[On-demand] Product Management Webinar: Product Culture

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] We’re gonna kick off now. So big welcome. This is the series of webinars that we run here at ProdPad. they’re called our fireside series. So welcome to the Fireside. we’ve been running these things for years now, so every month for several years, you can go back and actually see our past recordings on prodpad.com/webinars where we’ve had experts from all over the place.

And it’s always with a focus on those experts and their insights. It’s a focus on learning and sharing and, picking up from their experiences. so today is gonna be recorded. you’ll have a copy of this afterwards and it’s gonna be shared with you. You can share it around to your colleagues and you will have a chance to ask questions.

So jump into the q and a area, to drop any questions that you have now or later on as this conversation evolves. and we will, do our best to get to those. you should be able to use the q and a to, up vote other people’s questions as well. so we’d love to see, which ones are most popular, what’s resonating, and we’ll pick up from there.[00:01:00]

a little bit about ProdPad before we kick off. ProdPad is a tool that we’ve built, ourselves. Myself and my co-founder Simon, we were both product people and we needed tools to help us keep track of the product work we were doing. all those experiments, all that feedback, all the stuff that we’re trying to figure out whether we should build or not.

It was a place to organize that and give us a sense of, of. Control and, understanding about what’s in our backlog and which things are gonna have the biggest impact. it created like the single source of truth for us as we built this tool originally. And so now it’s being used by thousands of teams around the world.

It helps give transparency into your product process so that, it makes really clear as to why decisions are being made and what things are gonna be most impactful for the company as a whole. ’cause it connects back to your overarching goals. We have a free trial that you can jump in, and you even have, access to what we call our sandbox mode, which is preloaded with example, [00:02:00] roadmaps and OKRs and experiments and other pieces.

So you can see how it all fits together. And our team is made up of product people. We are founded by product people. We’ve got lots of product people within the team. give it a try and give us your feedback. We’d always love to, to hear from you. And enough about us. Let’s introduce our guest.

We’ve got Christian Idiodi joining us here today. Everybody say hi to Christian. Hello. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, and he is a leading expert in product management and in transformation. He spent decades helping teams from, startups to giants like Microsoft, build world class products. He’s known for cutting through the noise, challenging old habits and equipping teams for real change. he’s the co-author of Transformed and Hosts the Product Therapy podcast, sharing, real talk on what it takes to make lasting change in product organizations.

And today he’s here to talk to us about managing up, influencing up, how to get buy-in for your [00:03:00] org-wide product transformation. everybody say hi. Hi, Christian. Thanks so much for joining us.

Christian Idiodi: Oh, it’s my highest honor. Thank you for having me.

Janna Bastow: Excellent. It’s great to have you here. And, I just saw somebody raising their hand and everybody raising your hand.

if you’ve got questions, drop it into the chat or into the q and a, and that way we can, pick those up and, and answer them as we go. But, to start with. Christian, I just wanna ask, like when you walk into a company that’s stuck in old habits, what are the first signals that tell you that some sort of this product operating model is needed?

Christian Idiodi: Wow. there’s a lot in terms of symptoms or indications that the way companies work may not be yielding the results they want. I typically joke with my kids about like, how do you know a company needs help? So I’m like, when I’m walking through the company and the best ideas in the company [00:04:00] are stuck in the hallways of the company and not in the hands of their customers.

it’s like it time for change. It’s this brilliance in so many companies of all the cool things they could do, but you look at their actual product and it’s not a reflection of that brilliance. But truly, if you think about some of the symptoms you could think about. engineers not doing anything more than building things.

product people feeling like project people. Design being downstream when companies complain about too much tech, debt, misaligned priorities, too many priorities, lack of focus. Things just take too long. Heavy opportunity costs, innovation cycles, we have 50 engineers. The other company has 10, but they are running cycle cycles all over us.

we’re not getting to value faster enough. all of these things, you are shipping a lot of things, but you’re not making a dent or impact. They are all indications [00:05:00] not of a problem in what you do, but a problem or opportunity in how. You don’t, and that’s for me a big indication of a need to change how you do things.

And to be clear, I always joke about the blame cycle when you see a culture that is very good at blaming other groups for things not walking. It’s also another indication there as well, a signal.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, I think you hit something on the head there. all these brilliant ideas within the hallways, right?

and this is what I see. teams of people, like companies, full of brilliant people, and each one has this clarity on how they think they would go and solve things. And yet together the company just seems to be running against itself.

Christian Idiodi: Yes. Yes. Quite common. and I, cannot understate how common that is in so many companies.

It’s never for lack of brilliant people, all great ideas but the [00:06:00] ability to translate that into meaningful solutions for their customers, that’s where they’re challenged. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: The real magic isn’t in having those ideas, it’s in getting the team organized enough to do something with it. Yeah, I imagine the larger the company, the harder that challenge is.

Christian Idiodi: so they might think,

Janna Bastow: okay, alright, so they

Christian Idiodi: might think, yeah. Yeah. But the larger the company, the more opportunity to solve problems, but it’s not actually done that way. Yeah. And we can talk more about that, but it’s often the difference between an empowered environment and one that is. Led with control.

Janna Bastow: Okay. So that’s really interesting. What do you mean by an empowered environment versus one that’s led by control?

Christian Idiodi: So I, if and I explain this to CEOs all the time, a company might say we have 50,000 employees, and you look at smaller companies. Innovating faster, driving value faster, getting things out the door.

