Listen now!

In this episode:

• What can you do when your boss will only communicate with you through angry text messages?
• How can you leverage meeting minutes to get more from the meetings you attend?  And should you?
• What will it take to improve your intuition?

Listen now!

Resources:

Transcript:

Tom: Now, your boss is embarrassed because, A, he looked stupid in front of a client, and, B, he looked stupid in front of his boss. Nobody wants that, so his natural reaction is to try and find a way to get out of that situation. So what do you do? Well, first thing I’m gonna do is find a thousand reasons that it’s not my fault, right? And before you go and make that list of the thousand reasons your boss is absolutely, undeniably, unquestionably wrong, if you’ve already done that, don’t email that to the CEO and your boss. It’s not gonna help you. Seriously.

Male: [00:00:38] “Becoming a Geek Leader,” season 3, episode 10.

Tom: [00:00:44]

Sponsored by BrightHill Group’s Team Leadership Services

Dysfunctional teams are painful and cost you time and money. They also suck the life out of you and take the fun out of work. How about your team? Is it time for a tuneup? How prepared is your team for the challenges ahead? I can help create a simple development process for your team members, something easy for you to use, not another project for you to manage. Growth doesn’t happen by accident. Whether it’s through a leadership assessment or helping you plan a leadership retreat, give me a call to talk about how to set up an affordable program to improve your team’s teamwork and help your team members perform like a well-oiled machine. Check out brighthillgroup.com/geektraining. That’s brighthillgroup.com/geektraining for quick videos on my team building and leadership retreats. Then give me a call at 240-668-4799. That’s 240-668-4799.

Introduction

[00:01:49] Welcome to the “Becoming a Geek Leader” podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the “Becoming a Geek Leader” podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

[00:02:11] In today’s episode, I’m talking about a tool that can help your projects be significantly more productive. I’ll teach you the five steps that are gonna let you multiply your project results. I’m also addressing a question from Giovita [SP] about a boss who’s managing by text messages, and I’m also sharing John Maxwell’s law of intuition. And we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover. Let’s get started.

Mentoring segment.

Male: [00:02:35] In the “Mentoring” segment, Tom tackles tough issues based on his years of experience.

Tom: [00:02:45] Okay, in the “Mentoring” segment today, I’m talking about meeting minutes. Now, I know that that sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry, but I’m telling you there’s a lot of value here. Leveraging meeting minutes is something you’re gonna be able to tackle when you’re at level 2 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

Male: [00:03:03] Level 2, team member. Level 2 is where you work well with others, and together, you all succeed.

Tom: [00:03:13] And I know when it comes to meeting minutes, an awful lot of people think this is like watching paint dry or some other mind numbing thing, but I will tell you that I’m actually passionate about it. Why in the world would I be passionate about something as boring as being a meeting secretary? Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned while being a part of a formal meeting setting it is that decision-making is rare, and capturing decisions made is critical. Whoever writes the meeting minutes is the one writing history. Whoever writes the history controls the record.

[00:03:47] Now, as I’m getting started here, I wanna say something very clearly and very directly. If you’re responsible for keeping meeting minutes, do not lie. Never lie. Lying is a sure path to destroying your reputation, and you just shouldn’t do it, period. Don’t lie. Now, with that out of the way, being truthful doesn’t mean that you can’t choose to document things in a way that suits your interests. Now, let’s say you’re in a meeting where a lot of things are discussed and not very many decisions are actually being made. You got into a ton of rabbit trails and off-topic discussions. There was even a rant by one person on their favorite complaint that had absolutely nothing to do with the meeting, and you walk out of the room and you think, “Man, what a complete waste of time. We only talked about two of the seven things that I wanted to talk about.”

[00:04:35] Now, does that sound familiar? We can address meeting management in a future podcast, but let’s talk about what did happen during that meeting. So for item 1, let’s say you had unanimous agreement about next steps. Everybody kind of nodded their head, “Yup, we should definitely do that.” For item 2, there were two objections raised, and both, you know, can be fixed. But you didn’t get complete agreement. Everybody but two people agreed. Then you got to item 3 on your agenda, and that’s when you brought up the topic that just destroyed the meeting. Nobody could agree. And not only that, but people got fired up. People got angry and upset and frustrated. And after that, there was no agreement on anything, and the agenda was completely destroyed in the process.

