Hello, product leaders!

It’s the beginning of the year (still) but I promise I won’t bother you with any “it’s important to have New Year’s resolutions (aka goals)” or “what I’m doing with the 332 days ahead” posts. I only would like to ask one question related to the topic of focus and that is: Have you planned your regular check-ins?

I see way too many product leads and product managers not checking in with their own goals and the goals that their teams have set for themselves. Personal goals get written on a paper that is filed somewhere in the HR department, training budgets get released but the majority of teams don’t plan how to spend them wisely, and OKR sets get created, but there are no weekly check-ins and they just get a review at the end of the quarter.* 

Not ideal… to put it mildly. But there is an easy fix to that. Whatever initiative you are setting a goal, an ambition, an objective, or plan for, make sure you are scheduling your check-ins (plural is intended here). Try to add them to rituals you already have in place. Make sure everything is following an annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly rhythm. Human beings love rhythm. It makes it easier for us to remember that it is time for another check-in.

I’ve added a link to a brilliant post by Clay Parker Jones discussing this exact topic (he calls it “Pace Levels”) in the “Gems I found” section of this newsletter so you can explore this topic in more detail if you’d like. 

And of course, you’ll find plenty of other articles, podcasts, and videos to check out.

Radical Optimism or Why Every Leader is a Futurist

As a leader, you are by definition a futurist. (This is something I’ve learned from Alicia Shao just recently). Let’s explore this for a second. 

Your role is to look ahead and anticipate the challenges and opportunities that your team will face in the future. You study and analyze trends, forecasts, and scenarios to understand how the future might unfold. You provide insights and recommendations on how to prepare for and shape the future. In times like these, when the world is changing rapidly and unpredictably, this role is more important than ever.

So, fellow futurists, how do we want the world to be? 

Most people would answer: Better. Humans are always seeking to improve things.

And, if you are looking back, on a large scale that’s what we did. Humankind made things better. We are healthier than ever, live longer than ever, have more knowledge than ever, and made significant progress on topics like equality and social justice. And I know, if you zoom in on most of these topics, you will find flaws, things we still need to improve, problems we still need to fix, and challenges we still need to tackle (especially the ones we’ve created!). And these are not minor problems. They are substantial, even existential. 

But we won’t fix them sitting in the corner, complaining or pretending they don’t exist. We need to be “radically optimistic” about the future. Because if we succeed in being radically optimistic, our peers and teams will be inspired by our example and we will create a climate of hope. Hope is a very strong catalyst for innovation and collaboration, which then will help us to solve the challenges ahead: the ones our teams are facing, the ones your company might be facing, and the ones humankind is facing. 

So I invite you to participate in a short exercise: Take a pen and paper and note 5–10 things that you are really optimistic about right now. Things you are convinced will have significantly improved 12 months, 3 years, a decade from now. Then reflect on how that makes you feel and come back to that feeling, that mental space when needed.

It will have an impact on your teams. I promise.


What Midjourney thinks "radically optimistic" leaders look like. Let's make sure to prove it wrong :-) 

My recent writing

I’ve published a few short and sweet pieces to get you thinking and (hopefully) make positive changes to your behavior. 

• How to introduce yourself as a product person - Better Introductions  → read post 
• End-of-the-year Reflection: Stop Living on Autopilot → read post

We rounded out the year with several excellent (if I do say so myself!) interviews with Community of Practice leaders and organizers. Each one is full of practical tips and insights that will help you build or improve your own product CoP.

Communities of Practice - Learning from Other Product People:

• Sarah Reeves on the Product Community of Practice at StepStone
• Nesrine Changuel on the Product Community of Practice at Google
• Priya Biswas on the Product Community of Practice at ATB Financial

I publish on my blog on a regular basis. So make sure you come visit once in a while or follow me on your preferred social media channel (Mastodon, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram) to stay up to date on the latest.

Gems I found - I think you’ll like them as well

Books I’m currently reading

Jeder Mensch ("Every Person") - Ferdinand von Schirach

This is definitely not a product management book, but one of the books that has helped me to be radically optimistic about the future. 

It’s a very short book that talks about how the American Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France laid the foundations for our modern society, our freedom, and our inalienable rights. But these declarations did not reflect reality. The great manifestos of humanity called for an order of society that did not yet exist. They were describing utopian ideals.

Schirach explains why now is a good time to think about a similar utopian declaration for Europe and proposes six fundamental rights that should be enshrined in such a declaration to face the pressing issues of our time: environmental degradation, climate crisis, artificial intelligence, the power of algorithms, systematic lies in politics, new autocracies, unchecked globalization, and threats to the rule of law and war.

