Principles for a product head-start

My first product was a mess. A CMS…

One that I had started to work in as a content editor in a small EdTech company. My struggles were real for so many of my colleagues and customers trying to publish and search engine optimize their content, so I started finding ways to make our lives easier. I dipped my toes into product management and had a supportive environment to make it happen. Then, like today, my grit to solve messy, exciting problems pushed me further into product.

Hi, I’m Diana, and I’m running Product Grit. Over the past 10 years I’ve worked in Product Management and Business Transformations in scale-ups and established companies within cloud communications, productivity, marketing technology, ecommerce, and I’ve experience the mad ride of product in teams with different cultures, ambitions, leadership and competencies. I’ve been lucky to learn from inspiring people leaders, mentors and insanely talented PMs in my teams and I want to give back to the community, learn, challenge myself continuously.

My vision for Product Grit is to create healthy product cultures where teams thrive and deliver value consistently.

To achieve that, I’m working side-by-side with product leaders and teams to support them in levelling up their product strategy, craft, ways of working to help them get set up to succeed.

In my everyday product work through the years readings like Inspired, Hooked, Continuous discovery habits gave me confidence in my craft, helped cement my beliefs and progress as a product leader. I have had my fair share of agile process focus, Scrum certifications that I now feel very ambivalent about, before I developed convictions and practices of good product management. The good, the bad, the ugly of products I’ve built and enabled over the years helped me tailor my method to the maturity, culture and competences of the companies I work with.

Here are some of my product management beliefs. None are original, neither should they be. There’s definitely room for better products out there, and the more we help each other level up our craft, the better for all users.

Purpose-first

This is about finding a meaningful problem to solve that customers care about that and has a positive impact on the world. In a product organization context, I believe in principled leadership: a strong company purpose and product leadership that attract good people, that keep people engaged when times are tough (surprise - product is hard!) and give that ‘hell yeah’ feeling when looking at results, feeling it’s all worth it. Purpose keeps teams anchored, honest about progress towards their goals and creates more persistent engagement in a product culture.

Bias for action

This is very much inspired by the Amazon leadership principles of making decisions without complete information. I see it as one of the foundational attitudes of being truly agile in product development: jump at the problem with enthusiasm, explore solutions cheaply and scrappily, reduce risk of your deliveries and evaluate outcomes continuously . At the product team level, I see this as ‘the’ key self-starter attitude to jump at opportunities, get the essential information and get learnings quick. I see many teams stuck in discoveries or letting the method drive their priorities instead of wanted outcomes. I encourage them to come back to their purpose, what they are trying to solve, explore options quickly and just go for it. With a bias for action more learnings happen quicker and less risky.

Radical candor

As a product leader, empathy has helped me see opportunities, build rapport and adapt my coaching. At the same time, it’s easy for it to slip into flattery, passive listening or compromises on healthy and reasonable expectations on what is a rather complex role (specifically thinking here of managing PMs). I then realized that only when empathy is coupled with honest, timely, direct feedback from a position of care it allows to pierce through shields, allow some discomfort and painful learnings. I follow Kim Scott’s Radical Candor series and you should too. I’m still working my way to being naturally direct at expressing feedback, but I’m getting there.

Results matter

One of the business unit leaders of an established company I worked with used to conclude their quarterly results call with ‘Results matter, everything else is just conversation’. I was intrigued at the time, and the high achiever in me gloated - thinking of results as hard numbers, needles moving, charts on PowerPoints. I now realize that the results are sometimes the conversation and the sum of learnings. I believe in incremental progress towards big ambitious goals, more important than achieving the Nirvana state, and I do believe in accountability and keeping oneself honest about results. 

Grit

Finally, it’s about grit. I see it as persistence with accountability, following through despite adversity, with cautious optimism about the bigger picture. To me, modelling that as a product leader means being uncompromising, insisting on high standards when it comes to the value delivered to customers, being humble, present and showing the way in the pivotal moments of building the product. It may mean working side-by-side with a product team on a high impact initiative, course correcting an initiative, an uncomfortable performance improvement plan or admitting you’ve been wrong and showing opportunities to make it better.

If you think alike - or not! - and want to share learnings, drop me a line.