S2 Ep. 8: Why Must You Align People on Tough Decisions?
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Hope Gurion: Alignment. That magical state all product leaders seek but rarely experience for long. If and when we do manage to achieve alignment, it’s a fleeting moment of euphoria that evaporates as soon as we recognize the next area of misalignment to tackle. In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, we learn why product leaders must effectively align their executives, stakeholders and teams as they fearlessly answer the question “Why must 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 without a doubt 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. How to bring to the surface where and why you aren’t aligned and how can you remedy it? It can be time consuming and it can frustrate many product leaders who are loathed to add yet another responsibility to an already full and shifting plate. To try to help with this challenging and important issue every product leader will experience, I’m doing something a little different for the next few episodes of Fearless Product Leadership. In a 3-episode miniseries, we’re going to deeply explore the why and how of achieving alignment for product leaders.
In this first episode, three Chief Product Officers share what it means to truly be aligned and why alignment is a critical state of being for product leaders, executives and product teams. In the next episode, 5 experienced product leaders share the tactics they use to align around priorities, decisions and investment allocation. In the final episode, we’ll learn from Bob Gower and Alex Jamieson how the techniques shared in the previous episodes stack up against the techniques they have found to be most effective which they’re detailing in their new book: “Radical Alignment: How to have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life.”
So, let’s level up on why achieving a state of alignment is so powerful for product leaders, their executive teams and their product teams. Fearlessly and philosophically tackling the question “Why must you align people on tough decisions?” are:
Nate Walkingshaw, former Chief Experience Officer at Pluralsight
Sean Murphy, VP of Digital Pharmacy at Optum and former VP of Product at Target
First, Nate Walkingshaw shares some awesome insights here on aligning leaders and teams around the right product experiences. You’ll hear how he uses the mission, vision, strategy framework to align on the what, but after you’ll hear why co-authoring is so critical to truly achieving alignment as he shares a story about a pivotal moment in Pluralsight’s history that shaped the what true trust in the product teams’ ability to understand customer needs looks like.
Nate Walkingshaw: This is how I align, an organization or teams around, different strategic initiatives or priorities or things across the business. I'd say early on my product leadership career, even as a leader, as a CEO, I struggled with gaining alignment around things. I think the thing that plagues product leaders is consensus; like when you try and go grab alignment and you're really committed to the outcome that your product is intending to produce. What happens a lot of the time, is you talk and interview people and gain alignment, you end up in this conceding mentality. And really, all you have to do is go through this consensus, align people around what everyone wanted and then, you ship the product and it fails. And you learn pretty quickly that gaining alignment around consensus isn't going to work.
So, a piece of feedback that I give is that you have to be pretty committed: one, to the mission of the company, to have the vision of the product, which is like two to three years out. And then the strategy, which is the execution year you're in, to deliver that vision and that mission, and you have to make sure that every person that you're trying to gain alignment, clearly understands those three components. Once those components are defined, then it's the execution layer gets a lot lot easier. And I would say, a key element for me, that I've learned is being able to capture the voice of your customer and your teams from the bottoms up; and then, reconciling that with the alignment around the mission of the company or the vision or the strategy that you have. Then, making sure that a lot of those ingredients that went into the creation of that are co-authored and shared. When that happens, I think you can just count on unleashing this amount of energy to teams and to products, that allows you this unexpected velocity that you've never seen before.
I'll give you like one good example: We had, when I first started our site, a team of eight, and I think by the end of the year, we had a team of 40, roughly. What was interesting about that, is when we started the continuous delivery work, we I think that first year was like 61 new experiences, but we probably spent a full quarter, like working on the mission of our product, the vision of what we were actually going to go tackle, which we had never done. We've never talked to customers before, to learn what our customers might want. Then, what were the first priorities of that strategy to deliver the outcome; and we aligned on outcomes are there's no outputs? This was like, “Okay, well, if we ship this thing, what what is the outcome?” So human behavior would have to interact with this thing, in order for us to prove it true. Not, hey, did we ship it on a certain date? And I'm telling you right now, like that was a secret, I feel like a secret ingredient at that point in time, that people had never experienced, we're going to wait for people to interact with the product, look at the interaction of the product and then make decisions to see if it map back to strategy.
It was awesome, awesome! 61 new experiences, but that second year, now that we've had been in that cadence was 275 new product experiences on our enterprise product offering, that actually yielded the types of outcomes we wanted; the type of human behavior engagement retention characteristics that we wanted. We had really happy teams, like the teams felt safe. They felt that they could be heard. They felt that their voices were included in the development of this product. It really created a different dynamic that I'd never felt before on another product team.
Hope Gurion: Can you tell me more about co-authoring as a mechanism for alignment?
Nate Walkingshaw: Yeah. So, I want to talk to you a little about this concept of co-authoring. So, this is going to be deep, like probably deeper than you're expecting to go here.