And when you look at the culture, I [00:07:00] try to explain this to a CEO, I say, okay, you’ve got 50,000 employees. Maybe you’ve got a thousand leaders. 49,000 individual contributors. In a typical command and control environment, what tends to happen is the company has a big problem. Or opportunity.

All those 1000 leaders, they start thinking about all the things we should do, different strategies, and then they hand over to the 49,000 people they have in the company. A list of roadmap items, futures projects, things to go do. Now these leaders could be very smart, brilliant leaders. Let’s in short give them all the credit.

Let’s say all of those leaders have five ideas each that are fantastic.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: That’s 5,000 amazing ideas that they’re now prioritizing into projects for 49,000 people in the company to go do. That’s a traditional model, cascades down. In an empowered model, you are [00:08:00] flipping that upside down.

You are saying as a company, we’ve identified a problem. We have 49,000 smart, talented people, and I like that Steve Jobs quote, why hire smart people to tell them what to do?

Janna Bastow: Yep. We hire

Christian Idiodi: smart people to tell us what’s possible. So I’m gonna give that problem to 49,000 people to think about, to discover solutions to that.

If they all had five ideas each, that’s like 250,000 plus ideas we’re going to try as a company. Yeah. And the job of the thousand leaders is to create an environment. For them to try, experiment, deliver, and launch those solutions. Are you seeing the difference in that model? So it’s often, this legacy control model that passes on, projects to teams versus the empowered model where you’re saying, I’m pushing the decisions of what we do [00:09:00] to the people that are closest to the problem, closest to technology, closest to the customer.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a clue in the name, these are knowledge workers who are working with companies. That’s what an organization is a collection of knowledge workers. Let them use their knowledge, right? Yeah. They’re there because they have eyes and ears and they can see what’s going on in the space around them.

Christian Idiodi: Yeah, but Janna, that’s harder than you think because many leaders where training an industrial revolution and in a factory model. Yeah. So all of those. Models, which are very arcane today.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: Are used to leverage efficiency in the hands of people than in the minds of people.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: So organizational playbooks are designed, yeah.

To drive efficiency of using hands than using minds. So you’re calling out knowledge workers, but we’re still using legacy factory walker type of techniques and processes in how we manage.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And you call it, a legacy [00:10:00] factory way of working and that sort of stuff. Which makes me think of like the old days, right? But surely that’s all dying out now. Is it just the old companies that do this or do new companies fall fallow this way of thinking too?

Christian Idiodi: Ob I, I wish I could make the argument that there is just some kind of, this is old school, new school kind of trip.

But remember, We are still going to school with institutions and teachers that lend in some factory model on how to create efficiency that are teaching these things down. That’s the educational system. And then think about that in environments where your current leader or CEO today. Learned how to be a leader or CEO working in a company for 30 years.

And so they are teaching a whole generation how to write the business case and manage a project the way they manage things 30 years ago.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: So it, I wish you could say that this is only limited to all legacy companies in terms of the thinking. It’s pervasive in many [00:11:00] companies because of the people that are leading those companies.

Janna Bastow: That’s, that’s really interesting. And surely these people can see that there’s a better way of working. What’s holding them back to this old way of working? Is it just because that’s what they’re used to? Or do they have some sort of preconceived notion that it’s somehow better and more effective for the business?

Christian Idiodi: Look, I, have not met, at least. Today in all of the work I have done around the world, in any company where a leader, an executive team has told me, all this stuff you’re talking about is crazy talk. it doesn’t make any sense. Oh, this product model nonsense. I, don’t understand how this is going to be better.

I have not met a single executive. That has chased me out of the room because I am saying something absolutely contrarian to their modeling in their head. I always say the product model is not new, but getting leadership to believe in it is actually very [00:12:00] new. The reason most leaders don’t adopt the product model is because they’ve never seen it before.

Janna Bastow: Ooh,

Christian Idiodi: they’ve never lived it before. It’s just sometimes they don’t even know how their actions, their behaviors, their language or their choices could help or hurt creating the environment for good work to occur. It’s like I’m talking to a product leader, the A team, the other day, it is like the last, I told the team to do discovery.

Why are they not doing discovery? And the team is sir, you told us we are not allowed to talk to customers. And he said, why do you need to talk to customers? I, you need to do discovery, not waste your time talking to customers. This came from the leader and you can see oh, philosophically I agree we should do that discovery thing makes a lot of sense.

But practically it’s I didn’t know me blocking you, spending time with customers hot. So it’s the number one reason I think. People don’t get good leadership [00:13:00] is because their leaders have not experienced good leadership. the number one reason most companies don’t walk this way is because their leaders have not walked this way before.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, and I can imagine that becomes a really big blocker to getting these things through. does the transformation work better? I assume if it’s coming from the leaders versus from That’s right. The knowledge workers, right?

Christian Idiodi: Yes, of course it does. It’s why many people are here. They’re like, I buy into this, but

Janna Bastow: my leader.

Christian Idiodi: My executives. Oh, if only they did.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re getting to the crux of what we are talking about, which is, okay, we’re here in this company, and actually who here is, hearing this from their own company. let us know in the chat, you working for a company where you feel like.

