0:00 Understanding empowered product teams
5:22 Autonomy and leadership in product teams
10:19 Building trust in teams and leadership
19:52 Building trust and transforming company relationships
Featured Links: Follow Andrew on LinkedIn | Make Things That Matter | Marty Cagan’s article ‘Product vs Feature Teams’ | Buy Charles Feltman’s book ‘The Thin Book of Trust: an Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work’
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Episode transcript
Randy Silver:
Hey Lily, what’s the difference between an inspired team and an empowered team, and why does this sound like a dad joke setup?
Lily Smith:
Well, Randy, is it that the letter has been transformed?
Randy Silver:
How did you know? Anyway, today we’re talking to Andrew Scottsko, a product leadership coach at Make Things that Matter, all about what empowered product teams are and how to actually get there.
Lily Smith:
And you might think you know the answer, but Andrew digs into some pretty deep stuff in this chat and I found it very insightful, so let’s get to it.
Randy Silver:
The product. Experience has brought you by mind the product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.
Lily Smith:
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about mind, the products conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world and online.
Randy Silver:
Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.
Lily Smith:
Hi, andrew. Welcome to the product experience podcast. How are you doing today?
Andrew Skotzko:
I’m doing great. Lily, Thanks for having me and great to see you and Randy today. How’s everything been in your world?
Lily Smith:
Very, very good. Thank you, aside from the COVID, but let’s not talk about that. So we’re chatting today about empowered teams. But before we get stuck into our topic, it would be great if you could give our audience a real quick intro into who you are and your product journey and what you do in product today.
Andrew Skotzko:
Yeah for sure. So what I do today is I work as a product leadership coach and advisor. So I work with basically the VPs of products, cpos and the leadership teams, helping them build and transform into being strong product companies. So how I got here is a bit of a winding journey, as I’m sure Randy and other folks like me could attest. But basically I started my career in marketing, switched engineering and then somewhere along the way realized that there was this beautiful and weird thing called product. That brought these the technical and human sides of my brain together. And once I once I got a taste of product, that was it for me and just kind of went all in. And you know, that was somewhere that was 10 or 15 years ago, and it’s just been my obsession ever since. So it’s. It’s the weird world that we all love to hang out in.
Lily Smith:
And you have been helping lots of businesses with their product teams and we pretty much. I’m sure most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of empowered product teams and that that is the kind of the utopia that we’re all aiming towards. So, tell us in your words, like what is an empowered product team?
Andrew Skotzko:
Absolutely so. Yeah, as you said, literally like by now, unless anyone’s been living under a rock, they’ve heard about empowered teams and OKRs and accountability and all these wonderful things that that paint a picture that that I like to call sort of this, this idea of like empowered nirvana, right, it’s this, this mythical place that we all would love to spend our days working in. And then there’s the, the reality of like. Okay, so that sounds awesome, but how do we get there or how do we do it? And you know, I think that’s kind of what led me to explore. Some of the questions that led us talking today, earlier this year, was I was really asking the question of like, what does that actually mean? Like, what does it actually mean to empower a team? What is this word that we throw around really mean? And, as I said, I really explored it, both on my own and talking with lots of different people. At the end of the day, I came down to my stance is that it’s really. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a trade, right, it’s an agreement between teams and leadership that is often kind of glossed over, and it’s this trade of autonomy for accountability, and so, of course, we’re going to talk about all this a lot more, but this is where something like OKRs is very helpful. But, in a nutshell, what you have is you have a team that is signing up, like they’re putting their name on the line, to be accountable for delivering some kind of outcome, but in exchange, they get, let’s say, bounded autonomy for it. And so when I that’s that’s how I started to think about it, when I when I started to bring that into my conversations with teams and leaders, making that conversation explicit and actually like unpacking it together, really improved a lot. So that’s, that’s how I’ve, that’s how I think about it today.
Randy Silver:
Andrew, we like to talk about autonomy a lot, but I think a lot of people misunderstand the term or at least use it in a way that’s not intended. So what does autonomy actually mean with an empowered team?