[00:05:18] What do you do if you’re responsible for your meeting minutes for that kind of meeting? Well, first, you need to write the meeting minutes. You got to write them up. And you got agreement on one item, write that first item you got agreement on, and that needs to be documented. For item 2, you were able to document that while there were issues raised by Lisa and Julio, there was a general agreement about the direction that you needed to move, and you note that you’ve taken action item to follow up with Lisa and Julio individually to see if you can get their buy-in. It’s as simple as that.

[00:05:51] Now, here’s the thing. With item 3, you got that far, and it’s clear the team does not have a go-forward plan today. In fact, item 3 definitely is gonna need a special meeting on its own. It might even be too big. You might have to break item 3 down into multiple pieces in order to get places where you can find agreement from others. So you take an action item to schedule a follow up meeting dedicated to item 3 in the near future. Now, there’s no way to spin it other than to say, “You’ve got work to do after this meeting.” No question. But you documented what did happen and you framed it in a positive way. Now, framing it in a positive way is important. The conqueror Napoleon said leaders are dealers in hope, and you’re a leader here. It’s your job to deal in hope to the team and for your boss as well.

[00:06:41] So just as a quick recap, there are five steps to getting huge value from creating the meeting minutes. First, actually write the minutes. Write them down, and you positively document all the things that can be seen as positive from the meeting. Whatever it is that could be seen as positive, you find a positive way to express it. Two, you document the decisions that were made. So you write the minutes. You document the decisions. Three, you document areas where more work is needed. Fourth, you identify who is gonna take the action and when, if possible, when it’s gonna happen as well. So you write the minutes. You document decisions made. You document areas where more work is needed. You identify who is gonna take action and hopefully when. And then fifth, you send out the meeting minutes.

[00:07:28] Now, when you email the Word document out or the link to the document out, you say, “Here are the minutes from the meeting. Please let me know if I made any mistakes or if I’ve forgotten anything.” Now, I can tell you from experience that you will almost never hear back from anybody, but that’s okay because what’s happened now is if there’s a question about what did we decide during the meeting, you go back to the meeting minutes and that’s the official record. Now, you might think, “I’m not the meeting organizer. There’s no way I can keep the meeting minutes. It’s not my role.” But if you’re not the meeting organizer, you can still take the minutes. All you have to do is offer. You go to the organizer and you say, “I think we’d benefit from having meeting minutes. Would it be okay with you if I acted as scribe and I created them? I’ll be glad to send them to you so you can send them out.” Look, as long as you do a decent job and you’re helping that meeting leader accomplish their goals, they will welcome your help.

[00:08:26] Now, there’s too much for me to cover in a single “Mentoring” segment of the podcast, but if you’re interested in more, you can check out my free lesson on simply effective meetings, where I talk about meeting management, meeting minutes, and more. If you go over to brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, that’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, you can get immediate access to a free course on meetings that includes minutes and strategies to improve participation and templates for meeting agendas and for meeting minutes also. Creating meeting minutes is a powerful way to help you make progress on your projects, and that’s today’s “Mentoring” segment.

Coach’s Mailbox.

Male: [00:09:05] In the “Coach’s Mailbox” segment, Tom answers a direct question from a listener. Want Tom to answer your question? Just send an email to coach@brighthillgroup.com. That’s coach@brighthillgroup.com.

Tom: [00:09:26] What do you do when your boss is not handling things well? Now, this question is something you can deal with when you’re at level 2 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader. In today’s “Coach’s Mailbox” segment, I’ve got an email from Giovita. Giovita writes, “Tom, I’m hoping you can help me. My boss is making me crazy. He was at an offsite meeting with senior leaders and a client. All of a sudden, he starts sending me angry text messages basically blaming me for a problem. The CEO had called our department out in front of the client for screwing up. As I looked into the problem, I learned that what he was upset about didn’t actually happen at all the way he thought it did. We didn’t screw up, and he was upset about nothing. His angry text messages made me and the team scramble over a complete fire drill waste of time. What can I say to my boss?”

[00:10:19] Well, Giovita, that’s a tough situation. And we don’t know exactly what happened, but I’ve been in your situation before, and I’ve also been at the table for these leadership meetings, too. I can only speculate about what happened with your boss, but I’ve got a pretty good guess about what might have happened. A lot of times, leaders don’t have the details at their fingertips. And sometimes, they carry forward what they thought they heard, and they tell a story they’re pretty sure is right. And one possibility here is that your CEO is afraid of looking bad to the client. And so he thought he heard your department drop the ball. And then in the meeting, he says out loud what he thinks is true, and essentially throws your boss under the bus.