You are working in this old operating model, you wanna be working in this new product operating model, and it’s the leadership that is difficult to get the message across to. Who’s feeling that right now and Christian to you? what do you say to somebody who’s in this position who, who, feels like they can [00:14:00] see what’s going wrong?

They understand that it’s working better in other companies. Maybe they’ve read the books, they’ve been in a better company, but they’re trying to figure out how to communicate that upwards.

Christian Idiodi: Yeah. I spend a lots of time with CEOs or senior executive teams in many companies and in many cases, companies bring me in.

It could be a head of product, a VP, senior leader, and they’re like, look, and maybe I get it. I need to get all these people in my organization to get it as well. Yeah. And people often ask me, what do I say in those sessions? How do I get a CEO and an executive team? And, I after the introduction of that kind of way, I, typically, I’m always very clear, right?

If I’m talking with a CEO and executive team, I say very clearly, look, a company cares about what the CEO cares about. A company cares about what this executive team cares about. And so I say to them, [00:15:00] what do you care about? And they say, what do you mean? I say, what’s the, what are the most important things to you?

And they, oh, we need to grow the company. We need to drive revenue. We need to win the competition. And so I say to the executive team, okay, who wakes up every day, let’s say, and, I, sometimes I might even tease them like, I am going to guess that I know a problem you will always have.

And they’re like, what is this? And I’m like, you are going to want to grow revenue. is there gonna be ever a time in your history you don’t want to grow revenue? They’re like, of course. I’m like, okay. So even when you’ve grown revenue this year, you know what you’re gonna wanna do next year? Grow revenue some more.

And I say, who wakes up every day in your company to grow revenue? And you could see executive looking at each other. what do you mean? who wakes up every day? This is the most important thing to you. You’ve got thousands of people who wakes up every day to do that. They’re like, it’s not sales.

They’re like, the sales. Just sales. They capture [00:16:00] value. It’s not marketing. It’s not operations. Who solves this problem? And I say, look, the most innovative companies have figured this out. They have a group of people that wake up every day. To solve the problems that these group of people, these leaders you all think are the most important right now.

They have a fancy name, red. They call those people product teams. And I say the product model is predicated on really one, enabling you to accomplish your goals, the things that are most important to you. And two, you kind see this whole idea that you can push a lot of your innovation and your factor to people that have the skillset to do it in a meaningful way.

And so in some ways, the way I get executives on board in kind [00:17:00] of a buy-in is for them to understand that this is not contrarian. To the most ideal things they want and what has gotten them successful. May not get them successful in the future because forget about. The technology part, your customers are changing.

your, customers, a whole generation of kids that look at digital or technology fest in everything they do. and you have to be well equipped to compete in that way. So there is a narrative in there that. Try to use to engage and inspire people. And please don’t get it wrong. Some leaders in the room will be like, this might require a lot of change.

This might move a lot of pieces. I don’t really know if this is gonna work. And my answer is Al always the same. I’m like, I don’t know either. do a test. And I tell them that all the time. I’m like, look, what does it have to do? Let’s do a test. Let’s see. And the reality is, [00:18:00] let me frame it to you.

In the history of every company I have met that is not a startup, if they play back every single time they’ve done something innovative, most of the principles in the product model are reflected in it. This is not new. Like when you explain to people like, okay, think about the last time you did something great.

Let’s talk about the key elements of that. Oh my goodness. I remember that when COVID hit, everybody rolled their sleeves up. We jumped in and we walked together, okay? There was clarity of focus. Leaders were in the room. We removed all the obstacles, all the barriers. We didn’t know. You start to say, hold up, so what’s the product model?

I say, you see the secret ingredients in that magic you had. The product model is simply saying. Why don’t we make that what we do most of the time in most places, not what we do sometimes in some places. [00:19:00]

Janna Bastow: That’s actually a really interesting example, right? Like when COVID hit, a lot of companies transformed the way they work.

They wouldn’t have called it a transformation. That’s right. it might be survivorship bias. The ones who survived, they all did something about it. What is it about these moments of pressure, these breaking points that cause companies to just suddenly start working in a more productive way?

Christian Idiodi: you are really getting down to the. Root of why companies transform.

and we’ve seen these three big buckets. One, sometimes there is a genuine threat to their business. like COVID, you’re describing survival die. You did see companies survive. Some companies died in that way.

or, Amazon is coming into our industry or or Stripe has learned something to compete with us. Some companies now threatening. The existing way you’ve worked. And, whether it’s your Netflix blockbuster type of story in that way. Yeah. the second is sometimes there’s some genuine excitement [00:20:00] about what they could accomplish.

there’s some financial greed, oh my goodness. The best stocks in the world today. of all companies that work in the product model. Yeah. If we work like that, we could be rich too. Don’t be fooled. Companies evaluate the financial rewards, the multiples that they can get in valuations.

The exits they can immerse if they’re treated as a SaaS company versus a service company or a tech company versus a consulting company. Those types of things do motivate people. But for many big companies, big enterprises I work with, they’re just pissed off. About the return on their investments in tech.

They’re doing it outta spite. They’re like, holy Lord, we spend, we spend 50 million a year, a hundred million on technology. We have 1000 engineers. We, and I can’t get anything out. Let me be clear because I, [00:21:00] often tell people, they, fail to understand the frustration in leadership or the patience of companies.

I tell people all the time, when you are. Company has something called an innovation lab. It literally means my product team is not innovating.

