1. Janna Bastow

Co-founder & CEO of ProdPad, Co-founder of Mind the Product

LinkedIn

Okay, let’s nip this in the bud. Yes, Janna is our Co-founder and CEO here at ProdPad, but she’s made it on this list of Product Leaders through merit – not blind favoritism. 

Janna has been a huge voice in the product space for many years, hosting and appearing on webinars and talks to share her masterful insight into roadmapping, customer feedback, and more. She also Co-founded Mind the Product, an excellent community of product people that hosts world-renowned conferences and events to help Product Managers excel. 

Janna pioneered the Now-Next-Later product roadmap, a now popular time horizon-based roadmap that we’re pretty crazy about. We think it’s waaaaay better than restrictive timeline roadmaps and it’s now a fundamental feature of the ProdPad tool. 

Janna chats about the benefits of Now-Next-Later often, and you can catch her speaking about it in many of our webinars. We think this is a great one to start with .

2. Tatyana Mamut

Co-founder & CEO of Wayfound

LinkedIn

Tatyana is a customer-obsessed Product Leader, believing that you should spend your energy building things that make your customers happy, not your bosses. With her long list of successes, we think she’s onto something. 

Tatyana has been a transformative leader for multiple companies, building high-impact products for Amazon, Salesforce, Nextdoor, IDEO, and Pendo. Those are some pretty big names. At the time of writing, she’s currently killing it at Wayfound, helping businesses to thrive with AI. 

With AI transformation and how that affects customer experience being a recent focus of Tatyana’s, she’s an excellent voice for those looking to learn how to leverage this technology without losing the human touch. 

3. Brian Elmi

SVP of Product at Drata

LinkedIn

Brian Elmi is one of the most highly admired Product Leaders, but don’t just take our word for it. He’s been named The Most Admired Product Leader category winner at the Product 50, an award run by Amplitude. So, what’s he done to deserve this crown? 

Well, Brian is currently the VP of Product at Drata, but it’s his two decades of experience that make him a standout Product Leader to learn from. He’s been involved in Product Management and Design at multiple Fortune 500 companies but has also lent his expertize to startups, too. 

Brian once led Product Development at Intuit, overseeing the TurboTax product line – which happens to be the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. That’s pretty good going. 

4. Melissa Perri

Founder of Product Institute

LinkedIn

No list of great Product Leaders is complete without Melissa Perri. In fact, she’s so awesome that we’ve also included her in our 15 Women in Product You Should Be Following list.

Melissa Perri is a coach, consultant, and advisor, focused on helping Product Managers make their organizations amazing. She’s also the creator and lead instructor of Product Institute, an outstanding school for product people to polish their skills. 

She’s focused on steering people away from the Build Trap and has written Escaping the Build Trap to act as a guide. 

Melissa speaks often on this subject, and has been our webinar guest here at ProdPad on multiple occasions.  Why not check out this Product Ops Bootcamp webinar with Melissa Perri, no signup required. Consider it a gift from us, because we’re nice like that.

5. Marty Cagan

Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group

LinkedIn

Marty Cagan needs little introduction, as he’s a well-known name among Product Leaders. Marty is a great voice and also a combative one. Not afraid to hide away from heated debates on best practices, his insight is well-considered, and designed to get you thinking on ways to improve your processes. 

His arguments are coming from a place of experience, having served as a product executive at companies like eBay and Netscape. His trilogy of books, Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed, are highly regarded and considered essential reading for those in Product Management. His books delve into topics like the approaches of leading tech giants, ways to create environments where teams thrive, and how to update your business for the ever-changing demands of the modern day. 

He’s the Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group and his insights cover the length and breadth of Product Management. Following him will give you a well-rounded look at all aspects of the discipline, including valuable ways to find marginal gains to drive improvements.

6. Matt LeMay

Author & Product Consultant

LinkedIn

Matt LeMay is a Product Leader focused on helping others streamline their processes to make things far simpler. He delivers data strategy and training workshops for companies like GE, American Express, and Pfizer. 

His ethos is all about focusing on the work that matters most. His two books, Agile for Everybody and Product Management in Practice are bursting with great insight to help you improve and develop and work in a more agile way. They’re perfect resources for those at the dawn of their careers and are something seasoned Product Managers wish they had access to when they were first starting.

He’s also the creator of the One Page/One Hour Pledge, a commitment to help reduce busy work and maximize collaboration. The framework is used by over 100 teams worldwide. 

In the past, our CEO Janna has had the pleasure of picking Matt’s brain about a few topics for our webinar series, most recently she spoke to Matt about how to show the ROI of your product work. It’s a grade A webinar you should really check it out. 

7. Adrienne Tan

Co-founder & CEO of Brainmates

LinkedIn

This is a big claim, but a true one – Adrienne Tan has invigorated Australian Product Management, breathing life into the scene. A lot of her work has been focused on boosting the product community in the country, which wasn’t as vibrant when she first started. This desire to connect product people led to the successful creation of Leading the Product in 2015, an annual conference that brings together thousands of Product Managers to learn and share insights. 

Adrienne Co-founded Brainmates back in 2004, working to give clients the tools to drive business growth. Adrienne is highly active on LinkedIn, posting insightful blogs and videos on various topics relating to leadership, frameworks, and more. 

She’s a wonderful contributor to the Product Management landscape and teaches that we thrive in a community and that if you haven’t got one in your area, maybe you should build one.

8. Brant Cooper

CEO of Moves the Needle

LinkedIn

For over 15 years, Brant was one of the leading lights in Product Management, being an innovative voice and one of the originators of the Lean Startup movement. Most recently he founded and was CEO of Moves the Needle. In July 2024, the product world lost Brant, and with that a key figure in Product Management. 

But his work lives on and should be celebrated. A great way to explore all that Brant stood for is through his book Disruption Proof. Designed to help you through times of unforeseen change, it’ll teach you more about the RAD mindset, the five E’s, and the K-A-S-E strategy. Three core principles that Brant championed.

Since his passing, the Product Management world is just that little bit dimmer. We’ll miss you, Brant.

9. SC Moatti

Founder of Products That Count

LinkedIn

If you’re looking to network with other Product Managers, then SC Moatii is a must-follow. She’s the Founder of one of the largest networks of PMs across the globe, boasting a community of over 20K product leaders, managers, and innovators that you can learn from.

That community is called Products That Count, and we highly recommend you join it if you’re not involved already. 

All that said, SC Moatti is more than just a facilitator of connection. She’s also got great insights herself, with a good focus on mobile product management and digital transformation. She often talks around the U.S. and is also the host of the Product That Count podcast, which we really recommend! 

If you’re looking for more podcasts to listen to while you do the dishes, walk the dog, or whatever, we’ve got a list of some of our absolute favorites . 

10. Lenny Rachitsky

Former Product Lead at Airbnb & Podcast Host

LinkedIn

Talking about podcasts, Lenny is the host of one of the biggest product podcasts around, hosting a range of impressive guests who have bundles to say about Product Management and more. 

Lenny doesn’t piggyback on the name value of his guest – he’s one of the best Product Leaders in his own right. As a former Airbnb Growth Product Manager, he’s seen his fair share of success and knows what he’s talking about. 

Lenny had a great chat with our own Janna Bastow on the topic of building better product roadmaps. You can take a listen to that episode below .

If podcasts aren’t your thing, you can also check out his socials which are chock full of insights, witty remarks, and advice. He’s one of the more entertaining people to follow on social media. His newsletter is also a great resource, with around 70,000 signed up to it, so you just know it’s stellar. Check out the Lenny Rachitsky Newsletter. 

11. Lisa Dziuba

Head of Growth at Lemon.io

LinkedIn

Lisa is a champion of finding untapped growth channels and exploring those avenues to grow your product and your company. She’s a pro at product marketing, using her decade of experience to drive growth, focusing on user insights and data. 

She’s the Product 50 winner for the Startup and Small Company category and is currently a Product Marketer at Lemon.io, bringing to that position a treasure trove of knowledge and success to draw upon. 

Lisa’s accolades and achievements are insane. For WeLoveNoCode she generated $3.6 million in ARR with 30% MoM growth. If those numbers mean nothing to you, she basically helped the company earn $3.6 million a year while growing the company by 30% each month. No surprise that it’s been acquired by Toptal. 

More excitedly, Lisa is just getting started. She was a nominee for the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021 so there are plenty more miles in the tank and plenty more opportunities for her to achieve even more success. 

Follow her to learn more product marketing tips and ways to grow your market share. 

12. Eric Ries

Founder of Lean Startup Co & Author 

LinkedIn

Eric Ries is likely a name you already know. He’s a big fish in not just the product world, but also among startups. This is because he’s the brainchild of the highly popular Lean Startup Methodology. 

This methodology provides the basis of lean product management, and we think it’s such a fundamental aspect of modern-day product management that we’ve included his book The Lean Startup in our list of Best Product Management Books. 

The reason why his work is so useful is that it details how to work in a lean way that saves you development time and money. It focuses on the Build-Measure-Learn cycle that helps you move faster, learn quicker, and drive consistent improvements. 

Although this book is from 2001, Eric hasn’t rested on his laurels. He currently serves on the advisory board of multiple tech startups and has been a consultant for several high-profile companies. 

13. Ken Sandy

Product Coach & Lecturer

LinkedIn

Ken Sandy is a senior technology Product Manager hailing from the San Francisco Bay area – a hotbed of great Product Leaders – with experience at MasterClass and LinkedIn Learning. 

He’s a fantastic product teacher, crafting the first Product Management course at the Engineering school at UC Berkeley, which has over 400 alumni, now making waves in the industry. 

His work is a great resource when learning how to be a great Product Leader yourself. His book The Influential Product Manager is particularly valuable for those stepping into senior positions. 

Ken Sandy is a product sage, imparting his wisdom to startups and scale-up companies all over the United States, Canada, and Europe. 

We’ve got a kickass on-demand webinar with Ken about building a killer product strategy that you shouldn’t miss. Give it a watch, it’s worth it. 

14. Jake Knapp

Co-Founder at Character

LinkedIn

Jake Knapp is one of the more recognizable Product Leaders as he’s a New York Times bestselling author with his book Sprint. Don’t let the name deceive you, it’s definitely not about athletics.

