S2 Ep. 9: How Do You Align People on Tough Decisions?
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Hope Gurion:
“Can we synch up today?”
“I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“I think we may have a disconnect on this topic.”
Whatever business jargon you prefer to describe it, you’re not aligned. In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, the second of 3 episodes in the “Alignment” miniseries, we learn how product leaders effectively align their executives, stakeholders and teams as they fearlessly answer the question “How do you align people on tough decisions?”
Welcome to the Fearless Product Leadership podcast. This is the show for new product leaders seeking to increase their confidence and competence. In every episode I ask experienced and thoughtful product leaders to share their strategies and tactics that have helped them tackle a tough responsibility of the product leader role. I love helping emerging product leaders shorten their learning curves to expedite their professional success with great products, teams and stakeholder relationships. I’m your host and CEO of Fearless Product, Hope Gurion.
“How can I ensure we’re aligned?” is hands-down the most common question I hear from my product leader coaching clients. For many product leaders the feeling of not being aligned is palpable but the underlying causes of the misalignment aren’t always so clear. What to do to shine a light on where and why we are misaligned and then remedy those root causes is not always obvious to product leaders. So, to try to help with this challenging and important issue which every product leader will experience, I’ve created a miniseries of Fearless Product Leadership episodes all focused on alignment.
In the previous episode, 3 chief product officers waxed philosophically on why alignment is such a critical state of being for product leaders, executives and product teams.
In this episode, we’re going to hear from 5 senior product leaders on HOW they achieve alignment, the specific tactics they use to align around priorities, decisions and investment allocation.
In the 3rd and final episode of this series, the authors of the book: “Radical Alignment: How to have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life” Bob Gower and Alex Jamieson, share their feedback on the advice our product leaders shared in the first 2 episodes and then they share their advice on how product leaders should approach those tough conversations required to achieve alignment on strategic choices.
So, let’s get aligned about alignment! Fearlessly and tactically tackling the question “How do you align people on tough decisions?” are:
Nicole Brolan, Executive GM at Xero and former Chief Product Officer at SEEK
Lucinda Newcomb, Chief Product Officer at WeightWatchers, former VP of Product at Sephora
Prasad Gune, SVP of Product at Udemy, formerly SVP of Product at Sygnified and Opentable
First up, Rachel Obstler of Pagerduty shares her 3-step approach to alignment on critical decisions: First, identify the decision maker. Second, ensure that you know what the decision will be before the decision meeting and third, meet about the decision so everyone aligns on the decision as it is made.
Rachel Obstler: So, aligning stakeholders on a tough decision is always the fun thing to do. We actually have a process and it's a process I've used at other companies as well, in some in some form, which is like a readout meeting, or you could call it like a meeting where you come with all the evidence, the information, and there's a set of people that show up to that meeting, and then you can make decisions at that meeting, send them out pre information that you can look at it, all that stuff. Now, that being said, the meeting is the mechanism, but the reality is and in my opinion, all of the decision making work or the work that you need to do, actually has to happen before the meeting. If it was a really important decision, I would never walk into a meeting without already knowing what exactly typically the decision was going to be, or at least getting enough consensus or enough backing, so that it would be a successful outcome.
So, there's a couple things that you can do to make that happen. And one is getting all your ducks in a row. That means do the analysis that you need to do. The important part here is, don't overdo it; don't do too much analysis, people only absorb so much information anyway. So, it's enough to hit all the important points so that people can make a good decision. Then the second thing is getting all the key people aligned before the meeting. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to have pre meetings. I know meetings are like the devil for a lot of people. They are for me too. I would be very happy if I had just 10% less meetings all the time; but you can do things over Slack, you can do them over email, you can do them if you catch people in the hallway, if you catch them before you're going home at night, there many different ways to do it. I find that a lot of times you have to pre surface an idea or pre you know, pre-load something before you can have a really good discussion about it. Just sending out slides ahead of time is not enough to do it.
So. if it's a really important decision, you make sure that the decision is heading in the right direction or already made, ideally, before you go into the meeting. And then you might say, well, then what's the point of that meeting? But there is still a point of the meeting. The meeting is alignment. It's everyone committing verbally. everyone being in the same room. You know, making sure that all the parties like are aware of every other party being for it, so there is still function for that meeting. But you you want to take as much of the hard decision making out of it as you can.
