Category: General

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”

As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but it’s also true for inanimate things, like cars, and also things that aren’t things at all, but just, abstract concepts, like “New York State” or “HR”

“Everybody knows if Subscriber Acceleration is involved, our timelines will go out the window.”

This can be a nice way to make our lives more interesting – naming your car as a teenager felt like almost a rite of passage in the early 2000s! – but it carries some risk when we start to let our understanding of how humans interact and work over to more abstract concepts, especially in the workplace or when working with governmental or nonprofit organizations.

“Why can’t Global Avian Legal get their story straight?”

The problem is, when we start to think about “other teams” as singular, seamless atomic units, we start to make some simple mistakes:

  • We assume the whole team has the same opinion on a project or priority
  • We assume everyone on a team has the same knowledge and is equally informed
  • We begin to set up a mental model where teams relate to one another directly

But that’s the thing – teams don’t relate to one another. In some very real way, teams don’t even exist, they’re a collection of people, and people are complicated, and messy, and have differing incentives and mindsets. You can’t talk to a team. You can’t take a team out to coffee. You can only relate to individual humans who are a part of that team.

When I first started at Disney, in my initial listening tour, I asked a senior colleague of mine if he could recommend any books or blog posts that would help me to navigate working at Disney, which felt like a huge battleship compared to the tiny fishing boats I’d worked on before. He recommended Ferrazzi’s now-classic Leading Without Authority (which I would also recommend to any PMs or aspiring PMs!)

One of the pieces that Ferrazzi touches on repeatedly in the book is this idea of listening to pursue co-elevating, his model of finding opportunities to achieve shared successes. “To influence others, you must first build strong relationships,” he says.

The thing is, you can’t build a relationship with a team – only with another person. This is especially important for folks who work across many teams or business units to accomplish big initiatives and build big impactful solutions – you need to find ways to stay grounded to the actual folks doing the work, and push back (in your own mind at least!) on the anthropomorphizing of teams.

The best way to know that it’s time to build a relationship with another person, or to encourage a leader working with you to develop a 1:1 relationship, is when you start hearing people say things like those called out above.

When you yourself, or someone working with you, starts assigning motivations or personality traits to a team, be alert! An opportunity for greater collaboration and clarity awaits if you dig one layer deeper:

“Who on Platform Widgets did you talk to?”

“Who on Subscriber Acceleration usually sets timelines?”

…and then, go talk to that person!

Trombone Oil & Picking Good Problems

There are these three ideas that are coming together for me right now.

We’ve talked about the importance of novel intersections before – how as you explore different areas, texts, content, relationships, you find places where they approach the same problem in different ways, or you find a similar perspective being represented in unexpected ways across industries.

One of the best ways to drive innovation is to get out of the office, and we need to follow that same pattern when it comes to our information and research diets. We have to get out of the standard operating procedure sometimes, and cast a wide net, find other things that are interesting and engaging outside of our professional day-to-day.

(I think this is why we see such a strong correlation between arts and crafts and winning the Nobel!)

When I joined Disney, I read Bob Iger’s book. In this book there are a number of useful take-aways (although it is a pretty classic business guy book), but one rang out to me and has been hanging around my mind since:

“My former boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” ”

Iger in Ride of a Lifetime

It was a little later that I first read the (now classic) Shreyas Doshi piece on the importance of not only identifying customer problems but also seeking to understand how those problems relate to one another.

After you’ve talked to a customer about a specific problem & possible solutions you could build, ask them to stack rank the problem being discussed vs. the other problems they are trying to solve for their business & org. This is where the real truth will emerge.

Shreyas Doshi

And there was the time that ol’ Brian Chesky scared me into learning about product marketing, which brought me to the very smart, very thoughtful, very valuable podcast and books of April Dunford (which I have recommended before and will recommend again!)

One of my biggest takeaways from Dunford’s Obviously Awesome (which was my Work Book of 2023 by the way!) was the importance of framing a product or solution within the broader context of your target customers or market – and being sensitive to the dynamic and shifting nature not just of your own product being developed, but also how the market itself can shift away from established successful frames.

(I know classically we think about positioning as a skillset for product folks working with external customers, but I’ve started using Dunford’s positioning framework with internal platform teams, and it’s been really valuable!)