Jake Knapp is the inventor of the design sprint, a five-day, short burst of intensive activity that allows teams to tackle complex problems quickly and effectively. He began using this methodology at Google in 2010, working with the teams behind Chrome, Google Search, and more, before bringing the design sprint methodology to Google Ventures in 2012. 

Basically, many Google features that we use and love daily are thanks to Jake and his ingenious design sprint approach. 

Today, Jake Knapp coaches thousands of product teams, is the Co-founder of Character, and also writes a newsletter that you can subscribe to here.

15. Aileen Lee

Founder of Cowboy Ventures

LinkedIn

Aileen is the Founder of Cowboy Ventures, a company that partners with start-ups and enterprises to help them build products that their users will love. She’s a Product Leader with years of experience and is a significant voice, with her finger firmly on the pulse. 

She proved this when she first coined the popular term ‘unicorn’, used to describe a business that hits $1 billion in revenue without being listed on the stock market. She’s a trendsetter, and highly influential – even Times Magazine seems to think so, placing her in their 100 most influential people list in 2019. 

She’s been a massive player in making Product Management less of a boys club by supporting more women to get into positions of power within product. Her support, mentorship, and angel investment have helped to increase the number of female venture capitalists, start-up owners, and Founders.  

Her ‘Welcome to the Unicorn Club’ article, where she first used the term unicorn, is a great resource for Product Managers looking to learn from and analyze the success of high-performing start-ups. For something more recent, you also check out why she believes that more unicorns will be female-led in the future. 

16. Teresa Torres

ProductTalk Coach

LinkedIn

We’re big fans of Teresa Torres here at ProdPad, so much so that she’s featured on multiple of our awesome webinars! 

As a Product Management coach, Teresa has helped multiple companies like CarMax, Spotify, and Tesco to improve their development. She’s also helped thousands of product people with her product discovery courses found on Product Talk Academy. She’s a big deal, okay.

Teresa is big on the importance of continuous discovery in the product world. She follows the mantra that you’re always learning and uncovering things about your product to make it better. Consider Teresa an expert on this, so much so that she’s written a book to guide you on how to do it. 

Continuous Discovery Habits digs deep into step-by-step frameworks you can follow to make continuous discovery a key aspect of your product development. From the book you can learn how to collect customer insights, validate assumptions, and make better data-driven decisions. Cool. 

Want a taster of what Teresa has to say? Check out our webinar with her to find out more.

17. Khatereh Khodavirdi

VP of Data Science at PayPal

LinkedIn

When you play a massive part in the success of one of the world’s biggest online payment and money transfer businesses, people are going to stand up and take notice. Khatereh is the current Vice President of Data Science, Operational Analytics, and AI at Venmo and PayPal. She’s big into using data and analytics to drive growth, taking advantage of insights to spearhead the next generation of commerce products. 

Before her time at PayPal, Khatereh was a core member of eBay’s first-party ads initiative, playing a key part in the outrageous growth of the business in its heyday. 

Khatereh knows a thing or two, and her expertise has been rewarded by being named the Best Product Leader in the large company category at the Product 50 awards. She’s a consistent poster on social media, making her a great person to follow and learn from.

18. Ibrahim Bashir

VP of Product Management at Amplitude

LinkedIn

Ibrahim is the vice president of Product Management at Amplitude – yes the Amplitude that’s behind the Product 50 that helped illuminate so many great Product Leaders. We thought with his company helping to champion some of the best Product Leaders in the world that he deserved some love too. And boy does he deserve it. 

Ibrahim has been building and shipping software for over 20 years, scaling Twitter’s service infrastructure and Amazon’s Kindle business to name just two. In his newsletter Run The Business on Substack, he writes a lot about building teams, shipping products, and repeating outcomes. 

It’s a great resource to gather the thoughts of someone who’s been around the block and knows the ropes, and we’ve loved his insights so much that we’ve invited him to share his thoughts on our blog.

Read what he has to say on Product Value in B2B Software.

19. Aziz Musa

Founder of Cush Digital

LinkedIn

Aziz is one of the best public speakers and Product Leaders, and since blowing us away with his talk about delivering a pure product at Mind the Product in 2013, we’ve been big fans of his work and insight. 

Aziz has a lot of experience leading multiple startups, including the digital consulting arm of Pegasus, Blackbird, and Spartans Boxing Club. He’s now the Founder and CEO of Cush Digital, one of the fastest-growing digital agencies in the Middle East and North African region. 

Aziz has a wonderful focus on psychology, philosophy, and empirical study to help you create amazing products that your customers love, and shares his knowledge at conferences regularly. Aziz has been a guest on a number of great podcasts and webinars and is a strong voice to listen to if you’re looking to improve your understanding of Product Management and marketing. 

20.Ghazal Badiozamani

Chief Product Officer at Catchafire

LinkedIn

Ghazal is a unique thinker in the product space, suggesting some great ideas that go against the grain, and that’s why she’s a great person to follow and learn from. In November 2023, she stood firmly at a conference stating that we need to stop aligning our product strategy with our business strategy. What ? 

Well, looking for answers we asked Ghazal to elaborate on our blog, and her really useful and insightful explanation can be found below. 

Ghazal is a Product Leader with a lot of pedigree, with success in helping companies create their strategies and develop high-performing teams. She’s the current Chief Product Officer at Catchafire, with experience launching products in medicine, edtech, analytics, and material science. Fancy.

21. Bruce McCarthy

Product Culture Founder & Keynote Speaker

LinkedIn

Bruce McCarthy is a serious thought leader when it comes to product roadmaps, having co-authored the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched. He explores new ways to build your product roadmap that go against the traditional deadline-based approach – something that we can definitely buy into. 

Like our CEO Janna Bastow, Bruce has been an early voice in moving away from feature-based roadmaps. If you want to see Bruce talk about his approach to roadmaps and to effectively use OKRs alongside them, oh boy do we have the webinar for you. 

Watch as Bruce and our CEO Janna Bastow break down the relationship between OKRs and roadmaps and figure out how to work most effectively.

22. Susana Videira Lopes

Director of Product at Abatable

LinkedIn

Susana is a powerhouse of Product Management, with over 10 years of experience leading product teams in multiple B2B scale-ups. Her mantra for Product Management is to focus on solving difficult yet truly meaningful problems for your customers. 

A great example of this is how she launched an award-winning AI product to fight identity fraud at Onfido, which helped the brand achieve tenfold revenue growth over six years. 

Susana is one of the Product Leaders who helps product people get a leg up. She’s an angel investor at Ventures Together and also provides coaching to founders in early-stage businesses. Her blog is a fantastic resource covering some key principles and frameworks in Product Management, including minimum viable product and customer research in B2B.

Susana is currently the Director of Product at Abatable, which focuses on building a thriving future for climate, nature, and people. 

23. April Dunford

Author & Founder of Ambient Strategy

LinkedIn

If you’re looking for advice on how to position your product and business to drive success, April Dunford is your woman. She’s spent 25 years as a startup executive, operating in the trifecta of Marketing, Product, and Sales Teams. 

In these roles, she learned what makes the difference between a winning product that everyone wants, and a loser that never got off the ground. She’s used that insight to develop multiple successful products and build startups that were acquired with a total cost of over $2 billion . 

April has developed an impressive approach to positioning products in ways that work, becoming a certified expert in the craft. She’s written Obviously Awesome, an absolute barnstormer of a book that captures her approaches to positioning that any startup can follow. Her follow-up Sales Pitch is a fantastic resource for designing a compelling case for why your product should be chosen over others.

24. Adam Thomas

Product Lead at Pendo.io

LinkedIn

Adam Thomas is a Product Leader and speaker, boasting over 15 years in product leadership roles at the likes of Google, BP, and SmartRecruiters. He now uses his experience to help product teams plan better and communicate more effectively to achieve their goals. 

He’s one of the few Product Leaders who’s seen the tension between customers, Product Teams, and organizational outcomes firsthand, and now shares strategies to overcome this challenge. 

Adam Thomas has risen through the ranks, starting as a System Programmer to become the insightful voice he is today. He writes and talks about helping businesses move beyond relentless triage and create solutions that promote a better culture. 

He’s an exciting voice in Product Management, and we’re thrilled that he’s a ProdPad webinar guest! Find out how to avoid the five deadly sins of strategy .

25. Nilan Peiris

Chief Product Officer at Wise

LinkedIn

Nilan is the VP of Growth at Wise, being in that role since 2014 while acting as an advisor for the brand since 2012. During that time, Wise has grown to become one of the biggest international money transfer providers in the world. Good going. He’s also the Chief Product Officer, leading the way for new product development and innovations.

Like many other great Product Leaders, Nilan spends time advising startups and small businesses to get the most out of their products. He’s spoken at length about how to market your product through word of mouth and has also reflected on his 10-year experience with Wise at an insightful Mind the Product Talk in 2023. 

He’s a consistent podcast guest and provides great insights on his socials, so he’s definitely worth a follow.

26. Lewis C. Lin

CEO of Impact Interview

LinkedIn

Lewis C. Lin is one of the best Product Leaders focused on helping you get hired. Since leaving his position as Director of Product Management at Microsoft, Lewis has been a massive voice in helping product professionals develop their interview skills and land their next role. 

His book, The Product Manager Interview is a great resource for learning tips and tricks to excel and stand out in your field, and he’s also got a great Slack community where you can practice for your interviews, too. 

By the way, we’ve made a list of some great Slack channels built for Product Managers. They range from being communities to help connect with other PMs, places for marginalized individuals in Product, and everything in between. Why don’t you take a look?

Lewis C. Lin was named as one of the best job posters you should be following on social media, making him a fantastic resource for Product Managers looking to change up their careers. 

27. Itamar Gilad

Product Manager at Google

LinkedIn

Itamar and his ideas are a very big deal in Product Management. Not only has he worked with some big boys in Google, YouTube, and Microsoft, but he’s also led the product growth teams at Gmail that helped the application reach one billion monthly active users. Wow. 

But he’s not done there. Itamar is also the inverter of a couple of well-known frameworks that many Product Managers use today. The GIST framework for product development and planning may be his biggest one, which separates your roadmap into goals, ideas, step-projects, and tasks. Hence the name. 

He also has the confidence meter to his name, which lets you calculate how confident you are in a product idea. It’s a pretty nifty tool we recommend you try. In fact, a confidence meter is built into ProdPad allowing you to be a fast visual of your entire backlog by confidence rating. 