Hope Gurion: That make sense and a few people have mentioned that approach. Some people are also trying to get clarity on who truly is the decision maker and who just needs to like, sort of weigh in with support or confidence or potentially be a skeptic. So, they have a skeptic’s point of view, like are you very clear on that going in as to whether or not this is a consensus-driven decision? Or this is a CEO-level decision, but with a desire to see support from other members of the leadership team? Like, how much do you know about the who truly is the decision maker for these types of decisions that you that you go through this effort for?
Rachel Obstler: Yeah, so typically, the set of true decision makers is defined. That doesn't mean that there aren't other people who you need buy-in from. And the other thing is a lot of time the true decision makers will make those decisions based on what their people say. So, there are a lot of times when I can go a level down and get all the support needed. And then that makes a decision happen as well. And it's easier to get on people's calendars that way do so. So yes, I would say that whether it's defined or implicit, you always need to know and typically do know who are the people who need to buy-in.
Sometimes it's really simple. Sometimes it's one person. Like in the end, if you need to make a decision about pricing, the real person you need for it is the CFO, beyond your chain of command. And so those are the the best and easiest ones because there may be a lot of people in the room who have opinions and think that they count. They probably do count but, but in the end, sometimes there's only one person who really matters. If you do know who that is that really shortcuts the process. makes it a lot faster.
Hope Gurion: Next, Nicole Brolan shares how she aligns both her leadership team and her product teams on priorities in two phases: first by vetting and refining the options to achieve OKRs in one-on-one discussions, and second by reviewing all of the competing priorities with the CEO and other leaders to ensure clear decisions.
Nicole Brolan: This, for me has really kind of evolved over time because what I would say is the transformation that we're going on bringing together, our Asia teams and ANZ (Australia-New Zealand) teams, has added layers of complexity to this amazing and have really made me have to look at this technique in a whole new way. So, I would say, prior to the transformation, I would have cases where people wouldn't necessarily be aligned. A lot of my techniques were around individual meetings, really making sure to try and frame up, I always try to start with the objective facts. So, you've got the different perspectives. The different perspectives always translate to usually a handful of options. So I find by articulating those handful of options, and fleshing out what you get and what you don't get, why we'd be doing things and even if people pull it apart, that's actually the benefit, like let them pull it apart. But it means that you're getting closer and closer to truly understanding what people believe. And once you get that you can start to negotiate around, “Okay, well, I see what you're trying to do. Actually, we're not that far apart. It's just we're looking at it from a different perspective. You know, what if we try this angle?”
The transformation’s been really interesting, because we've been needing to get alignment from senior stakeholders on how we want to start to bring our experiences and our platforms together. This has been tricky because you've got conversations going on at a very senior level, so the CEO, and his team, and then you've got your teams. So, what I have found that there's two things I think that I've found really, really important in this stage. one has been really, really frequent communication with my team. So, two parts to that: one is any of the content that's actually going to the leaders, making sure they've seen it, and making sure they’re inputting into it. Now, we may not always completely agree, but I think them seeing it along the way and seeing it evolve, helps with that buy in and helps them understand where decisions are trying to get to.
The second one, just really regular updates on the conversations that are going on. And my view, I try to really go with transparency, so I often talk about how I think things might play out. I will say to them, this is where the conversation is at. You know, for example, I think people want to make bringing our platforms a priority. I think we might do that by doing some enablement work. Therefore, if I play it forward, we haven't confirmed it yet, but I think it means XYZ. So, as you're doing that the whole way along. A) you lead is particularly if you've got, you know, a high functioning product team, they will be giving you feedback all the time on when they agree and disagree. Also, it means that they're getting used to the idea and it means they're mentally starting to prepare for what might come next.
What I've seen is by using this approach with the product team, the product team is usually pretty well prepared for these changes by the time they hear, I think On the flip side, when you look at like senior leaders and trying to present, and this is tough, because you're saying, we want to bring experiences together, which means there'll be trade offs on current priorities. So, this is a really hard one. I think the thing to be very clear on is to make sure again, going back to objective facts. Going back to objective facts, which is, first of all, we have to prioritize. And so, making sure that through the discussion, you are getting a very clear priority, everything can’t be equal priority.