These are three ideas that are in the same neighborhood, which is of special interest to product folks, which is the area of Problem Assessment. The most important thing a healthy product organization does is ensure that they don’t build the wrong thing, and it’s easy to hyper focus on a solution, on a product, and lose sight of what problems that real people have, that you can help them to solve.

It feels like every team I talk with, someone has a story about working for months on a project, crunching to hit a deadline, and then seeing the delivered product fail to achieve any interest from the market. We want to avoid this!

When we chat with our customers, when we observe the platform landscape of our companies, there will always be things to improve, areas where we might deploy our resources and time. It’s important that we take the above lessons and leverage them to help consider problems from a few different perspective:

  • “Is this trombone oil?” (Assess business opportunity)
    • We want to consider, if we absolutely defeat the problem, if we build out the absolutely best possible solution and become the dominant player in that market, will that be … a big deal? Would it move the needle for our firm?
  • “How does this rank against other problems? (Assess customer pain)
    • When we talk to our customers, do they consistently report that the problem at hand is more important, more urgent, or more painful than the broad landscape of other problems they have?
  • “Can we appropriately frame this problem?” (Assess market understanding)
    • Even if your firm has the product/engineering talent to build out an exceptional solution to a serious problem, do you know enough about your target market to bring the solution to them in a way that will communicate the value in terms and ways that resonate with that market?

Like any discovery exercise, this assessment can go as deep as you can sensibly prioritize: of course, the framing piece can be improved by learning more about a market and audience, the customer rank piece might be dynamic based on who your target customer is, and even the market sizing piece might change given other larger shifts in the macroeconomic landscape (think about the market for AI Assistants only two years ago!)

They also relate to one another: you wouldn’t want to invest a great deal in learning about the appropriate framing for a customer segment if you aren’t yet sure you have a solution to their most painful problems – and ensuring with relative confidence that you have a significant addressable market probably should come before the other assessments.

I hope bringing these different pieces together this can be a helpful lens in considering the different problems that you might work against: if we can avoid trombone oil, and build things that create real value, and solve real problems, that’s a great start!

The Time Brian Chesky Scared Me So Bad I Bought A Book

When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical.

Surprised in part because, AirBNB is a company whose product folks have had a serious impact on me and my own product practice – Lenny of course but also more directly Nick and James from the Transform team (who I got to know during my time in the modern data stack space). To think that a company that produced such thoughtful and successful product folks, was pivoting away from this mindset and methodology (which I’ve built my professional journey on!) was jarring, to say the least.

Was this part of a larger market shift? Was Product Management going the way of the Elevator Operator? Surely a little over-the-top, a dramatic overreaction from a former theater kid. But even so!

A quick Google will give you lots of hot takes and deep dives on what Chesky really meant, and how what they were really doing was shifting from the way that they had found themselves doing product, more intentionally to a revenue- and market-focused direction.

That being said, in hearing the news, my first reflection was more personal – I’ve had the opportunity to work with some world class product marketers, but that part of the overall Product Toolkit was an area where I felt quite weak – not for lack of interest or adjacency, but just, never happened to get around to it!

So, I did the thing any good Product person does when faced with uncertainty; I did some discovery! I reached out to the undisputed most talented product marketing professionals I know, and asked for help.

And help they did – after a few Zoom powered coffee hangouts, I felt as though I had passed through the Dunning Kruger horizon. The depth and complexity of the topic unfolded before me in an exciting (and nervous-making) way, like any topic does once you get close enough.

One aspect of my concern was validated almost immediately: while I had worked closely with marketing teams and marketers, my own toolkit could use some sharpening in this area. So, I set about doing just that sharpening – ingesting a lot of audio and text content, YouTube videos, and overall sort of soaking in the broad Product Marketing Content Ocean – and an ocean it is! There’s no shortage of folks who are happy to opine on the many aspects of the field.

Through this effort I did find two resources to be especially useful and continue to be folks I look to for expertise and value regularly, which I share here:

  • Jason Oakley of Productive PMM – I subscribe to his newsletter, which shares regular quick-hit examples and analysis of interesting things being done in the wild.
  • April Dunford – I will read, write, and listen to anything that April makes! I’ve been so impressed by her thinking, her storytelling style, and her deep and expert analysis. She has a podcast which is a great first stop.

It was through April’s podcast that I first started to think a lot about positioning – not something I had considered with much depth before, but something which, due to the topic itself or perhaps due to April’s natural charisma and engagement around the topic, really drew me in.