We’ve actually spoken to Itamar in depth about the benefits of GIST over product roadmaps. You can get your hands on the on-demand video by clicking the link below .

28. Minji Lee

Head of Data Science at Uber Freight 

LinkedIn

Last, but certainly not least, we have one of the most exciting Product Leaders to keep your eye on in the coming years.

Minji Lee is a product expert who’s one to watch, being voted the Most Promising Up and Comer at the Product 50 awards. She’s currently the Head of Data Science at Uber Freight, the market leader in intelligent logistic solutions. 

She works on AI and analytical solutions to power her product discovery and creation, using the technology to craft dynamic pricing solutions for carriers and shippers. Her efforts have improved the satisfaction of her customers, launching key features to enhance Uber Freight’s value proposition. 

Minj Lee is a product expert in waiting and is poised to make a big splash in the product world. 

Feeling inspired by our Product Leaders?

Inspired by this list to become the best Product Manager you can be? Well, we’ve got a whole host of resources for you to dive into to improve your knowledge and understanding. We’re talking webinars, courses, downloadable templates, blogs, glossaries, you name it. Check them out! 

Of course, a Product Manager is only as good as the tools they use. You’ll struggle to chop wood well with a rubber axe. At ProdPad, we’ve got one of the best tools for Product Managers that can help you up your game. Be it for roadmapping, idea management, feedback analysis, or more, try ProdPad today to see how we can make your outcomes better. 

The post 28 Great Product Leaders and What We Can Learn From Them appeared first on ProdPad.

What is SOC2? 

SOC2 is designed to ensure that you securely manage your data to protect both your organization’s interests and your clients’ privacy. It’s particularly relevant for businesses that use cloud technology to store customer information, making it a really useful benchmark for SaaS companies and cloud vendors alike​​​​.

The SOC2 framework is structured around five Trust Service Criteria (TSC): Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. Each of these criteria addresses a different aspect of operational security and data management:

In this article, I’ll take you through:

• Why SOC2 compliance is important
• The three main components of SOC2
• Why it’s a useful starting point for your compliance journey
• How to become SOC2 compliant

What makes SOC2 compliance so important?

Essentially, SOC2 is all about safeguarding data and building trust. If you’re handling sensitive information (and let’s face it, pretty much all information is sensitive these days), achieving SOC2 compliance isn’t just about meeting a regulatory benchmark. It’s a clear way to demonstrate that your company is serious about security.

Given how concerns over data privacy are escalating, being SOC2 compliant can provide you with a competitive edge. It shows you’re a trustworthy and secure partner to work with. This is getting more and more important, especially as potential enterprise customers and partners often require SOC2 compliance as a prerequisite for engagement​​​​.

Something that makes SOC2 stand out is its adaptability – you’re not required to meet all five of the criteria it’s judged on, but can choose those relevant to your business operations and objectives. This flexibility lets you tailor your compliance efforts to what’s applicable to your product, rather than adopting a less efficient one-size-fits-all approach​​.

SOC2 also allows you to design your controls to meet the particular TSC requirements that you pick, unlike other compliance standards that offer a prescriptive list of controls. This customizability makes SOC2 a versatile and appealing option, especially for those of us working with SaaS and cloud services.

SOC2 compliance is a big win for any organization that stores or processes customer data. By adhering to the SOC2 framework and achieving compliance, you’ll both protect your clients and your business from data breaches and cyber threats, and also enhance your marketability, and build stronger trust with your customers and partners.

Trust Service Criteria, controls, and evidence: the pillars of SOC2 compliance

The Trust Service Criteria (TSC), controls, and evidence are the bones of SOC2’s framework. This framework helps you prove that your company is dedicated to protecting customer data through a structured and transparent approach.

What are the Trust Service Criteria (TSC)?

The TSC are a set of principles that underpin SOC2 compliance, providing a comprehensive blueprint for organizations to manage customer data securely and responsibly.

By adhering to these criteria, you can align your practices with best-in-class security standards, protecting sensitive information from being spread.

The five TSC are:

• Security: Serves as the baseline criterion, emphasizing the need for robust access controls, firewalls, intrusion detection, and other preventative measures to safeguard system resources.  It’s the only mandatory principle, underscoring its importance in the SOC2 framework.
• Availability: Targets the reliability of services, requiring systems to be accessible and operational for users as agreed upon in SLAs or contracts.
• Processing Integrity: Focuses on ensuring that system processing is accurate, timely, complete, and authorized, underpinning the reliability of operational processes.
• Confidentiality: This concerns the protection of confidential information from unauthorized access and disclosures, applying primarily to data that is restricted to certain users or organizations.
• Privacy: Relates to the handling of personal information in accordance with the company’s privacy notice and applicable privacy regulations, ensuring the ethical management of personal data​​​​.

What role do controls play in SOC2 compliance?

Controls are the specific practices and policies that are put in place to meet your chosen TSC. They are the mechanisms you use to put those criteria in operation, and cover everything from meatspace security measures to digital safeguards and procedural protocols.

Your controls will need to be designed around the unique risks and operational environment that you’re working with, and the specific TSC you’re aiming to comply with. Using this bespoke approach will let you address your specific security and compliance needs more efficiently and effectively, and help to embed SOC2 principles into your operational DNA​​​​.

Examples of SOC2 controls

Here are a few examples of the sort of controls you might need to implement: 

• multi-factor authentication for system access
• encryption of data in transit and at rest
• regular vulnerability assessments
• employee training programs on data protection

How do you use evidence to demonstrate your SOC2 compliance?

There’s no point going through all that hard work and not having anything to show for it. That’s why evidence collection is such a critical component of the SOC2 compliance process – you must document and demonstrate the effectiveness of your controls.

This involves gathering, organizing, and presenting data that proves that you’re adhering to the TSC through the controls you’ve implemented. It plays a crucial role during the final SOC2 audit, as the auditors will review this evidence to assess the organization’s compliance with the selected TSC​​​​.

Examples of SOC2 evidence

The evidence you’ll need to gather for your SOC2 audit includes things like:

• policy documents
• system logs
• audit trails
• incident response records
• employee training records

Collecting and managing your evidence is an ongoing process. You need to continuously monitor and adjust your controls as the playing field changes. After all, hackers never stop iterating, so neither can you.

Why is SOC2 a good place to start?

Thanks to its flexibility compared to other compliance standards, SOC2 is a particularly good fit if you’re at the start of your business’ compliance journey, especially for startups and smaller companies. By letting you choose specific TSC that match your needs, it gives you a tailored compliance path that will align more closely with your company’s risk profile and operational priorities.

The initial focus on the mandatory Security criterion gives you a solid foundation to build from, and lets you add to it when you need to and are ready to. It accommodates business growth, allowing you to phase your compliance process, and provides scalability. This is really useful for rapidly evolving startups and smaller businesses, providing a baseline to build upon with additional compliance layers as they grow.

Compared to more prescriptive standards like ISO27017 and ISO27018, SOC2’s less stringent approach gives room for greater innovation and agility in meeting the compliance requirements, so you’ll have the freedom to design controls that fit how your business and product work.

SOC2’s model encourages a customized, scalable approach to compliance, focusing on security while enabling you to adapt and evolve your compliance strategy as your business grows. Embracing its adaptable framework, will help you make sure that you’re on top of security and privacy now, and in the future.

When you’re ready to start thinking about your next compliance goals after SOC2, be sure to check out my full guide on enterprise-ready compliance.

How do you achieve SOC2 compliance?

The journey to SOC2 compliance is a thorough process, to say the least! There are a bunch of critical steps that you’ll want to get prepared for, from the initial selection of Trust Service Criteria (TSC) to the final audit.

By the end of this pathway, you’ll not only meet the stringent requirements set forth by SOC2, but you’ll also enjoy enhanced overall security and operational integrity.

This isn’t the sexiest initiative on your roadmap, nor will it be the most fun you’ve ever had at work, but by heck you’ll feel like celebrating when it’s done and you have that compliance badge in your hand. 

So, let’s kick off and explore these steps in detail, highlighting where you, as a product leader, can help your teams navigate this complex landscape.

1. Select your Trust Service Criteria and controls

The first step involves deciding which of the TSC you want to be included in the SOC2 audit. This decision defines the scope of your compliance efforts and helps you ensure that you’ve focused on the areas that are most relevant to your business and your customer expectations.

As a Product leader, you will play a key role here, as it’s your job to make sure the selected criteria align with the product’s security needs and business objectives​​. You’ll need to work closely with a range of internal stakeholders, including security teams and executive management, to identify which TSC fits your needs.

After selecting the relevant TSC, the next stage of the process is designing and implementing controls that meet the criteria. It takes a deep understanding of your product’s architecture and operational workflows to get this stage right, as well as a strategic approach to embedding security into these processes​​​​.

2. Producing a Gap Analysis Report

Next, you should conduct a comprehensive gap analysis to compare your current security practices against the SOC2 requirements. This report will highlight where you’re non-compliant, and lays out a framework for addressing these gaps.

You need to make sure that the gap analysis covers all aspects of your product, infrastructure, and company operations, so it can give you a clear picture of the steps you’ll have to take to achieve compliance.

Make sure to engage teams from across the business when reviewing your report. That way you’ll ensure you’re covering all perspectives when you work out what to do about it. The report should offer actionable insights, so you can prioritize your compliance efforts based on risk, impact, and resource availability.

3. Implement the changes

Based on what you discover with your gap analysis, the real work starts, because it’s time to get busy implementing the necessary changes to your policies, procedures, and tech. This can often be the hardest part of the whole process, as you’ll likely find you need to make some pretty significant modifications to how you do things, and your product itself.

It’s also your time to shine, because you’ll be coordinating the changes across all the affected teams. It’s up to you to make sure that everyone’s work aligns with the SOC2 requirements, and doesn’t disrupt the product’s functionality or user experience​​.

This is your initiative to manage, with a clear schedule, responsibilities, and milestones to guide the implementation process. You’ll want to help and encourage your departments to collaborate, because the changes have to be implemented cohesively across the whole company.

4. Collect your evidence and prepare for the audit

As you are making the necessary changes, it’s vital you start collecting the evidence you’ll need to prove your compliance with the selected TSC and controls. Simply put, there’s no point in doing the work if you can’t show what you’ve done.

