An interview with Steven Haines, Author of The Product Manager’s Desk Reference.
Steven Haines, Author of The Product Manager’s Desk Reference and one of our speakers at LTP DIGITAL 2022 | USA is a Product Management guru.
Steven Haines is a world-renowned author, speaker, and thought leader in the areas of Product Management and Business Acumen. As the founder of Sequent Learning Networks and the Business Acumen Institute, he has trained tens of thousands of people who work in product management and other functions.
His industry-defining work has contributed to the transformation of mindsets, methods, and corporate competitiveness. Steven’s books include The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (1st – 3rd editions), The Product Manager’s Survival Guide (2nd edition), Managing Product Management (1st and 2nd editions), and The Business Acumen Handbook.
He is passionate about Product Management and driven to inspire Product Management excellence.
Steven caught up with us to share his insights on what he believes makes a successful Product Manager and how we can support the Product Management profession.
What attributes do great Product Managers have?
“There are a number of them and they all exist on several different plains. There are business skills, people skills, and just ‘being’ skills. A PM needs to be able to do customer-based research, competitive analysis, create strategic plans, have a strong vision and strategy, assess logically prioritize opportunities and ideas, complete business cases, construct launch plans, or release plans to work effectively with developers.
The list goes on!
Product Managers are business people first and foremost, so they must hold crucial business attributes if they want to succeed.
But attributes like persistence and passion are needed for Product Managers as well. They need to have the fortitude to express the future possibilities of what a products business can be about. I would use the words resilient, committed, determined to describe those with entrepreneurial underpinnings.
There’s no CEO of your product, but there is a person who thinks about the product non-stop and has the right mindset or mental model associated with it to be the Product expert.
You can talk about it for hours, but there are business attributes and behavioral attributes needed to be a great Product Manager. Business attributes are the mechanics and the things needed to run a business and the behaviors that have been demonstrated to others provide for the stature and the gravitas of that person.”
There is a gap between what people know and what Product people do, how do you distinguish between what they know and what they say they can do?
“First of all, I live in this universe because it is an essence of my own diagnostic process. You have to be able to distil the business of the product into sections that relate to things like customer market insights, strategic planning, and performance management. If you go to a more granular level, you can both learn things in school and through association, from sitting next to people and being on their teams. But doing things means you actually touched the product in some way.
I want to share an interesting story about my daughter. When she was 10 or 11 years old, I used to tell her to go clean the bathroom. I would go and see what the bathroom looked like afterwards, and she would always say “Well, I did what you told me” but she didn’t really do it. I would have to actually show her how to clean the bathroom and do the work.
What this taught me, is that sometimes people can’t bridge the gap between what they believe they know and actually doing the work, which is why there’s huge losses in productivities in companies.
When I’m doing an assessment and there’s an activity statement, I produce a business case for a product. Then there are two rating scales; what people know and what people do in their performance standards. You can then look at a gap between the two.
It’s not the singular activity of perhaps doing the business case, it’s all of the homework that was needed to be completed beforehand in order to produce the business case.
There is a fabulous book called “The Knowing-Doing Gap” by Jeffrey Pfeffer where he profoundly made statements like, “Talking doesn’t produce work. Emails and meetings don’t mean you’re doing the work. There is a difference between that peripheral stuff, and the actual rolling up your sleeves and doing the work.” That is a tremendous problem and challenge for people who want to cultivate Product Management talent.”
How do you identify Product Managers in an organisation that really shouldn’t be Product Managers?
“I will tell you another story. I worked in one particular part of a very large International bank, and there were about 120 people who held the title of a Product Manager.
The Head of Product had a copy of My Desk Reference novel and wanted me to do a diagnostic and assessment of these PM’s. After interviewing them all, I found that only about 10 of the 120 people were actually fit to be Product Managers. He was astounded.
I guide my clients so that they are able to segment a population of people who may appear to be undertaking Product Management to identify whether they are a good fit or not.
If you can decompose the work into its requisite bits and pieces through one of our models, you’re able to better determine what a person is good at and what they are not good at.
Product Managers who are worth their salt can think dynamically because there is a lot of amorphousness. They have to make something out of nothing, and there’s some linearity through processes that are used inside of an organization. Those people who can reconcile those two states of tending to be better Product People. People who like task-oriented work need to be told what to do usually fail to understand the product and the domain.