Andrew Skotzko:
Well, really quick. I’m curious. What do they most people you talk to, what do they mean by that word?
Randy Silver:
I can do whatever I want. Get out of my way, stop telling me what to do. Yeah, that’s not what that means. Yeah, and, to be fair, I don’t hear that a ton, but I hear people complaining about it and I’ve come across it a couple of times.
Andrew Skotzko:
For sure, for sure, and you can imagine, you can see where someone might draw that interpretation and where that could be problematic. If you’re I don’t know a CEO and you’re going, hmm, we’re having issues already and now you just want to, like, go out of free for all. So, no, autonomy is not a free for all, it is not a blank check to go do whatever you want. It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well. But this is why I was saying a second ago, like a bounded autonomy, right, you have autonomy within guardrails, within limits, and so what I think of it meaning in the context of an empowered product team is you have you being the team, like especially the product trio, if you want to use that language. Right, the autonomy, you’re empowered to come up with the solutions that drive the results. Right, like the fundamental trade is like okay, I as the leadership team, I’m going to give you this space and in that space, like, it’s up to you, You’re going to do, you know, you’re going to figure it out. It has to meet certain constraints, has to work for the business, it can’t violate our brand or be illegal or destroy our business model or whatever the infinite list of constraints may be, but as long as you’re meeting the constraints, it’s up to you to come up with the solutions. Because the most, I think, the most disempowering thing to use that overused word, you know, I guess I fundamentally look at product teams and everybody on them as it’s a creative role. Right, product is often pigeonholed or a lot is like a very analytical role, and certainly there’s a lot to that, but I actually think of it fundamentally as a creative role. You know, everyone wants to make things that matter and use their time well, and so I think the most disempowering thing is just to be told like oh, I don’t really care about your creative input, just go build me X, which is essentially the model we’re all reacting to and trying to get away from of, you know, feature-filled roadmaps and feature factories and on and on.
Lily Smith:
And how has that changed? Or what kind of problems do you see with product leadership? How are product leaders getting it wrong? Because I feel like there’s a fine line or like a balance that you need of like looking after your team and steering them in the right path versus like giving them that autonomy and making them feel accountable.
Andrew Skotzko:
Yeah, it’s a great question and there is no, I don’t think there is like one perfect answer here. It’s all very situational. So when I think about some of the product leaders that I’ve been working with over the last year, they all have different contexts, but the thing that seems to carry across those situations is, first of all, it’s not dictatorship, right, they’re not saying this is it and that’s it, I said it and that’s all it is. It’s not. You know, they don’t get to rule things. They actually have to evangelize and influence and persuade and build a vision and get the team involved, because without the team, division is you know, it’s meaningless if you can’t actually execute on it. So I think the hard line to walk here is finding that balance between the rigor of responsibility and accountability, of saying like, yeah, this team has to truly sign up for delivering a result. I mean, I think this is one of the differences, just to make a somewhat esoteric distinction. I think there’s an important distinction here between accountability and responsibility. And responsibility is something that anyone can take for themselves, right, in any situation. I can choose to take responsibility for something, right. It doesn’t require anybody else’s involvement or agreement. But accountability only exists by virtue of agreement. Right, I am only accountable to something to you, lily, if we talk about it, have a conversation and agree that I am accountable to it, and that involves things like the conditions of satisfaction and the constraints, the terms, whatever words you wanna put. But I think that’s actually the thing that’s most often skipped over is that conversation and an explicit signing up process, basically, where, let’s say, you’re the product leader, lily, and I’m one of the PMs reporting to you. You come to me and you say, hey, we’re gonna go do X, and you just tell me and you don’t ask me for any input. Right, you’re just sort of dictating. That’s a very different experience versus what I think you would probably do is you would sit down with me, we would have a conversation about the direction and the vision and you would lay out for me what the big problems that we could solve that would make a big difference are, and then I would at some point sign up to take that on. I would say like, yeah, I’m in, I’m taking that on. I don’t know how we’re gonna do it yet, but me and the team are gonna figure it out.
