Hi, everyone. Let's talk about strategic skills for product leaders. Um I hope you're just, as I said, as me to be here.Um I have been working in product for 10 years now and six of those years actually having the official title of a product manager and now I'm the head of a whole team. Um And I'm very excited to share this with you today. So this is you, sometimes it feels a little lonely being a product manager, but you might also be um a designer, for example, um an individual contributor or already a people manager. The one thing we all have in common is that we want to build products that people love. That's our goal, right? Um But even though it can feel lonely, sometimes I want to remind you that nobody is an island. We cannot do this alone to build these products that people love. We need collaboration and alignment and this just means we need to work together with a lot of people and we have to make sure we all go into the same direction. Um I, I like this quote that has been attributed to many um that says we cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sales. So today, I want to talk about different ways to adjust those sales and the skills that help with that.

Um And the one skill that we need above all, the most important one is communication. Um There are a few things I want to say about communication. Um First of all, it should be strong and explicit. This means um you need to be very clear and I'm ambiguous as well. Um And, and be honest and candid. So I'm not talking about brutal honesty, you still can be very kind. Um But it is important to be honest. Um Radical transparency is another thing that is so, so important and it is something that I've seen, most people struggle with and I have struggled with myself. Um which is funny because in delivery when we execute on product initiatives, uh we know that we need to ship fast, we need to learn, we need to iterate. Um And yet in communication, we kind of ignored this. So I, I challenge you, share your thoughts and how you get there and the iterations that took you um to, to get to a decision for example, because that way uh people can really understand where you're coming from. They have the context and they might be able to see the big picture a lot better than if you just tell them. Well, this is my decision, deal with it. Um and the other half of communication.

So one half is just like the way you say things and also the way you don't say things and the second half that is super important is listening and um I mean active listening, I don't mean listen to understand. Uh No, sorry the other way around. I oh wow there, let me just get that out of the way. We're not doing any updates right now. Perfect. So listening to understand that's the key here and not just listening to answer, this is something that we easily fall into. Um Just think back about maybe your last meeting or when you had a conversation about something, how you might have just waited for the other person to be done with what they're saying to then jump in and give your opinion or you know, extra information from your side. But um trying to be curious and open, listen to understand and ask questions to understand even better. All right. So now we know how to communicate in, you know, in which ways we can do it the best. But what do we actually need to communicate to foster that collaboration and alignment I had mentioned earlier. So the first really important thing that you need to communicate in, in a strong and explicit way is purpose and direction because if we want to align people, we need to know what we align them to.

Um So it's, it's great if you have a clear vision and you give people context, you explain the big picture, you give them the why. And um I can tell you from personal experience, sometimes these things can feel very abstract and hard to grasp. And storytelling is an amazing tool to rally people around a common mission. Marty Kagan. I mean, he's like one of the product like leaders out there that probably most of us have heard about, He frequently talks about the concept of missionaries versus mercenaries. Um And you want people that care and that actually rally around this mission that you shared with them because uh missionaries can outperform mercenaries, like people for hire any day. So um that's, that's the one thing when it comes to mission. When we talk about goals, you wanna make sure you have the right level of objectives um and goals so that it narrows down the playing field, it, it gives your team's guardrails if you will, so that teams can actually act and do things without being paralyzed by, you know, a really, really vast area of uh opportunities.

So you need to give them something that helps them to focus. Um And then if you have a good strategy, this will actually help you understand how to get to those ambitious goals that you set. And it depends a little bit on your level if you actually create that strategy or if you don't, but something that everybody has to do is evangelize it. Um You know, you, for you, it might be quite obvious because you work with the strategy, you work with the goals, you work with a road map very regularly. But for most people on your teams, it might not be that obvious or for your stakeholders. So, you know, if you don't sound like a broken record, you're doing it wrong. So when you feel like, oh, I feel like I have said those 800 times already, that's when you're just starting to communicate enough. And um I've, I've had an incident with one of my developers in the team and I think it was around a week after we had actually talked about the roadmap and I went through it with him um because he had newly joined the team and I explained all the things that were on there. Um And I think a week and a half later we had a retro and he said, I don't even know the road map and I thought, wait, what?