So again, I find by framing up all of the things that we've been talking about that we want to do, the importance of them, when you what I found is if you're trying to talk about things in isolation, that's what you get “Everything's important”, because you have one side conversation. Yes, that's important. You have a conversation about something else is that equal Important, I have found that when you holistically bring everything together, and you put and you come with a view on what you think is important, people see that a card or be important people see how many things the business is trying to do, so it forces that debate about prioritization. Then, I think as much as possible, I always try to strip out emotion out of anything, and just be really factual. You're very aware now, by this stage, as a product leader, if teams are too diverted in focus, you'll get nothing, everything will go really slow, and you won't get the outcomes that you achieve. So, we always really advocate from the outset that they need to be really focused on a certain set of priorities. If we're trying to do too much, you just have an objective conversation with the leadership team about how it won't work, we won't get what we want. And therefore, if we want to look at extra things, then that requires extra level levels of resourcing.
Hope Gurion: And so, is that in terms of bringing it all together, I'm hearing there's a benefit, sort of get feedback on options one on one, you kind of pull it all to the surface, what's you're dealing with facts, missing facts, opinions, but then you ultimately have to get the people in a room to see all of the priorities facing off against one another so that we can narrow in. Do you use a document or like what is your way of sort of exposing, “These are the competing priorities we got to narrow in to be focused and actually achieve our desired outcome?”
Nicole Brolan: Yes, we didn't really do just fine just for a PowerPoint deck. So generally, we will have PowerPoint slides that kind of are pulled together and what we'll generally do is, again, make sure they're linked back to business OKRs. So because again, I think the important part with this is, we go one on one and we'll speak to the Managing Directors of the businesses and everything like that. But again, if you open the door and you open the door to what anything that's important to you, you'll end up in a world where you're going to end up with this long list of things that they want. Some of it isn't necessarily flagged as a business priority right now. So, we always make sure that we're linking it really strongly back to the business OKRs, it's like, what's important to you, the ties to the priorities that you and your executive team set at the beginning of the year. And so that link always helps because I think it, it stops people from going too far off track. And it reminds people that, hang on, we can't just start introducing new priorities. Now we can, if something's come up, and its brand new, and it's a massive priority, then let's have that conversation. But let's remember these are the things that you and your leadership team said were important. How do we help you deliver on those like, what are the things that it's delivered?
And yet, I find catching up one on one with senior leaders, really understanding their perspective. So hearing them out, understanding and a lot of times some of this is very rational views, and then some of it is just concerns or worries, like, I'm concerned that, you know, are we going to have the right level of focus for this thing that I think is really important? You know, I'm concerned that I'm not going to get it fast enough. I think with that, you just have to hear it and note it, and then even in the then when you have the biggest session, and in this case, because you're trading off markets, you basically need to have the CEO there, because you need the CEO to be able to tie break the votes. But what you do is you come in with all of the recommendations based on everything you've heard. So we lead quite strongly with this is what we think we should do and why. But you also call out, you acknowledge like, “the managing director of ANZ has this concern, we think we can mitigate it by doing this.” So, we think we're okay. You know, in this other market, there's a concern and actually that concern is probably justified where we're also concerned. But given all of the other priorities, we think it's still the right direction. So, I've found the more you can really play back and make it clear that you've heard them. And that you've incorporated that feedback and you're doing something about it, or you're acknowledging that we can't do something about it, I've found that gives stakeholders greater confidence.
Hope Gurion: Now Lucinda Newcomb shares how she aligns executives and stakeholders around the roadmap every month. In this meeting she ensures everyone sees and shares the full breadth of what’s being worked on and why, so they broaden their perspective on potential priorities.
