In this week’s episode on The Product Experience podcast, Arne Kittler, Product Leadership Consultant and Co-Founder of Product at Heart, delves into the importance of providing clarity in building great products, and what it means in practical terms.
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Episode transcript
Lily Smith: 0:00
This week on the Product Experience Podcast, Randy Silver talks to Arne Kittler, Product Leadership Consultant and Co-Founder of Product at Heart Conference. In this episode, Anna covers the importance of clarity in product work and breaks down what this means in practical terms. The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:31
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Randy Silver: 1:01
Arne, welcome. It's so great to have you on the podcast a second time, really, yeah, even though we also have your music on it every single time.
Arne Kittler: 1:10
It's still amazing that you chose our track. I'm really, you know, keep being surprised when I listen to the podcast. Oh well, that's me on the bass Makes me happy every time I hear it.
Randy Silver: 1:22
So for people who don't know you outside of your fantastic music, can you just do a quick introduction? What are you doing these days and how did you first get into product?
Arne Kittler: 1:31
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'll start the other way around. So I mean, I've been doing digital stuff since 25 years and for the last 12 years I've been managing product organizations, first for a long time at Zing, the German professional network, and last three years as CPO at Facelift, a MarTech social company, and I'm now shifting to doing product organization, consulting, coaching and fractional leadership.
Randy Silver: 1:57
Welcome to the dark side.
Arne Kittler: 1:59
Yeah, thanks very much.
Randy Silver: 2:01
I know one of the reasons you got into it is there's something you care a lot about. You've been writing a lot about it lately. We have this problem that's fairly endemic in our culture. In product culture, Things are supposed to be simple, but they're often not. It's very difficult for us to get to simplicity, to clarity. Tell us a little bit about that. Why is that so hard?
Arne Kittler: 2:24
Yeah, that's true. I mean I've been fascinated with the topic of clarity, and I think I mean why it is important for us as product people is we can only be successful with others, and this means we need to collaborate a lot, and so many things can go wrong in collaboration if we lack clarity. And so I've been indeed fascinated by this topic and because it's, as you say, like it should be simple and also everybody wants clarity, so why can we not just have it? And so I've observed that there are several things that get in the way, like, for instance, often time pressure may be one reason, because, you know, execute first, and so we feel we don't have the time to initially invest in clarity at the beginning of setting off to do something together in a collaborative way. There are also misconceptions about, well, maybe clarity being the same thing as certainty, which it is not, and I mean we know as product people, certainty is very, very difficult to achieve. We are very aware of the known unknowns that we have, and I think that keeps us sometimes back from even trying to achieve clarity, because we feel we haven't fully done our homework and we first need to get absolute certainty before we can provide clarity, but I think that's wrong. There are so many things we can do, in particular, also because it allows us to deal better with the uncertainty that's just natural in our environment. So those are separate things, but I think we sometimes mix them up in the wrong way.
Arne Kittler: 3:52
There are also more personal reasons, I think, where we shy away from clarity. Sometimes clarity is hard, it can be painful. You may not like actually actually the result of the clarity that you get. So I think that's one reason why we shy away from it. And the fourth thing maybe to mention I think most of the product people I know like Harmony and they appreciate all the smart colleagues that they work with and sometimes it feels like if they're pushing too hard and say, hey, can we clarify that again, and so on, that this might get in the way of their harmonic relationship to colleagues which they appreciate. But those are different things, like having a good personal relationship is not the same thing as fighting for clarity in the subject matter. So yeah, I think those are all reasons and I think it's important to work on clarity, on different layers also of clarity.
Randy Silver: 4:45
Yeah, it's a real problem. We have all these tools around discovery and around ranking things and getting an idea of how we are going to do prioritization. And we do these at local levels, usually at backlog-type levels and occasionally at more strategic levels. But we do that within the product team, working with our developers, with our designers. We don't necessarily do it with all of our other stakeholders and often we get differences of opinion from the rest of the organization. It's a different understanding. They think I asked for X, so why am I not getting X? And X sometimes doesn't mean exactly what they thought it meant, exactly exactly. Why can't we get to this? I mean, there's what you're doing, there's why you're doing it, there's how you're doing it, there's how fast you're doing it. Why can't we get organizations to provide that clarity at a strategic level before we go into tactical?
