Strong Product People
Authors: Petra Wille
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Overview
Strong: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers is a comprehensive guide for Heads of Product (HoPs) on how to effectively lead, coach, and develop their product management teams. It goes beyond the technical aspects of product management and delves deeply into the ‘people’ side, emphasizing the critical role of leadership and people development in creating successful products and organizations. The book is structured in five parts that address key aspects of building a thriving product organization: defining the role of a PM, managing and developing the team, recruiting talent, training for excellence, and creating the right work environment. Wille provides practical frameworks, exercises, and tools to help HoPs guide their PMs towards mastery, including the ‘GWC Assessment’ for evaluating team capabilities, the ‘PMwheel’ for assessing PM skills, and the ‘future self’ framework for personal development. She emphasizes the importance of continuous coaching, feedback, and creating a culture of psychological safety to foster growth and motivation. The book is highly relevant to the current challenges faced by technology companies, particularly in the context of rapid technological advancements, the need for innovation, and the growing emphasis on user-centricity. It is a valuable resource for anyone who manages product managers, aiming to build high-performing teams that deliver exceptional products and create a positive impact on their organizations and users. It strongly advocates for adopting an agile mindset not just within product teams but across the whole organization, recognizing the importance of adaptability, collaboration, and responsiveness to change in today’s dynamic business environment.
Chapter Outline
1. Your Role in this Game
This chapter outlines the three core responsibilities of Heads of Product (HoPs), which are: 1. Ensuring everyone understands the company’s business goals and translating them into product strategy and goals for the team. 2. Building and managing the product management team, including hiring, development, and performance monitoring. 3. Creating the right work environment for product managers to thrive.
Key concept: The three Ps of organizational success: People, Product, and Processes.
2. A Quick Team Assessment
This chapter introduces the GWC assessment, a framework for quickly evaluating the capabilities of a product team. GWC stands for Get It (understanding of the role), Want It (motivation and alignment with career goals), and Capacity to Do It (having the necessary skills and resources). The chapter guides readers on how to apply the GWC assessment to their own teams and interpret the results.
Key concept: GWC assessment: Gets It, Want It, and Capacity to Do It.
3. The Role of Product Managers
This chapter delves into the role of product managers, emphasizing their core responsibility to find the balance between four key dimensions: value, usability, feasibility, and business viability. It further outlines key activities of a successful product manager, including understanding customer problems, experimenting with solutions, delivering value, and optimizing products based on feedback.
Key concept: It’s the product manager’s job to come up with a product solution that is valuable to the user, usable by the user, buildable by our engineering team, and still viable from a business perspective.
4. Define Your Good
This chapter stresses the importance for HoPs to define their version of a ‘Good PM’ by considering their organization’s unique context and needs. It introduces a framework for creating this definition, comprising three elements: PM essence (personality traits), PM responsibilities, skills, and know-how (measured by the PMwheel), and company values and principles. The PMwheel is an assessment tool that measures eight key product management activities.
Key concept: PM essence traits: Curiosity, Emotional Intelligence, Wants to Make an Impact, Intellectual Horsepower, Adaptability, and Nice to Spend Time With.
5. Being a Great Boss
This chapter guides HoPs on how to be effective leaders for their product management teams. It emphasizes the importance of a human touch, being opinionated yet adaptable, leading by example, having a healthy work-life balance, and making an impact on the broader organization. The chapter also recommends seeking feedback from employees and peers, as well as from external mentors and coaches.
Key concept: Effective leaders are made, not born. They learn from trial and error, and from experience.
6. Identifying and Closing Product Manager Gaps
This chapter focuses on identifying and closing product manager skill gaps. It highlights the importance of recognizing different levels of PM maturity (newbie, team-focused, competent, and leading PMs) and their corresponding skill gaps. The chapter also discusses the “future self” framework, a four-part document that helps PMs identify their current state, desired future state, actionable steps, and a timeframe for development.
Key concept: Spencer & Spencer iceberg model: Skill/Knowledge, Attitudes & Values, Self-Concept/Traits, and Motive.
7. The Power of Coaching
This chapter underscores the importance of coaching as a tool for PM development. It presents a four-part coaching cycle: gain clarity, create a strategy for success, act, and evaluate progress. The chapter provides a detailed playbook for conducting effective coaching sessions with PMs, focusing on finding the right coaching topics, asking powerful questions, taming the advice monster, and keeping the dialogue ongoing.
