6/9 Critical Convos You Forget To Have With Your Team: What are the organizational challenges?

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Convergence Podcast. I'm your host, Ashok Sivanand. Today, we continue on our series of crucial conversations that we believe all teams must have. What organizational challenges might hurt our product? On this show, we'll deconstruct the best practices, principles, and the underlying philosophies behind the most engaged product teams who ship the most successful products.

[00:00:36] This is what teams are made of. My team at Integral and myself have helped numerous product teams across both startups and large Fortune 500 enterprises with improving how they foster more engaged teams, delight their customers more, and build more business value through their software products. And in that time, we've noticed that oftentimes teams forget to communicate about crucial topics, and that undercommunication leads to tremendous downspaces.

[00:01:04] And we've been talking about the last-stream issues. So we've synthesized nine of the most crucial of those conversations. And today, we're discussing conversation six of nine, what organizational challenges might hurt our product. Make sure to check out the summary of the nine conversations that we shipped on April 23rd, 2024 on the podcast. And check the archives for other deep dives and facilitation techniques for the different topics.

[00:01:33] Also, hit subscribe on your podcast app to get updates when we ship episodes with our guests as well as conversations seven, eight, and nine as well.

[00:01:42] So organizational risks, this may be one of the most sensitive topics of the nine conversations.

[00:01:47] In my experience building product, especially in the enterprise, this conversation can begin the mitigation of a lot of delays in shipping, increased costs, and frustrated teams.

[00:01:57] So some of these delays in costs can also compound. And things like technical debt or other form of debt can make this cost a lot more when you have a team who isn't aligned on priorities from ideation to shipping to iteration.

[00:02:14] And so I believe these tend to happen because of three main reasons. And they're all a function of growth.

[00:02:21] The first is large, dispaired organizations that need to come together to service the customer initiative.

[00:02:26] So if we create an example, like say you're making digital thermostats, your organization may have to partner with a distribution channel outside your company, like hardware stores, or maybe HVAC companies who help bring awareness of your product to the customer and help sell it to the market.

[00:02:46] The second one is that the initiative may be funded by multiple internal budgets.

[00:02:52] For example, this digital thermostat could be product development, customer service, marketing coming together to build a mobile app that serves as an augmentation of a product that helps you control the thermostat from your app,

[00:03:06] but also allows your customers to buy more thermostats, as well as help your customers with more easily gaining customer support or technical support.

[00:03:17] The third issue is that your company may have a shared services group that's carved out into separate organizations for your efficiency.

[00:03:26] Some of them that come to mind in your team may be a branding department or compliance, legal, finance, and so forth.

[00:03:32] Don't get me wrong, if we do our jobs right and our customers love our product and our business is growing, we end up refactoring the organization to support that growth.

[00:03:42] The challenge though that shows up from this refactoring for efficiency is along the lines of maybe information silos where relevant information isn't always shared liberally,

[00:03:54] say between the company and the distributors and the HVAC partners.

[00:03:58] Sometimes this tends to happen internally as well, where maybe your product development team and your marketing and customer service departments all work off of different technical systems

[00:04:09] and team members don't have access to all the relevant context to make the best decisions, even when the information sits within the firewall at your company.

[00:04:17] There can also be tremendous slowdowns in the velocity of shipping product or increases in the time from when you have an insight or idea to when your customers and your business actually get value from that insight or idea being converted to product.

[00:04:31] And those bottlenecks can often arise when it comes to a command and control form of governments that tends to happen in larger companies where various stakeholders can block the shipping and iteration of the product through delayed decisions.

[00:04:44] And this can create a lot more cost in your system because of the delays and compounding factors like your competitors may be able to get product out and iterate faster than you,

[00:04:55] or your team ends up getting frustrated and you end up having to deal with churn and retention issues and the cost of rehiring.

[00:05:03] As a product leader, I've also had to deal with roadmaps that are really hard to synthesize and define when we have various stakeholders with competing priorities.

[00:05:17] And that makes roadmapping a lot more sophisticated.

[00:05:20] And it leaves you at the risk, I believe, of having a roadmap that doesn't flow to your business or even to your customers or your team.

[00:05:27] And it looks more like a Frankenstein.

[00:05:30] And trust me, you do not want your customers to feel like they're using a Frankenstein product.

[00:05:36] And you don't want that for your team either.

[00:05:39] Personally, I feel like this also leaves you at the risk of missing out on a very emotion-driven loyalty to your product and to your organization,

[00:05:48] from your customers, from your team members, and the rest of your community.