[00:11:04] Now, I’m gonna just take a moment and say it’s important to realize how most of us who ever found ourselves in a leadership position actually got into that leadership position. Most of the time, we were talented individual contributors, and as we established a pattern of getting stuff done, we found ourselves responsible for bigger and bigger stuff, until we’re put in charge of a team. Now, if our team delivered, we get promoted again. So what that means is that people in charge are often more focused on tasks and getting stuff done than they are on leading people. And it also means we may not be aware of what it takes to lead people well. And what’s even worse is the average manager is in position for 10 years before getting any training on people or on leadership.

[00:11:53] And that’s why, many times, bosses are not great at dealing with people. And that’s why your CEO may have chosen to throw your department under the bus. So, let’s take just a minute and put yourself in your boss’ position. He’s found himself, all of a sudden, under a bus. And what’s worse is he doesn’t actually know if the bus belongs on top of him. It’s conceivably possible that you and the team did screw up. He doesn’t know. And this is a situation that as Steven Colbert, the comedian, calls truthiness. It might be true. It also might not be true. And it’s possible that it’s true, and because now someone in authority, the CEO, said it, it’s even truthier than before.

[00:12:38] Here’s the thing. Now, the facts don’t matter because regardless of the actual facts, this became a factoid because it was repeated by the CEO, even if the facts are unquestionably in opposition to whatever it is that he just said. So now, your boss is embarrassed because, A, he looked stupid in front of a client, and, B, he looked stupid in front of his boss. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. So his natural reaction is to try and find a way to get out of that situation. And that’s where the text messages come in and the crappy day you had dealing with those lousy text messages.

[00:13:21] So, what do you do? Well, I put my engineer brain in gear, and the first thing I’m gonna do is find a thousand reasons that it’s not my fault, right? And before you go and make that list of the thousand reasons your boss is absolutely, undeniably, unquestionably wrong, before you do that, and also if you’ve already done that, don’t email that to the CEO and your boss. It’s not gonna help you. Seriously. Don’t send that out. As I said, at this point, the facts are irrelevant. What matters are the feelings of the leaders.

[00:13:56] Now, for those of us with an engineering background, it’s really annoying because we like to think of ourselves as super rational people. And unfortunately, we’re not. Unfortunately, what happens is we make our decisions emotionally, and then we find a logical justification for them. Your boss will logically rationalize whatever he wants to make it okay for him to have sent that lousy email to you. And there is nothing you can do to change that. So, this bitter pill is that the feelings matter more than the facts, but I’m here to tell you the truth even if you don’t like it. That’s my job. So, now you might think, “Well, yeah, feelings matter. What about my feelings?” Well, I’m sorry to say that I don’t think your feelings are all that relevant to your boss or your boss’ boss.

[00:14:44] So, what should you do? Well, the first thing you should do is find the time when you can go see the boss in person face-to-face. That type, this…conflict resolution is almost universally more effective if you can do it face to face. There’s a lot of power in being able to do that face to face. Do not text-message back, and do not email to try and resolve the issue. That’s not gonna get you where you wanna go. Next, tell your boss you’re sorry they were in that situation. Now, we’re not admitting fault here. What we’re saying is, “Boy, that really stinks for you. I’m sorry that that was the case.” You’re not admitting guilt because you don’t have to admit guilt because you weren’t guilty here, but you can legitimately be empathetic about the situation your boss is in.

[00:15:29] Next, you wanna tell your boss you’ve looked into the facts, and he might be interested in learning what you learned. And this is not the time for you to be defensive, nor is it a time for you to be self-righteous because there were a thousand reasons it wasn’t your fault, right? Even if they were a 100% wrong in accusing your team, this is not the time for you to take a victory lap. What you wanna do is tell your boss that after looking into it, you’re convinced your team wasn’t to blame. Now, in your process, you may have uncovered some facts that led the CEO to believe you were to blame and go ahead and share those. It looks like we did the wrong thing here because. Or so and so said. Or there was this email. Or whatever. But share those facts and then say, “But I’ve uncovered what really happened, and it turns out it wasn’t our issue.”