Randy Silver:
Andrew, you’re doing a really good job of defining terms that we use all the time, so I’m gonna push you to define one more Ooh good, and it’s really obvious one trust. You said accountability is. You can’t have a trust without accountability or accountability without trust. But I think that word also gets confused for people sometimes. So can you give us a little bit more on what you mean by that word, by trust?
Andrew Skotzko:
Absolutely, randy, thank you for that. And you’re right, I am a big fan of defining terms because it sort of externalizes and makes explicit a lot of meaning and assumptions, and I think that’s where a lot of the problems start. But trust is a big one because you’re right, that’s basically what it all comes down to. So my personal favorite definition of trust is from a writer named Charles Feldman, who wrote a really great book everybody should read, called the Thin Book of Trust, and the definition of trust there is that trust is defined as choosing to make something you value vulnerable to somebody else’s actions. So it means that I am putting something I care about and value at the effect of you and I do not control you. Right, I cannot control you, which is where the vulnerability and the trust comes into play. So I think that’s really the heart of it. And so that is the difficult bit, because then you start to get into all these questions and maybe this is where you want to go, I’m not sure about like great, how do you? How do you build it? What do you do about it? How do you repair it if it’s out?
Lily Smith:
I mean, yeah, you’ve literally just asked all the questions that I was going to ask you, but let’s start with like one of the harder ones, like if you’re, if you’re building, let’s say you maybe don’t have empowered teams yet, but you’re kind of working in that direction and you know there are occasionally like conflicts within peer to peer relationships or or you know, even with as a product leader with the team or the team with the product leader. So if you don’t feel like you trust people within that product organization, like what can you, what can you do about it?
Andrew Skotzko:
Yeah, no, I love the question. I think the first thing I want to say is I just want to name something that’s implied in your question, which is that we can do something about trust. We can rebuild trust. A lot of people operate like trust is this. It’s a binary, right, it’s either there or it’s not, and once it’s gone or it’s broken, it can never be rebuilt. And while there are certainly situations in which that is true, I don’t think that’s usually the case, and so I think it’s helpful to look at it like okay, where is trust a problem? And? But I think, more importantly, it’s really important to zoom in on what we mean by that. So, for example, when, when someone says I don’t trust that person, you have to ask okay, what do you mean by that? Right, because trust is multi-dimensional. Trust is not one thing and it’s not all or nothing. So, for example, there, there’s all sorts of different sort of trust models out there. Feldman’s got one. There’s another one that I like, called the trust equation, by Steven draw’s deck, I think it’s how you say his name. That’s a good book from about 20 years ago. That’s useful. But one of my favorite ones that comes actually from a friend of mine, pam Fox Rollin, who’s got a new book coming out that I just want to say everyone should go check out. It’s called growing groups into teams. She and her partners or her co-authors in that book actually explained a model that I love right now it’s my current favorite which is saying, okay, let’s say trust is quote, unquote out. Okay, is that? Does that mean, like this, I don’t trust their sincerity? Is it that I don’t trust their competence, their reliability, their honesty, their respect? Right? These are sort of like five dimensions of trust that all mean really different things and all have different solutions. So I think the first thing to do to answer your question, lily, is you have to, like get a little more specific about where the problem is, because I might trust a PM on my team to give an amazing demo but I’m that which is like in the label of the bucket of competence but I may not trust their ability to give a three year projection or forecast to the board. Right? Same person, awesome at their job, two different situations, both in the domain of competence. So I realized I’m getting a little long-winded here. Let me zoom out. So, step one get specific. What do you mean? Step two is to then actually have a conversation about it, right? So I think you have a conversation about what’s going on here and most people don’t even realize you can actually have this conversation and that once you can have this conversation, there’s almost no conversation you can’t have. This is almost like the skeleton. Key conversation is like can I have that conversation about trust and where it’s out and why? And you don’t have to have all the answers going in, you just have to be willing to step in there with somebody. I think that’s actually the most important thing and there’s we can get into some other like more tactical things on the team level or the leadership level, if you like, but I think that’s how I want to at least tee it up.