But I just told you, but because for me, it's those things that are in the road map are my day to day. For me, it's clear and I will remember them. But for him who does not work with the roadmap all the time, he didn't even remember it. So there's no bad intention or anything. Just remember, you need to say things over and over and over again just to make sure everybody knows what's up. So now we have that part where we say, all right, we need to talk about purpose and direction. What's the other path that we need to talk about norms and values? Now, let me go on a bit of a tangent with the stages of group development. Real quick, Tuckman defined 4 to 5 stages of group development. Um And these can really help you to understand norms and values and like the how of how teams want to work together uh groups form. So that's the the first phase where people come together. Um Everyone's usually on their best behavior, but also everybody is on their own, they're independent, they're focused on themselves in the next phase. This kind of starts to sort itself out um their trust to be started to be built. But there is also usually a lot of chaos and sometimes conflict when teams come together because people have different um things that they bring to the table and experiences and knowledge. Um So it can, it can actually lead to conflict. And this is where Norman comes in.

And this is when there is finally an understanding of competition in the team. So like what are things that different people are good at but also shared goals within the team. And in this phase, we usually resolve conflict to then have a spirit of cooper operation and collaboration.

And this is what we need to get to the last phase. Of performing. Um This is when team becomes or groups become competent, autonomous, um you know, group norms and roles and common goals are clear to everyone and this can lead to unexpectedly high levels of success. And isn't that where we all want to be? So, um this is something or this is the reason why this is so important and there are ways to help make this explicit, make these uh norms and values explicit. And you wanna make sure you talk about shared values, individual as well as shared goals and the processes that you're using and your role as a product leader or as a product manager leading their team is to coordinate these things, coach people empower them and support them along the way.

So um a really great tool that I can um recommend for this is the so-called team canvas. Um If you Google it, you can actually find templates and step by step guides on how to workshop a team canvas and it has all this information in it personally. I like to do this on a quarterly basis. Um Once you start working with a new team or once you just discovered this new tool, you can create the first version and then you check in once a quarter and see. Is this all still true? Does it still hold up? Are there things we want to change? Has the team makeup maybe changed? Do we have new members? Have other members left, you know, and it gives you um a great starting point. All right. So now we've talked a lot about communication, but we haven't actually talked about real skills. And also what do I mean by strategic skills? It might be something that you have heard before, but it might also be that you haven't heard it before. So let's just quickly look into what's tactical and what's strategic. What's the difference? Anything that's called strategic is relating to the identification of long term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them. So think big, that's what strategic is longer term.

Um Big goals, you know, and then on the other side, we have tactical, which is more small scale actions that are serving a larger purpose, the strategy. Um and they might be, you know, with a limited or immediate end in view. So it's, it's smaller things I have learned these terms or to use these terms when talking about skills from a dear friend of mine who's also a product lead. Um And uh yeah, she was the first one that introduced this to me. Strategic skills are what often get referred to as soft skills, but calling them soft skills makes them sound kind of squishy and weak and not that important. You know, when you think think hard skills, those are the important ones, your hard skills are your tactical skills.

So they are like your factual knowledge, for example, maybe a framework and a framework is great, but it can only get you that this far and, but to actually get to this whole communication thing that is so important that I've just talked about a lot. That's what you need your strategic skills for. Here are some examples of strategic skills that I personally think are super important for people that work in product. We've already talked about active listening and general communication. And here are some more examples of what communication can look like.

Writing is a form of communication. Um Sometimes like, you know, you might have to, to write a stakeholder newsletter or your tickets or one pagers or, you know, I've, I've tried out this uh Amazon press release before and for all of these things, it's really helpful if you get better at writing, which is something you can easily practice presentation skills.

Um I hope I've gotten pretty good. I'm seeing a comment that um the person likes the presentation. Um So I think I'm getting better at that. Um Storytelling is such an important tool. Our brains are actually wired for stories. Um Drawing can be super helpful. Some people understand complex um things better if they see them drawn out facilitation, like how good are you at running meetings and workshops, giving feedback. It's not an easy thing like getting good at giving feedback is really worthwhile and I can only recommend doing that and also getting into a habit of coaching, coaching your team members, um and helping them to get better. You can do that as a line manager, but you can also do peer coaching so you can coach each other. Um And there, there's just so much there, this could be a whole talk on its own. I just wanted to give you a few examples here. Um And, and they're all connected with each other. So there's not like you can't just be like, oh, I'm just gonna learn how to do great presentations and nothing else. Um You know, they, they all kind of connected. Um and something that they also all have in common is that you need an underlying mindset to get really good at these. And I want to quickly touch on that as well. So what's the mindset that a great product leader needs to actually excel with these skills?