Your evidence will be reviewed by the auditors to assess the company’s adherence to SOC2 standards. You need to ensure that evidence is being collected systematically and comprehensively, and that it covers all aspects of the changes​​​​ you’ve implemented.

Having detailed documentation of all the changes made, including your policies, procedures, and system configurations, is essential for your evidence-collection process. You’ll probably find it helpful to regularly review and update your evidence collection process as you go to ensure that all the necessary documentation stays accurate and up-to-date.

5. Audit

The final step in the SOC2 compliance journey is the audit, conducted by an AICPA-certified auditor. They will assess how effective your controls are and the accuracy of the evidence you’ve provided. You’ll want to work closely with the auditors, giving them access to any information they need and deal with any questions or concerns that may crop up during the audit process​​​​.

Giving your support to the auditors, including providing them with clarifications and any additional documentation they need, is key to a successful audit. Plus, after the audit, you should review their findings and implement any recommended improvements.

What are the two types of SOC2 reports?

Using everything I’ve told you so far, you should be able to lay a solid and comprehensive foundation for your journey to SOC2 compliance. And at the end of that journey is the all-important final milestone: your SOC2 report.

This report is a testament to your company’s adherence to the stringent standards set by the AICPA on security, privacy, and data protection. Again, though, SOC adds flexibility to the process by offering two types of SOC2 reports at differing levels of rigor – Type 1 and Type 2. 

SOC2 Type 1 report

The SOC2 Type 1 report (also written as Type I) is often seen as the first stage in the SOC2 compliance journey. It provides a snapshot of your organization’s commitment to security and operational integrity.

This report demonstrates your company’s capability to design systems and controls that effectively meet your chosen TSC. It can serve as a powerful tool in the earlier stages of product development or market entry, as it offers reassurance to your stakeholders and customers that you take security seriously.

Gathering and presenting evidence required for a Type 1 report still requires meticulous documentation of how you design your systems and controls, so it will still take thorough planning and organization​​​​.

SOC2 Type 2 report

The SOC2 Type 2 report (also written as Type II) goes a step further, as it evaluates the operational effectiveness of those systems and controls over a period of time. This type of report provides a more comprehensive view of how the controls are implemented and function in your daily operations.

It’s a more robust demonstration of your company’s commitment to maintaining high standards of security and privacy, as it shows you can design, effectively implement, and maintain controls that will protect your customer data over time.

Achieving a Type 2 report takes continuous effort, monitoring, adjusting, and documenting the operational effectiveness of your controls, so you’ll really have to commit to constantly updating and improving to maintain compliance.

Example of a SOC2 Type 2 report

If you’re wondering what the eventual report will look like, why not take a look at ours here at ProdPad. You can find details about our SOC2 compliance in our Trust Center and download a copy of the Type 2 report.  

How can product leaders help guide the SOC2 compliance process?

For product leaders, getting to grips with SOC2 reports is more than ticking boxes—it’s a strategic journey. Here’s how to tackle it:

Coordination is key: It’s crucial to bring teams from Security, Operations, and Product Development together. As a product leader, you’re the linchpin in this effort, working to build a culture where compliance and security are everyone’s business.

Strategize for success: Aligning your SOC2 compliance with your business goals is essential. Think of it as steering your compliance efforts in a way that fuels innovation and growth, rather than holding them back.

Turn compliance into opportunity: Getting your SOC2 reports isn’t just about meeting standards; it’s a chance to stand out. Use it to underscore your commitment to security and privacy. This is a powerful message for your customers and a solid foundation for growth.

Successfully jumping through all the hoops to get your SOC2 reports, whether Type 1 or Type 2, is a clear signal of your commitment to the highest security and privacy standards. These aren’t just shiny badges to collect. They’re tools that can enhance your product’s appeal, build customer trust, and drive your company forward.

By being smart about how you navigate the SOC2 compliance path, and by making the most of the knowledge the reports can give you, you’re not just securing your data (important as that is!). You’re securing a competitive edge in a world that values security more than ever.

The post SOC2 Compliance: A Product Leader’s Guide to Getting It appeared first on ProdPad.

What compliance certifications do you need to be enterprise-ready?

To be enterprise-ready, software companies need to adhere to a wide range of compliance certifications, each serving different aspects of software security, data protection, and operational integrity. The specific industry and where you’re operating also matters, with requirements differing from country to country, and even at the state level in the US.

Different industries will also have different compliance requirements, and the necessity for those certifications will differ depending on whether the industry is a regulated one or not.
Here’s a look at some of the crucial certifications, ranked by their importance, to guide your compliance journey.

Must have certifications to be enterprise-ready

These certifications are the ones most commonly on enterprise procurement teams’ must-have list. It’s very unlikely you’d find enterprise organizations that would buy a software tool that didn’t comply with most of these standards.

• ISO/IEC 27001 – A global standard for information security management systems (ISMS), crucial for protecting your systems from security threats.
• SOC 2 – Ideal for service providers storing customer data in the cloud, it ensures your information security measures are in line with industry standards.
• GDPR compliance – For companies operating in or serving customers in the EU, adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation is mandatory for data protection and privacy.
• ISO/IEC 27017 – Pertaining to cloud security, an important standard for organizations operating in the cloud, providing guidelines on information security controls.
• ISO/IEC 27018 – This standard is vital for cloud service providers handling personal data.

Important international certifications to be enterprise-ready

Depending on where you are operating, the following certifications could be highly important to your organization’s certification process.

• Cyber Essentials – A UK government-backed scheme that provides a foundation of cybersecurity measures for all industries.
• CCPA compliance – For companies operating in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act sets a benchmark for privacy and data protection.
• EUCC – For European companies, following the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity guidelines helps align with EU standards for network and information security.

Important industry-specific certifications to be enterprise-ready

If your product serves more highly regulated industries, such as the Healthcare or Financial sectors, or you work with government agencies, then there will be some very specific certifications that you will need to achieve.

• HIPAA – For software companies in the healthcare sector, complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is crucial for protecting patient data.
• PCI DSS – If you handle credit card transactions, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a must-have for securing payment information.
• FISMA – The Federal Information Security Management Act is important for companies working with US federal agencies to ensure data security and privacy.
• FedRAMP – Mandatory for cloud service providers serving US federal agencies, ensuring cloud products and services are secure.
• HITRUST CSF – In healthcare, HITRUST certification combines HIPAA requirements with other standards, providing comprehensive security and privacy measures.

Good-to-have certifications to be enterprise-ready

While these certifications are less vital to have, they can be both important hygiene factors for your business, and useful differentiators in a crowded or competitive market.

• ISO/IEC 27701 – As an extension to ISO/IEC 27001, focusing on privacy information management, it’s beneficial for enhancing privacy protocols beyond the basics.
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework – While not strictly speaking a certification, adhering to the NIST guidelines can significantly bolster your cybersecurity posture and is highly regarded in the industry.
• CMMC – The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification is becoming increasingly important for companies in the defense industrial base but is not universally required.
• ISO 22301 – Business continuity management, ensuring your business can continue operating during disruptions.
• ISO/IEC 20000 – IT service management, showing commitment to quality of service and customer satisfaction.
• CSA STAR certification – The Security Trust Assurance and Risk (STAR) Program for cloud environments, integrating key principles of transparency and trust.

Prioritizing your enterprise-ready compliance efforts

What is a priority for you largely depends on your industry, the nature of the data you handle, and the markets your product serves. For most software companies, starting with ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 certifications is a smart move, as they lay a solid foundation for information security management and operational integrity. GDPR and PCI DSS become critical based on geographic operation and transaction handling, respectively.

HIPAA and FISMA are indispensable for those in healthcare and government contracting, while ISO/IEC 27701 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework are excellent for bolstering your security and privacy measures further. Industry-specific certifications like FedRAMP and HITRUST CSF should be pursued based on the specific market segments you are targeting.

The landscape of compliance certifications can seem complex (and it is!), but focusing on the “must-haves” first will allow you to build a robust compliance framework. From there, adding “good-to-haves” and industry- and location-specific certifications can enhance your competitive edge and help you ensure that your software is enterprise-ready for customers worldwide.

Who should be responsible for achieving enterprise-ready compliance?

Achieving enterprise-ready compliance is a multifarious endeavor that will require coordination and collaboration across several roles within your organization. The Product Manager often takes the day-to-day lead in navigating the compliance landscape. However, your efforts need to be supported and complemented by a diverse and cross-functional team, each contributing their expertise to ensure comprehensive compliance.

Product Managers are at the forefront, responsible for overseeing the product’s strategy and roadmap, and ensuring that compliance requirements are prioritized appropriately and given the right strategic importance. As a PM, you coordinate with various departments, translate legal requirements into technical specifications, and monitor the progress toward compliance goals.

IT and Security Teams are the people you’ll need to implement the technical aspects of compliance. This includes securing data, managing cybersecurity risks, ensuring the integrity of information systems, and deploying necessary infrastructure upgrades. Their expertise is central to addressing the technical requirements of various compliance standards.

Legal Advisors can clue you in on the important details relating to the legal implications of your compliance decisions. They’ll help you navigate the complexities of international laws and regulations to ensure you’re enterprise-ready. They assist in contract management, intellectual property issues, and ensuring that all aspects of your product and its development adhere to applicable laws.

Human Resources (HR) also plays a vital role, especially in ensuring compliance with regulations related to employee data and privacy. You’ll need these folks training everyone on compliance-related matters, managing personnel records in compliance with legal standards, and ensuring that company policies reflect the latest regulatory requirements.

If you can bring these teams together and get everyone working in harmony, you’ll have formed yourself a compliance A-Team, each bringing their own unique perspective and expertise to ensure your plan comes together.

If you collaborate in this way, you’ll not only ensure that your products meet the necessary compliance standards, but you’ll also help to foster a culture of compliance and ethical behavior within the organization.

What are the steps for getting enterprise-ready?

To get your software enterprise-ready, we’ve compiled a structured path you can follow – it involves detailed planning, rigorous testing, and continuous improvement.

Here’s a step-by-step guide showing you what you need to do to achieve compliance and prepare your software for enterprise customers:

1. Conduct a gap analysis

Start with an in-depth audit of your current software against the compliance standards you aim to meet. This involves evaluating your software’s security features, data handling processes, and operational procedures.

