Afternoon Insights Panel
Summary
Key Insights
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Shielding product teams too much can stunt their growth; occasional challenges help build resilience.
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PMs risk burnout and becoming bottlenecks if they try to filter all communication between executives and teams.
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Storytelling is a vital, cross-functional skill for conveying value and aligning stakeholders.
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Tailoring strategy communication to audience attention span and priority is key to effective messaging.
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Repeatedly asking about fears and risks surfaces critical unknowns and guides research priorities.
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Translating risks into financial terms facilitates executive-level decision making.
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Different org sizes and maturities require different leadership approaches to information sharing and team autonomy.
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Having one designer supporting many PMs and products is fundamentally insufficient for successful product outcomes.
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Framing product value as a benefit to partner teams aids greater organizational buy-in beyond end-user focus.
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Leaders should name and credit team members for successes but own and investigate failures to instill trust and transparency.
Notable Quotes
"If you don’t have a little earthquake every now and then, you have a real big one after a while."
"If you put yourself between the C-suite and the product teams, you become a bottleneck with no time for actual leadership."
"When something good happens, I want to name the person who did it and say yes, they passed through me. When something bad happens, I say let me and my team go look into it."
"Storytelling helps us speak in the language and context that motivates each team and stakeholder."
"You can build your strategy into eight pages, five, three, one, half a page, then a sentence to adapt to your audience."
"Have you just asked what scares us or keeps us up at night? Those repeated fears highlight the risks we need to avoid."
"I know that a development team of six costs me a million bucks a year, so risk has a dollar value executives understand."
"The idea of one designer to 12 PMs is dead on arrival; either design isn't valued or the company is short on designers."
"You’re not just convincing people of the value but the benefit to them of working with you on the product journey."
"We can design the experience of working with us just like we design for end users."
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