Randy Silver:
Andrew, that’s exactly where I wanted to go. Actually, is there a difference in these dimensions between creating trust at an individual level, you know, with your stakeholders, with your peers, versus doing it from a leadership level and doing it down to the teams that report?
Andrew Skotzko:
up? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there actually is a difference. I think the principles translate across the, the different positions in the organization, but in terms of the actions you’ll take, I think, yes, there is a difference. So I think the way I want to frame this is that, whether you’re you know, I’m basically asserting that this whole Thing about empowerment comes down to this handshake between teams and leadership right, that’s the fundamental thing, and that that handshake is built on trust, which is where we are now. So, depending on which side of the handshake you’re on, there are things different, things you can do to both earn trust of the other side and also extend trust to the other side. So let me explain it that way. So, if I’m on the, we’ll start with the leadership team, because I, like, like you, randy, I think a lot about the, the environment created by leaders, so let’s start with them. So if I’m on the leadership team, I have to first think about what am I doing to earn the trust of my teams. I think that’s where everybody should start is like, okay, am I being trustworthy first before I go Pointing fingers anybody else? So I think in this, in this case, I would start by looking at a few things. If I’m on the leadership team, am I insisting on Basically strong thinking over any one solution, right? Am I being? Let me give you the anti pattern Am I being attached to my solution, right? If I’m just trying to, like, get the team to just do the thing you know, build the damn thing I want you to build already, like that is a great way to destroy trust. That’s not going to help you build trust, or or to earn their trust, rather, is another way to say it. But what works much better is to insist on strong thinking from everybody, including yourself, and to call yourself out when maybe you are insisting on a feature that you have not really Substantiated. Right, maybe you keep pushing this like pet project and then, like I’ve seen this a team I worked with earlier this year I saw the co-founder, who’s who’s no longer the CEO, but he’s still very involved Actually own in a pretty public forum that he’s like, oh wow, I realize I have just been a broken record for this one thing that I want for like a year and a half and he said something to the effect of like I realize it doesn’t make any sense. Actually, it doesn’t make sense for where we are, where we’re trying to go. And you just saw the moment he said that, like you just saw the whole room, you saw everybody involved in the company just go like, oh, finally, okay, cool, we can have a real conversation about this. And it’s not that anybody’s like a bad person in the situation, but like that level of honesty and openness just bought so much trust. So that’s, that’s one thing is like it says insist on strong thinking, being willing to call it out. And then the other one I want to call out from the leadership side in terms of earning trust is really managing your own biases. Right, that’s like an ongoing practice for a leader is every one-on-one you’re having every presentation like owning, where your Biases, your own preferences and bias are coming into the equation because you have outsized influence by virtue of your position. So that’s. There’s more we could say there, but that’s probably enough for now. That’s on the earning side. On the extending side, I think this is actually the harder one for leaders. I think most leaders would probably nod along quite nicely with everything I just said. This is where the rubber meets the road, because this is where they actually have to get vulnerable and extend trust to the teams, right? So if we go back to that definition of trust from a few minutes ago of, you know, choosing to make Choosing, to risk making something you value Vulnerable to somebody else’s actions, that’s the hard one. And so for a leader, that means actually giving up control. That means actually giving the team space to pursue things that maybe they would not, the leader would not pursue, or that are not big, they go against the leaders instincts, and that doesn’t mean the leader doesn’t get to have a voice, but it does mean they like, like they have handed over the reins, but they retain the context. So that looks like giving the team space to explore ideas, giving the team data and evidence that they have that the team may not have. That looks like leading through context and not control, right? So creating a vision, creating a strategy, creating principles and then creating that container, those bounds in which the team gets to really go do their thing. And the last one is really not overusing veto power, right? The thing that makes a stakeholder a stakeholder, almost by definition, is that they do have veto rights, and so the thing is you can’t throw those around all the time, right, if you’re just vetoing every single thing, because it’s not what you would have done. That just destroys trust, and so that’s where actually giving space and relying on the data goes a long way. I’m happy to talk more about the team, but is that kind of what you were asking about, randy, with the leadership side?