[00:16:16] And next, you’re gonna wanna try and come up with a solution. Even if it’s something like better cross-team communication or a better approach to problem reporting or problem tracking, the key thing is you wanna focus on solutions, not the history. The history is just not gonna help you at this point. Now, once you’ve settled the issue and you’ve got some kind of proposed solutions, then you can talk about the way your boss handled the situation. Now, I don’t have time today to go into exactly what you should do there, but if you check out season 2, episode 4, which I called “Dealing with a Disrespectful Team Member,” I think you’ll find the technique there to be very, very helpful in dealing with the how your boss handled it. And while the episode is about dealing with a disrespectful team member, the technique I described there, can easily be used with your boss as well.

[00:17:08] So, Giovita, I hope this helps. I’m sorry you had to deal with a boss who picked a lousy way to address a conflict that he was in. And I just want you to remember, the facts are not as important as the feelings of the people that are involved. And that’s today’s “Coach’s Mailbox.”

Thought Leader segment.

John: [00:17:22] Hello, I’m John Maxwell. As one of founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

Tom: [00:17:28] In today’s “John Maxwell Thought Leader” segment, we’re covering what John calls the “law of intuition,” that leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias. And this was something I think you can begin to tackle even at level 1 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

Male: [00:17:44] Level 1, individual. At level 1, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level 1 focuses you on improving your technical skills.

Tom: [00:17:57] Intuition, that is a tough one. How do you explain something you know in your gut? Well, today, I wanna talk about intuition when it comes to your acting as a leader. And one key idea here is that everyone is intuitive in the area of their giftedness. And this is exactly what Dr. Kim Ruyle talked about in episode 9 when he said, “Experts don’t even know what they know or how they know it.” This is a matter of having collected a ton of information over a long period of time. So whatever you’re great at, you’re almost automatically gonna generate a sense of intuition about it. Whatever you’re interested in, whatever you naturally research and read about or study, as you do that, you’re gonna be growing your intuition capacity.

[00:18:43] Now, let me ask you, do you know how to ride a bike? Do you know how to dribble a basketball? When you do that, do you think about how to do it or do you just do it? You don’t think about theory. Now, you mastered those tasks and now you just do it. And one key way for you to be better prepared to be intuitive in the way that you’re interacting with others is to increase that level of knowledge. Intuition is facts plus instinct plus dozens of other things. Intuition is when you know something but you can’t say how you know it. Going deep. Digging into your field, studying and learning and knowing the knowable facts provides a good starting point. You need to do the work to learn those details. There’s no way around that. And that’s related to that 10,000 hours number that Malcolm Gladwell talks about to become an expert, that time involved in the process. And here’s a challenge. When you’re a leader, you often have to make decisions before you feel like you’re ready.

[00:19:44] I’ve got a friend who’s a natural researcher. He’s data-centric. Before he tries anything, he has to do a ton of reading and organizing and collecting data and more. But the downside is, there’s never enough data. And one day he said to me about this, “The law of intuition makes me mad. I mean, I decide we need to take on something new, so I start to look at the options, I figure out everything I can about it, and then I learn a ton of new things as I’m researching. I have to track down all the information I can about those new things, and by the time I’ve done that, I have to go back to the beginning because some of the original things have changed. And what really makes me mad is there are these ‘shoot from the hip’ people, who don’t do any of the work I do, and then they just luckily stumble onto the option that I spent months researching. It’s just not fair.”

[00:20:29] Well, he’s right. It’s not fair. And I think he’d be happy if he had 100% of the possible facts before he decided. But interestingly, former Secretary of State, Collin Powell, said that his practice was to make a leadership decision after gathering only 40% to 60% of the information that can be obtained. And he uses his intuition to make up the difference. Now, there are those who would say, “Yeah, but then you’re wrong sometimes.” Well, the fact is, you are wrong sometimes, and that’s okay. It’s not that we seek wrongness, but we seek action. Most people won’t take action at all, and the process of taking action, even the wrong action, is gonna help you learn and grow your intuition.