Lucinda Newcomb: I call it the monthly roadmap meeting. I always follow the same format, which is, “Here's what we've done. Here's what's in progress” and anything that's changed they may need to know about and here's what's coming up. And then what else we want to talk about because you need to start with you know, taking a victory lap, like it's important to acknowledge here, the things we've just accomplished; and you guys were all so excited about this, you better actually be excited about now that it's done. Make sure everybody's aware because part of it means by the time you get to, “Is there anything else new that we need to consider?” It's so helpful for everybody to be grounded and understanding everything that is happening. Because, so often they only have a part of the world and they're like, you guys aren't doing anything for me. So, what could you possibly be doing that's more important? If you take the first hour of the roadmap meeting to discuss all the things and why we're doing them and what's happening. It quiets the voices in the room who are like, “you have plenty of time to work on my stuff.” “No, we don't! Because here are the other things” and by the way, if you want to argue that this thing is not important, be my guest. Let's have that conversation together. It's super important to first level-set so that everybody understands the full breadth of what's happening, and nobody's just kind of coming in. “Well, you're not doing anything for me. So, what on earth are you possibly doing?”
Hope Gurion: Next, Seth Roe shares how he aligns his executive team investment allocation using a product lifecycle planning exercise around the phases: incubate, invest, maintain, sunset. This technique allows the leadership and product teams to align on resourcing levels and expectations while freeing the product teams have clarity and autonomy on how to execute within those investment allocations.
Seth Roe: Yeah, so to align our executive teams and all of the dependency partners that we we have to get things done. We have a highly highly matrix organization, which I'm sure most companies do nowadays that are supporting a large portfolio of product. I'd say three or four years ago, we went down this path that I think Spotify had had kind of leaned in on, where they were creating a bunch of small squads and teams, and then they were doing this thing called big room planning where they were coming together on a quarterly basis to kind of identify the big blocks and big dependencies and sign up for what they felt like they could deliver in that quarter based on the objectives.
We went through that process for a little bit. Then we started using OKRs to make sure we felt like we were going after the the most meaningful things. And then each of the teams were signing up for their key results. We were still struggling with communication across the teams, a lot of siloed projects going on, a lot of optimization-like projects that just weren't driving any real innovation or what we thought was the meaningful value that we wanted. And from time to time, we would identify winners and it was really hard to move resources from one area or one team to another team. That's why it kind of led us to this new model. I was explaining in the last question; but the thing that what that has been working over the last few years it's just this idea that we're getting a lot of the big ideas, the big themes up onto a board and really forcing the executive team to align around which ones are the most important ones, the most important themes, the most important objectives on a on a quarter by quarter basis. and it's it's definitely seemed to help.
One of our recent collaborative gain product councils. Andy Cerio from Target introduced this quadrant that basically showed us how you could use it’s a two by two quadrant in the bottom right quadrant is incubate and the top right quadrant is invest and the top left quadrant is maintain the bottom left corner is sunset. You basically just step back and look at all of the big themes and ideas that are that are coming in the organization and are truly being asked to be funded. Our executive team has started getting together on a quarterly basis to make sure that we feel like where we're investing our resources, whether it's in the incubate, invest, maintain, or sunset area is just the right mix. It's really like a true portfolio strategy. It's really helped to give our leadership team that holistic big picture view that I feel like we've all kind of struggled with from time to time when you when you then get in the trenches and start making decisions on a on a day to day basis.
I highly recommend that tool. We’ve been trying it for about a month now we've used at one time it really helped take a lot of the personal interest, what folks felt like was the right direction for the company and just kind of helped us step back and look at things a little bit more objectively, which has been nice. Then from there, once you feel like you've kind of balanced your portfolio in the in the way where you're like, hey, maybe we want 15% of our resources in the incubate bucket, which is pioneering activity that we don't know if people are going to come back with with any goods or not. Then in the invest bucket, that's where we feel like it's beginning of the year, we want to make sure we're getting our biggest bang for the buck in the year we put 50% of our resources there in the first half of the year. Then there's there is a bunch of maintenance and and technical debt that we need to pay off in the maintenance bucket. And you know, in the first quarter, there was no sunset work to do. So, we were good there.
It's really helped. Then you can go back to these teams that I was talking about earlier and say, Hey, this subject matter expert going to get three to five resources. This person is going to get three to five resources, the maintenance crews going to get two to three resources and we're honestly in the first quarter of doing this, but so far, it's, it seems to be moving in a really healthy direction. So, I'm super excited about it and very appreciative to Andy for sharing it because it's been a very, very cool tool.