Randy Silver:
Yeah, and you brought up something really interesting there as well. I mean not that everything else we talked about earlier in this conversation was interesting, but the two dimensions of getting trust and then extending it. What is the difference? What’s the thought process about that?
Andrew Skotzko:
No, I love that question. I think the fundamental point I’m trying to make there is that when we think about trust, it’s very easy to point fingers right To say, oh, I don’t trust them, or trust is out. But I think the first thing that a leader has to ask is what is my contribution to the situation? And I actually think that’s something everybody ought to be asking. Right, if you have a conflict whether that’s in a personal relationship, a work team, whatever if there’s a conflict, everybody has some part to play, right, even if that part is just tolerating it and not speaking up about it. They may not be the person who’s like most quote unquote at fault, but that’s why I think it’s so important, because then it puts everybody in a stance of what’s mine to own and how can I contribute to making it better somehow?
Lily Smith:
I think in my experience as well, I find one of the ways in which trust is built between a leader and their team is with the giving and receiving of feedback, which is very much that kind of. I think it leans more on that earning it side of things, but being able to take feedback and criticism well and inviting it but then also kind of giving it in a very radically candid kind of way, like we all do. But is there anything else? Just thinking about the times at which you’re able to really demonstrate earning trust and extending it and the one-to-one environment that most leaders have with their product teams, is there anything that you kind of recommend or speak to in that sort of one-to-one situation? That is like a good sort of moment at which you’re able to really practice or develop your trust between your team.
Andrew Skotzko:
Yeah, I think there’s a few different angles. One that comes to mind right now is I mean, the broader point that I want to make here is I think it’s owning that you’re not infallible, right, like being a human being as a leader, and not trying to present that you’re all perfect, you got it all figured out like you make mistakes too. That goes a long way, especially if you think about the power imbalance or power dynamic between, let’s say, a CEO and a second-year product manager. Right, there’s just implicitly a huge power imbalance there, and now in a large company, that dynamic isn’t probably going to happen, but in a smaller company it might. So I think this is where just owning that you make mistakes too, and making it like this is where both sides really opening up their thinking, externalizing their thinking, I think goes a very long way. If you’re on the product team side and you externalize your thinking, you can bring your stakeholder or your CEO or whoever you’re bringing them along for the ride. But on the other side, if you’re the CEO, the product leader or whatever, it goes a really long way to not just shut someone down without explaining right, if you actually explain the thinking and why a certain thing might not actually work despite a lot of good intentions and effort. I think that goes a really long way. So I think that’s like from the leadership side of bringing people along for the ride. But I think the other one is really and this one feels weirdly hard from when I’ve seen leaders struggle with it but it’s to give credit right To really say like you know what I disagreed with this direction, but you and the team and the data, you totally nailed it right. Like when a leader can disagree and commit and then three months later to say like yeah, I was wrong, this is awesome. Like I’m so glad I was wrong and I’m so glad that this you know. I don’t even hesitate to say like wrong, that’s the wrong framing. But to just celebrate the win and to not have their ego be so wrapped up in it. I think that goes an incredibly long way, especially in that one-on-one dynamic, because I don’t know, I’ve had a lot of calls from one or both sides of that dynamic where they just feel like they will not acknowledge how things actually evolved.
Randy Silver:
So, given all that, Andrew becoming a strong product team, what’s the way that a company earlier in its journey can get started and move towards it in a deliberate fashion? What should they be doing?