[00:21:11] We have to have knowledge, and knowledge alone is not sufficient. Facts cannot solve it for you as much as we like to do that. It’s knowledge plus experience. There’s a saying that goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, however, they’re different.” And this is something I talk to my kids about in the workshop. I ask them to solve problems in the woodshop, and one thing we’ve discovered is this. We don’t actually learn anything about our theory until the saw hits the wood. It’s that practice that makes a difference in our intuition. So, you can increase your intuition by increasing your knowledge, the facts that are out there, and increasing your experience. And that’s how, when the moment comes where you have to make that decision, that gut check, you’re gonna know what to do. The law of intuition says that leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias. And that’s today’s “John Maxwell Thought Leader” segment.

Behind the Scenes segment.

Male: [00:22:11] In the “Behind the Scenes” segment, Tom shares a tip about how his business works.

Tom: [00:22:20] Well, I have to say I can’t believe it. Here we are the last episode of season 3. What a blast. I have learned a ton over the last three seasons of the podcast. One of the things I’ve done to make things easier for me is I’ve developed templates that I use to create episodes, everything from the way that I write, the content, to the way that I record the content, to the way that that gets processed before it becomes the podcast episode. And I’ve been learning from other podcasters about how to make my episodes better, too. And hopefully, that’s showing up in the quality of the material that I’m sending your way.

[00:22:58] Now, I want to take a minute and say that I appreciate you. I’m really appreciative that you are listening, and I’m here to serve you. That’s one of my goals, is to serve you. And I wanna ask you, would you please help me? Specifically, what I’d like to know is what challenges are you facing? If you could ask anything, what do you wish you could ask? Seriously, send me an email. I read all of them, and I’d be happy to help you tackle your challenge. Maybe there’s a topic you’d like to know more about. Now, let me know. I’m in the final stages of planning for season 4’s topics, things like dev ops and other Agile tools. I’d love to hear more from you about the things that you’re interested in.

[00:23:36] And finally, is there a win you’ve experienced because of what you learned on the podcast? I’d love to hear about that, too, so you can send me an email. The best email address to use for me is coach@brighthillgroup.com. That’s coach@brighthillgroup.com. And that’s today’s “Behind the Scenes” segment.

Episode Hack.

Male: [00:23:55] In the “Episode Hack” segment, Tom shares one action-oriented takeaway from this episode, something you can apply right away.

Tom: [00:24:09] In today’s episode, we talked about how to create great meeting minutes. We talked about the law of intuition, and we talked about managing by text message. And it’s this third area that I wanna focus on in our episode hack. For today’s episode hack, I want you to think about the last time you found yourself in a really uncomfortable situation with your boss or maybe another leader. What might have been happening with their emotions? Make a list of two or three emotional reactions or situations they may have been dealing with. You see, if you take the time to identify the emotions that other people are feeling, that’s gonna help you find ways to overcome that resistance you’ve been getting from them. And that’s today’s episode hack.

Closeout

[00:24:51] Hey, can I ask you something? Did you hear something helpful on today’s episode? Why not share it with a friend? On my iPhone, it’s as simple as hitting the three little dots on the bottom right of the screen, selecting share episode, enter your friend’s email, and hit send. Why do this? Two reasons. One, your friend or co-worker will thank you. You’ll be seen as a source of helpful and valuable information, and they will appreciate you for it. And number two, I need you to help me get the word out about this podcast. I’m working hard to bring great ideas and great content to you, and it’s a big help to me if more people hear those ideas. Go ahead. Share it now. I’ll wait. Thanks.

[00:25:42] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of “Becoming a Geek Leader.” Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

Steve Johnson walks u through “What is Product Management” and helps us figure out how to start small to get to success.

Transcript:

Tom Cooper:               So just to kind of get started, at the highest level what is product management?

Steve Johnson:            Well, product management is delightfully ill-defined, certainly in the technology industry and many others. But ideally product management is what a lot of developers call the “one throat to choke.” There’s one place to go to get the answer to everything. I remember reading an interview years ago with Bill Campbell at Intuit and he said that if you are a start-up the second hire would be a product manager. Because the product manager figures out the rest of it.

We often come up with hey, let’s build a thing. But what the customer really wants is that thing wrapped up in services and delivered in multiple pieces, for instance. The product manager’s job is really to be the president’s representative at the product level looking at it from soup to nuts. Is there a business to be had here? Is there a market need that we can address? When we talk about product we don’t just mean software or hardware. We mean the whole product.

