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.

---

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?

Financial Literacy for Product Managers

While product managers are not required to have the in-depth knowledge of accounting that their finance stakeholders and counterparts do, it is worthwhile to have a good understanding of financial principles – to both increase competency and fluency, and to affect product strategy. Depending on the organization that a product manager is in, they may also need to build business cases for new product investments. And at some point, maybe a product manager wants to break into the rapidly-growing Fintech industry. Regardless, financial literacy can help a product manager in a couple areas.

Product Managers need to understand their contribution to an organization’s success

Understanding how the product contributes to an enterprise’s revenue, expenses, profits and cash flow provides the context that a product manager needs to see how their product might be prioritized at the enterprise level. Most companies have multiple products that are competing for resources, so that context is important. And financial acumen enables Product Managers to align their product strategies with the broader financial goals of the organization, creating a better aligned relationship between product development and business objectives.

Product Managers can get insights from competitors’ finances

Understanding competitors’ performance and trends can help a product manager orient their product in the marketplace. For public companies, there is much useful information in the public filings that must be disclosed. This can help create a picture of where competitors are investing and what their product roadmap could look like.

Product Managers need to speak the language of decision makers

Understanding how decision makers in an organization speak - in terms of how a product affects revenue or expenses or what a feature’s ROI is - gives credibility to a product manager. It unlocks better conversations with stakeholders and executive leadership, whether those conversations are around budget approvals, resource allocation, or strategic partnerships. This can help a product manager secure what's necessary for the product's success.

Financial Terminology to know:

Revenue - Also called "sales" or "income," revenue is the total amount of money earned from selling a product or service. This forms the top line of the income statement.

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) - All the direct costs associated with producing or delivering a product or service. This includes materials, labor, and manufacturing overhead.

Gross Margin - Gross margin is the difference between revenue and COGS. It is one of the most important numbers in finance, guiding pricing and profitability decisions. It’s also used to evaluate a company’s profitability and efficiency in producing and selling its products.

CapEx (Capital Expenditure) – Upfront investments that provide value over the long term – most often tangible items like facilities, equipment, but also can be things like research & development expenses or enterprise software. CapEx appears on the balance sheet and is depreciated over the years that asset is in service.
OpEx (Operating Expenditure) – Ongoing costs required to run the business day-to-day. This is expenses like employee salaries, marketing spend, subscriptions, and utilities. OpEx hits the income statement immediately as the costs are incurred.
PM Note – whether a proposed project uses CapEx or OpEx spend can impact how it is funded and when it is scheduled. Knowing what you need and when can help secure buy-in from Finance.

Net Present Value (NPV): The difference between the current value of cash inflows and outflows over a period of time is known as Net Present Value. The NPV is a calculation used to determine the feasibility of a proposed investment or project.

Return on Investment (ROI): This is a classic financial metric measuring the payoff of an investment. ROI calculates the net profit or cost savings relative to total dollars invested.
PM Note - Product managers rely on ROI estimates to build the business case for features or products under consideration. Prioritizing ideas that deliver the highest ROI ensures efficient allocation of engineering resources.

Profit and Loss (PnL): The profit and loss statement is a financial statement that summarizes sales, expenditures, and expenses over a specific period, usually a fiscal quarter or year.

Break-Even Point: A break-even analysis determines the point where revenue equals total costs, resulting in no profit or loss. This calculation tells you when you might start making a profit.

Payback period: This represents the amount of time needed to recoup an investment through its generated cash flows. It’s a metric emphasizing speed of capital recovery from investments.

Amortization / Depreciation: Both are calculation methods that smooth out expenses over time on a balance sheet. Amortization is a method of calculating the expense (cost) of an intangible asset that reduces in value over time. Depreciation is expensing a tangible (fixed) asset as it is used.

Earnings Per Share (EPS) - The portion of a company’s profit allocated to each outstanding share of common stock. EPS is a key metric for investors evaluating financial performance and impacts shareholder confidence and valuation.

Financial fluency, similarly to good negotiation skills, is a necessary tool in a product manager’s toolbox. Financial insight is key when exploring new markets or strategic shifts, ensuring decisions are not only innovative but also financially sound. And all that contributes to a more effective product strategy.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Product Managers should learn more about how to read financial statements – balance sheets, cash flow statements, and 10-K filings. Then the PM should build a rough estimate of their product’s revenues and expenses.
To begin:

- compile known operating expenses like development costs, sales and marketing costs, plug-ins/subscriptions, etc.

- check with the finance team if there are additional allocations to the product line (for example indirect costs from HR, IT, etc.) that you might not know about

- compile the product’s revenue using existing income statements or PnL statements, or additional analysis of product metrics

Once the PM has a rough estimate of a product’s revenue and expenses, review it with the product team. Ask the team to project what future financials might look like given assumptions or trends or market information. If everyone on the team can be speaking the same language in regards to the product’s financial impact and viability, it contributes to a more unified overall product strategy.