Key concept: The four-part coaching cycle: Gain Clarity, Create a Strategy for Success, Act, and Evaluate Progress.
8. Monitoring Performance and Giving Feedback
This chapter focuses on monitoring employee performance and giving effective feedback. It emphasizes the importance of creating a healthy performance culture that balances demanding high performance with preventing burnout. The chapter also provides a framework for delivering feedback, stressing the importance of giving continuous feedback, catching people doing things right, and focusing on the future. It also introduces a Google-developed feedback survey that can be adapted for internal use.
Key concept: Feedback can be categorized as either task-related feedback or behavioral feedback.
9. Motivation Do’s and Don’ts
This chapter explores the concept of employee motivation, arguing against the myth that managers “motivate” their employees. Instead, it suggests that employees are inherently motivated and that the manager’s role is to avoid demotivating them. It introduces McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y management styles and outlines 14 common ways managers demotivate employees. The chapter emphasizes creating a work environment that fosters intrinsic motivation.
Key concept: Theory X and Theory Y.
10. Building Individual and Team Alignment
This chapter focuses on the importance of building alignment within the product organization. It describes three dimensions of alignment: upward (with management), lateral (with peers and partners), and inward (within teams). It emphasizes the need for clarity of intent, open communication, and early discussions to resolve potential conflicts. It introduces the “UBAD” model for measuring buy-in: Understanding, Belief, Advocacy, and Decision.
Key concept: The three dimensions of alignment: Upward, Lateral, and Inward.
11. How to Find the Time
This chapter addresses the challenge of finding time for people development. It provides strategies for both HoPs and PMs to prioritize development activities, emphasizing the importance of small, meaningful conversations and creating good habits. The chapter also highlights the need for HoPs to genuinely care about their PMs’ growth and provides a “Why I should care” canvas to help HoPs internalize the benefits of people development.
Key concept: The “Why I should care” canvas.
12. Where to Find Great Product Managers
This chapter guides HoPs in finding and recruiting skilled Product Managers (PMs). It differentiates between active candidates (actively searching for jobs) and passive candidates (open to new opportunities but not actively looking). The chapter emphasizes the need for a compelling job ad, a well-defined candidate profile, and the utilization of both active and passive sourcing methods. It also touches on the importance of employer branding and optimizing the hiring funnel.
Key concept: Active and passive sourcing.
13. Interviewing, Assessing, and Hiring Candidates
This chapter delves into the process of interviewing, assessing, and hiring PM candidates. It outlines a six-step hiring process: scanning applications, comparing applicants, conducting a profile check, assigning a take-home case, conducting formal interviews, and making a job offer. The chapter provides insights into what to look for in candidates, how to structure the interview day, and the importance of creating a positive candidate experience.
Key concept: The six-step hiring process: Scan applications, Compare applicants, Do a profile check, Assign take-home case, Conduct a formal interview, and Make the job offer.
14. Effective Onboarding
This chapter stresses the importance of onboarding new PMs effectively. It emphasizes investing as much time in onboarding as in hiring, creating a good first impression, making the onboarding process a structured program, and involving peers as onboarding buddies. The chapter outlines a time-phased approach to onboarding, focusing on Day 1, Week 1, Month 1, and Quarter 1, and the key activities for each phase.
Key concept: Invest as much time in onboarding your new PM as you do in hiring them.
15. Help Your Product Managers Create a Product Vision and Set Goals
This chapter focuses on guiding PMs in creating a product vision and setting goals. It emphasizes the importance of a clear vision, strategy, goals, and principles as a framework for decision-making. It presents a four-step process for creating and implementing these elements: create it, share it, live up to it, and refine it. It also introduces various models and tools, including the product value pyramid, decision stack model, and KPI trees.
Key concept: The four-step process: Create it, Share it, Live up to it, and Refine it.
16. Hypothesis-Driven Product Development and Experiments
This chapter delves into the concept of hypothesis-driven product development and experimentation. It encourages PMs to embrace a scientific approach, starting with observations and assumptions, formulating hypotheses, and conducting experiments to validate or invalidate them. The chapter highlights the importance of prioritizing assumptions, using proper hypothesis statements, and being aware of common biases. It also introduces various methodologies for experimentation, such as A/B testing, user interviews, and prototyping.
Key concept: The hypothesis-driven approach.