Hope Gurion: Yeah. And I'll put this in the show notes for the episode, a visual on that. The question is, though, are you first doing the percentage like, how do we want it sort of like we have this fixed pie, right? First, we do the percentages, then we layer the themes in or the OKRs. And tell me about like, what, what is the visual that you walk away with that helps you sort of plan teams and objectives and you know, what's in maintenance? What's in invest?
Seth Roe: Yeah, that's a great question. So, we go in there first by having our ideal state of what the percentages are, then we see all the submissions and ideas and one pager basically, of the things that the teams want to get done and that's the area where we're really trying to the leadership team is trying to get out of the business of the strategic and tactical stuff and let these teams truly bubble up the ideas that they think are ultimately going to achieve the outcomes and objectives that we want. We've been, like I referenced earlier, it is really the greatest struggle I have as a product person simply because I've come up through the product ranks is getting out of the business of the actual tactics. It's the hardest thing to do for a leader in my opinion, one of the hardest things to do, but it's the single greatest thing that impacts morale. If you can get out of that business of telling your teams what to do. They will bring you the greatest ideas that you've ever seen. I know that sounds cliche, and we've all heard it, but it's when the rubber hits the road, it's the hardest thing to do, but it works time and time again.
So when we see all these ideas come into the, into the book of work, we then are looking at based on our ideal state of percentages that we thought we wanted to go after whether or not that works, meaning there might be a half a dozen great ideas that come into the invest bucket. And we came into the room only allocating enough to do two. Then we got to move our mix around because we want to go after three. Those were some of the hard conversations that we were having. In the past, the way that we were structured, we were basically funding six of these ideas every quarter, and the teams were just spread too thin, like the teams just weren't big enough. Then out of the six things that we started doing. Two of them became super exciting and look like they had great potential, and we just couldn't accelerate them. So, that was where we were, we were having issues, kind of achieving our outcomes. And that's why we, we've been trying this new approach; I'm not saying it's the right approach. It's very, very new to us and, and our organization, but it's definitely put some, some new steps in the structure that are some pretty healthy forcing functions, in my opinion, that are making us have the hard conversations we need to have at the front of the project rather than one we've basically created the teams and started the projects. It's it's much harder once you've done that.
Hope Gurion: Finally, Prasad Gune shares how he keeps his company aligned on both the vision and the tactical product updates on what problems are being solved, how and by when with quarterly 360 reviews and every 4-6-week sessions with key customer-facing teams.
Prasad Gune: Yeah, it's a great question. It's a pretty broad question, it covers a lot. I think the best way to answer would be, there's clearly a 30,000-foot view of the world that you need to create and then you have to create tactical tools as well. So, let's take the 30,000 foot view. It's really about the vision roadmap, where you want to take the company some of the reasons that product organizations have challenges with the rest of the org is because it's not clear what you're working towards. That vacuum is then filled by apprehensions basically from other organizations, we will see on the right stuff, will my product, will the product my customer needs to get shipped? In fact, will we get our numbers?
So being very clear about what it is that you're going to build with as clear timeline as you can give, let's be honest, we have to be, sort of cautious about the timelines because, you know, many things can intrude in terms of what you can and can't deliver, but giving them a sense of when things are coming, I think matters a lot. But if you're able to build that view of Okay, here's what we'll be doing in the next 12 to 18 months. Here's when we expect things to come. That reduces the, the apprehension, it really increases the confidence that people have in your groups. So, setting that at a very high level, I think is the start.
Revisiting it regularly is important. In prior organizations, I remember when I was at LinkedIn, one of the things we set up was a quarterly session with the field teams from any of the customer success teams, making clear what it is that we worked on the last quarter, what are the customer issues that people had asked for, that we've actually tackled and what is it that we're going to do in the next three months. We do three of those sessions, every quarter all in the same day one for the US customer success team, then one for the team and one for Asia Pacific, and it was a great way to have sort of a 360 degree view of things. We let them know what we were working on, but they could also post questions and have feedback. You do that regularly enough, then you've set up you had the 30,000 foot view, you have the five or 10,000 foot revisit every quarter and then beyond that, I think it's more you know, regular tools and processes and it sounds profit sounds heavy, so I don't doesn't have to bring any heavy, you can have a Google Doc, for instance. I would open table we were you know before rigorous about collecting feedback both directly from customers and from the field, and not just collecting it, but categorizing it and prioritizing it regularly; and I'd have a session along with the product managers, but also sales leadership, roughly once every six weeks, we try to do it every four weeks.