The way that you create, co-authoring is, teams, individuals, leadership, everyone has like their own world, their own truth and their own experiences. I think in order for you to co author or co create something like really purposeful, you actually have to be able to - it can be for 30 seconds, it can be for 90 seconds - but you actually have to be able to go over to this other person's world, truth and experience and actually fully empathize with what's happening with those teams. A good use case for this, is that we could pick an experience inside Pluralsight’s product, like learning paths. The mission, the vision, the strategy; we were hell bent on making sure that learning paths actually entered its way into the product. And remember, there's no qualitative or quantitative data behind this. The product management teams however, had done a ton of discovery work, they interviewed hundreds of learners and technology leaders on, how they would want to experience learning passes one great experience we had. Well, the teams came back and said, “Hey, Nate's team. When we interviewed these developers, they actually don't want a learning path.” And we're like, “No, that's…. no, no, no.” And it's like, “No, they don't want a learning path” and I was like, “Okay, well, we'll tell us mor” and he's like, “Well, these developers are already front-end engineers. They actually don't need a front-end engineering path called Angular, like they already are Angular engineers. What they want is a skills path; and they want a skill-specific path relative the skills they already have” and I'm like, “Yeah, that is probably pretty accurate.”
As we started to try on these ideas, and just want to see how big this idea is, because we were going to go with learning paths, and then we shifted the product strategy to go skills, then skills path, then they ended up to skill IQ. So, credentialing, the amount of skills and now, if you look at how our product is used today, the skill-path relative to skill IQ is used as a backbone for benchmarking a skill, figuring out the gaps that you have in that skill; and then we build custom experiences based off the knowledge that you already have or don't have. This literally was just an aggregated, repeatable study that the product teams did. Had we not wanted to listen to what they had to say and look at all of this repeatable data and actually go over to their world, their truth and their experience, we probably would have shipped learning paths. I can tell you right now, it would have had have a material impact on the success of the product. Definitely an impact on the culture and the success of the teams, because we just would have shuttered have their research to the curb, and they said, “Yeah, thanks. That was cute. I appreciated your feelings there and you'll build learning paths.” Instead, we co authored what it could look like together and it completely unlocked our ability to be successful.
Hope Gurion: That's awesome. You went not only into the world of the developers and what they cared about, which is, “I've got a base of skills tell me what more I can do with them help me fill in the gaps to become even more talented and valuable and proficient in different things.” And into the people who were doing the interview on product teams during the interview. So, I think that just exemplifies that, you can have a point of view of how the world should go, but the more you deeply understand it, the better your buy-in and value creation path will be.
Nate Walkingshaw: 100%, that my teams will my teams will tell you this, but the word I always I have to like two sayings that I repeat all the time is: “strong opinions loosely held.” I want you to come with a strong opinion, just like make sure you don't hold on to that too tight.
Then the last thing is “All your answers, live in questions if you actively listen.” Most of the time if we just kind of sit still and ask questions and listen. Most of the answers are live in, other people around us. When you ship a lot of products at a lot of scale, you actually the quieter I get as a leader, because then you actually learn how complex like, the problems are and then you learn, how small, your ideas are relative to how complex you would need to build something to solve pretty big problems. I think through my career, I've learned to just actually get quieter and quieter and quieter and listen more and more and more. The fruits of that have been learning a ton from the people that are doing the work or from the customers are producing this, this digital exhaust that I get to look at and be like, “Okay, my strong opinion didn't even need to be there because those answers actually live in a lot of this the aggregated, quantitative data.” It's pretty cool.
Hope Gurion: Next, Sean Murphy shares why it’s important to know who the decision-maker is, especially when it’s you, and why you need to distinguish between getting agreement vs support from your peers.
Sean Murphy: So, the question on how do you align stakeholders when you're trying to make that tough call is another real tough one that all product owners, all product managers, all product leaders face. And there's a few things that I think through over when I'm basing that.
The first off is, what is the political climate? I think when you're walking into that situation, these would be a full understanding of is there appetite in the organization to to pursue what you want to do? Do you have the political clout to pursue what you want to do? That climate isn't right. Then you're probably not going to get that support. And as we were just talking about what technical debt, if you just signed up for a big rewrite, now's not the time to come out and ask for the support on something else. So, one is, is the political climate really right?
Two is getting really clear on who the decision-maker is, and people want to be consensus driven, but in the end, one person needs to make a call. I think we're product leaders, and even myself I've struggled is seizing that authority to make the call. I think a big part of it is stepping up and saying, “Hey, I'm going to make this call.”
Third, I guess, is understanding the difference between getting agreement from your partners and getting support from them. You don't necessarily need agreement from them that this is the right thing to do the right way to go: all you need is their support. I think being very frank for that say, “Listen, Sally, I know you don't think this is the right direction to go. This is my call and all I need is your support and these three things from you the next step” So, I think asking for that is really, really important.