17. Balancing Product Discovery and Product Delivery
This chapter emphasizes the importance of balancing product discovery (figuring out what to build) and product delivery (building it). It provides guidance on how to find the right balance at different time scales - day, week, month, and quarter - and introduces the use of product management task boards to visualize and manage this balance. The chapter also highlights the need to prevent feature creep, ensure sufficient time for deep thinking, and avoid constantly feeding the “beast” of development with random tasks.
Key concept: Product management task boards.
18. Time Management for Product People
This chapter focuses on the importance of effective time management for product people. It explores the paradoxes of time, such as Parkinson’s law, the Stock-Sanford corollary, the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), and the time fallacy, providing strategies to overcome their negative effects. The chapter introduces time management frameworks such as the Eisenhower matrix and the rock, pebbles, sand model. It also emphasizes leading by example and provides guidance on what managers can do when someone asks for help in time management.
Key concept: Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
19. Working with the Cross-Functional Product Development Team
This chapter provides advice on building and working with high-performing, cross-functional product development teams. It discusses the nature of teams, the importance of empowerment and minimizing the “maker-to-user” gap, and the need to foster an agile mindset across the organization. It also explores Tuckman’s stages of team development, Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team, and common obstacles encountered by teams, including lack of alignment, insufficient autonomy, conflicts between members, and unsuccessful products.
Key concept: Tuckman’s stages of group development: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.
20. Communicating Directly and Openly
This chapter emphasizes the importance of direct and open communication in product organizations. It outlines the basics of communication, including Lasswell’s communication model, the motivations for communication, and the various channels and timings used in different situations. The chapter provides solutions to common communication problems, such as lack of clarity, one-way communication, and insufficient time for personal interaction. It also offers a comprehensive checklist for effective communication.
Key concept: Lasswell’s communication model: Who communicates what via which channel to whom with what reason and effect?
21. Planning and Prioritization
This chapter focuses on planning and prioritization in product management. It distinguishes between planning as creating a list of future actions and prioritization as ranking alternatives against specific criteria. It argues that prioritizing effectively is more critical than planning and offers guidance on setting priorities, explaining and defending them, sticking to them, and adjusting them as needed. The chapter also introduces an approach to planning and prioritization, including analyzing throughput, collecting and filtering items, clustering and assessing ideas, performing reality checks, making selections, and ordering priorities.
Key concept: Truth: There will always be more work than there is capacity to do it. No matter how large your development team may be, it will never be large enough to handle everything. This is what drives the need to prioritize.
22. Increments and Iterations
This chapter explores the concept of working in increments and iterations. It explains the importance of shipping early and often to start learning, simplifying things for the development team, and creating business impact as early as possible. The chapter also distinguishes between increments (adding new functionality) and iterations (improving existing functionality). It introduces the concept of MVP (minimum viable product) and presents alternative approaches such as Henrik Kniberg’s earliest testable/usable/lovable product framework.
Key concept: The onion or pyramid model to visualize increments and iterations.
23. Product Evangelizing and Storytelling
This chapter focuses on the importance of product evangelizing and storytelling for PMs. It highlights the power of stories to unite teams, convince stakeholders, and inspire users. The chapter provides guidance on crafting compelling stories by painting a desirable future, explaining why someone should participate, acknowledging potential difficulties, presenting a shared goal, and creating a sense of urgency. It also provides advice on making stories “sticky” by using a well-defined structure, avoiding jargon and buzzwords, and incorporating visual elements.
Key concept: The hero’s journey: Ordinary world, Call to adventure, Challenges, tests, and trials, and Ultimate destination/transformation.
24. Keep the Senior PMs Engaged
This chapter emphasizes the importance of keeping senior PMs engaged and motivated. It introduces the concept of the Individual Contributor Progress Vacuum, where senior PMs can experience boredom or stress due to a lack of growth opportunities. The chapter highlights the importance of providing senior PMs with mastery, autonomy, and purpose. It offers specific ideas for keeping senior PMs interested in their jobs, such as involving them in building the product development process, onboarding new PMs, giving back to the product community, and leading communities of excellence.
Key concept: Mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
25. The Product Organization’s Location in the Company’s Org Chart
This chapter discusses the importance of the product organization’s location in the company’s org chart. It argues that product should be on an equal footing with other key departments, such as engineering, marketing, and design, to ensure healthy friction and balanced decision-making. It examines potential problems when the product team reports to other departments, such as being overly focused on sales or introspection, and provides guidance on restructuring the organization to give product an equal say.
Key concept: Healthy friction.