I think most folks have the experience of, occasionally, being really taken by an aspect of their own work, some line of thinking or research, or new approach or methodology, that can arise with a sort of renewed energy, a renewal of excitement and a new sort of lens on a great many things that you’ve been doing regularly without much new insight or novelty.

For me, the most recent example of this is positioning – in coming to better understand this line of thought and methodology, I’m find it applying to more and more aspects of my own work.

It has me so fired up, between the great fright that Chesky gave me, and the compelling nature of Dunford’s podcast, I did something I never thought I’d do. I bought a sales book.

I haven’t finished the sales book, but I am already seeing some unexpected intersections of how we thoughtfully market and sell to external customers, and how internal / platform product teams could more thoughtfully represent the value of their partners and work. There’s something here, and I’m stoked to dig in more.

All this to say, if there’s a kerfuffle in your industry, in your place of work, and it makes you nervous or anxious (as Chesky’s shift to Product Marketing did for me) it’s worth sitting with that internal landscape, spending some time interrogating that feeling, maybe having a coffee or two with friends or mentors. You may find there’s something new and exciting behind that anxiety that unlocks a whole new space in your journey.

Forming, Norming, Storming, Performing

Immediately following grad school (I studied Philosophy at SUNY Binghamton), I spent a year in the City of Binghamton, working as an AmeriCorps community organizer.

It was a tough job. I commuted that year exclusively by bicycle. The pay for an AmeriCorps organizer at that time was the median income of the community where we worked, which for the First Ward / North Side neighborhood was $11,000 for the year. There was a mass shooting.

It’s funny how even now, a full decade into working in the technology sector, I am still finding things from my pre-tech professional life to be valuable, and sort of echoing forward to shine some interesting light onto my present work.

Part of the AmeriCorps training was this absolutely monstrous binder, full of pages and pages of notes and printed out slide decks and procedures, and some theory and best practice, and maybe also some political cartoons, if my memory serves.

In that binder was a primer on Tuckman’s Stages , which are a mental model to the way that groups evolve and shift over time – through predictable, identifiable, and independently understand-able stages of existence. Forming, Norming, Storming and Performing.

(They’re well named, you don’t really need to read the Wikipedia page to grok the rest of this post – but it is a good read!)

At the time, my professional focus was a program called the Neighborhood Assemblies, an effort of City Hall to create some direct democracy inputs into the budgeting and policy processes for the city, and being able to see the different assemblies through this lens was very helpful – especially, for me, seeing how a certain amount of tension, and conflict, could be a productive ingredient in the overall recipe of a successful group’s navigating its way through Storming toward Performing.

Since then – through WordPress.com, Akismet, WooCommerce, dbt Labs, and now Disney Streaming, having this lens through which to understand how a team, or a division, or a whole company, is generally doing, has been really surprisingly helpful for me.

It’s a nice lens because it offers a certain capacity to zoom in and out – a particular team may be highly performing even within a larger department which is possibly still norming or storming. I have found it helpful to help frame groups as small as two – especially since, as some of you have heard me say to an annoying degree, teams don’t have relationships, people do.

I’ve found these stages to be really powerful in conjunction with some of the insights from Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, where we can place a lot of how he describes organizational disruption and its causes squarely into the ways and whys teams and departments degrade from Performing back into the earlier stages.

If you work in Product, this can be a really valuable mental model, and I’d recommend leaning into it, regardless of your level or area of remit. If you work cross functionally or in a role that depends on multiple teams working together, and having an understanding of how to understand and improve organizations could be valuable for you, then you too could benefit from learning a bit more here.

Not all lessons echo forward through a whole career, and this might not be a tool that’s valuable for you for the next twenty years – but it’s been really helpful for me, to understand the teams I work with (and on!) and to help communicate with those teams and their leaders how they might move forward toward that coveted Performance stage!

Joining a Giant Company: Three Concerns

I started working for The Walt Disney Company in August of 2021 – it has 190,000 employees. The Walt Disney Company’s employee base is roughly the same size as the biggest city I’ve ever lived in.

(that’s Providence, RI, by the way)

As a younger man I did work for larger organizations – The Federal Government (roughly 2 million employees) and Starbucks (in the neighborhood of 350,000 employees) – but that was in some ways a different professional landscape. I was an AmeriCorps community organizer, I was a part time barista, whereas at Disney I’m a Proper Professional, I have a letter/number designation

(P4! Senior Product Manager II!)