Arne Kittler: 5:41
things. I think on the strategic level, I think for organizations, the main difficulty is you have to say no to things. I think that's the most difficult. I think we all like talking about all the things we could be doing or that we want to do, but the difficult thing and this is also for senior leaders of the company is really to say what are we not going to do? This is one thing that I really like about Martin Ericsson's decision stack. It says very clearly you know also indicate what you're saying no to, and I think that is really hard for leaders and it's a very uncomfortable conversation to have, also within management teams. I've also experienced that as a CPO being part of a C-level team at FaceLift. You know what we want to do easy, what we cannot do in order to do the things that we want to do much more difficult.
Randy Silver: 6:29
I once had a CEO come to me. I was working for a company that had been acquired and the parent company CEO came in to a meeting with all of us and we talked about we were having some problems delivering some stuff. It was taking longer than we had originally anticipated and they were disappointed. They want us to keep delivering that, do it right and faster and do a bunch of other things. And we said look, we're not achieving A. We can't do A, n, b and C. And he said well, this is the problem with you guys. You're an or company, you do this or that, we're an and company. Amazed, I'd never heard someone say it back clearly before.
Arne Kittler: 7:07
But I think that often is the expectation, but it just doesn't add up, unfortunately. On the other hand, I mean, I have to say that also, I mean more recently. I mean I think we all feel the pressure of delivering results faster. You know, growth, long-term growth, is no longer the priority for most of the companies and most companies cannot afford, you know, doing stuff now that will pay off three years in the future. We have to be profitable now and this has, of course, changed the priorities.
Arne Kittler: 7:33
And I think this is also challenging for product teams, because they are really used to setting really solid foundations, thinking really long-term, and it's nice to think long-term, but they always have to remind themselves to keep delivering stuff quickly because otherwise the company is out of business and then you cannot say, well, yeah, but we did everything right and the platform would have been super scalable. Unfortunately, it never needed to be scalable because the company went out of business before it scaled. So that's also a change. I think that also we as product people really need to accept that priorities have shifted and we need to adapt to that, and maybe that also means that we cannot always do things perfectly by the book. Sometimes we also may need to be a bit more pragmatic in how we do things Okay.
Randy Silver: 8:18
So, speaking of pragmatism, it's relatively easy Nothing is ever easy but it's relatively straightforward to sit down with people and make a plan and say, ok, this is what we're going to do. We've agreed that these things are in scope and we are going to try and do these and these things. We just don't have time for right now. And that's perfect and everyone agrees to it. And then, about two weeks later, people start saying, oh, can you also just do this? It's always the curse of the just thing Add this, but it's just a little thing. How do you get people to either not do that, which might not be realistic, or to accept OK, if we do that, we're also not going to deliver on something else. So take your pick, yeah.
Arne Kittler: 9:02
I mean, I think it depends on what role you're in. I think if you're in a leadership position yourself, you always have to make sure that you have your priorities clear. And yes, priorities can change, but if they change that leads to trade-offs and you have to make that explicit to everyone so that there are no disappointments. Just adding stuff on top, it just doesn't work. So if something else comes in, something else well, drops in priority. That's a natural thing.
Arne Kittler: 9:29
And I think if you're an IC or part of a product team, then you may not be able to influence the priorities, but at least you can always, you know try to make it as transparent as possible for folks. You know what the implications are like. What happens if you do that other thing, what does it conflict with, and basically push the leadership to revise their priorities so that you are not, in the worst case, working against those priorities so that some people on the leadership team believe the priorities are what they said two weeks ago and now you work on something else because another stakeholder wanted something else from you. Then you get into trouble and you may also get lost in too much parallel work.
Randy Silver: 10:13
How should we be revising those priorities? Should it be something that is top-down of oh, there should be a change in direction because the wind has shifted direction or is it something that should be more bottom-up? We've been asked to do lots of things. We can only do a certain amount of them. This is what we recommend, or we're going to give you A or B and ask you to choose one, because we can only do one direction. Should it be bottom up revision of priorities or should it be a top down thing?
Arne Kittler: 10:40
I think it needs to be dialogue and it can be either way, depending on where the impulses to change things come from. So I think there's no one right direction. I mean, the main thing is that the different layers fit with each other.
Randy Silver: 10:55
We've talked about strategic. What about tactical, the what you're building and how you're building it? Yeah, where is the problem? In clarity on that?