Tools and frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework can be useful here. The outcome is a Gap Report that highlights discrepancies between your current state and the compliance requirements.

2. Develop a strategic compliance plan

Based on the Gap Report, craft a detailed plan that outlines the necessary actions to bridge the compliance gaps. This plan should include:

• Software adjustments: Specify the changes needed in your software’s architecture, coding practices, and features to enhance security and privacy.
• Infrastructure upgrades: Detail the infrastructural improvements required, such as server security enhancements and secure data storage solutions.
• Policy and procedural updates: Outline the revisions needed in your internal policies and procedures to align with compliance standards. This includes training programs for staff on compliance best practices.

It’s a good idea to make sure your compliance plan has its rightful place on your roadmap rather than being squeezed in as someone’s side project. After all, if it’s strategically important that you make in-roads in the enterprise market, then that importance needs to be reflected in your product priorities. That will help ensure the initiative is given the right level of resource and investment.

If done right, compliance to these standards should unlock sales opportunities and directly impact revenue. That’s why you need to get this on your roadmap, set a nice target outcome of increasing revenue or growing enterprise market share – and then measure the results post-release and celebrate the wins!

3. Implement the compliance measures

With the plan in place, start putting it into practice. This step is iterative and involves:

• Software development: Update your software according to the plan, incorporating enhanced security features and compliance-specific functionalities.
• Infrastructure modifications: Upgrade your IT infrastructure to support the necessary security and compliance measures.
• Policy enforcement: Update your internal policies and procedures, and ensure all staff are trained and aware of their responsibilities under the new guidelines.

4. Conduct internal audits and pre-certification assessments

Before seeking official certification, conduct thorough internal audits to test the effectiveness of your enterprise-ready compliance measures. This might involve simulated security breaches, data privacy audits, and other stress tests.

Pre-certification assessments by third-party organizations can also offer valuable insights and identify any remaining gaps before you apply for certification.

5. Obtain official certification

Once you’re confident in your compliance status, it’s time to obtain your official certification from the relevant authorities. This process will vary depending on the specific certifications you’re pursuing but generally involves extensive documentation and an official audit by the certifying body.

There are companies you could call on to help you manage this stage of getting enterprise-ready. Organizations such as Trust Assurance Platform, Vanta, Drata, or Strikegraph can help you gather all the evidence and documentation that you need to present to the auditors. Known as compliance platforms, these tools and services can help you speed up the process and get you over the final hurdle.

These platforms can be used to automatically collect (where the integration exists) the evidence needed to prove you meet the controls on a regular basis. In addition, these platforms allow you to upload evidence manually again on a regular basis. This way the auditors can review the evidence without needing to talk to you directly.

6. Implement continuous monitoring and improvement

You’re not done yet! Compliance is not a one-off achievement but an ongoing process. Implement systems for continuous monitoring of your compliance status, including regular software updates, periodic audits, and ongoing staff training.

Stay informed about changes in compliance standards and adjust your practices accordingly to maintain your certifications. Don’t take your eye off the compliance ball! 

7. Customer transparency and support

Finally, ensure that your efforts toward compliance are visible and transparent to your customers. Provide them with detailed information about your compliance status and how it protects their data and interests. This is a good news story and it’s worth shouting about.

Offer support for any compliance-related queries they may have, and demonstrate how your software facilitates their own compliance efforts, such as through audit trails, security features, and data management tools.

8. Secure new enterprise customers!

Don’t go through all the work to get your compliance badges and then not shout it from the rooftops! The whole reason behind this initiative was to secure enterprise customers, or remove sales objections that might have blocked deals in the past. 

So, now you are compliant, make sure the Sales and Marketing Team are all over it. Here are some things you could do to drive awareness of your enterprise-readiness…

• Add the compliance badges to your website (the footer is a nice place, have a look below to see ours).
• Reach out to any ‘Closed Lost’ prospects where not having the compliance certification was the deal breaker, and see if you can win them over now.
• Try some Account Based Marketing and target a list of relevant, enterprise organizations that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Consider contacting their procurement teams (the people who will care about compliance the most) to get on their radar as a possible software solution.

Achieving enterprise readiness through compliance is a meticulous and ongoing process, but it’s worth it to enhance your software’s market appeal and build trust with your enterprise customers.

By following these steps, you can ensure your software meets the rigorous demands of enterprise-level deployment, which will give you a solid foundation for growth and success in the competitive software market.

What’s the newest compliance requirement to be enterprise-ready? 

The EU AI Act! 

As the European Union prepares to implement the AI Act, a pioneering piece of legislation designed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence across its member states, software enterprises and Product Managers should take note!

The act introduces a risk-based classification system for AI applications, setting out requirements and compliance standards from minimal to unacceptable risks. Understanding and adhering to these classifications will be critical, not just to avoid hefty fines, but also to ensure your products meet the EU’s rigorous safety and ethical standards.

The implications of the EU AI Act go further than mere legal compliance, though. If you proactively align your AI deployments with the act’s requirements early on, you could gain a competitive edge, fostering trust and credibility among European consumers and businesses.

This alignment will go a long way to emphasize your company’s commitment to principles that are increasingly valued in the global marketplace, such as ethical AI development, focusing on transparency, accountability, and the safeguarding of fundamental rights. This will help ensure you’re enterprise-ready going forward into the AI age, as large businesses adjust to the growing regulatory frameworks.

For companies aiming to penetrate or expand within the European market, compliance with the EU AI Act will be, to put a fine point on it, non-negotiable. Early adaptation to its requirements will ensure a smoother market entry and operations generally. And you can be sure that other regulations will follow worldwide, which you’ll already be geared up to address.

It just goes to show how important it is to stay informed and responsive to the evolving regulatory landscape, both in AI technologies and in the tech field as a whole. Ensuring a proactive approach not only mitigates risk but will help position your company as a leader in the responsible use and development of AI.

SOC it 2 them

It’s important to remember that achieving enterprise-ready compliance is more than a regulatory hurdle; it’s a commitment to excellence and an opportunity to set your software apart in a crowded marketplace. Plus, if you manage it, pulling in enterprise customers is sure to do wonders for your revenue .

By fostering a culture of compliance, embracing the roles each team member plays, and staying informed about regulations like the EU AI Act, you’re not just getting your software enterprise ready – you’re preparing your company for future success.

So let’s turn this compliance journey into a stepping stone for building better, safer, and more reliable software. Your grandkids will thank you for it when they’re not being riddled with lazers by Terminators.

The post How to Get Enterprise-Ready: Making Your Software Compliant appeared first on ProdPad.

We’re all familiar with the term, ‘passing the buck’ and how people evade or reassign responsibility to somewhere or someone else. Senior execs do it to product teams all the time. 

I’ve seen it happen to many product people in different ways over the years.  Perhaps you can spot some of the patterns below in your own organization and take action before they have an impact on your work.

Product management always takes the hit

You see it in companies where the bosses set expectations like unrealistic deadlines and then pressure the product team to stick to them. The team then has to struggle to get things out on time, even though it wasn’t their call in the first place.

Product teams could pass the buck to the development team – after all, they’re the ones who build and come up with the estimates that always seem to slip. But PMs always seem to take the hit for everyone else – and I think proudly so – I wouldn’t want to be advocating for a role that was known for throwing its teammates under the bus. Rather, PMs are known for defending the time of their developers (and designers), helping to get them breathing room and much-needed air cover. 

On the flip side, however, product managers often don’t get the same consideration from the rest of their organization, with the most notable offenders being sales teams and the executive team.

Sales teams may well ask for features to be built, rather than selling what they have. Saying they can’t sell the product until X feature is delivered puts all the pressure on the product team – but the sales team should take responsibility and learn to sell or reposition what they have. It’s easier for salespeople to expect the product team to add what they feel is missing. (And don’t get me started on the salespeople who sell things that don’t exist and dictate the roadmap!)

Executives with a badly formed business plan or model put the product team in a difficult position. A classic example is the agency trap, where the company (usually for short-term cash gains) accepts custom project/client work, while also expecting the product to develop at speed. But the product team only has so much time, and can’t do client project work and product discovery and development work at the same time, especially if the client work leads to a stream of deadlines to hit. And it’s not the product team’s decision or fault that they’ve ended up in a delivery-focused way of working. It’s been foisted on them by poor decisions at the executive level.

Unreasonable reliance on the product team

To be clear, the management team is responsible for creating a viable business and workable company strategy. But sometimes they over-rely on the product team to create something that doesn’t yet exist, in timeframes that they can’t know are reasonable (let’s be real: you and the dev team are still working out the scope of this thing, never mind how long it will be before you’re able to deliver). By doing this, management absolves itself of the responsibility of creating and maintaining a viable business, brushing it off as the product team’s problem with no consideration of whether it’s achievable. I’ve seen some teams given ridiculously tall orders.

A company strategy should encompass a realistic product strategy (plus realistic marketing strategies, tech strategies, and so on). It’s not a good strategy if it relies on miracle workers to make it happen or if it’s dogged by insurmountable problems.  The execs shouldn’t just ‘pass the buck’ on their bad decisions or bad planning to their product team and hope that the team figures it out. 

How do you stop it?

The product team must call out this passing the buck when they see it. To be able to do this product people must understand the wider company strategy and where the product strategy fits in it – it’s one of the most valuable things a product person can do. 

They should also understand who’s had a say in product strategy and where some of its assumptions came from. Was the strategy handed to the product team, or did they play an active role in defining how they could help the company reach its goals? 

If there’s a sense that others are ‘passing the buck’ to the product team, then call it out and set boundaries. If you don’t, then the product team risks having more work pushed at them, setting them up for failure further down the line. For example, if you keep agreeing to custom client work, to the detriment of discovery work, you set a precedent that you will always accept project work…  and the core product will never progress and the company won’t move towards its ultimate goals. 

Calling it out helps management and other team members to see the broken parts, like missing resources or misdirected efforts, so that they can help to correct them.

The post How Passing the Buck Sets a Product Team Up to Fail appeared first on ProdPad.

Do you ever feel like you’re getting pulled in two directions?

As a product person, I’ve often felt like I’ve had the pressure to deliver like a project manager. It’s a little like having an angel and a devil on each shoulder.

One is telling you to dive in and ask why, and to understand the problem deeper, and to maybe group together these two parts that solve similar problems into one… while the other is yelling at you to stick to the plan, to avoid scope creep, to just deliver on time and get the job done!