That’s what it means, when a company goes out and the only time they can grow is by buying another company. They are realizing we cannot create that kind of value that company did in the same amount of time.

So acquiring a company is the best way to do it. When you have your leaders outsourcing every single thing they want to some third party group buying solid, these are all, most of the time reflections of a lack of management, patience with the product, organization, or your inadequacy to deliver value through your existing organization.

Janna Bastow: So that’s really interesting. Do you come across companies where they’ve got an innovation lab, they’re buying up [00:22:00] innovative companies. They’re obviously not innovating themselves, but there’s people within that company who have been screaming saying that they want to be innovative, but they’re being held back by something.

Christian Idiodi: they, mostly don’t understand it.

they don’t understand what’s in their way of innovation. That’s for many leaders, they just cannot rationalize the blockers in their way of innovation. They just know that their current pathway takes too long, is so expensive, and often does not yield good results.

And so if I am a traditional business, I’m like, my money is best spent somewhere else. Because and that somewhere else will say to you, oh, you see we can move faster. imagine if you got a three a, proposal from some outside third party telling they can build your new app in one month and your own internal head of product.

And third people are like, we need six months to build it. I was saying, [00:23:00] at least I can get something in one month. And, often innovation labs don’t do anything meaningful in the world because even after they’ve built it, you internally have to maintain it. They just create a whole lot of tech debt.

Relearning is a technology transfer problem, so all very real things here. All very real things. Good question.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Absolutely. And so you mentioned, one of the things you recommend is, look, if you’re not sure, do a test.

Christian Idiodi: Yes.

Janna Bastow: What do you recommend as a starting point, as a test? How do you figure out the scope of that test?

Christian Idiodi: we, we call a test a pilot, in some ways. And what happens is, remember if a company is transforming from the project model To the product model, they’ve always solved their problems. By doing a project, we want to build something, do that project, wanna build a new website.

Website project. So you now say we want to transform, you know what most companies do? We do a transformation [00:24:00] project. because that’s their wiring of how they work.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. That’s

Christian Idiodi: actually what you’re trying to change. The best way to transform is actually like a product, not a project. a project is like big bang handoffs, racy, all of those charts, deliverable dates, that kind of stuff.

In some ways, a product is saying we don’t know the answer. When we start, we need to discover, experiment, iterate, start small, have an MVP, do a version one roll out. That’s a different mindset. So in this way here, because your transformation is a change. And when you do a change in the world, people are paranoid about Why are we doing this change?

What’s gonna happen to me? What’s in it for me? So these are all important things that you need to discover. So what we do is we do a pilot. And a pilot means you might identify one business unit, one leader in there, you are going [00:25:00] to coach them on the two biggest muscles you’re trying to build in your culture in most transformation efforts, which are the muscles of deciding what to do and the muscles of how you do it.

So strategy and discovery. So I’m coaching a leader on how to lead with context. I’m coaching a team on how to do discovery. The clock is sticking. What your organization wants is outcomes. What’s good outcomes, good solutions. wow, look at what we did. We did that here, we did that in record time.

We, we tackled the risk in this. that’s, people often ask me, are you biased about what you pick? Absolutely. Because what matters in your company is that you can actually deliver a good outcome quickly. So I need to demonstrate that and what I’m doing in the pilot. Is I am uncovering the antibodies in the system that can reject things.

I am addressing the gaps. I am re [00:26:00] removing the obstacles, startling the objections. I’m not doing it in Big Bang where I’m gonna discover all of this at the same time. It is small group. I can address issues in there, respond better. if say your company, you don’t have any designers. And you’re like to walk in the product model, you need to have design.

You’re like, I can’t hire 50 designers tomorrow. But if you start a pilot, can you hire one? Can you get one person in? So you can start faster. You can address gaps faster. I don’t need a strategy for every group, maybe just this one area. I don’t need to get everybody on board. I just need this one area and I’m going to learn and have a success, have this learning model out behavior before I skill it.

Across an organization.

Janna Bastow: That’s a really brilliant way of putting it. I love the idea of piloting something and just starting really, small. Now, let’s say you’re not in the leadership team, right? You are, somebody else. You’re one of the other 49,000 in the company. Is there a way for [00:27:00] people within that team to self-organize and, pilot something themselves to prove that they’re onto something?

Christian Idiodi: Absolutely. you, don’t have to wait. This is the big. Aspect of where many people get shook up cultures where you feel like you’ve lost agency, this is happening to you. I cannot make change in some ways. I, many, of us in products know the, market adoption curve, like Jeffrey Mos type of early adopters, majority, and things here where many people say, my company, my whole organization has to change.

What you are really trying to say is you want that big majority in the middle to change and adopt. What you’re trying to say, but there’s really no business that starts with that.

Same thing here. Your real focus should be on your early adopters, your early evangelists aspect of your population. That first [00:28:00] 20%, that’s what it’s in every company.

Champions of people that want to work in an empowered way, that want to make a dent, that want to have great outcomes. You are empowered if you work as an individual in that group. You don’t need the whole organization to change.

Janna Bastow: Nice. And that’s empowering. That’s an empowering thought. Yeah. okay, we’ve got this group of 49,000 people and there’s a product person who wants to make this change.

Who should they call up to their team? Who should they start winning over to their cause first?

Christian Idiodi: in kind of the idea, I’m funny is, waiting for. Permission. You are starting where you are and you wanna build momentum. So most people, while they might argue with, okay, I don’t have the agency or something, might say, I don’t have autonomy.