Arne Kittler: 11:03
Yeah, I think. I mean that is often about the day-to-day interactions we have. So it's often about how do we get to a decision. What do we do if we don't agree?
Arne Kittler: 11:13
and so forth, and this is, I think, tricky. I mean, I mentioned the wish for being all in harmony all the time, but it's important. There will be situations where like in particular, between different PMs you come to a situation where you just have conflicting goals and you cannot resolve that by yourself and you should not try to resolve it. You should just be mindful and notice that there is a conflict that you will not be able to resolve and then escalate gracefully. This is something that, at least in Germany, people are afraid of escalation. It has a very negative ring to it, but it's an important aspect of clarity, because if you cannot resolve it yourself, who's going to do it? So you need to also challenge. I mean, we spoke about priorities. You need to challenge the overarching priorities.
Arne Kittler: 11:56
So, to give an example, maybe from when I was a couple of years back, when I was at Xing, I was in such a conflict. I was responsible for the mobile apps of Xing, for the overall platform of it, so I cared very much about having a well-balanced user experience that matched with what users expected from the brand, and I had a colleague who was in charge of the paid memberships, so he was all about signups to the paid memberships. That was his main goal. So I cared for activity, he cared for paid memberships. That was his main goal. So I cared for activity, he cared for paid memberships. And we just noticed at some point okay, you know like the conflicting point was that he wanted something about the paid membership in the main navigation, which is very scarce resource in mobile apps, of course, and I said, yeah, but the only certain fraction of the users that actually make use of those functions?
Arne Kittler: 12:43
can we not solve it differently, more in context, and so on? Yeah, but then of course it would have to be so prominent and blah, blah blah. So in the end we needed to just take that one level up and say, okay, if in doubt what is more important working towards activity or working towards paid memberships and we got our response and then we were able to move on and work accordingly. But we never would have been able to resolve this. So what we encouraged is one learning we had back then at Ex-Sing. We even wrote an escalation manifesto. We called it back then.
Arne Kittler: 13:12
So I mean, first, basically notice that you cannot agree and agree that you don't agree. And then I think the most important things when you escalate is to not do it behind your colleagues' back, but do it together so that it doesn't get this negative ring to it. And then the third thing is to be really clear about what is unclear. So in the example I just gave, the main question was what is important? Is it activity or is it sign-ups for the paid memberships? That's the core question. It's not about all the other things around it and what it means for the navigation. Leadership does not have to care about that, but that question is one that we weren't able to answer. And then the other thing is then when you raise something towards leaders, there is a natural tendency to say hey, they asked me something, now I'm going to be in charge and take over. No hand it back and let the people do what is their responsibility. And let the people do what is their responsibility.
Randy Silver: 14:05
I like that you mentioned escalating gracefully is the key, and then you give a really nice example of it. I do have to ask though, knowing a bit about the culture at Zing you had a collaboration manifesto with a very long name. Was there a very long German name for the escalation manifesto?
Arne Kittler: 14:22
No, no, no, no. You mean the Auftragsklärung? Yeah, no, no, that's the only German thing we used internally.
Randy Silver: 14:30
Yes, and I would have said it, except my pronunciation would have been terrible.
Arne Kittler: 14:34
I think you've done well, but anyways.
Arne Kittler: 14:37
Yeah, but that's long ago, so, nevertheless, I mean there is one aspect maybe I mean, since we were also speaking about how to create clarity in the moment, I think one aspect that helps with that is to collaboratively align early. So and you could say, well, is that still part of the strategic or is that part of the technical? I think it's somewhere in between, probably, but it really pays off if you spend a little bit more time upfront, sitting together with the stakeholders, getting you know people's understanding and not just talking about it. But that that was one of the ideas of that format after I was also that we developed a canvas which forced people to externalize their perspective, because if people just sit in a room and you you present them something you were not and you cannot really know if, if they really agree or if they were just lazy or thinking of the next meeting that they were, that they had to prepare for.
Arne Kittler: 15:29
So, like you know, doing it as a collaborative, interactive exercise, talking about you know what are the expected outcomes, what are the ambition levels, what must not happen as a side effect of what you do. So such things you know, no matter if you use a specific framework or not. But like getting into those conversations early before you set off to. You know, put more effort on something usually pays off. And we may feel that we don't have the time because why don't we start? You know building stuff already. But if you do it smart, you can do some preparational work, for instance, in the tech team. You know, make sure that some technical foundations are in place while you still clarify what it actually is that you want to do.