26. Change from Within
This chapter explores the concept of driving change from within the organization, focusing on encouraging new ways of working and fostering bottom-up change initiatives. It presents six approaches for facilitating bottom-up change: starting small, creating success stories, finding allies, sharing success stories, convincing the organization, and helping everyone succeed. It provides examples of common bottom-up change initiatives, such as adopting hypothesis-driven development, using KPIs, implementing OKRs, and embracing agile methodologies.
Key concept: Start small and make sure it works.
27. Foster the Agile Mindset
This chapter focuses on fostering an agile mindset throughout the organization. It defines the agile mindset and its four key characteristics: forward thinking, constant exchange with the environment, lean structure and process organization, and drawing on internal, experience-based strengths. The chapter highlights the benefits of an agile mindset, especially in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment, and provides guidance on how to assess the current state of agility, define the story to tell, and identify areas to invest time in to help the organization become more agile.
Key concept: Agile Manifesto values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, Working software over comprehensive documentation, Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and Responding to change over following a plan.
28. Handling Conflict
This chapter addresses the inevitability of conflict in product organizations and provides guidance on handling it effectively. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the nature of conflict, recognizing that it often stems from different perceptions rather than right or wrong. The chapter outlines proven approaches to resolving conflicts, focusing on managing stress, controlling emotions, paying attention to feelings, and respecting differences. It also presents a two-step strategy for conflict resolution, involving a timely follow-up meeting and specific actions for resolving the issue.
Key concept: Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication framework.
Essential Questions
1. What are the core responsibilities of a Head of Product (HoP) in building a successful product organization?
The success of a product organization heavily relies on the capabilities and development of its product managers. Heads of Product (HoPs) play a crucial role in ensuring their PMs are competent, motivated, and aligned with the company’s goals. The book outlines three core responsibilities for HoPs: 1. Translating company goals into product strategy, 2. Building and managing a strong PM team, and 3. Creating a conducive work environment. By focusing on these areas, HoPs can cultivate a high-performing team capable of delivering exceptional products.
2. How can a HoP define what constitutes a ‘Good PM’ within their specific organizational context?
Defining a ‘Good PM’ is crucial for successful hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance evaluation. The book suggests that this definition should be tailored to the organization’s specific context and needs, encompassing desired personality traits, essential skills and know-how, and alignment with company values. Wille provides frameworks like the ‘PMwheel’ and the ‘GWC Assessment’ to help HoPs develop this definition and evaluate their PMs against it, ensuring a consistent understanding and shared expectations across the team.
3. How can a HoP effectively use coaching to develop and empower their product managers?
Coaching is presented as a critical tool for PM development, focusing on empowering individuals and unlocking their potential. Wille advocates for a continuous coaching approach, not limited to formal performance reviews. This includes regular 1:1s, providing actionable feedback, and using frameworks like the ‘future self’ document to facilitate personal growth. Effective coaching requires active listening, asking the right questions, and guiding PMs towards solutions rather than simply providing directives.
4. What is the role of motivation in leading a product organization, and how can a HoP create a motivating environment for their PMs?
Motivating employees is not about imposing external incentives, but about creating an environment where intrinsic motivation thrives. The book argues against the common management myth that it’s the manager’s job to “motivate” their employees. Instead, it suggests focusing on avoiding demotivating factors like micromanagement, lack of recognition, and tolerating poor performance. Fostering autonomy, providing purpose, and promoting a healthy performance culture are key to keeping employees engaged and motivated.
5. How can HoPs help their PMs find the right balance between product discovery and product delivery?
Balancing product discovery (what to build) and product delivery (building it) is an ongoing challenge in product management. Wille suggests using the ‘rock, pebbles, sand’ model and product management task boards to help PMs visualize and manage this balance. It’s crucial to dedicate sufficient time for deep thinking and user research (discovery), while also ensuring smooth execution and delivery. The focus should be on delivering valuable increments and iterating on existing features based on user feedback and data.
Key Takeaways
1. Define ‘Good’ in the context of your product and organization.
Clearly defining the ideal PM profile within the context of the organization’s specific needs and product domain ensures everyone understands what ‘good’ looks like. This definition becomes a reference point for hiring, performance evaluation, and development conversations, facilitating alignment and setting clear expectations for PMs.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer leading a team developing a new AI-powered chatbot could use the ‘Good PM’ definition during the hiring process to evaluate candidates’ experience in AI conversational design, their understanding of ethical considerations in AI, and their ability to translate user needs into technical requirements for the chatbot.