[00:05:52] And that churn and retention issues causes loss in market share and increase costs and complexity of iteration.

[00:06:00] So to help reduce these effects of these problems and implications, there are four things that I like to do.

[00:06:06] I like facilitating a lifecycle of the user story and a stakeholder map.

[00:06:12] And then I like to leverage tools like weekly product demos and to invoke the support of leadership in an intentional way to help de-risk our outcomes.

[00:06:23] So the first thing I like to facilitate is the lifecycle of a user story.

[00:06:28] This is essentially a question that I ask of our customers or the product teams on how ideas get to the top of your product idea funnel.

[00:06:36] And then what is the process of that idea being filtered, prioritized, and eventually developed into production software?

[00:06:44] I like to draw this up in a linear way, similar to maybe like a user journey, except instead of a user's journey,

[00:06:51] it's how an idea flows through the various decision points.

[00:06:56] I believe that visualizing this will help you identify where the bottlenecks and some of the other risks are.

[00:07:03] And doing this together with your leadership and other stakeholders also gives everyone context on how it actually happens

[00:07:11] and hopefully also inspires buy-in from those stakeholders on their role in helping your team's success and not being a bottleneck.

[00:07:20] The second thing is a stakeholder map.

[00:07:22] And this is a visualization of the organizational landscape and the associated risk when it comes to trying to minimize the friction of filtering

[00:07:30] and prioritizing the best insights into the most valuable product features.

[00:07:34] On there, I'd like to share who the gatekeepers are, who the cheerleaders are, how many degrees of separation there from the team.

[00:07:42] And while team leadership can go on trying to convert everyone to cheerleaders,

[00:07:47] I think it's really important for the team members to know how to navigate the various points of friction that may exist on this landscape.

[00:07:54] It also helps identify who needs to be kept informed, who you owe specific outcomes or outputs to,

[00:08:01] and how they each like to be interacted with so you can get their best support.

[00:08:05] The next thing I like to do is get support from leadership.

[00:08:09] So once you've facilitated these two tools, there's a bunch of risks that I think you'll start to see surface.

[00:08:14] And identifying them and seeking support early with your leadership to highlight these risks provides them an opportunity to provide you with guidance and leadership,

[00:08:26] as well as for them to take early steps on their part on how they will help you navigate stormy weather around the organization should this risk come to being.

[00:08:35] Note that some managers who may need some reinforcement or help with prioritizing difficult decisions with other parties can come to being.

[00:08:47] We've sniffed these out in the past and in the past have offered to help them prepare and role play this conversation,

[00:08:53] or even show up alongside them so that they can deliver the most important thing to the stakeholders.

[00:09:00] And then the last thing I like to do is really leverage product demos.

[00:09:04] Hopefully you're already bought into doing regular, maybe weekly product demos.

[00:09:09] And it's also critical, I believe, to invite stakeholders to those demos.

[00:09:14] Give them visibility into the progress made.

[00:09:16] Solicit feedback from them early.

[00:09:18] And even if you can't incorporate all of the feedback in, which you won't be able to,

[00:09:23] allowing them to voice their opinion and thanking them for it goes a long way in building trust.

[00:09:27] And also earning a benefit of the doubt when you need their help with something.

[00:09:32] Add those folks to distribution lists and team updates.

[00:09:35] And even shoot them an occasional Slack message or email thanking them for something that they did to help unblock your team

[00:09:43] or giving them a story on how their input led to impact for everyone.

[00:09:48] Hopefully this has been helpful for you to navigate the organizational structure on your teams

[00:09:53] and leading to shipping more delightful products and fostering more engaged teams.

[00:09:58] If you want to soundboard any more about your team organization,

[00:10:04] shoot me a DM on any of the socials or head on to convergence.fm and send me a voice note with your question

[00:10:13] and I'd be happy to get back to you.

[00:10:15] You're also welcome to book some time with myself or my team if you go to integral.io slash convergence

[00:10:22] and we can schedule some time for you to go over any additional questions you may have

[00:10:29] around creating the lifecycle of a user journey, a stakeholder map, how to leverage your weekly demos

[00:10:37] and how to make it easier for your leadership team to support you and the product initiative that you are leading.

[00:10:46] As always, we will be back on Tuesday with the next episode.

[00:10:50] So stay tuned for that.

[00:10:52] And until then, I hope you have a wonderful week.

[00:11:00] Thank you for joining me on the Convergence podcast today.

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