Um We need to be purpose driven. So why, you know, why are we doing this? What's the purpose? Because if we understand the purpose, why we're doing a certain thing, we can actually get kind of um yeah, give that to the team and everybody works a lot better. If there's a common purpose, we need to be humble, there's no room for ego. Um We should be inclusive and this can be on different levels. This can mean diversity and inclusion, inclusion and, but this can also mean, you know, include your developers into your discovery work.

They're not code monkeys. They also like to care, like they usually care about the users and like to understand them better as well. We need to be passionate but I think nobody that's not passionate actually survives the product. Very long, to be quite honest, we want to be curious and flexible. Um as product people, I might not be the biggest Jeff Bezos fan. You can think about him what you will, but he was very right when he said be stubborn on vision, flexible on the details. This also holds true on like lower levels or smaller levels um within product teams. And even though you might not be officially a people manager, I wanna say all product managers are in a people position. So you need high EQ now, what's a Q? That's emotional intelligence. This means things like empathy. We're usually really good at learning how to be empathetic towards our customers. That's like the one thing that everybody knows. But are you, do you also have empathy for your stakeholders and your team? I know I didn't for the longest time, my stakeholders, I would just think, oh, they just really don't know what they're talking about. Like look at me having all the empathy for my customers and understanding them way better while I actually didn't have empathy for my stakeholders and where they were coming from.

Um ego, it really just gets in the way um you know, give credit to your team when things go well and if things don't go well, take responsibility and make it into a learning opportunity, always assume good intentions. When I first learned this, this was a game changer for me because no one is intentionally bad at their job. And instead of assuming that someone is like, has bad intentions, maybe assume that you have a lack of context or they do and you need to talk about it and communicate more transparently about what's happening. Um I like in German, we say, we say you can give people a trust advance. So you basically trust them from the get go without them having to earn your trust. And only if they then kind of disappointed or do something where you're just like, oh, I believe that wasn't great, then you can actually go back into OK, we need to rebuild this trust, but just trust people because everybody is doing their best. Usually um resolving conflict is also one of those things um that empathy can get you very far in. But some, sometimes you also need to escalate. I've had a situation like that with a developer on my team and we just really, we had a bad start.

We just weren't really getting along and it was really hard and we both did not really enjoy working with each other. And so um at some point, I reached out to the head of engineering and I said, I'm, I'm really stuck here I don't really know what to do. I've tried the things that have worked for me in the past. Clearly, they did not work here. So I need some new ideas. I'm out of ideas. Can you help me also? You know, this person better, maybe you can give me some pointers and he had told me to just give them very, very clear feedback on the things that don't work for me. And I did that. And then the developer reached out to me and said, thank you so much for this feedback. Do you maybe have 30 minutes so we can talk about it? 30 minutes turned into two hours and it was the beginning of our relationship of, of an actual friendship now. Um And we solved all the main blocks in those two hours and created a space for healthy communication between the two of us. And it's been really great ever since. So ask for help and the last one, gather feedback. So we already talked about giving feedback. You should also ask for feedback because things that used to work in the past don't necessarily still work.

Um Or just generally things that you do um might not work for everyone on the team. So make sure to ask people and be inviting a feedback. All right. So now that we've talked about all of these skills, um I just wanna make sure we don't forget about the technical ones. There has to be a balance if you don't know any framework and if you have no product as a craft and knowledge, you can have the best strategic skills out there um that you still need that as well. But I mean, you know, maybe unpopular opinion, I don't know, but I would say if you only have tactical skills and your strategic skills, your human skills are not that well developed, you can't be a great product person. So make sure you strike a balance between your tactical and your strategic skills. Both of them, you can train in my opinion. Um And that will make you a great product person and you being successful in both of these areas will actually lead to um your team succeeding because you learn how to empower them and, and make them better.

And while this might be a bit of a heavy topic, um please do not forget to have fun, have fun with your team. Um They are amazing people and you know, uh it helps us to grow the bonds between everybody um to just have, have a bit of a good time. Um Happy to share some tips and tricks on that as well. And um yeah, that, that was my little presentation. Thank you so much and you can follow me on linkedin, on medium, on Twitter, uh whatever, wherever you are at. Um I'm super happy to connect with people, ask me some questions. I'm happy to share my slides and, um, thank you so, so much for everyone that was here. And, uh, I'll, I'll hope I'll, I'll see you all in, in other sessions.