I was talking to somebody just an hour ago about the Nest thermostat which is big right now. I have one and it’s just beautiful. It seems to me that there was clearly a product manager looking beyond the thermostat. I mean, there are plenty of thermostats out there. You can buy one from Home Depot or Lowes and they’re all generically the same with very difficult to understand user interfaces. So the Nest thermostat is very easy to use, but more than that it’s an entire product.

When you hook it up it verifies that the wiring is correct. When you get it working it says, “Hey, can I hop on the Internet for you?” And it synchronizes the thermostat behavior with the weather in your city. It sends me an email once a month telling me about my power consumption and some things I might choose to do to improve my performance.

It has an iPhone app that allows me to manage the thing remotely. It has a motion sensor that says, “You know what? Nobody has walked by this thermostat in 24 hours so I’m going to set the temperature to something reasonable since apparently you’re away.” That wasn’t just what the other guys did which was we have a programmable thermostat that you can program and it will do thermostat. They’ve created an entire product.

Tom Cooper:               That’s really interesting because you’re looking at the need even if the consumer doesn’t understand that need. I’ve never thought that I want my thermostat to email me. I’ve thought that I’d like my thermostat to help me save money, but I never thought that I’d like to get an email or recommendations about what I could do. That’s really interesting. I’ve worked in a number of tech companies and I’ve worked with a ton of tech companies and a lot of them don’t do anything that they call product management. But don’t all companies actually use product management?

Steve Johnson:            Well, yes. What every company is doing is managing products. The question is whether there is a person with a title. In a start-up the president is the product manager. It means, what products are we going to build? What revenue can we forecast over time? And in a start-up capability you’re probably looking at it in the context of how is this cash flow going to make sure that I make my house payment?

But then multiply that times a bunch in a regular business that has a track record and somebody said, “Hey, I have an idea for a product”. Well, everybody has ideas. The question is, which one should we pursue? Is there one here that we should fast track? Is it targeting a market full of customers or is it one sales guy talked to one customer who had one need and I’m never going to be able to sell this again?

Tom Cooper:               Right, so really what you’re talking about is a methodology or a process to prioritize future requests?

Steve Johnson:            Exactly. Ideas come from everywhere, right? The executives have ideas. Sales guys have ideas. Customers have ideas. Product managers have ideas. Developers have ideas. The first step of the process or the method around product management is a vetting process that says that we can’t do everything. So we need to be able to pick carefully which ones we do allocate resources to. Once we’ve done that we have to break the idea down into the deliverables.

And if we started from, “I want to build a thermostat” then you would build a thermostat. If we started from customers are extremely passionate about smart energy and let’s build an energy management solution, then you end up saying not just that you need to do some circuit boards in a round box for a thermostat. It’s the bigger thing that I talked about earlier. So the idea becomes, what are the parts that we need to build and we keep breaking that down into constituent parts.

The same thing is true for, “I have an idea for an existing product. I want the iPad to do this. I want my Android phone to do that.” You have to look at all of those ideas and say, “Which one affects the most people with the most benefit?” Beyond that, that’s all product part.

Guess what? Marketing that product often involves product management. People who are doing go to market say, “I need some help understanding how this tool is used or what features it has and how I explain those to the market.” Otherwise you end up with what David Meerman Scott calls industry gobbledy gook. And we just say that we’re the market leading discontinuous innovation deliverer with proven results.

Tom Cooper:               Wait, I’m writing that down. That’s so good.

Steve Johnson:            There’s not even a TM on that. So we have this product idea. We are taking it to market. Guess what? We also have to figure out what is the right price point for this, or do we just throw it to the sales team and say “Take a shot. Sell it for as much as you can.”

Tom Cooper:               Wait a minute. You’re talking about a huge area of responsibility if you’re talking about establishing pricing, looking at the market, marketing communications, feature development, working with the product creation team that’s actually going to implement the ideas. That sounds like your product managers need to have a lot of different types of expertise. What types of things should you be looking for from product managers?

Steve Johnson:            Very good point. I think it’s important to separate these things. There are a lot of activities that need to happen in order that we can manage and market a product. Often that is given to the title product manager. But it may be director of products marketing or it may be a senior executive team. But there are a bunch of things that happen between the idea and revenue. Somebody has to have oversight of that.