Andrew Skotzko:
Yeah, well, let me start by what they probably shouldn’t be doing. So what they shouldn’t be doing is what a lot of people try to do, which is they see this picture of kind of the empowered Nirvana and all these wonderful books that we’ve read by, you know, marty Kagan or Teresa Torres or Petra or whoever, and they just try to jump all the way to the end, right, like that is almost guaranteed to fail. One of the things that I try to stress to people is that really what we’re saying? If we’re trying to become a strong product company or transform or move to the product model, or however you want to say it, we’re trying to fundamentally shift the relationship between the product organization and the rest of the business, and the thing that we all overlook is that that is the outcome, like that’s the result. So you cannot start there, you have to get there, and so don’t try to just jump there, which means don’t try to just change everything at once and ask the leadership team that’s been used to like controlling everything, to just hand over all the reins, and you know it just doesn’t work. So the actual sequence that it starts with is being able to ship good product, right. So if you can’t even ship your toast, right, like if the benchmark that most of us talk about is a bare minimum two weeks, if you can’t ship to your customers at least every two weeks, like do not pass, go, do not collect $200, like that’s thing one. Because if product can’t even ship, then the organization has no credibility within the company. And so if you’re starting and things are in a super bad place, you just got to get the shipyard shipping right. It can be like a bug fix and just celebrate the hell out of the bug fix. But just like the thing has got, the pipes have got to start flowing. Step two is, once you can actually get something through the pipes is you have to start solving those problems and building things collaboratively right. So that’s where all the all the great stuff around product discovery really kicks in. Do you have cross functional teams or do they, you know, do they actually do proper discovery? Do they do prototyping, all of that? And then number three is really that’s where the harder part of product leadership comes in, which is everything around product strategy, product vision, etc. And then, once you get there, you actually have enough momentum and credibility built up that you can actually, like, start to make much bigger changes in the company level of relationship. So if I were to summarize all that, first you got to be able to build ship things, then you have to be able to build and discover what is worth shipping, then you have to actually be able to lead and do strategy and vision and then at the end you have essentially transformed your relationship to the rest of the company. A lot more to it than that, but that’s one way to think about it.
Lily Smith:
I was going to say, in your experience, how long does this take?
Andrew Skotzko:
I think it depends a lot on the size of the company. You know, if you’re, if you’re trying to transform a 50,000 person company versus a 20 person startup, you know we’re just not even talking about the same thing at all here. I think at the low end it’s probably six months. I think at the high end, realistically, you’re talking three to five years, probably three years if you did this really really well. If you have a big company and you did everything right, it’s probably like three years. If you don’t do everything right, it’s probably much longer. And there are many, many examples of companies that are, you know, quote unquote transforming and they’re in like year nine or version six of the transformation. And you have to honestly ask like does this still hold water with anybody?
Randy Silver:
And how many McKinsey’s and the and eccentric have they been through at that point?
Andrew Skotzko:
Oh yeah, right, the BCG, the eccentric, deloitte, mckinsey, etc. Etc. You know and it’s not because they’re not smart people or anything like that, but I think a lot of times, you know, this is one of the things that I think is really interesting about the whole strong product company transformation thing. Right Is that it requires the fusing of, I think, two disciplines which often operate quite independently, one of which is product, and that’s all the stuff we obsess over. But there’s actually this whole other field out there called change management. That is a domain and a field that has worked on the problems of organizational and company transformation for a long time, and they’ve learned a lot, and so a lot of my research and exploration and work recently has been bringing the best of that domain into the product domain, because I think we’d be a little bit silly to just ignore what all these smart, well-intentioned people have figured out over the years. So I think there’s bringing a lot of that together is what’s actually necessary, because the product let’s say, let’s call it the product model or strong product company is kind of what we’re trying to become. And then there’s this whole other field that has a lot to say about how to effectively become that.
Lily Smith:
Well, andrew, it has been great talking to you about this topic. I’m sure all of the people who have been listening are very inspired and will soon be very empowered See what I did there. But yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, it’s been really fantastic.
Andrew Skotzko:
Oh, it’s a pleasure being with you all. Thank you for having me.
Lily Smith:
The product experience is the first. And the best Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.
Randy Silver:
And me, Randy Silver.
Lily Smith:
Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver:
Our theme music is from Humberg-based band POW. That’s PAU. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Humberg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith:
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Forward slash product tank.
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