I cannot make this change because it’s bigger than me. the whole essence of what the product discipline is that it’s purest form, is that you are solving a problem in a way that it’s beneficial. To the people that you’re doing [00:29:00] it for. We call them customers with a fancy name and the business that we’re serving, and they have something that they love, and, that works for them.

You gotta find an outcome. And unfortunately, what tends to happen is even when well-intended people do something great in a company because of the bigger macro culture, they don’t point to the principles that help them. They point to themselves. Say, oh my goodness, Janna, how did that happen?

I’m awesome. Look at what I did. I navigated all of this. I struggled. I pressed on, I was an all you know, because the culture is already wired for heroism. They want heroes. They, it is a masonary culture. You want your bonus, your credit, so you lose sight that you’re really trying to model. What you’re really trying to help your organization adopt are the principles that led to your success.

Hey, the reason this was successful is because I did discovery. Before I did delivery. I [00:30:00] minimized the risk upfront. I spent time with customers. I brought my engineer into the pro. these are things every other person can replicate, but they cannot replicate you. They cannot be like, oh, now I have to have you on every project in order for things to work.

So what I tell people is. your results, your discovery, your ability to deliver outcomes are the biggest things that drive the credibility and trust in the product model in your company. And you want to attribute your success not to your heroism in doing that. But please don’t get me wrong, you are courageous to do it, so we will give you that credit, but because you want meaningful change across your organization.

You are going to give the credit in your story For your success to the principles and environment that allowed it to happen.

Janna Bastow: That’s actually, ’cause that’s

Christian Idiodi: key.

Janna Bastow: That’s actually really smart. It makes sense, right? If you’re trying to get this early adopter and then over to the, majority, You’ve [00:31:00] got show the majority that they too can be this hero, right? That’s right. It wasn’t your heroism, it was the fact that you followed a process that actually we can all do if we, all just push in the same direction.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right.

Janna Bastow: I hear people saying that they want to do this sort of thing, but they’re often saying things like, I can’t start yet because we’re in the middle of this big, we got all this tech debt, this redesign, refactor, whatever.

Or we can’t start yet because, we don’t touch anything over Q3 or Q4 or whatever. Or we can’t touch anything because we’re waiting for so and so To quit, or to join or to whatever. what do you say to people who aren’t. Taking ownership and starting now.

Christian Idiodi: Yeah. there is an aspect to this that is courageous around change people.

I’ve even had companies that will tell me, what is the good time? Is it when we’re in a crisis to transform or when we’re in peaceful time? [00:32:00] we don’t wanna rock the boat. We are making money now. things are working well. and if you think about the resistance.

To transformation. There are many executives in so many companies that have worked in the legacy way for a long time. In short, they’ve built their whole career. On being efficient and effective in your current system. They know how to, that’s how they got promoted. They know how to navigate it.

They know the politics. They know how to get approval, how to get funding, how to drive their projects. Yeah. Now you are saying, we not to shift a whole bunch of that. They’re like, oh, what’s wrong with what we’re doing? I get my bonus every year. We get, so there’s some inbuilt complacency. That can happen in some levels of like, why are we not gonna change?

Life is good. what is the need to change? Secondly, for many people, you are calling out. There are excuses baked in your system, but that is why you will need to transform. It’s like a CEO telling me the other day, Christian, I don’t have time for strategy. I said, [00:33:00] that is exactly why you don’t have time because you don’t have a strategy.

You are working on doing all the things. You’re unfocused You know the only way to break the cycles. Of increasing your tech debt is by getting your engineers involved in deciding what to do. The only way to break the cycle, like all of these

excuses, they are all symptoms, not of what you do, but of how you do it.

So you want to find the areas of leverage Today, they’re not, understandably, some areas may be like, look, I’ve got commitments to go deliver. Yes. Go deliver on those commitments. But you’re now saying to yourself, the next commitments I have, I will make sure I do discovery before I do delivery, because then I’ll have a better delivery.

You can do that. I’m gonna get my engineers more involved in discovery. You can do that. I’m gonna focus on an outcome, a problem to solve. I’m gonna engage with my stakeholders differently. There are so many aspects, principles in the product model that you can start [00:34:00] to adopt without permission or approval to do

Janna Bastow: And actually you make a really good point there. sometimes there’s gonna be things that you’re committed to delivering, right? There’s already been company-wide commitments or agreements that you’ve made upwards or whatever it is. but actually there, there’s no reason why you can’t break off small pieces and just do little bits of.

Product work, right? Yeah. Just taking little tiny bites off and then showing that each bit gets you that much more permission to go do something bigger the next time. That’s right. We’re you’re not saying drop everything and just go into discovery mode and be like, ah, Whatever we said we’re gonna deliver, we’re not gonna deliver.

Right? That’s

Christian Idiodi: right. don’t do that. This is all about trust. Remember, it’s a race to outcomes. you know the best thing you can do for your organization. To adopt the product model is to deliver an outcome. I know it sounds crazy. Be like, what? How do I deliver an outcome if the system is not wired for that?

Deliver as the smallest outcome you can.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: [00:35:00] In the environment you have meaning solve a problem meaningfully like point to something. Everybody understands, I’m gonna work on increasing sales, I’m going to work on driving profit, engagement, adoption, satisfaction, something measurable. And you’re saying.