Randy Silver: 16:08
Just to summarize a little bit of what you said earlier. Some of the key points To escalate gracefully means you have to recognize it early, work with the other person in a collaborative way to say we're at an impasse, there is an issue here that neither of us can decide. This isn't a power play for us. This isn't a power play for us. This isn't a fight. Let's summarize it the root of the problem and talk about what the choices are and what clarity we need. Bring that to the appropriate parties, but then also critically, they have to make a decision. Give some clarity and then give it back to you to do. It's not a we're incompetent, we can't do this Exactly?
Arne Kittler: 16:45
We are no, no, exactly. It's just get that one thing clarified, get the priorities right and then take over again.
Randy Silver: 16:52
Yeah, I think there's a lot of behavior that gets in the way of that in organizations. They haven't examined it, they haven't thought about what they need to do to do it well, and I love the way you summarized it. Okay, so we've talked about strategic and tactical and escalation. Let's talk a little bit about clarity of role, because that's something that people get confused about a lot. Why is this so hard for so many product people?
Arne Kittler: 17:14
Yeah, I think there are different angles to roles. I mean, there is the role that we have what's actually expected of us as product people from the organization and sometimes, if you don't have clarity on that, from your leadership, because you have clear role definitions and you have a good dialogue, I think that's even more important with your head of product about what they expect from you, because there can be different focuses in different areas of the business. There's not the one recipe to say, okay, if you take all those boxes, you're a great PM. It really differs, and so not only having some sort of role definition framework, but also having a dialogue with your manager is important. But then there's also the role that you play in the team, in the cross-functional team, and what different developers may be expecting from you, what they may be thinking your role is versus what you expected from them. So that's one aspect that I find super important that within the team, people talk about their role expectation and the main thing there really is to frame it as expectations of the role and not of the person. That's super important to set apart and, like in one of the blog posts I recently wrote, I also gave one framework that former agile coach taught me that helps to really set us apart the person from the wall, because you know, being critical or people can easily get defensive if they think it's about them as a person, but in the end it's about what the developer needs from the role of the PM and it doesn't have to do with you as a person necessarily. So, yeah, so role expectations on the team are important and and I think the third thing is I mean we spoke about collaboration a lot and collaboration also often involves different other product teams, maybe also go-to-market teams and so forth, and something that I've observed often goes wrong it's just not clear who's making the decisions.
Arne Kittler: 18:58
It's just not clear who's taking the next step, who's driving the car, so to speak, and so often you know people are all comfortably sitting in the backbench and it's not clear who's the driver of this initiative. This is why my preferred framework for that would be the DAISY framework. I mean there are several of these decision clarification frameworks. I like DAISY because this driver D in DAISY stands for driver works. I like DAISY because this driver D in DAISY stands for driver, and I like the metaphor of there can only be one person who, in the end is in charge of driving a joint initiative. So that's why I think it's important that either the people working on a joint initiative together figure this out, or, if they cannot do it, then well then at least they make it transparent that it's not clear to them who is driving, and then somebody else needs to decide who the driver is.
Randy Silver: 19:51
Makes sense. Two things from that that I really like. One is Roman Pickler has this really wonderful chart on his site about decision making and he helps people to say sometimes you make the decision, sometimes you make the decision to inform other people, sometimes you make the decision in consultation with other people, sometimes there needs to be a consensus. And it helps guide people to think about oh, there are different types of decisions to be made or different ways to make decisions, and it's a really helpful thing to remind people. We get paralyzed sometimes by waiting for other people to give us direction.
Arne Kittler: 20:25
Exactly, and I mean the decision speed is or decision velocity also, as some people call it I think is super important. If you want to move fast in product Like if you get stuck with waiting for decisions, that's the worst thing that can happen because it's just super unproductive.
Randy Silver: 20:39
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Lily Smith: 20:45
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Randy Silver: 21:46
Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast. And you talked about role clarity and the role in the team. Yeah, there are product people working on things at different stages of development or different stages of maturity. There's the Pioneer Settlers and Town Pl planners model that I really like to use. But sometimes you are moving fast, You're trying to learn and break new ground and just get to a point where you've got an alpha candidate, beta candidate and do things there are other times you've got something in market, it's mature and you're trying to grow it a little bit or maintain it, and other times you're trying to actually replace it and figure out graceful under life. It's a very different product role for each of these Totally yeah.