2. Embrace coaching as an essential management tool.
Coaching is a powerful tool for empowering PMs, guiding their development, and helping them overcome challenges. Using the four-part coaching cycle of gaining clarity, creating a strategy, taking action, and evaluating progress provides a structured framework for conducting effective coaching sessions and fostering continuous improvement.
Practical Application:
When an AI engineer is struggling with prioritizing tasks related to model development, data preprocessing, and testing, an HoP can use the coaching cycle to help them gain clarity on their goals, develop a strategy for task management, break down the tasks into smaller steps, and regularly evaluate progress, thus improving their time management and productivity.
3. Harness the power of storytelling in product management.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for product managers to communicate the value of their product, inspire their team, and gain buy-in from stakeholders. It involves painting a compelling vision of the future, explaining why it matters, and outlining the journey to get there, making the product and its impact more relatable and engaging.
Practical Application:
When introducing a new AI-powered feature to a product, instead of simply listing its technical functionalities, the team can craft a compelling story around it. This story could focus on how the feature solves a real user problem (e.g., saving time, improving efficiency, providing personalized recommendations), highlighting the positive impact on users’ lives and the value it brings to the company.
4. Prioritize ruthlessly and avoid ‘golden apples’.
Prioritizing effectively and sticking to those priorities is crucial in product management, as there will always be more work than capacity to do it. “Golden apples” - distractions that seem more promising than the prioritized tasks - can derail the team’s progress. It’s essential to have a clear vision and strategy in place to filter out these distractions and stay focused on the most impactful work.
Practical Application:
An AI product development team can implement a ‘no golden apples’ policy during their sprint planning, committing to focus on the prioritized tasks for the sprint and avoiding distractions from new ideas or requests that might seem more promising but would derail their progress. This ensures the team stays focused on delivering the core value for the sprint.
5. Establish a clear ‘Definition of Done’ for all tasks.
Defining clear expectations and standards for task completion is essential for team alignment and efficient workflows. A “Definition of Done” outlines specific criteria that must be met for a task to be considered complete, ensuring everyone is on the same page and minimizing misunderstandings and rework.
Practical Application:
An AI product team can implement a ‘Definition of Done’ for their machine learning models. This could include specific criteria like model accuracy thresholds, performance on various test datasets, successful deployment to the production environment, and documentation of model limitations and potential biases. This ensures a shared understanding of what constitutes a completed task and facilitates smoother collaboration and handover between team members.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Chapter 7: The Power of Coaching
This chapter delves into coaching as a fundamental management skill for HoPs, providing a detailed playbook for conducting effective coaching sessions. Its insights on active listening, asking powerful questions, and guiding PMs towards self-discovery are highly valuable for anyone managing AI engineers and researchers, who often require a different approach to leadership and development compared to traditional software engineers.
Comparative Analysis
While “Strong Product People” provides a comprehensive guide specifically for Heads of Product, other notable works in the field offer broader perspectives. For instance, “Inspired” by Marty Cagan focuses on the principles of empowered product teams and their role in creating successful products. Similarly, “Empowered Product Teams” by Marty Cagan emphasizes building autonomous product teams, aligning with Wille’s principles of team empowerment and autonomy. “Product Leadership” by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw offers a wider perspective on product leadership, encompassing strategic decision-making, organizational design, and product strategy. “Strong Product People” aligns with these books in emphasizing user-centricity, iterative development, and data-informed decision-making. However, it uniquely focuses on the HoP’s role in fostering individual PM growth and creating a supportive organizational structure for product excellence, which is less prominent in other works. The book’s emphasis on coaching, mentoring, and building a robust feedback culture is a valuable addition to the product management literature, highlighting the ‘human’ aspect that often gets overlooked in other, more technically focused books.
Reflection
“Strong Product People” is a valuable contribution to the product management literature, offering practical guidance and insights for leading and developing product teams. Its emphasis on the ‘human’ aspect of product management, focusing on coaching, feedback, and building a positive work environment, is commendable. However, some of the author’s opinions, such as skepticism towards personality tests in hiring, might require further nuanced discussion and research. Additionally, while the book primarily focuses on traditional software product development, its principles can be adapted and applied to the rapidly evolving field of AI and technology. The book’s strength lies in its actionable frameworks and tools, making it a practical guide for HoPs and aspiring product leaders. However, its intense focus on the ‘people’ aspect might overshadow the equally important technical and strategic aspects of product management. Overall, “Strong Product People” is a useful resource for anyone involved in managing product teams, prompting reflection on leadership style, people development, and the creation of a thriving product culture.