Real quickly, I talked to a guy yesterday who posted for a director, I think, of product management and marketing. He said that 98% of his resumes were from marketing communications people. When you say marketing everybody in this industry seems to say, oh yes, that’s the creative types who build sales tools and go-to market materials. He said, “So I ultimately took the name marketing off of the job description so that I could get some product people in here.”

But that’s really the point isn’t it? In terms of expertise 42% of product managers have an MBA which means that they have strong business skills. That’s one thing that people look for. But increasingly a lot of the teams that I work with have pulled product managers so far into the product creation process that they’re really using the product managers for their technical expertise rather than for their business expertise.

Furthermore, as I indicated in the director story a lot of people have marketing expertise, but more important than that is an understanding of market. For example, we want to market our product in Brazil. We want to market our product in higher education. We want to market our product in anti-virus or fraud detection. So these are markets where we need to have somebody who is an expert in the way those markets talk to one another.

The fourth expertise is domain expertise. I have a story about a vice-president from a bank came up with a fraud detection method. He came to a company to turn it into a product. Because he had both domain and market expertise the company misused him. He came to the company to leverage his domain expertise to create a product. But because he came from the world of banking every sales guy on the planet called and said, “I need you to come talk bank with one of my buyers.”

And so he was on the road for nine months until he finally threw up his hands in despair and said, “Now I’m going to go to another company who doesn’t need me to come and talk bank, but wants me to develop my fraud detection algorithm.” So those are the four expertises. There’s business, there’s domain, there’s technology, there’s market. It’s really hard to find all four of those in one person.

Tom Cooper:               So do you think of it in terms of a team delivery? How do you solve that then if you can’t find necessarily all four of those in one person?

Steve Johnson:            Indeed. If I were organizing a product management team today I would look for at least one person in each of those areas. I mentioned higher education earlier. I went to college a long time ago. I wouldn’t say I know much about the world of university. I do know costs have gone up a lot lately, but that’s about what I know. So I would hire somebody who has a deep domain knowledge in higher education. What are the trends in the industry? That would be the person that I would use for all of my thought leadership pieces rather than talking about product and talking about trends in the industry.

I would hire a technical person to work with development and turning the ideas that we’re finding into the development deliverables. I would hire a market specialist. If we chose to sell to universities in the Americas, universities in Asia and universities in Europe, I’m guessing those are different.

I remember one of my vice-presidents/colleagues years ago did a little presentation from the context of non-U.S. thinking. He put up dates where the numbers were in the wrong order. He used commas instead of periods. He put “U”s in words that didn’t deserve them. He talked about summer. We thought, “Wait a minute. You’re right. If you’re in Australia, summer is different.” So what does it mean launching this summer?

And the fourth thing, I don’t know if I mentioned, as I’m talking this through I’m thinking of a fifth one. I would certainly want somebody on staff who had strong analytical skills with a business background who can turn ideas into spreadsheets. What’s our financial road map down the road?

And yet, often what I’ll do is if I don’t have that business skill on staff I’ll send a market person, probably, over to finance and say, “Can you guys help us with a three to five year revenue and costing breakout?” The VP in finance is delighted to help and generally assigns you to one of his experts and they’re delighted to help because they haven’t done anything meaningful since college. This isn’t what they thought they were going to be doing. Instead they are just checking expense reports against policy. That was kind of rude.

Tom Cooper:               The one thing about working with you, Steve, is that you know exactly where you stand.

Steve Johnson:            Yes, subtly is my strength.

Tom Cooper:               So now in this space, what you’ve covered is a huge amount of territory here. I hear CEOs saying, “This costs too much. I can’t even think about doing that because it’s so darn expensive.” But really, I think what you’ve said to me before is that it’s really about investment for seeing a return. You should be able to see a return on all of the money you spend on this.

Steve Johnson:            Exactly. And furthermore, people are doing this anyway. There are people in your company today who are saying, “I don’t really have deep domain expertise, but I need to know whether I should do it this way or that way.” So they guess. The real challenge to me is, sure everybody wants to do everything on ROI, but for me it’s thinking what’s the cost of doing it wrong?

Tom Cooper:               That’s a really good point. I think we tend to think that whatever we’re doing today is okay and it’s risky to do something different. It’s that myth of risk that there’s actually risk associated with even current state.

