Welcome to The Lens, my newsletter on Product Management and related topics. I include some of the content I came across that you may find useful if you are interested in getting into Product Management or just interested in learning more. If you like what you read, please forward it to someone you think may get value. Thank you.
Compassionate Leadership
It’s December and as a hobby, we watch a lot of holiday and Christmas movies. One of the movies is Grinch from 2018 (link). Cindy Lou has decided to trap Santa Claus and seeks her friends’ help. Her friends want to know why they want to trap Santa. This is similar to when employees don’t understand the plan or strategy. It's a leader's raison d'être to motivate people behind a common goal. Well, Cindy is no such leader because her goal is personal. Her friends resist that they won’t help if she doesn’t tell them why they are signing up. At this moment, Cindy taps into emotional intelligence and reminds them how she had helped them without wanting to know the purpose. If she left at that, it would have been an example of a quid pro quo, mob mentality, and not a purposeful leadership. However, she continues “I did it because you are my friend, and when something matters to you, that means it matters to me”. It is such compassionate leadership that separates some leaders. Reminds me of a similar story from a military leader who realized how deeply caring for his team made a huge difference to the outcomes. Also, leading by example means you give first and then you ask. Spoiler alert, she did get her friends to co-conspire.
I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Colonel Nicole Malachowski. Nicole broke many barriers - she embarked on an adventure among the first group of women to fly fighter aircraft. And she worked for many causes during and after her Air Force career. Among the lessons and stories I learned from her talk, this one is immediately actionable. When some of her team members made a mistake, instead of harsh disciplinary action, she literally used it as a learning moment. Not just for them, but for the entire team by starting a practice/forum named ‘Steel sharpens steel’, during which they were encouraged to share their mistakes and lessons. Once it became a routine practice, team members started to share the mistakes voluntarily and socialized on how it can be avoided in the future. Several noteworthy lessons are here - first, using an incident to help the broader community made it useful for everyone. But making it a routine created a culture. Changing a culture takes time, but taking one step of action begins it and which doesn’t take a lot of effort or time. A good leader identifies and puts these actionable steps into practice.
To be Strategic
In some places, strategy is a word that is thrown out a lot. Any task that has a semblance of more than one step and spans more than a certain duration will get thrown under the umbrella of strategy. But it shouldn’t be that vague and there are several frameworks and specific definitions to help us define a strategy. Jeff Weiner, ex-CEO of LinkedIn, touches upon this confusion of definitions in his course (link) that some confuse it with mission and others with operational tactics. Michael Porter, the founder of the modern business strategy field, defines strategy as a competitive position, deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value. Jeff defines, similarly, that it is to some extent how a mission becomes reality. The fundamental key, he says, is the ability to understand the competition and competitive dynamics. Julie Zhou, the author of The Making of a Manager, (link , aff) breaks strategy down into three steps(link):
Create alignment around what wild success looks like
Understand which problem you are looking to solve for which audience
Prioritize
I’d summarize like this :
Know what makes you unique for your customers, and do more of it proactively and by constantly evaluating it.
I will write more about this in the future. I leave you with these thoughts. Let me know if you have any feedback. And do share with whoever is in the early stages of their PM career or is interested in getting into Product Management.
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