The book is sadly only available in German but there is an English-language website where you can read a bit more about the idea.

→ More on books I've read here and on Instagram

 

Decision-making

Are you looking for a way to enable your teams to make good decisions faster or more autonomously? You might want to do some reading on the topic of product principles, like:

• ​⭐ Why your values are useless by Martin Eriksson -  "Principles take it one step further though, and crystallize the inherent trade-offs in any good strategy. A brilliant way to do this is to use even/over statements."
• The 37signals Guide to Making Decisions - “A company is essentially two things: a group of people and a collection of decisions. How those people make these decisions is the art of running a business. This guide shows how we do it.” 

Communication & conversation

• 💡 ​Nine Ideas to Inspire More Meaningful Conversations at Work. This is a brilliant post by Antonia Horvath and a leadership guide for understanding the type of conversations you need to have—and how to have them effectively.
• “Extreme clarity means communicating something in a way that leaves no ambiguity in the mind of the reader and that all readers ultimately leave with the same understanding,” writes Simon Cross in the excellent post, Communicating with Extreme Clarity.
• In an ideal world, extreme clarity leads to a high degree of alignment. And that reminds me of Emily Tate’s amazing 2-by-2 grid she presented in a talk last year. You can find my write-up of it here.

Leadership and management

• 📌 As I mentioned in the intro, rhythm is everything. Here’s the Pace Levels post by Clay Parker Jones I was referring to. “Pace Layers help visualize, distinguish, and discuss different kinds of work and teams within an organization.” 
• And on a similar note: John Cutler’s Mandate Levels is  a helpful framing to challenge the way you hand product teams their mandate.
• Josh Seiden gets asked a lot of questions along the lines of “What outcomes should I set for my team?” But rather than be prescriptive (there are too many variables and so much depends on each company’s unique situation), he recommends focusing on the user journey to identify “a measurable change in human behavior that creates business value.” 
• If you or the people who report to you are struggling to get things done, it could be down to a lack of “organizational awareness,” which Kate Leto explains is a type of emotional intelligence—and one that many product people need to work intentionally to develop. 
• “A product development artifact is an object that manifests and/or enables the product development system of a company or squad. This can be a tool, or a piece of documentation of a process, principle, or role,” writes Sophia Höfling. Check out her post 7 artifacts for effective product development (incl. templates) to get some ideas for how you might use artifacts within your own organization.
• Finally, if you’re ready to radically rethink the way your work is incentivized, be sure to check out This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s Tyler Hogge’s Playbook. I've worked like this, with full revenue responsibility—and I loved it!

Communities of Practice

• ✍️​ We need more community! And I’m not the only one who believes this. Science says so, too. See Harvard Study Reveals the #1 Thing That Makes Humans Happy. Why Are You Doing the Complete Opposite? 
• Community engagement is so 2022. Here are 10 things you should obsess over instead. Via the Rosieland newsletter.

The importance of design

• 🤑 Designing for the mainstream? To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising. Read the story of Raymond Loewy on how to sell everything. “Consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible.”

Tech and tech trends

What's new with STRONG Product People?

🥳 I had the best time talking to Lenny Rachitsky about coaching product people, how PMs can improve their storytelling skills, get better at public speaking, and why community is so crucial for product managers. Fun fact: This episode has the most prolonged show notes so far.
→ Listen to the episode

The book is turning two!

• March 20–22 - INDUSTRY - the product management conference (Dublin, Ireland)
• March 27 - Product Tank Melbourne (Remote)
• May 2 - Agile Leadership Bookclub (Remote, Event will be held in German)
• June 28–30 - Product at Heart (Hamburg)

Before you leave - last note 

Everyone is talking about AI, fancy new profile pictures and ChatGPT these days and if you haven’t played with this new technology, you absolutely should. I find it as fascinating as everybody else and am so looking forward to the many applications we’ll see in a very short time that will use these new technologies.

And as much as we should explore the many possibilities AI is bringing us, we, especially those of us in leadership positions, need to explore the pitfalls, shortcomings, and boundaries of this technology as well. Especially their moral and ethical impact on our societies.

I’ve just recently listened to an interview (in German) with Philosopher Markus Gabriel. And he said something that resonated with me:

“(...) Scientific progress must always be accompanied by moral progress at the same time. We have to make considerably more effort not to just let things go.”

So, product people, it’s on us! We have the knowledge, the foresight, the data, the experience, and the imagination to discuss the moral impact of AI. So let’s play with it, let’s use it, and let’s discuss what we have to take care of to make it a great addition to our world's tech stack.