Use Context For More Influence - A Podcast

This month I was invited by User Interviews to be on their UX research podcast, Awkward Silences. The theme of our discussion is how designers, PMs, and researchers can wield greater influence in their organizations, through learning about the environment and the context. We talk about understanding decision-making processes (what I call “decision literacy”), translating design work into business impact, and creating the conditions where teams do their best work.

I encourage you to listen (perhaps with your product team!) and bring some of these strategies or exercises back to your day to day.

Highlights include:

• 11:08 Design Skills That Can't Be Replaced by AI

• 15:56 Decision Literacy in Organizations

• 21:42 Surprising Realities of Leadership Meetings

• 24:36 Building Influence Without Organizational Power

• 29:01 Storytelling via Roadmaps Exercise

• 35:47 What Trade Off Are You Most Uncomfortable Making

Listen to the full episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Projecting Expertise

In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Executive Presence 2.0, she breaks down EP as an amalgam of qualities that true leaders exude, a presence that telegraphs you're in charge or deserve to be. Through extensive research and interviews with executives, she has determined that the largest component to EP is gravitas. Gravitas is how you act and affects much of how others perceive your intellect. The ability to project intellect is an important skill for product leaders who are looking to gain respect and cultivate influence. Most product managers have extensive expertise, but they might need some coaching or framing to be able to project that within their organization.

There are a couple ways in which product managers especially should be able to project expertise in their product, users, and objectives.

1. Know your stuff cold. You should know the salient details of your product strategy, user journey, stakeholder requirements, etc. by heart, being able to recount them fluently without much filler or stammering.

2. Be able to go 6 questions deep. Be able to answer questions at the root of the issue or topic - have the context necessary.

3. Read the room. That means tuning yourself out for a moment in order to tune in to the needs and wants of others. Then you can course correct on the spot to establish a connection. You want to make your audience comfortable so that when you speak, they hear you. You aren’t compromising your message, you are calibrating it.

Product managers very rarely lead by position, it is most often through influence, which is based on relationships and expertise. To garner the respect necessary to lead without given authority, product managers must be able to project their expertise and intellect to others in a convincing manner. That is a learned skill all product leaders should develop.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Product team members may not feel like they are experts, despite their extensive knowledge on a subject. (In fact, the well-documented Dunning-Kruger effect shows a cognitive bias exists where people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities, and high performers in the domain tend to underestimate their skills.) Use a stand-up exercise to illustrate to team members that they do have expertise.

Ask team members if they feel like they are an expert in a domain. You’ll likely get a combo of yes and no’s. Then, ask each team member to write down five topics that they could speak on for 10 minutes without any advance preparation. You could have this be open to any topic, or attempt to narrow it to professional topics. This exercise is entertaining to see what topics team members generate (and a good get-to-know-you activity!) but also creates discussion on how easy/hard it was to compile the list. Do they feel like an expert in these domains? Would they be convincing to an audience speaking about these topics?

Types of Innovators

The job of a product team is to solve problems for its users and the business. We might not always think of it in this term, but that problem solving is innovation. Some problems require higher levels of innovation than others, but always that should be a goal of our product teams. A Harvard Business Review article explores the roles we take on during the innovation process, “to identify where specific people are needed and who should work together to generate new breakthrough ideas.”

HBR identified four innovation styles: Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer, Implementer

The research found that generally, these innovation styles are not evenly distributed. The most people were found to be implementers, folks who take action to put solutions into work. The least amount of people were found to be generators, those who find new problems and ideate based on their own experiences.

This is problematic for two reasons. One, the product teams you are working on are likely lack a balance of innovation styles to be insufficiently cognitively diverse. To solve the most wicked problems that rise on your product, you’ll need support from all four of the innovation arenas. And two, the style you are most likely missing is generators. If we aren’t identifying the problems, are we best serving our users?

Bringing this framework to your product team can help the team understand where they might have gaps, and which innovation styles they might need to lean into.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

After they learn about the innovator types (have them read the article, or walk them through the above graphic), ask your team which innovation style they lean toward. Is the distribution the same as the general population? Which areas are missing?