I remember there was a woman when I worked at the bank who wanted to be a Product Manager. She was so determined to be a Product Manager that she got herself promoted. Unfortunately, she failed.
This highlights a problem in the industry. Product Managers are not falling out of the sky and sometimes, bosses or leadership teams are trying to fill a seat and have somebody there to fill a headcount as opposed to really having the right person.
Sometimes, the bosses or Product Managers never did Product Management or received adequate training, so they don’t even know how to coach and develop a Product Manager who is failing. They may hit some checklist items on their resume but the way they think, act and relate to people, as well as their core business and financial skills are sorely lacking.
The last leg of the stool is that there are companies, especially smaller-to-medium sized software companies, that are very agile-driven. They have defined Product Management through the development process, not through the business management of the products. These people are doing a slice of the job, but not the whole job. They are more like Project Managers, and sometimes they’ll be tagged as Product Owner, but they’re not true Product Managers who are Business Managers of Product.”
How do we support Product Managers to be better?
“Product Managers within the context of a talent pool is our group of people who need to be cultivated over time. It’s a word I use in my book and one I use when coaching my clients.
If you think about a plant, a plant has different stages; you plant the seed, put fertiliser on it, turn the dirt, water it and repeat. That’s a way of growing the person.
There needs to be a progression of work that is scoped out for the development of a person. In a lot of companies, the Product Manager just brought in, hits the ground running and does everything. Well, I lived that. And that was a huge mistake. I should have started out at a lower level, and experienced different things. But I’m a brute force person and the way that I learned is unusual. My effectiveness is also from an unusual place, which is why I was a high performing Product person and why I do what I do today.
You need a talent strategy. One that gathers information, synthesises it, and then looks at developmental opportunities, because one size doesn’t fit all, and one person isn’t like the other.
You need targeted development activities in order to cultivate a person within a talent pool. It’s like influencing people who occupy a market segment; if you’re looking from the outside, there is a segment of people who need to be sliced and diced according to their knowledge, skills, experiences and potential.
Everybody has a different growth path and very often in companies, the bosses are not equipped to do this work. HR people don’t know how to do this work either, so PM’s languish, with untapped potential and don’t belong there. This dilutes the community and makes the practice of Product People appear ineffective.
I know this is a very sharp criticism. I’ve been doing this for a really long time and I think that companies need to start to embrace this if they want Product Management to be a part of their competitive arsenal of being successful in winning share in the hearts and minds of the customers.”
How do we change organizations to support Product Managers better?
“All the Organisational Development people always talk about change and transformation, which implies that there’s some place to aim for. If we can assess where we are, and where we want to go, we can create a path to get there.
Well, that’s easier said than done.
I work with many leadership teams who cannot align or agree on the structure and purpose of Product Management in an organisation. Because they fail to do this, or are not willing too because it means relinquishing some of their functional influence, it’s going to be difficult to evolve a talent pool that is somewhat underserved.
Change or transformation comes in baby steps. I focus on leading Product Management and I do deep dive assessments of the structural components of an organisation that enable Product people to succeed.
That sort of infrastructure needs to be built or fortified in order to have a company with the appropriate Product Managers. Talent management is part of that top down perspective. If you want to change, you got to go figure it out what it looks like.
If I were to do a developmental sprint, the leadership team assigns a sub-team that is responsible for organizing all the job descriptions and accompanying for Product Managers, and then coming up with a leveling hierarchy or heuristics. What are the steps for progression? What work do they have to do? What evidence do they need to demonstrate?
This could take a year or two if you were just leaving them to their own devices. But if you organize it, give them a specific timeframe to work within and who’s responsible for this developmental project, you might actually achieve these milestones by the deadline dates in a quicker time.
People don’t often have a place to put their artifacts, tools, templates, performance data and market research data. Maybe a company needs to build a repository to store stuff, so where do you keep your stuff? What happens when one person goes and another person has to startup? What’s the onboarding scheme? Some companies do this, but many don’t. Statistically speaking, about 1/3 of companies do a great job of it, about 1/3 of companies stink at it, and about 1/3 of companies someplace in the middle.”