As a product person, you should cherish every moment you get to spend in discovery mode. This is where the big, juicy problems of the world are found and cracked, and real value is discovered. 

Delivery is when you’re honing in on that one problem, and is really more of a means to an end. You have to have delivery, as it ultimately pays the bills, but it’s not the earth-moving disruptive activity that discovery has the potential to be.

You have to have balance – you have to find enough time to discover problems, and of course, spend some time delivering on those solutions.

But what if this gets thrown off balance? What if you’re like me, and you end up starting out with great intentions to discover problems and interesting ways to solve them, but before you know it, you’ve got your hands tied with too many delivery commitments? 

About 12 years ago, I was a product person for a company in London. I was meant to join the team as a product manager, but after a week or so there, it became clear that I was really lined up to do a lot more project management than I’d anticipated. 

The company hadn’t knowingly mis-sold me on the job. They’d just gotten stuck in a trap that I now know is really common, as I see it all the time amongst other product teams that I spend time with. 

I’m here to warn you about it and hopefully help keep you from the same trap. I’ve delivered this advice as a keynote talk at a number of product conferences and events. If you want to take the learning away, feel free to help yourself to the accompanying slides They should help illustrate everything I cover in this piece and can help you talk through the ideas with your teams.

The Power of Product Discovery

Why is discovery so powerful?

Discovery is at the heart of what product teams do. The very nature is to cast a wide research net to identify problems and hold back from committing to a solution. The product team then has a process of, essentially, guessing and checking to optimize to find the best solution that’s cost-effective, desirable to the market, feasible to build, and valuable for the business.

It’s a process that can take years, and is messy, and doesn’t guarantee success by any stretch. But when it is successful, it pays off in spades. 

Contrast this with how agencies work. In an agency, a client identifies a problem for you and enlists your team to tackle the problem, and then you and your team get paid for that piece of work. 

The biggest indicator of your ability to scale is to look at what it is that you actually sell, as a business.

This determines whether you’re more of a product company or an agency. 

Agencies sell their time in exchange for money. This usually takes the form of client contracts and projects.

Product companies, on the other hand, sell value that they create. 

Time is the one thing we can’t create more of, it’s the ultimate limited resource, and so agency-style businesses can only scale with more human resources – more people providing more of their time to the business. 

Product companies are able to create value, by investing time upfront, into a mix of products or services that can be resold again and again, without needing a directly proportionate number of humans involved to scale. 

This is why product companies can go from start-up to scale-up and grow into such enormous tech giants, and fundamentally, why agencies can’t.

Now, there’s absolutely no shame in building and running an agency. It’s a brilliant way to make money and create purpose, solve problems, and get paid. But if you want to become a unicorn it isn’t the business model you need.

Product companies change the world!

But agencies don’t change the world. Product companies do! 

If you take a look at the companies storming the charts in the last decade, it’s tech companies who invest in scaling the product side of their business. 

Here’s a look at the S&P index, and how Netflix, Amazon, and Google are outperforming even the best of the best, with their product-minded approach.

And so, so many companies go in with this idea of building and scaling a product company, but end up in this same trap that I did in this previous job. 

Acting like an agency.

Taking on client jobs and commitments, and carving into their time that would otherwise be spent on discovery. 

And rather than take off, it can cause companies to sputter and fail.

What’s going on here?

How agencies work

Imagine you’ve got a business, and it’s got a monthly cost – let’s say this is you and 3 team members. And that’s you in month 1.

Assuming all things equal, this is you over the following months too. Low-cost team, but still a cost.

Now, you can’t go on spending forever, you need money. If you’re setting yourself up to be an agency, then you can take on work and start selling your time. 

If you’re any good at business, you’re selling your work at more than it costs you. 

Your cumulative sales go up, and your monthly profit is tidy but small.

Okay, so you want to grow your profits? You can grow your team! Then you’ll have more time to charge out for client projects. Your profit goes up a bit. Your growth is still a stick straight line, however. There’s no exponential growth in sight. 

If you wanted to be rolling in it, in this agency model, you’d have to hire and manage a lot of people.

How product companies work

A product company, on the other hand, has an entirely different way of working. 

They usually start off with a group of founders, and maybe some ideas and connections, but not a lot else. They’ve got a monthly cost, but aren’t selling their time in agency work. They’re investing it in a product that hopefully will sell in the future.

The cumulative sales is huge though. Once you’ve got something of value that sells, the sky is the limit. 

Yes, you’ll sometimes need to bring the size of your team up to support the growth, but nothing like the 1 for 1 nature you get with trying to scale an agency when you’re selling project hours worked. 

You might notice that I didn’t include the profit on this diagram. That’s because it’s probably still way below zero. 

This is the fundamental problem with product companies and what makes them tricky. In order to get to the point of having something that sells in a scalable way like this, it can take months or years. That’s months or years without getting paid. How does that work?

Well, this is why startup funding is so popular. 

It buys your team time to figure out what the product that creates value will be, so you can survive the months until you actually generate money of your own. 

Or, if you’re so lucky, maybe you have money of your own to invest in, or can live and work without a salary for a while, or have access to government grants. 

Okay, now this might seem really oversimplified, and it is, for anyone who knows their way around how startups work. But it’s important to keep in mind because I’ve seen even the savviest companies fall prey to this one trap.

See, there’s a danger zone. 

It’s so much easier and faster to make instant money in an agency-style business. 

If anything ever goes wrong in the plan, or heck, sometimes all it takes is a little bit of temptation, it’s easy to fall into this habit:

A client who comes to you asking for something a little bit custom. An offer of what would otherwise be a month or more of payroll in one fell swoop, and all it takes is you to stand there and say or do things that you already basically do for free for the company otherwise.

What’s the harm in taking on one little project if it lines your pockets or keeps the lights on?

Because what happens, is you go from envisioning this scenario, where you’re able to discover a problem, solve it well, and make lots of money before anyone turns up asking for rent…

To this scenario:

Your initial investment ends up running short, your costs are that much higher, and it takes longer than you might imagine getting to product/market fit. All of a sudden, you’re a dollar short and a day late.

Nearly every start-up starts off with great intentions of following a scientific methodology of measuring, learning, and iterating until they’ve solved the most valuable problems in the world.

But these go out the window in times of stress.

Sometimes, “whatever we need to do to get to the next round” actually becomes selling time for money.

Agency work, done by a team who has otherwise configured themselves as a product team. It solves the immediate problem at hand, which is preventing the lights from going out…

…but it also usually means that the product work gets delayed and delayed.

Because let’s admit it. Making money and cashing cheques is addictive.

After all, ideas are nothing, it’s all about the execution right? That’s the power of delivery.

Except that every minute of time a client buys to have you work on their problems is a minute you can’t spend discovering and solving the bigger problems in the world.

There’s a chance that the client happens to identify a problem that’s big enough to apply to a wider market and you’re able to solve it at the same time as solving for the paying client, but those chances are slim. More often than not, you’re really just in delivery mode, and you haven’t just magically leapfrogged months or years of discovery. 

Signs you’re veering into Agency Mode

So, as someone who’s been there, and has seen countless companies end up down this path, I can share some signs that your company is veering into agency mode. 

1. Sales Led Roadmap

The roadmap is such a telling feature of any company. 

In a discovery-led company, the roadmap should be a series of problems to solve and should facilitate the discussion of what could be solved and in what order, to fulfill the product vision.

In a sales-led organization, the roadmap looks more like this:

This is actually my roadmap, from years ago. 

The grey areas represented discovery-led work, where we were building for the wider market and trying to find the biggest, juiciest problems in the space to solve, and the best ways to solve them.

Unfortunately, our time was dominated by the work in the green strip, what we called ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Partner launches’. These were things that we were doing to close specific deals by specific dates. 

Sure, it got us paid that month, but look at what the cost was. For the preceding quarter, in particular, the month and a half before this roadmap was generated, we basically did nothing to further the vision of our core product. All of our work was tied up in partner work.

And while it looked like the partner work cleared up in the future, it never did. Our salespeople were always coming back with a big grin on their face to tell us about the next thing that they’d sold, only for us to find out it required work on the roadmap to make it fit. Ultimately, we didn’t do a fraction of the discovery work this roadmap suggests we were going to do in the future. Ultimately, this business failed. 

A discovery-led roadmap looks entirely different.

It’s centered around business objectives to meet, like revenue or user targets, and customer problems to solve, and the product manager uses the roadmap to make sure that things are prioritized to make the most use of resources, and are spending time discovering in the most interesting and valuable problem areas first. 

It’s not overrun by client commitments.

2. A Product Manager who’s actually just a Project Manager

Another sure sign that you’re veering into agency mode is when your product manager is having to act the part of the project manager. 

A project manager’s job is to gather requirements, figure out the scope of the project, and then guide the project through to completion, managing resources, milestones, delivery processes, and other constraints along the way.

I’ve been in this position, where I was hired as a product manager, but found myself sat in front of clients essentially taking down a list of requirements and helping to write up quotes for custom work.

I’ve spent far too much of my time breathing down the necks of development teams, trying to get estimations, and creating “accurate” buffers to report back to the sales team and clients. 

This was all time that I couldn’t spend figuring out if there were bigger problems to solve, and how we might be the ones to solve them.

3. Feature Factory

Another sign you’re veering into delivery mode and out of discovery is that you’ve become a feature factory. 

This one is so easy to fall into, as it starts when the company is young. 

In the early days, each new feature gets you more downloads, more press, more sales. It improves your product, measurably.

But over time, each new feature begins to weigh you down. It doesn’t give you the same boost, and you end up with a Frankenstein of a product. 

We’re addicted to our features. We can’t quit the habit of building features because of the pressures from those around us.

• Like the salesperson saying they can’t sell the product without that one last feature
• Or your marketing bod pointing out that you’re lacking a feature that would mean some vital checkmark on their pricing grid
• Or that inner voice that tells you that you just need this one thing to tip your numbers into a viral growth loop
• Or the eternal question from your board, your boss, your customers, from everyone: When is this coming out?

Teams stuck in a feature factory are constantly chasing the next idea and spending a lot of effort on getting work out the door, but not a lot of effort on making sure that they are doing the right work in the first place.