Ask them to think about how to encourage an even distribution of styles on the team, as well as how to create more generators within their team and the organization. Remember that innovation styles are cognitive state, not fixed personalities. How best can you use identifying these styles to create more true innovation on your team? How can you use this to smooth the pain points in your problem solving processes?

AI in Product

Artificial Intelligence is a HOT topic right now. With headlines like “If You Aren’t Using AI, You’re Falling Behind” and “AI is changing jobs across industries” and “Forget about the AI apocalypse. The real dangers are already here” no average person can not be thinking about AI. But as product leaders, we bring a different lens. We need to be thinking through how the ubiquity of AI and machine learning can benefit our users, our processes, our products.

To get your team thinking about how AI might affect them - and generally change the world - try having a stand-up discussion dedicated to it. These YouTube videos can be good thought-starters:
- How Will AI Change the World - a 6 minute TED Ed video
- The Urgent Risks of Runaway AI - a 15 minute TED Talk by Gary Marcus, an AI researcher

Like so many technologies and innovations, there is no one right way to incorporate AI into your product or processes. It is on us as product leaders and within our product teams to learn about the technology and the options available and determine if this will be useful. However, it is also important to understand our team’s hesitancies or excitement about the possibilities. It is hard to maximize the effects of something that you are fearful of. The below prompts can help open up discussion.

And after the discussion, if your team wants to learn more, this free learning path from Google Cloud Skills Boost could be beneficial.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Before stand-up, ask your team to watch one of the videos above that provide an introduction to some AI concepts. At stand-up, focus on how the team feels about the rise of AI, and if they have any fears or concerns.

One way to do this would be to imagine the future a few years from now. Using a whiteboarding platform, they can place themselves along a spectrum of opinion on various parts of AI. Another way could be to just ask open ended questions about their concerns or what questions they have. Likely, you’ll have a wide range of responses, as well as a wide range of familiarity with AI and its concepts.

To add some humor, maybe show your team this meme.

Job/Career Priorities

Job news is everywhere right now. The jobs report was released last week, showing lowest unemployment rate in decades, even as tech companies continue to lay off workers. The Great Resignation that began in 2021 continues, but recent reports have come out citing those who left their jobs feel regret about their decisions. Companies continue to update and mandate return to office policies as the pandemic wanes and a recession looms. All of this can lead to a very charged workplace.

Team morale is an outsized contributor to product team efficiency and outputs. How individuals feel about their employer, their position, their work life contributes greatly to their success on a product team. Even though these larger conversations might not feel like they directly impact a backlog or a sprint, they certainly affect the individuals managing that work.

This graphic by @lizandmollie of how we do and could measure success on the job is telling.

All workplaces are different. And what you need at different times in your life and your career might be met or not by your current workplace. Employees should understand what their true needs are and if the workplace can meet those needs or not, either now or in the future. Sometimes reframing the discussion in these terms can help an employee who was feeling anxious understand their stability; conversely it can also help an employee on the fence decide what is right for them.

This is not to take any responsibility away from the company. As product leaders, we should continue to positively affect the culture of a company in all the ways that we are able, advocating for our team members, their advancement, and their work life quality. Companies should of course be changing and adapting to an evolving workforce as well.

If possible, let’s continue to help contextualize the bigger picture to our product teams, and hopefully create a more stable engaged team by doing so.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Begin by showing your team the above graphic from @lizandmollie. Explain the concept of needs and priorities with a job changing over time or based on life circumstance.

Ask folks to on their own (not publicly) assign a percentage to their career priorities based on the list - Pay, Benefits, Title, Balance, Flexibility, Impact, Passion. Feel free to adjust categories, especially as it makes more sense culturally/regionally - countries with more standardized federal/state benefits might not have that as category, for example. After giving folks time to tally their responses, ask them to move a dot into the bubble that aligns with their number one priority right now. If you feel comfortable generalizing, you can talk about how this might compare to the company’s ability to respond to these needs/priorities.

Encourage folks to talk to their manager about their job priorities if they haven’t already. This is a good exercise to encourage folks to do every 4-6 months, to see if anything has changed for them.