Extra credit: Look into your competitor’s finances. Project their future and see how you stack up.

Hosting a Successful Meeting

Product teams host countless meetings, both in and out of the Agile ceremonies. There are workshops, brainstorming sessions, stakeholder read-outs, initiative discussions, user feedback sessions, and many more. Product leaders bring people together to share ideas and create results. Being able to host an effective meeting is a skill any product manager should be adept at.

Purpose
The most important part of a meeting is knowing why you are there. Every gathering should have a crystal-clear purpose, more than the general category of meeting. For example, “one-on-one” is not a purpose.

Effective naming of the meeting can be one way to communicate its purpose. By naming the gathering on the invitation and repeating the name in reminder emails, you create a sense of belonging before anyone enters the (virtual) room. Names can create social contracts. The best names help us understand our role at the event and help us to understand that we’re a part of something.

Even small nuances in naming are noticeable and important: Update is different than discussion; Workshop is more structured than brainstorm; Catch-up is more casual than one-on-one.

Think through your naming – how can you convey the most information, have the attendees feel not only that they belong but that they are true participants in the purpose.

Attendees
Priya Parker, in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, states: “Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering.” 

Think through who will help fulfill and forward the purpose, and who will not. Who are you inviting out of obligation? Different organizations have different cultural norms around meeting attendees - learn your organization’s unwritten (or written) rules here, but also be willing to stretch them make it work for your gathering. My current organization is a consensus organization that loves to share information, so often invites will get forwarded to additional attendees. For more structured or meaningful gatherings, it might be a good idea to turn off this feature in Outlook or put a note in the invite to not do so.

Format
The attendees should be prepared for the format of the meeting. Are you sharing materials in advance that they need to read / prepare comments on? Should they come prepared to engage or will they be mostly listening and then walking away with homework? Are multiple people hosting or presenting materials?

Think through the before, during, and after. Will you need tools like whiteboards if in person, or a prepped Miro template if virtual? Do you want to do a poll or survey during the meeting? How will you follow up on any ideas or action items after the meeting?

During the Meeting
Priya Parker is adamant to resist the urge to start your meeting with logistics or reminders. Instead launch in a way that sets the tone for the rest of your time together. If this is a team that meets often or a meeting that occurs at a regular cadence, consider creating a ritual that sets the stage. This is why radio shows and podcasts have theme songs - it alerts listeners that the content is starting and cues them to listen more attentively. (For one of my recurring meetings, this is as simple as sharing a Miro board link in the chat. As soon as I do that, the chitchat ceases and we are down to business.)

Involve participants in the meeting by asking for help. When you help contribute to something, you feel a part of it - so even though we are afraid to burden folks by asking for help, this can be beneficial for all involved. The asks can be very low stakes - ask someone to record the meeting, or share a link, or pass out sticky notes if you are in person. These micro-moments help move us toward belonging.

Throughout the meeting, promote debate and meaningful interactions. Look for a healthy tension as people discuss ideas. If you shy away from difficult topics, you might not arrive at the best solution, or let all diverse perspectives be heard. Parker says, “Good controversy can make a gathering mattering more,” and it can certainly make it more memorable.

Ending
Just as you begin intentionally, end intentionally. What can a deliberate conclusion look like? One way is to simply plan enough time for attendees to reflect on the meeting and what happened.

Part of leaving the meeting space, especially for longer gatherings or workshops, is prepping to reenter the world. Ideally you made a new space, and it will feel like a departure to leave it. So how can we connect this gathering to the day-to-day? How can a part of this event or these learnings stay with attendees? Parker states: “Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.”

After the meeting, be sure to follow up on any action items and distribute artifacts that were created. Depending on the meeting, these actions could happen once, soon after conclusion, or multiple times over the course of days or weeks.

The only way to improve your meeting hosting / leading skills is to practice. Luckily, product teams provide many opportunities to do just that. Trainings and reflection activities can also help bolster this skill. See below for a stand-up activity that does just that.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

In preparation, have your team review Priya Parker’s blog, or even better, read her book: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Ask the team to reflect on intentional and meaningful gatherings they have been a part of, whether virtually, hybrid, or in-person. Look for similarities of these events, and what can be learned or replicated. How can they take these elements back to their own meetings?

Supporting Introverts on Product Teams

Extroversion is praised within American (and similar) society. People who speak the most, process thoughts out loud, or are very social often get a lot of attention, and it is typically positive. They often appear more confident or assertive. Extroversion can be a proxy for competency.