Arne Kittler: 22:30
Or I mean also, if you consider like platform product teams versus, well, more customer-facing product teams versus more growth-oriented product teams. It's also like very, very different roles, very different expectations of the people and also very different skill sets that they need. Some of them, such as aiming for clarity, I think, is always important, but many of the other things are pretty different.
Randy Silver: 22:54
And the last area where clarity really gets tricky sometimes is communication. We've been talking for 25 minutes now. What's not clear yet?
Arne Kittler: 23:03
I think communication in the end, that's the breaking thing. You can have the best directional clarity or situational clarity. If it's poorly communicated then it doesn't really help. Theoretically it would be clear. So I think clear communication is super important, and one thing that we also always must have in mind as product people is that we don't get into the rabbit hole of our own jargon and we need to really make sure that people understand what we want. So it's our responsibility to make ourselves understood and in order to do that, it doesn't help to talk in our framework lingo of product frameworks.
Arne Kittler: 23:43
When speaking to your sales colleagues, Really try to understand how they actually refer to certain things, because they care about the same things. They may just have used a different terminology for them, and it's not about you being right, about having the latest smartest terminology for something. It's about making yourself understood. I think that's the main thing and also accepting that sometimes you will need to repeat yourself and again and again and again. This is not because your colleagues are ignorant or stupid or anything like that. They may be distracted. That can be one factor, but in the end you cannot blame it on them. It's always your responsibility to make sure communication goes well, and I mean then there are many, many other aspects to consider, Like, I really love the talk from Simon Cross at Product at Heart, where he also spoke a lot about presenting data in a very clear way. So for people who have to present a lot of data, I really recommend they watch this talk. I think it's very, very helpful. But, yeah, I think main thing is the attitude to say your responsibility.
Randy Silver: 24:42
Let me ask you about the other side. So you may be very clear in your communication, you may be celebrated for it, people may tell you how well your message is coming across. But what about when you're getting a lack of clear communication from other people? What's a good way to engage with them to try and get to the clarity.
Arne Kittler: 25:03
Yeah, I think, especially as a leader, it's important to provide an environment where it's okay for others to ask clarifying questions, so that you know if somebody is presenting something and they may be using some company internal acronyms and there's a new colleague who doesn't know what that is Like.
Arne Kittler: 25:24
Again an example from Xing. One important metric we had was VOMP visitors of my profile, which is something that you cannot know when you haven't worked in social media companies before. So like creating an environment where it's okay for somebody who comes in and there's a company presentation where everybody talks about VOMP and just you know, raising your hand and say, by the way, guys, what does VOMP stand for? If you then applaud that and say, hey, I'm really happy that you asked that, because of course, you cannot know. Let me explain it again for all the newbies in the room, because you're probably not the only one who wasn't aware what VOMP stands for. You know that is super important that in those cases you don't ridicule people and make fun of them for being so stupid and not knowing what WAMP is. Actually, it's your problem if you use all these acronyms and yeah, so, yeah, that's what I would propose Very good.
Randy Silver: 26:17
Thank you, this has been fantastic, Chad Arna. Good thing we've got time for one more question and I'm curious, for anyone listening watching, what's one thing that they can start doing tomorrow to help get better clarity in their organizations.
Arne Kittler: 26:32
Start small and accept that. You know, don't wait for your organization's overall clarity to be there. Sometimes it may not, you know, it may not come. There are just some organizations who are too complex to figure it out, and although your managers may not be able to provide a perfectly crafted decision stack type of thing, or so don't hide behind that there are still many, many things that you, as an IC or as a priority or whatever your role is, that you can do, and yeah, I've given a couple of examples for that in my blog post. So accept the responsibility and start with the small steps and take it from there.
Randy Silver: 27:09
And we'll have links to Arne's blog post in the show notes for this, so do go and read them more, arne. Thank you, this has been fantastic. Hope you enjoy the rest of the conference Great.
Arne Kittler: 27:18
Thanks a lot, Brandy.
Randy Silver: 27:30
The Product Experience hosts are me, lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day, and me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith: 27:46
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver: 27:50
And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track. Thank you.