Then I think, finally, is a good environment for this is if you've already normed with your team, your peers, your partners, on your principles, on how you want to behave. The idea is around bias for action, doing fewer things better about indecision is the worst decision, which is perhaps my favorite calling and something I get trapped in all the time, even. Then also just acknowledging, is that reversible? Can you try something and go back if it's not working? Those are all, some of the tools or techniques that I use when faced with making a tough decision and asking stakeholders to get support.
Hope Gurion: And a follow up on that, do you prefer, individual discussions to get to either decision or support assessment? Or to try to bring people into a common space to understand the differences or concerns?
Sean Murphy: So, the question is, “Hey, do you go one-on-one to each person or do you try to create a moment where everyone agrees, decided to do something?” and I think depending on the situation, either technique could work. If what's going to move people is emotion and connection maybe to a real tough problem that gets this happening or consumers having, I think taking a group of people through a shared experience, a walk in someone else's shoes can be very motivating and powerful. But barring that scenario, I would otherwise focus on one-to-one individual conversations, hearing the challenges, and then, bringing everyone together afterwards for agreement.
Hope Gurion: Finally, Troy Anderson explains why understanding your stakeholder needs is as critical as understanding your customer needs. When you do, that will supercharge your ability to influence and align because you’ll be able to communicate details and decisions in the language and benefits your stakeholders understand.
Troy Anderson: For aligning other stakeholders in your organization. It's always a mixed bag. It's Forrest Gump box of chocolate. You'd have to understand where your chocolates are coming from. So, if one guy’s nougat, another one's almond and the other one is coconut, you better understand what each of those want. If you don't understand what they want, you can't really come with your message. The key with any sort of alignment issue, is understanding where the other person is. And your job, as a product leader anyway, is to understand the customer. Well, your stakeholders or your customers, sorry. Getting them on board and understanding their perspective, understanding what they're trying to solve, is all about understanding.
The big mistake I've made in alignment is, “Oh, well, the product worked. It hit the outcome. I'm done.” Well, no, because people may not understand. You eliminated a bunch of tech debt. So, what does that mean to the customer? If you haven't put things into the terms, the sales appreciates or finance appreciates, or, your operations doesn't appreciate, it kind of doesn't matter. If you're not recasting your things into their view, then you've, you failed on the internal customer side. And the internal customer, unfortunately, in most organizations is just as important as the external customer. A great way to get them aligned is to actually bring them into customer interviews. And I can tell you, nobody wants to do that. It's not because they don't want to do it. It's just that they get, “I have a bunch of time on my day. And I'd rather solve, a problems max.” If you can get them aligned and you can find the fun environment and you can say, “Hey, this is what we're trying to solve. I'd really like to you to see this and get your perspective on it.” They're a little bit more willing to to go along. But then they are involved in the journey and they see what's going on. Then when you go to check in with your stakeholders, and you put things into their perspectives and one thing to do people, before you have a big meeting with a bunch of people in the room go and meet with each of these people individually. Because, when you come to a group, they all hear it from their own perspective. I think, you know, Aristotle said that that's what he was talking about rhetoric. It's “enthymeme.” So, enthymeme is a big word, E-N-T-H-Y-M-E-M-E which is, essentially you are supposed to let other people fill in the blanks for the words that you say. So, if I say ABCD equals E, that's laying it all out, if you just say A and B, and they fill in C, D, and E. That’s enthymeme. So, but in order to say things in a way that allows people to fill things in by what you're saying, you have to get them on the same page. You don't get them on the same page. They're not going to fill it in even if you do A through E, they may not understand.
Hope Gurion: Who “owns” alignment is not usually not clear in an organization. It’s convenient to say “the CEO” or “the executive team” but I find someone usually has to set up the rigor and processes and it usually comes after a particularly painful bout of misalignment.
Product leaders often find themselves at the epicenter of misalignment. They have to navigate the hard choices of how to invest finite resources to create the experiences that will help their company succeed or fail in pursuit of their company strategy so they are often most incented to force decisions and alignment around those hard choices.
Why is it so important for product leaders to ensure their executives and teams are aligned? For me is pretty simple. It boils down to 3 costs that are too expensive for most organizations and product leaders to want to bear.
The time and energy wasted straying from an unclear or unsupported decision is too costly. It’s costly in terms of that time that could have been spent successfully executing on that decision.
The doubt and lack of confidence in the product leader and/or leadership team’s ability to make decisions and align effectively. It’s very difficult to restore that confidence once it’s eroded.
The dysfunctional precedent it sets from the top for silo’d fiefdoms to persist as everyone continues to act in his or her own interest vs what is best for the customers, investors and employees.
So, let’s not let that happen! There are good, effective techniques to achieve alignment and we’re going to hear more about all of those in our next 2 episodes.
Thank you to Nate, Sean and Troy for the perspectives and wisdom they shared in this episode.
If you’re a product leader seeking alignment with CEO, peers and teams, I’d love to be of help. Contact me on Linkedin, Twitter or schedule an initial consultation with me using the Contact Me page https://www.fearless-product.com/contact.