The reality is that, you know, stuff sometimes, but every six weeks is not bad. We're revisiting specific features and things we're working on. And finally, of course, you know, with the amount of communication tools we have nowadays, I'm on Slack with my counterparts in sales, finance, marketing, you know, other folks in the C suite regularly through things like Slack or HipChat or other tools, and that's a way to sort of be able to address things very quickly. So, I think just having that line of communication open all the way from, you know, the big picture view to tactical items is important.
Hope Gurion: So, what have we learned from these product leaders about how to achieve alignment? Clearly there’s not one way to achieve alignment, nor is there even one reason to seek alignment. Product leaders will frequently need to align their executives, stakeholders, and teams on critical decisions. On, ‘Where are we going?’ decisions like company, competitive, and product strategy. ‘How will we get there?’ Decisions around priorities, capabilities, resourcing, investment allocations, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ communications to ensure customers and the organization at large have the information they need so they can maximize the return on all of those product investments.
This alignment requires significant, concerted effort. It does not come for free. I find that new product leaders consistently underestimate the time and effort required to achieve alignment and often aren’t even sure that it’s their responsibility. Unfortunately, they usually discover too late how critical this responsibility is when they find that they thought they were aligned turns out to be a decision they revisit again and again and again, eroding confidence in their ability to lead in this critical role.
When working with my coaching clients to align with their peers and teams on critical decisions like target markets and opportunities, I recommend 3 steps influence and align on key decisions. and I’ve created a short video to demonstrate these techniques which I’ll link from the transcript.
Who’s the decider? Is this an executive team exercise like creating a business strategy or a product vision, where the product leader takes lead but knows that without enthusiastic support from the CEO/peers and the extended customer-facing and product teams that they are unlikely to get support for that decision. If you’re not sure, ask yourself “Who bears the cost if this decision turns out to be wrong?” The answer will illuminate who should decide and who should be consulted because they have skin in this decision. It’s the A and the C in a RACI chart, if you prefer that method.
What does success look like? What assumptions underlie that successful result? When you are clear on who is deciding and who must be consulted, interview those people to quickly expose the potential for misalignment by seeing how they answer those questions. I love using an online whiteboarding tool like Miro for this. For example, if you wanted to align an executive team on a new market opportunity, you might use a Lean Canvas in Miro. You can have successful outcome at the top (e.g. certain amount of revenue, certain amount of new customers, certain market share in X timeframe), and ask each person to silently jot down on sticky notes how they answer the questions about customer problems, target customers, value proposition, success metrics. As you capture these beliefs and assumptions about the outcome and the underlying components to get to that destination, you’ll begin to see where you and they are closely aligned and who is far apart and on which dimensions. Which leads to my 3rd step:
Do you see what I see? With the artifacts from your individual whiteboarding sessions you can bring into a single picture an exposure where you’re misaligned or very aligned. I’ll include an example in the video I’ll link from transcript. Better informed, the decider is now positioned to address the area and potential causes of where you are misaligned. By exposing it in a visual and seeing which stakeholders aren’t aligned, we as product leaders can now focus our efforts to resolve the differences or risk alienating the support of a key constituent. By having a single view, a visual artifact of the decision and where the disagreements or differences of opinions are, in this case using a Lean Canvas for our new market that reflected the diversity of expertise who had skin in the outcome of that decision, we now have a rudder that will align our follow-on decisions for our product vision, strategy, roadmap, backlog to realize that successful outcome.
I want to say thank you to our senior product leaders, Rachel, Nicole, Lucinda, Seth, and Prasad for sharing their expertise on this episode.
Keep listening to the final episode in this miniseries on alignment. In it, Bob Gower and Alex Jamieson authors of the book: “Radical Alignment: How to have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life” react to the practices our product leaders use and they share their best advice on how to achieve that much needed state of alignment.
If you’re a product leader seeking alignment with CEO, peers and teams, I’d love to be of help. Contact me on Linkedin or Twitter or schedule an initial consultation with me using the Contact Me page at fearless-product.com.