I have to navigate the workings of the organization to accomplish my goals in a way that is different from those other jobs.

Since becoming a tech professional, I’ve worked at two organizations prior to Disney – Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Tumblr, where I was employee number 130-something, and dbt Labs, where I was employee number 42. While these were both undoubtedly tech companies, in the same broad industrial space as Disney’s tech arm, I did have my concerns about shifting my professional context from the startup space to the established enterprise space.

(even just considered by itself, Disney Streaming Services, the arm where I work, is larger than dbt Labs and Automattic combined)

That’s what this post is about – what those concerns were, and how they’ve played out so far. Note that I’m just about seven months in, and I still have a lot to learn, and some of the following may turn out to be inaccurate, or maybe overly optimistic!

Concern: A big company won’t be as flexible or as energetic as a startup.

This concern, I’d say, is partially correct. I think maybe what I’ve found to be more important is, figuring out what I really value at work. That is to say, there is some part of working at a startup, of always having nine hats and a dozen projects to juggle, the constant uncertainty and balancing act of this vs that, of some weeks where you feel like you’ll never get to grab a breath – there is a part of me that really is temperamentally inclined toward that way of working, and the intensity of the relationships you develop in that environment.

What I’m coming to see now, though, is that I am not sure that I particularly like that part of myself; to be in a constant state of reaction and forward momentum at all costs can be thrilling, but it isn’t necessarily good for you, or your marriage, or your mental health. It might not even be particularly good for your career – more on that later.

The flexibility piece, I think I have been surprised by: I am able to operate in some ways more flexibly at a larger organization, because, and this may be especially notable for a Product Manager, who has to work across departments and functions quite a lot to get basic things done, you have so many more degrees of freedom. When you’re at an organization of 48 people, there are very few decision makers, very few paths to success for any given proposal or suggestion – when you have dozens of departments and directors to chat with, the opportunities for creative solutioning open up in ways that I had not ever expected.

Concern: I will be stifled and stymied by suffocating adherence to The Process.

Another sort-of-true, sort-of-not concern here. There are times when I do feel some pining for the faster cycles and lower organizational overhead of my earlier startup jobs – but I also think that the trade off makes sense, as an organization gets larger, and the pieces become more complex to place correctly, and the timelines and dependencies multiply exponentially, of course you need more scaffolding and structure to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.

There are also times though, especially on a Thursday afternoon, when the week’s Zoom Fatigue is really settling in, that getting a checklist of super clear action items from someone that outline exactly how to move my project forward, can be a balm on this PM’s decision-blasted brain. Sometimes it can be nice to not have to generate generational change in an explosive way at will, and instead, write the doc, and set up the meeting, have the simple satisfaction of a mildly productive day.

Concern: Working at a giant organization won’t allow for the kind of rapid career advancement that a startup can offer.

This one I feel may be right, depending on how you think about career advancement.

Part of it has to do with titles vs toolboxes (and there’s probably a longer post in here that I can loop back to later) – there’s also something here wrapped up in the book Peak (by Anders Ericsson, I had to search my own site to find, shockingly, that I haven’t written about this book already!)

That is to say, joining an early stage startup can represent a huge title gain – you can jump to a level that possibly wouldn’t be accessible to you otherwise. This can be amazing for your career, especially if you’re trying to make a lateral or business-area kind of shift (see my own move from data org to product org, in fact!)

But what it doesn’t afford you, the high stress, high energy, mostly-reactive world of a growth stage startup, is much space for reflection and repetition – since you’re doing, nearly by definition, new things all the time, and learning just-enough on the fly to move onto the next brand new thing it can be really challenging to build meaningful mental models around how to do the work itself, in a way that is sustainable and excellent – what I’m calling here the toolbox.

Whereas working at a larger org, with lots of folks in similar roles, with semi overlapping experience, can offer the kind of community of practice that you’ll struggle to find at a smaller org – notably in Product, where there tend to be few professionals, and they don’t typically have built-in opportunities to peer mentor or skillshare.

I don’t mean to say that this is a pure binary – it’s probably a sliding scale, and I’m sure there are some orgs that offer access to both title and toolbox. I also don’t mean to imply that one is better than the other – they’re both growth, but certainly different kinds of growth, and choosing one or the other (like many things!) is an exercise in trade-offs.