Some typical patterns to watch for include:

• Having very specific ways of prioritizing the ‘right’ idea, but those methods tend to be very sensitive to changes in the market or even opinion
• Lots of emphasis on moving quickly and getting work out the door. Watch for terms like ‘agile cadence’, ‘burn down’, ‘velocity’. These are delivery metrics that measure your ability to ship fast, but not the ability to ship well or to discover the right things
• Very little time granted to validating that past launches were successful and impactful and that the right things were actually shipped. A common habit is to launch ‘experiments’ but not actually check the results

A better approach is to take a step back and prioritize at the problem level, not at the idea level. 

This tends to avoid the trouble of getting stuck in a very granular priority system (like stack ranking or weighted scoring for ideas), and instead allows your team to focus on the company-level objectives and figuring out the order in which to tackle the problems and opportunities ahead. 

It helps to prevent your team from being distracted by that ‘one feature’ that will woo a client, and instead focus on the big picture.

How to get out of the Agency Trap!

So how do you go about getting out of this pattern?

Acknowledge it and have tough conversations

If you recognize that you’ve been doing this, bring it up with your team, and make sure that it’s acknowledged at the exec level. It’s often a tough conversation, as it means admitting that sacrifices have been made, but it’s important that everyone in key roles in the business knows what’s happening and how it impacts the outlook of the company.

Set your ideal outcome: What kind of company do you want to be?

As part of that conversation, ask and answer the question: What kind of company do you want to be?

Perhaps taking on lots of client work is all part of the plan, as the company actually does want to operate more as an agency in the future. That’s okay! It’s better that you all know that now, and can adjust your roles and expectations accordingly. 

Perhaps the aspiration is to be a huge tech company, and these short-term delivery commitments are just a means to an end. That’s okay too. We’ve all been there. It’s totally okay to take on some work like that, if it means not having to go for a risky round of funding, or if it enables you to grow the team to get to the next stage. 
It’s just really important that you have these tough conversations and align everyone in the team with what the ultimate goal is so that the best strategic decisions are made, and everyone heads in the same direction.

Rearrange and train the team where needed

This is the toughest step. 

You might have a salesforce who’s out there selling future versions of your product that you’ve decided you no longer want to commit your team to delivering. 

You might need to repurpose this team or rightsize this division to match your now clarified company aspirations.

You might have team members who are ingrained in the delivery mindset, who aren’t used to or prepared for a discovery-led process. You’ll have to work at the exec level to make sure there’s adequate support and training so the team doesn’t flounder when given a little bit of free rein for discovery.

Separate agency work and charge accordingly

Separate your agency work into a different business unit along with its own space for custom work.

Charge separately for this, and charge well! Remember that time is the most limited resource you have. If someone’s asking for custom development, do not be afraid to ask for eye-watering fees for the honor.

Remember, they are buying time that you could otherwise be using to be building your rocket ship. Their alternative might be any other development team out there… but is it really?

They are probably coming to you for custom development because you built something special and proprietary in the first place. You might be the only team in the world actually able to give them specifically what they want. Their alternative, if they don’t buy the product as is, or don’t pay your handsome fee for custom work, is to spend years rebuilding your product and then doing the custom bit on top themselves, or finding some other team to do this for them.

Sure, they might go with a competitor, but there’s a reason they are asking you. And sure, you might lose some deals this way.

But remember, you’re a product company. You’re selling a product that you’ve created. You’re not an agency at heart, selling your time. 

Otherwise it’s not worth your time! Charge way more for the clients you keep and get rid of the time-wasters.

Decrease dependence on project delivery cash

And finally, decrease your dependence on the cash that comes in from committed client or contract work, by being deliberate with how much time you spend in delivery and discovery. 

If today, it’s 80% delivery and 20% discovery that takes up your team’s time, can you get that to a 70/30 split by next month? When can you get that to a 50/50 split? 

Plan out steps in your strategy that look at how you’ll build up your core product so it’ll sell more and more, so that you’re less dependent on external funding from clients and custom work, and more free to solve problems in the core product itself. 

It won’t happen overnight, but nor will it happen by itself. It will take you and your team to gather around, admit there’s a dependency on agency mode work, and a concerted effort to make a plan to get away from it.

Final note

But remember, you don’t have to go product! 

There’s a big world out there and lots of ways of providing value. If you’re going to go the agency route, then acknowledge it, own it, hire for it, and do it properly, including setting pricing and expectations accordingly.

Don’t fall prey to the most common killer of product companies. Product companies get sucked in by the allure of agency work because it solves an immediate problem in the near term but forces them to take the eye off the ball. 

If done well, it can bridge them elegantly to their next stages and on to success.

But if done badly, it can doom your company.

Start acting now, to identify and work towards building the type of company you want in the future.

Just remember to ask yourself, what kind of company do you want to grow up to be?

The post Avoiding the Agency Trap – Product Led Companies Scale-Up appeared first on ProdPad.

Henrik Kniberg

Coach, Mojang

Henrik has a fascinating background, previously having worked as a game developer at Lego, coach at Spotify, and part of the Minecraft team.

A great first question was proposed to the audience: How do we get makers to build great products that are useful?

Let’s start with what makes an awesome product.

With that in mind, Henrik presented two examples of companies he’s worked with: Lego and Minecraft.

Lego: A 250 person project, 4000 man hours wasted of work for a project that was shut down two years later!

Minecraft: Built by two people, with the first public release in six days, and 100 releases within first year. They took all feedback and iterated constantly, before selling to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.

Great companies screw up, but learn from their failures. Mediocre companies will continue making the same mistakes.

So what was the difference?

The team at Minecraft was able to do faster iterations allowing them to pivot quickly. 

Frequent releases = easier planning and less frustration.

YSK: At ProdPad we release twice a week every week. We also don’t focus on timeframes, we focus on listening to our customers and shipping things based on feedback.

And then came a warning: drop the “MVP” and focus instead on “MLP” (Minimum Lovable Products). Show things that are still usable and build trust with customers as you go along. Changing the language with stakeholders can make a world of difference.

One of Henrik’s last points was making sure team communication was clear and transparent. Make sure your teams are working and communicating with each other, learn from your mistakes. Don’t ship burnt toast!

Misalignment can be a problem if there’s no cross-team transparency. You could end up working on the same problem with two different solutions (which have already been completed). This leads to time and money wasted.

How can you fix this?

Demo within teams, show what you’re working on. Allow teams to show what they’re working on and most importantly, make sure they’re talking about these findings to each other.

YSK: The ProdPad team demos stuff to each other all the time. Product will also give a specific demo to the customer team and answer questions about competitors, functionality, market interest.

TLDR

• Release often
• Get real user feedback
• Slice the elephant
• Autonomous teams
• Radical transparency
• Curiosity > Pride

Andy Ayim

Managing Director, Backstage capital

Andy started out with a very thoughtful quote on the Mind the Product stage:

“What does inclusion mean in practice?

Ask who’s not in the room. Who’s perspectives are not being represented at that time.

Who’s voices are not being heard?“

He then proposed mental models and frameworks for thinking. 

So what are mental models, anyway?

• They challenge you to keep things simple
• They help you reframe problems
• Aid to help you think differently 

First principle thinking

Answer the simple question of how do we solve this problem more efficiently if we start from scratch?

A first principle is a basic truth that cannot be deduced any further. 

Start with fundamental questions. What:

• Do we know is true?
• Do we know has been proven?
• Are the facts that cannot change?

Second order thinking and unintended consequences

Try to think through the problem and the consequences that may arise from the solution you’re looking to implement.

Second order thinking is useful when thinking of long-term goals. 

Inversion

Inversion is about looking at problems backwards. 

Think about everything that can possibly go wrong in order to move a product forwards.

Take that worst case scenario and use it as a project inspiration to figure out your solution. You’ll end up with a list of risks you can eliminate and manage. 

Five key things to help you get started

Our favorite recommended reading: Daniel Kahnemman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. 

C.Todd Lombardo

VP Product and Author of Roadmaps Relaunched

Are we building the right things? 

Let’s talk about that. 

Today’s talk is all about product research with C.Todd.

We’re currently meeting Bill Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur who, amongst all of his achievements, sold a company for $850 million – before the age of 29.

Bill is awesome.

Bill also thinks he doesn’t need to do research (my inner product manager is also freaking out with C.Todd about this!).

I think we know how this turned out.

Why do products fail? Above all, bad product research. But do you want to waste 45% of your resources? If the answer is no, do product research?

But what is product research?

It’s not just about evidence, it’s about experimentation. 

We have user research, market research, product analytics. Product research is the intersection of all three. We can’t just be one, we need to be all of them.

Rule #1 Prepare to be wrong, because you will be

Check your ego, you will be wrong and that’s ok.

In order to be wrong you need to accept that there are things that you do know, but also that there are things you don’t know. 

Rule #2 Get curious with your data

Start with what you’ve got, generate questions, and settle on a research question to answer. 

What you ask and how you speak matters – a constant throughout this conference so far. If you ask people to predict their future behavior, it will only validate your ego, not whether you’re working on the right stuff.

Based on how teams ask questions, diagnostic teams go up the charts and accelerate in growth. They’re trying to solve real problems for real people, not trying to confirm assumptions they already have.

Rule #5 Interview and ask questions

We’ve gone from two to five, maybe we should be asking questions.

What people say is not as telling as what people do. Humans are unreliable (Sorry, humans).

Rule #6 Go beyond the interviews

Interviews only tell you so much, walk in their shoes. Try and visit your users where possible, watching them interact with your product can give you a world of insight.

Rule #8 Inspire actions through insights

We’ve missed a rule, but this is so good we don’t even care.

Don’t just write a report, facts don’t move people. Stories and co-creation do. 

We are now meeting Jeff. Jeff is from Appcues, and we should all be like Jeff.

Why?

Jeff runs user testing sessions the last Wednesday of every month.

YSK: The ProdPad team runs constant user testing sessions and gathers feedback from our community. We’re with you, Jeff!

Rule # 9 – Make it a habit

It’s all about continuous discovery.

We’ve also just found out why the numbers don’t match up, there’s a lot more rules, but C.Todd has cherry picked the most important for us.

Kriti Sharma

Google Scholar and UN Advisor

Kriti built her first robot at the age of 15, and since then her mission has been to solve global issues through AI. Recently named 30 under 30 in the Forbes list!

So what did this robot do?

It grabbed a snickers at 3pm every day. 