Steve Johnson:            Exactly. So when we talk about product management, it’s happening in your company today. The question is, who’s doing it? Is it the president? Is it the VP of sales? Are the sales individuals saying, “Well, we don’t have anything but I decided to partner with that guy over there and bundle my own thing and offer it at a price that’s 10% above our costs”? That’s an interesting initiative on the part of the sales guy, but is that the business that we even want to be in? And is 10% enough money to make it worthwhile? Those are the questions that aren’t being asked. And as a company looks at their limited resources they need to make sure that they are putting their limited resources on the thing that has the best value to the company in the long run.

Tom Cooper:               That’s fantastic. I appreciate that kind of perspective because it’s a different one. People don’t necessarily think of it in that way. I appreciate you bringing that perspective to us today. So tell me a little about under 10 templates. Why under 10 templates?

Steve Johnson:            Better than that, there’s under 10 templates. But anyway, I worked with a team a while back and they said, “Well, we formalized our product planning process.” They handed me a three ring binder that was three or four inches thick. It was delightfully comprehensive, but completely unrealistic.

I reflected back in my first job 20 to 30 years ago as a product manager. I had a printed notebook that I kept with me all of the time. What happened was people would ask me questions and I couldn’t answer them. So I started carrying these pieces with me. And I said that people ask me about pricing a lot. Let me keep the price list with me. People asked me about positioning a lot. Let me keep the positioning with me.

Over time I developed six or seven or eight living documents that I referenced probably daily. That became my product plan. Instead of having a 45 page business plan that nobody, including the author, has ever read, why don’t we just identify the smallest number, preferably fewer than 10, of living documents that make sense to the executive team?

For instance, the kinds of documents that I’m talking about are a road map of where we are going down the road. A list of features that we want to build that the [inaudible 18:29] call a back log, a price list, a positioning document so that we can inform our marketing people and our branding people and our outside agencies of the product’s message. How many of those could replace some of these heavy dead documents that more established companies are still creating?

Tom Cooper:               That’s a really interesting point and I think it’s helpful to have a framework to move forward. I think that you said that you’re going to offer up a planning canvas as a resource for folks who are interested in learning more about this. Is that right?

Steve Johnson:            Yes indeed. Canvas is the right word. It is a place for you to articulate all of the different steps between idea and revenue and, for that matter, post-delivery retrospective. Who should be doing this step and what are the minimum set of artifacts that we need to articulate that step? You start with, what business are we in and what market do we serve? What products are we going to build? How are we going to market them? How are we going to sell them? How are we going to support them after the fact? The part that I think most young companies completely forget about is after the sale saying, “What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Is this even a good customer?”

Tom Cooper:               You’re really talking about product strategy and even can lean into corporate strategy type things which most organizations kind of struggle with. That’s fascinating.

Steve Johnson:            My dentist fires 10% of his customers every year because he looks at a post-customer retrospective and says that these customers are annoying. And it’s not that they don’t brush their teeth and floss, it’s that they don’t show up on time and they argue about the bill or they have a difficult insurance carrier. He says, “I have better things to do than to try and sell the same hour two or three or four times.” And I think that most companies don’t take that after the sale retrospective saying, “What is a good customer for us and what isn’t? Maybe we should fire some of our customers because they don’t move us forward strategically.”

Tom Cooper:               That is definitely a kind of radical thing. I think it is worth consideration, for sure. So if folks want to dig in and know some more about Steve Johnson and what you’re doing, where can they find more information about you?

Steve Johnson:            Please come to under10templates.com. You will find lots of stuff there. I have a description of the under 10 planning template that I’m going to share with people who listen in on this. I am blogging there. I have a bio there. I think of it really as my online resume. My belief is that companies want the smallest amount of process that helps them mitigate their risks. A lot of times they have too much or, frankly, a lot of companies have too little. Do we have more time for one more quick story?

Tom Cooper:               Sure.

Steve Johnson:            You can’t say no to that. I worked for a huge company, a billion dollar software company. There was so much process we couldn’t get anything done. So I got recruited into a start-up and employed with 25. I got there and thought that this is going to be great. There’s no process and we can get stuff done. Then a week later I was pulling my hair out because there was not process. You want to find that fine line between process that helps move you forward and find that balance for what makes sense in your organization. That’s the kind of stuff that I work with teams on today.

Tom Cooper:               That’s great. I appreciate that idea and wrapping it in that way because I think a lot of times we find ourselves caught in that middle place where we need process but we have too much process and we can’t actually get anything done. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.