But it wasn’t always this way. In Susan Cain’s book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking,” she traces the history of valuing extroversion to the changing society of the industrial revolution. American values shifted when we moved from distributed agricultural communities and migrated into larger metropolitan areas. As members of small, close-knit communities centered around farming and family, society placed value on inward traits like work ethic, integrity, and kindness. But the new industrial cities created more anonymous environments, and the ability to stand out or have your individual ideas heard became more important. Extroversion was realized as a positive trait. (Susan Cain also has an excellent TED Talk on the power of introversion.)

Introversion and extroversion may be opposites, but most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between them. The exact middle would be defined as an ambivert, a true balance of either end. Introversion or extroversion also may depend on a person’s environment or familiarity with a group.

Regardless, the goal of a product team is to empower all members of the team to actively contribute. We are also always looking for team members bringing a variety opinions and outlooks, and having a diverse team in terms of personalities is beneficial. Having introverts on the team can balance the more outspoken personalities. Introverts can also bring a level of thoughtful deliberation and depth of perspective, where extroverts may be quicker to act.

However, just having diverse personalities on the team is not enough - you must accommodate everyone’s communication styles to encourage their participation. In addition to psychological safety, there are other ways to create a more inclusive experience for all personalities, especially in our meeting-centric business environment. Generally these accommodations lead to more thorough and thoughtful discussions and decision-making.

• Collaboration Tools - I am a huge proponent of Miro, but any collaborative virtual space can do the trick if it provides real-time commenting in multiple modes. Polling during a meeting can also be helpful here.

• Collective Brainstorm prior to discussion - Many of my stand-up prompts follow a similar format of asking a question of the team, providing an opportunity to answer individually (usually through stickies on a board) and then coming back together to discuss. Even if all ideas don’t get discussed, they are usually all read, and will be recorded in meeting artifacts.

• Agendas! - Letting meeting attendees know what topics will be discussed or what decisions will be made provide those people who need a longer deliberation time to do so prior to the meeting starting.

• Asynchronous “meetings” - Beginning a dedicated discussion thread via Teams or Slack allows team members to answer once they are confident, or to decide on the correct wording before sharing.

• What else? Brainstorm more accommodations with your team through the stand-up exercise below.

And, perhaps one of the best considerations of all personalities is simply making space for them. Paying attention to the different needs and preferences of everyone - and valuing those individual differences - creates a culture of respect and acceptance within the team. That leads to better team health, and happier team members - regardless of personality.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask your team to take an introversion/extroversion quiz to see where they might fall on the scale. I had my team use this one from TED.

In our stand-up, we discussed results by polling based on the quiz result. Then, they answered the question of their own accord, placing a dot on a spectrum of where they felt they landed between extrovert and introvert both in their professional life and their personal life. Discussing how these roles flipped for folks between the two environments was very interesting.

We ended with a brainstorm and discussion prompted by the question “How can we better accommodate team members along all points on the scale in meetings / ceremonies / work streams?” The goal is to incorporate those ideas into our product team meetings.

Control versus Accomplishment

Employee burnout continues to be on the rise, with more than 50% of US workers experiencing at least moderate burnout. As a product leader, keeping a pulse check on your team members can help you spot burnout tendencies before they arise.

There are several risk factors to burnout:

1. Workload - everything you are responsible for, along with the access to the resources and support you need to meet those responsibilities

2. Control - your ability to direct or change your own work, setting your own goals and boundaries (can you say no to a request)

3. Reward - are you receiving recognition, opportunities, a sense of accomplishment, or simply positive feedback for your work

4. Community - a psychologically-safe environment, where you feel supported and connected, unafraid to show up authentically. Additionally, is the community consistent and fair, or reflect your values.

Three symptoms characterize workplace burnout:

• Exhaustion

• Cynicism (including distancing yourself from work)

• Inefficacy (or feelings of incompetence / lack of achievement)

Being transparent with your product team about what contributes to burnout and if your team is feeling any of the symptoms can help identify where changes might need to be made. It is important to note that while personal factors may complicate or compound burnout, it is by definition a workplace phenomenon. It is about the systems, structures, and demands of the workplace, not the individual employees.

There are many ways to pulse check with your team. The below is based on a weekly survey by Boston Consulting Group that they instituted while experimenting with predictable/mandatory time off. Awhile back I wrote about a tool called Care that provides a questionnaire as well as actionable insights. Regardless of how you do it, these discussions with your team should be a regular part of product team health check-ins.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Using a survey or the matrix below, ask your team a series of questions based on two factors - control and accomplishment. These are two of the major risk factors when it comes to employee burnout. For control, ask how much predictability or stability team members might have regarding their workload and their schedules. For accomplishment, ask how much value they feel they are providing or if they’ve learned something useful lately. Understanding where team members fall on these axes can provide some insight to their potential levels of burnout.

To push the exercise further, ask team members what type of activities or interactions provide them the largest sense of accomplishment. Potentially think about answers on a timescale of daily, weekly (or by sprint), quarterly, etc. Are there ways you can facilitate or cultivate more of those types of activities?