Imagine if I did this every day.

Janna Bastow: Yep. Absolutely. And you touched on something really important. It’s that building trust. Yeah. It’s showing that, hey, you can change the way that you work and you’re still getting as good, if not better results. Yes. And ideally, hopefully able to articulate them, right?

That’s right. If you’re changing your language around this, you’re talking about, Hey look, this is what we went out to learn. This is what we did learn, and this is what we got out of it. And you’re able to show this almost mini path of how you’ve gotten there. Which then opens up possibilities to go forward a little bit faster, a little bit, more freely.

So do you have any tips on framing or language to use when speaking to execs and, managing this, sort of, [00:36:00] this, this, ask upwards?

Christian Idiodi: Yeah. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t care about how. the, sausage is made in a company. they do care about outcomes. And they do care about protecting their revenue, protecting their brand, protecting your customer, protecting fellow employees. Most product people and I don’t know if we’re helping or hurting, they like a lot of framework process, big words, terminology and things that many executives that may not have grown up in a product model.

May find it hard to rationalize, you wanna do discovery, what the heck does that mean? And is it a good thing for me? You want to be product led or you want to, tackle, like we have all this taxonomy and funny terms. I, need a product vision and a product strategy and, and I often have to coach people.

product speak for execs is really the language of how [00:37:00] executive talks the talk in a big, in, in an executive forum. They care about some very important things that there is no senior leader in your company that does not understand money. I tell people what solves our problem in a company.

More revenue, money, just more money and more revenue. In some ways they understand risk. They understand more customers, they understand retention. So I often try to limit my use of product terminology when I’m making requests. I don’t say, oh, I need, you need to give me strategic context with a vision, a strategy, OKRs objective.

just imagine they’ve never seen good in those things before.

Janna Bastow: What you’re

Christian Idiodi: really trying to say is Imagine how great a job I can do if I understood more of the context, if I had more clarity about where we’re going. We call that vision how we plan to get there. We call that strategy. What is important right now, how we measure success.

Those are those, okay. R things It’ll be much better. [00:38:00] We will get a better product if we tackle our risk. I’m not sure if people are gonna buy this. I’m not sure if we can build this. I’m not sure if it’s legal compliance stuff. We call all that stuff discovery. So if, when I’m talking to executives, I use terms that leaders already care about.

Stop using terms that you care about, So you are gonna say to somebody like, why do you need time to do, there’s a risk in doing it. My job is not to not do what you said. My job is to ensure that when I do it, it’s done in a way that makes you happy and makes our customers happy.

It’s a risk because I don’t know what that way is. Yeah, that’s, see now you’re thinking to yourself, okay, so what do you need from me? I need to understand what the real problem is, how you measure success with it, and then I need some time to go discover the best way to tackle that risk.[00:39:00]

different from oh, I need discovery. You need to give me time for this. I need this from you. If I cannot do my work, if I don’t have a good vision, your strategy sucks. I just see so many people because they have the words to describe what is missing or what leaders are not doing.

It becomes a mental blocker for why they don’t take action or why they don’t communicate well to leadership.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And I think product people are actually perfectly equipped to take this on, right? Yes. Think of it this way. You don’t use product language at your customers. You go out, right?

Ideally, you go talk to your customers and you do discovery. They don’t call it discovery, but you do discovery with them, right? And then you find out how they talk, and then you use their language back at them. That’s right. Same thing, right? Your leaders are just stakeholders, they’re customers of sorts, and you can do discovery on your leaders and then use their language back at them.

Christian Idiodi: Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly right.

Janna Bastow: And okay. I’ve heard companies who use things like OKRs and they talk the [00:40:00] talk, but they don’t walk the walk. And they’ve used OKRs and they’re, saying they’re doing all this stuff. They love their outcomes. they love their discovery, but actually they still want you to commit to a certain amount of work done by the end of the quarter.

And, they’re not giving room for real discovery.

Christian Idiodi: Yeah.

Janna Bastow: I feel see, that’s even worse than some companies who are working in the old school way. Using the old school terminology. Yes. How do you deal with companies like that?

Christian Idiodi: I, it’s a hard construct because, I joke with companies, they always tell me, oh, we tried OKRs, and it really became something like, okay, this really sucks.

Janna Bastow: I never heard that one, but that’s that is true. That’s why it

Christian Idiodi: didn’t, it, there’s no adoption, no traction. It didn’t stick after we did many iterations of it. And I was like, so why did you do OKRs? They say, what do you mean? That’s what everybody’s doing. we watched a. A video on YouTube where Google said, we did OKRs and that was our secret to our success.

And I said, okay, do you have a culture like Google? They say, [00:41:00] what do you mean? I said, do you work in Empower teams where you give them problems to solve and it’s up to them to, they’re like, we think so. we give our teams like roadmaps and we allow them to do it. And I say, let me be very clear, OKRs are an empowerment tool.

They’re an alignment tool. As such, they’re a cultural tool. This is not a tool for future teams. It’s not a tool for delivery teams. It’s the wrong type of thing. Because to be more pointed, you cannot have like in its purest form your traditional roadmap.

What by when? And then also have an OKR.

Yeah, because an OK R is saying, this is what’s important. Increased revenue roadmap is saying, what? Build me this By Monday, what do you think people are gonna work on? Don’t work on the roadmap. You’ll never do your OKRs. Yeah. So the most important thing if you really want to go there, is to change the environment.

