one of my experiences with the company, we had customers on site with part of this engagement, basically a design thinking kind of engagement. We had customers on site, and one of the people that I was helping to try to teach them more about how you be a better product person. At one point it says to the customer, oh, no, you don't understand how this works. Let me explain your problem to you. No, right, hold on. We're trying to approach this maybe with that new mind in place where we're not trying to be the experts, we're trying to understand their problems more deeply. And the more opportunities we have to be engaging with the customer and looking for things that surprise us like, oh, why are you doing that? Why did you make that change to our product? Why did you add this step? Why is a sticky note on your monitor that says, oh, at step three, you need to go look into this filing cabinet for something. Right? Those gives us really interesting insights, and we need to be bringing them back to the company, sharing them, obviously, with the product team that's relevant. But sharing them with others, too, as a reminder to get out there and spend time with your customers.
JJ: Have you found or seen companies that are doing this really effectively and efficiently and how? Sounds like a simple question, but one of the things that I found that challenges organizations and teams in the midst of their real-world day job is that they have this insight, the salesperson or whomever is there with a client and they see the sticky note on the monitor and they figure out there's some sort of customer hassle. It's easy to say shoot an email to the product manager or talk to the next time. We are humans and so we forget things. We're not very efficient in our communication. It's not very scalable to just get a bunch of emails randomly from salespeople.
So have you found some mechanisms that companies actually use to capture that really important data and insights as we're with customers and then turning that into something that they can use throughout their processes?
CHAD: Yeah. So I think the state of what happens inside organizations, especially as we grow, it's not surprising that we don't do this as well as we would like to. Right. And at scale, it tends to be that sales is driving more opportunities than anyone else in the organization. And certainly there are companies and some of you relate to this too well, where product managers are basically just taking requests from sales and executing on that.
And there was one really large organization that was doing so many good things, and then they changed their structure and they told their product managers, you're internal facing only now you do not go spend time with customers.
JJ: Oh, wow.
CHAD: Why? Right. This is where our insights come from. So we could go down the whole sales path. We do want a relationship with sales. We want to have trusted relationships where they will bring us into opportunities with customers. This is mainly a B2B sort of context. Right. But as far as a good example goes, we have to be looking for that as product managers because we're probably the ones that have to engage it. You've seen the studies that people talk about this. It seems like a sweet spot that people usually say is around 30% of your time or so should be out with customers or somehow involved with customers virtually or in person.
But a great example that does this very well is Snap-on Tools. I only know about this story because Ben Brenton was a guest on my podcast, and it's a great one to listen to if you want to find it. ProductMasteryNow.com/Mastery is where the page is at. Or you can find on your podcast feed and just look for Ben Brenton. Search for that. So he's the global director of innovation. Right. And he came out of Pepsi. So he's a PhD, chemist in food science going into a company that is making tools. Right. And he knows nothing about metallurgy or anything, but his approach to how to lead innovation is he takes product people, product managers, product developers - and this is pre-COVID, it's been modified a little bit since then - into the field, four days a week. They go out and they visit customers four days a week, and they're with the customers just doing what the customer is doing. Right. Seeing how they use their tools, seeing the problems they run into, asking them about how can we make something easier for you? How can we make something better for you. Right. And I thought that was such a beautiful picture of how discovery can actually happen and really simply just go out four days a week with customers and see what their experience is like in their environment and cycle through your product people. Right. So he's out there all the time, but he's bringing different product people with them all the time in the organization to have that customer experience.
JJ: That's amazing. I think every product manager listening to this is getting their resume over to Ben Brenton right now, including me.
CHAD: Sign me up.
JJ: Yeah. Right. I want to do that. That's amazing. Yeah. I love that.
So maybe one final big challenge. I know you're seeing more than this, but one final big challenge that you're seeing common among organizations and product teams.
CHAD: Yeah. Let's build on this customer one, which is the other thing I typically discover is there's great resources already available in the organization that provides us some insights about the customers and problems and information we would like to have as product people. Sometimes this is just in the form of there's someone in marketing that pays for this really expensive subscription of some industry publication that gives us insights about the market and market direction. And no one knows about it outside of a couple of people in marketing. Right.
Or there are salespeople that are making every time they go visit customers, they're making a report of what they heard as part of that meeting. But it's not leaving the sales organization. It might be making its way into a CRM, but it's not getting the hands of product people. Or another example, marketing does some big survey every year or two with some of their key customers to try to identify trends from the customers. And again, that information isn't getting into the hands of product managers and people that are trying to lead where our next version of our products go almost always. And this is really simple. We identified during these engagements, if someone in the group knows about this resource, maybe has never used it, but at least they know about it and just kind of taking that survey, so to speak, looking around your own organization for the pockets that may have some information. Help you about getting deeper insights into the customers that's already being collected that you could take advantage of without having to set up meetings and do additional work. The information is just there to start mining through be really helpful. And so identifying who may have access to information that could be available, just start starting to ask around. At the same time, this is a great way to deepen some of those relationships that we need as product managers across the function, across the different parts of the organization. And to go kind of on an information hunt and see find out who has some insights that are already being collected that we can maybe centralize and make available to our product people.
JJ: Love that advice. It's been a great conversation, really interesting to hear your perspectives and certainly your tips on how your clients and others are handling these challenges. So Chad McAllister, thank you so much for joining me today and having this conversation.
CHAD: JJ, it's a great pleasure to be with you. Love what you're doing with your work as well, and helping the community. For people that want to get their hands on. Just thinking more about some of these challenges I've encountered, the ones I've talked to, and I think there's probably six more in this little PDF that's at ProductMasteryNow.com/love. L-O-V-E. Because the intention of this will help you create products they actually love. Thanks, JJ.
That's great. Thank you, Chad. So again, ProductMasteryNow.com/love. We'll also link that on the Product Voices website as well.
So thank you all for joining us on Product Voices. Hope to see you on the next episode.
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