Nowadays though, Kriti is working on a robot with better eating habits. The robot aims to have engaging, long conversations with people. It takes information from various news sources in order to hold these conversations, which is massively impressive.

Which leads to the question… can AI create a fairer world?

Kriti’s talk is touching a lot on product ethics, and whether or not these algorithms are working with a human touch, or solely based on gathering data which can cause bias and have unintended consequences.

A human-centered AI, says Kriti, can actually help solve problems better, and as an unintended consequence with her own product, resulted in humans trusting machines more than other humans.

Kriti is taking a bit of a dive at how humans interact with computers. Why does a cat with a jetpack have more credibility in the tech world than a girl with two computer science degrees? (Major applause from the audience)

And now we look at AI systems. Google Home, Alexa, even Cortana – what do these all have in common? All of them have female voices to do things for you. Could this have been avoided? Kriti suggests by asking the right questions and involving members from different backgrounds a lot sooner, we could spot these issues before a product is released.

How can we avoid these biases and unforeseen consequences?

You can use a canvas-style document to allow you to answer those questions. Is there a sustainability aspect to your product? What problems are you trying to solve? 

A few tips on building AI

• AI should reflect the diversity of the users it serves 
• AI must be held to account – and so must users
• Reward AI for ‘showing its workings’
• AI should level the playing field. It should be developed for the common good and benefit of humanity
• AI will replace, but it must also create

On the bright side, we can hope that when the machines take over, at least they will be nice.

Jonny Schneider

Head of Product Strategy and Design, Thoughtworks
From Melbourne, Australia

Is this what design thinking looks like?

Jonny tells us no.

Design is an ability. Process only helps with getting started. It’s about empathetic learning, learning from others, fast experimentation and optimizing systems of work.

Agile is not just about responding to change over following a plan. Agile came out of trying to do delivery and software better – it’s how we adapt to change as it happens.

How do we bring these things together in meaningful ways?

The bad news: You have to figure it out for yourself, but that’s because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all.

The good news: Jonny can give us a place to start!

1- Continuous learning is the new competitive advantage

The cost of creating software has reduced over time, but complexity and uncertainty has increased. Try to validate stuff before putting it out in the market – it can only serve you as an advantage. Nowadays experimentation is a lot easier. Continuous learning does not replace strategy, but it’s there to support it. Focus on confidence, not certainty.

2- Design the right experiments to learn the right things

Chiming in with what other speakers have said, Jonny warns us of making assumptions. Are the problems you are focusing on worth solving?

What type of learning will each experiment you run provide you with? It’s all about understanding the context of the problems you are trying to solve.

Most importantly – is there a demand for the problem you are aiming to solve?

When thinking about experiments, think of cost vs confidence.

3- Measure only things that contribute to decisions

Are you measuring the right stuff? Don’t let yourself be fooled by fancy data. Remember that whatever you choose to measure, those items are related to goals. Focus on impact on objectives.

A starter template for clear metrics from Jonny:

4- Solve for next order problems

Problems just have a way of unfolding on you.

“Different people from different parts of an organization will have different perspectives and will stand at a different distance from where the action is.”

It’s all about bringing the right people together.

When you do this, you can bring together the different elements of a [good] strategy. As a product manager, you’re there to enable people to come together to figure this out as a team. Most importantly, learn from the things that don’t work and apply that to your iterative process.

Kate Leto

Product Coach

What does it mean to be successful in product management? Kate is here to tell us.

In 1918, Charles Riborg Mann was asked to run research on engineering education in the US. Was the education preparing young men (only) for success?

Yes, 1918.

Mann sent out a survey to 30,000 people (wowza!) and asked them to prioritize criteria for job success. Only 7k people responded.

At the time, character was the most popular answer. The research was validated and the conclusion was that character/personal development was necessary.

We flash forward 101 years… and here we are at the Barbican!

The vocabulary in the last 100 years has changed, of course. From “personal development” to “EQ,” see how things have changed below:

By 2020, the expectation is that most employers will be looking for emotional intelligence as a skill.

Don’t know what that is? Kate explains with the following chart:

Individuals with higher emotional intelligence make up to 30k a year more.

Teams with higher self awareness can deal with conflict better, are higher performing, and coordinate better with each other.

Unfortunately, most conversations with companies don’t focus on emotional intelligence as much as they should. However, is the disconnect necessary?

EQ is related to building a great roadmap, says Kate.

As a product community, it’s time to take a look at our narrative in success and product management. It’s time to reframe that and realize the things we do are important, but they’re taking up too much space in conversation. We need a bit more space for emotional intelligence. After all, emotional intelligence powers our behaviours behind the things we do.

A good area of focus to get started is how we hire teams

Bad hiring decisions are bad for us, our teams, and our organizations.

People leaving companies has nothing to do with skills or tools, but rather not fitting in with the culture of the organization.

A few tips on person-organization fit

1- Build a role that matters

Don’t hire like this!

People aren’t just born ready to lead. Common guys!

This isn’t a real person, it’s just a unicorn!

Hire with emotional intelligence instead.

2- Broaden your interview techniques

Don’t interview in a way that makes you feel clever, it’s just satisfying your own ego. Ask behavioural interview questions instead:

• Tell me about a time where you handled a difficult situation?
• Have you ever encountered someone at work who was unreasonable – How did you respond?

This is designed for you to be able to listen, not to trick the interviewee. Focus on the narrative the candidate is sharing.

Further reading: The EQ Interview by Adele B. Lynn.

3- Hiring doesn’t end at the offer

Orchestrate long-term learning. 12 months down the line do a retro and evaluate the role in question – you can include the person you hired, too.

Most importantly, take a look at yourself. If you’re going to hire someone based on EQ, make sure you test your own EQ as well.

Lindsey Jane

VP Product @Monzo

The importance of being clear and how to do it.

Why clarity matters

Clear statements strips away the stuff you don’t need, and focuses on the items you can use to communicate a clear picture.

Noise vs signal – which ones does your organization have?

Too many organizations are so busy with filling out numbers and words that don’t mean and achieve anything – make sure you aren’t filling out the fields just to fill them up.

Be the batman in a field of princesses.

Take a position and be memorable.

We need fewer, better things. Have a clear idea that can be communicated well.

Critical thinking is the least taught, and most highly-valued quality in a product manager.

How to achieve clarity

If you’re going to be spending so much time writing, get good at it! It’s not about having perfect grammar, just be good at expressing yourself in a clear and coherent way.

You can’t hide a bad idea in clear, simple writing. Either the idea is terrible, or you will see a flowing of logic coming out of it.

Bad writing is what clipart is to design. DON’T DO IT!

Make things brief

Brevity is hard, but very important. Remove every word or phrase that isn’t essential. Use short sentences and strong verbs – break up sentences if you can.

Most importantly – use the active voice.

“Once you’re left with something clear, you can see if the idea stands up to scrutiny.”

Share early and often

Transparency is key. It builds trust and amplifies ideas, helps find problems early, shortens feedback cycles, and invites unexpected expertise.

Whatever it is you’re working on, make it visible.

Diversity of thought will stem out of sharing something in clear, plain language that a wide audience can understand. You’re not simply talking to people that understand or are familiar with what you’re doing, but invites outside thoughts and improvements.

Is this scary? Yes! But that’s ok – when you do your best work and it gets criticized, it can only be a starting point to create better things.

If you don’t know where to start, give it a shot with your closer team members. Build up the confidence to widen out the audience as you go.

Do the hard work and be brave.

Ezinne Udezue

VP Product @Procore

With a background in product management with Bazaarvoice, Discover, T-mobile, Motorola and Nokia, Ezinne spoke to us next.

“A product manager’s job is to create the right conditions for the team to solve the right customer problem with the right solution, delivered at the right time to drive the right business value.”

That’s a lot of stuff, huh.

No wonder product management is one of the most stressful jobs.

At the heart of it, it is about people, product, and process.

PM competencies can be somewhat categorized into six main buckets.

But what is next level?

Invest in understanding and valuing people

Bring together people with different backgrounds to make a better product.

We are in the process of a huge transition. Product is not just about the intersection of UX, Product, and Engineering, but moving towards success, marketing, and QA.

It’s important to remember you are working with humans.

“Slow down and put our humanness in the forefront of your interactions.”

Relentlessly focus on impact.

We know about outcomes, we know about outputs… but we have yet to learn about impact.

Is there a better or faster way to achieve things? Most importantly – was it all worth it?

Seek clarity in your impact and convey it. Be intellectually honest, link up to value.

Get someone in the rom to challenge you. Common topic today.

Develop continuous empathy for your target customers

Listening is not empathy – it is part of it. Walk in other’s shoes, be curious.

Talk to people, ask questions!

Empathy is:

• Anticipating needs
• Industry knowledge
• Support calls
• Onboarding
• Customer experience
• Market research
• Customer development
• Bugs

To be a true advocate, watch people – but do it because you care about the customer. It’ll only make you a better product manager and help you build for tomorrow, not today.

“Embody your role as the customer’s advocate. Evolve with your customer.”

Deliberately curate frameworks and systems for the craft

Respect the craft, do the work.

Use mental models that help with decision making, don’t assume the framework will do the work for you. Make it yours.

There is no hack for this. There is no quick workaround. If you read the book, use it, put things you learn into practice.

Product management is a team sport. If you want to lead, it’s important that you invest in understanding the people you work with. Focus on impact, that is your story. Be an advocate for your customer. And remember… do the work.

Brendan Dawes

Interaction Designer

Last but not least, Brendan Dawes took to the stage.

Like many of us, Brendan’s mom doesn’t know what he does for a living. He tried to explain it and it turned out something like this.

So what does he do? Well, he runs experiments. These experiments will raise patterns that will power deviations.

“All well-made products are made up of perfect timing mechanisms.”

If we use universal themes to connect with people. People aren’t interested in technology per say, it’s a conduit to communicate, says Brendan.

Brendan is now showing us the value of analogue, human pleasures. Combining these with digital can lead to amazing things- as the Happiness Machine (which prints receipts or happy online stories) demonstrates.

We are also seeing some cool data visualizations of different Twitter feeds, including Manchester United winning!

Now showing off his creative process (seem familiar, anyone?)

Thank you all for a great Mind The Product.

The post Mind the Product London 2019 – Live! appeared first on ProdPad.