Focus on creating more empowered teams, then if your question to [00:42:00] me is, how do I communicate to those teams what they should be working on, then I can be like, oh, we should try that KR thing. You see it, it’s not the, KR does not create the empowerment magically, does not make the culture in some ways.

It’s just a tool used by empowered teams, to communicate what teams should be working on and to measure outcomes.

Janna Bastow: Yep. And it always comes back to the same thing, that iron triangle of, of project constraints, right? Time, scope, and cost, right? If you’re using any tool, I don’t care whether it’s roadmaps or OKRs or whatever, to say this thing, the scope has to be done by this time, then cost or quality is gonna give.

And it’s always quality, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s right.

Christian Idiodi: Urgent always wins when competition with important urgent will always win.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. That’s some, some really good advice. when it comes to, Companies that are, looking to get into this transformation, are there any sort of industries or [00:43:00] company type sizes that tend to do better and others that tend to be worse?

Or is this applicable across any sort of product org?

Christian Idiodi: I do get variants of this in terms of, even excuses in that we are big or we are at scale or we are regulated. there are nuances to why not, or, all that transformation product model stuff. It’s a startup thing.

Or it’s not for big companies in that way. And I, I even often have to ask companies when they say, oh, we are big. I say, what kind of big are you talking about? Are you talking market card, big, revenue, big number of employees. Big. Is it Apple Big? Amazon big. these are companies that are even bigger than your company today that work this way.

whoa. we’re regulated. It doesn’t work well where there’s regulation. I, and I said, no, you’re not regulated. They said, what do you mean? I said, no, your industry is regulated. there’s nobody that comes [00:44:00] to play in your sandbox that says, I’m gonna follow a different set of rules.

If I decide to be a, in healthcare or in in financial services, the regulations apply to me. Are you suggesting that innovation doesn’t happen in your industry?

these are all these blockers in mental modeling that we’ve created over time, that many companies are coming. To terms with, when I tell a leader when they’re like, we’re regular.

I say, this is why you need product management. They say, what do you mean? I said, because you are saying to me. We just can’t do anything. We have to do things within regulations. There are constraints, like if this was just about doing anything, then why don’t they, anybody can just say do that.

But you are saying, I need somebody that understands the regulation, understands the people we are serving, and understands what we want. I’m trying to create a solution there that’s hard. Yeah, absolutely. That’s right. So I’m seeing industries, I [00:45:00] farmer coming into the product model, which is interesting big banks coming into the product model, insurer. These are companies that I will not touch with a stick years ago. but I’m making significant strides into the product model now. The big as driver. If you’re a technology leader today is this thing that we not ignore talking about ai.

Go on

Janna Bastow: it. It is,

Christian Idiodi: if I’m advising a head of technology today, I will challenge them to leverage this current wave of disruptive technology with ai. To transform their organizations. I was just with a leadership session and when there’s big disruption like the internet, for, it creates a point in time where your traditional, the business people recognize something very interesting.

Nobody’s talking about us right now. [00:46:00] There’s a new player in the room that our customers are talking about. Our competitors are talking about every executive room. A table is like ai, ai, and none of the executives there are the experts on it. The experts exist in the technology group. It is the first time since the internet that they say, lean in into technology of so what are we gonna do with this AI thing?

And unfortunately many companies react, respond, or create an AI project to try to AI five. ’cause they love

Janna Bastow: projects.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right. Because they know projects. But what I’ve tried to coach many leaders now is this is a great catalyst. For your transformation. Because you are saying to your organization, there’s an emerging technology that could be disruptive to our business.

Because it may be disruptive to our customers, our ways of working, our models, our competitors, and stuff that we now have to leverage or understand how we use, [00:47:00] what the product model does is equips us to respond to that proactively in the future than being reactive as we are today.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: And so now that the business is leaning into you, they are elevating technology.

At this point in time, they’re bringing you to their conversations because you have an interesting thing they don’t have, yeah. The knowledge of this AI thing deliver good outcomes because really what the product shifts, the transformation is you are shifting from a subservient relationship to a collaborative one.

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Christian Idiodi: This is a great reason to do it.

Janna Bastow: I think you’re actually striking at the heart of what companies actually want. Yes, they want more revenue that solves everything, but actually they want to grow and they want to outcompete their competitors. They wanna grow faster than their competitors. There’s no point saying to a company saying You grew 5%, but actually the rest of the market grew 20%.

They feel that they’re underperforming. Yes. which is [00:48:00] fair, right? Because everybody within the same industry, reasonably has the same constraints, has the same regulations, have the same Right. Things blocking them and AI is something that is bringing everybody forward. I don’t know of a single type of company that hasn’t had some sort of leg up That’s right.

They’ve taken advantage of or they could have taken advantage of. So it’s one of these things going, yeah, you’ve gotta operate within the space you have, you are the one who either sidesteps and works over these challenges and works around these constraints and picks up on these, leading edges that that, it bring you forward.

And it’s the product operating model that does that.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right. That’s right.

Janna Bastow: There was a question in the, chat actually. DEPA asked, er pointed out that he is been in a company where the founder and CEO wants to transform, but is held back due to a d fear of conflict within the rest of the management team.

Have you seen that one holding companies back before?

Christian Idiodi: Typically not from the founder, CEO, [00:49:00] That’s a different leadership thing that we need to address. Yeah. Typically, like I’m the head of products, the, head of engineering or head of whatever, and there’s conflict with other people, like maybe the head of sales, head of operations, some other group is not funding.

People to solve problems, they wanna fund projects. and that’s why, when I said a company cares about what the CEO cares about. If the CEO e cares about this, they are then most other people fall in line because the escalation in most companies get all the way up.

If you are saying, we need to hire an engineer, then outsource the engineer. HR is no, we’re gonna outsource. The CEO can say, no, we are gonna, I’m gonna deal with the consequences of bringing that in-house as a CEO. but you can’t deal with that with the head of product and the head of HR fighting themselves.

So I, it’s not as common. I’m not, I’m sure it does happen, but [00:50:00] if I were coaching a CEO on building the case, as an executive or a CEO in many companies. The same thing. I’ll say, do a test. Don’t try to get the big bang adoption of your organization. You can pretty much say, you know what? Maybe even pick the AI thing.

Say, you know what? We’re gonna try to drive more sales using ai. I’m gonna cover this little team here. It’s not gonna distract. I’m not gonna change anybody’s budgets. I’m not gonna change all the big things you guys carry on, but I want to try this little product model thing. I’m gonna put a bunch of people with good skills, product manager, design engineer.

I’m gonna give them a problem, give them some context and space. Let’s see what comes out of it, right? And then I’m gonna evangelize bring that to my leaders. oh my goodness, look at what they did. What if we had two teams doing this? What do you think? Who else wants to try? Yeah, I wanna try. Okay. You try.

In your team now you are telling the stories. You know now in your executive room, there are like three executives that have worked in a product model that are telling stories. Who wants to be left out? So [00:51:00] it, there is something about winning hats and minds that is at the root of transformation.

Business transformation starts with individual transformation. I would challenge an executive to really understand the nature of change and winning hats and minds there.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Now, so doing a transformation. This feels like it’s a classic. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, right?

You make a small bit of change and then you keep it building and growing how do you protect against burnout yourself, your teams, the people around you so that they’ve got the energy to see this thing through?

Christian Idiodi: If anybody’s wondering where I lost all my hair, or where my gray hair comes from, it is exactly from transformation.

Ensure if you are going through a transformation. And you’re still all smiley without any of these gray hair or stress. I don’t know if you’re really walking it, you’re

Janna Bastow: not transforming hard enough.

Christian Idiodi: You’re not transforming it. You know what it, is, it is unfortunate, because while there is some [00:52:00] aspect of this that is a corporate courage, the grind of a feud to make a meaningful dent and impact.

but we see this a whole lot with so many companies that have ripped the benefit. Transformation in their journey. It, only takes you experiencing this once, meaning experiencing what it looks like to work this way. The benefits of working this way for you to fight for it. Yeah. it is a tremendous amount of burnout if you do it as a project.

because you are doing the impossible tasks of making the whole org transform right now in the manner you want at the same time. Then if you are doing it iteratively, and, and to experiment and discovery, so you wanna check yourself on that. you want to. Evangelize, share your wins, the stories of it.

fool you share your

Janna Bastow: wins. Yeah, that’s

Christian Idiodi: right. You know that when you share the little dent or impact in the world, you are making it fools you enough, and it also builds trust [00:53:00] enough for the next thing you need to do. big piece of that. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: Excellent. That’s really good advice, and I appreciate you, you sharing all this.

Christian, one thing to leave us with any, further resources, that, we should be listening into. Tell us a little bit about your, your podcast and, what else we should be reading these days.

Christian Idiodi: yeah, my podcast goes behind the craft. That’s why I call it product therapy.

I don’t want to talk about frameworks and processes and so many things here. I wanna go what’s behind the craft of products, like mindset and, dealing with difficult people and communication. And when I say all problems are people problems, I truly want to talk about how we coach through. Some of these things, things we’ve talked about, like agency and politics and, these are all real rooted aspects that affect our work.

and I think we’ll become even more prevalent in the world of generative AI in our work. if everybody’s a good writer, if everybody’s a good [00:54:00] storyteller, a good analyst, you write all the business cases, start to look the same world class, how do you decide? Which one is good? How do you discern which one is good?

So your product sense, your product taste. All of these things become important. obviously our book Transformed Covers objections, it covers some of these topics with politics. empower covers leadership in this environment. Those are probably two good resources based on the conversation we’ve had today.

but by all means, follow us on sv vpg.com. We have a blog. We write about these topics. the podcast is often a great place to start as well.

Janna Bastow: Perfect. Hey, that’s a whole pile of really good resources for follow up on. absolutely. I love the work that you do, love the, the writing that you’ve done, and, love having you here, sharing your stories today.

This has been absolutely brilliant. thank you Christian. Oh, it is my highest for sharing your stories. Thank you. And, everybody say thank you very much to Christian. just as a final point, we’re gonna be back here, [00:55:00] in early September with a much more practical how to, offload your pm busy work to AI, so that you can spend more time in that discovery and customer facing and stakeholder facing space. What’s good? Bad and what’s ugly. So we’ll be talking about some of that. come back, join us then.

In the meantime, everybody have a fantastic summer and we’ll see you on the flip side. Christian, thank you. Thanks so much.

Christian Idiodi: Thank you. My pleasure to be with you.