In this week’s podcast, we were joined by Tobias Freudenreich, a product leadership coach and consultant based in Hamburg. This episode dives deep into the structure of cross-functional teams and explains how this structure can help us build great products that people love.
In this episode, we cover
- 0:00 An introduction into Cross-Functional Leadership
- 5:17 The challenges of Cross-Functional Leadership
- 17:50 The strategy and intricacies of Cross-Functional Leadership
Featured Links
- Follow Tobias on LinkedIn and his website
- Tobias’ ‘Introducing Cross-Functional Leadership’ blog post
- Tobias’ ‘Product Leadership’ talk at ProductTank Berlin
- Martin Eriksson’s ‘The Decision Stack’ framework
- ‘Getting Started With Outcomes’ post by Josh Seide
#mtpcon London 2023 is set to be an inspiring event. The speaker line-up is shaping up nicely and tickets are selling fast. Join us for our smash-hit conference on 20 October. Hurry and get yours ticket today – https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtpcon/london/conference/
Episode transcript
Randy Silver :
So, lily, you’re a Chief Product Officer now. Does that mean that you’re, like, in charge of everything?
Lily Smith :
Well, basically, yes, you know us product people. We just take over and run everything.
Randy Silver :
Yeah, it’s amazing when you get to that level All of a sudden, all the other departments just do what you say.
Lily Smith :
Um, Randy, I’m not sure where you’ve been working, but oh, don’t ruin the fantasy.
Randy Silver :
I mean it would be nice if we didn’t have to deal with conflicts and, you know, disagreements and just people stuff all the time.
Lily Smith :
Okay, yeah, but honestly, I’m not always right, and I do really appreciate the input from my CTO and head of marketing. There’s no way I could put a product strategy together without their collaboration and feedback.
Randy Silver :
Okay, yeah, I see what you’re talking about, but you know, cross-functional leadership like that, that can’t be real, can?
Lily Smith :
it. It is real and it’s fabulous, and we have the perfect guest to talk about it this week Tobias , an independent product leadership coach and consultant out of Hamburg.
Randy Silver :
Tobias is an old friend of the pod and he knows this stuff inside and out, so let’s get straight to our chat with him. The product experience is brought to 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 Product’s 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, tobias, thank you so much for coming on the podcast this week. How are you doing? I’m doing fine. Thanks for having me. For anyone who hasn’t already met you, people who haven’t been to product at heart, people who haven’t run into you, can you give a quick intro? How did you get into product in the first place and what do you do these days?
Tobias Freudenreich:
Oh yeah, so let me try to cut that short. So how did I get into product? I founded my first business in 2001. Back then and what I did was basically being the jack of all digital trades. Back then, on my business card I wrote audio video, web print and TV and I sold basically all of this. So I was a web designer, print designer, all of this, some programming, some screen design, and then over time my business grew bigger and bigger and I found myself more and more in a coordinating role where freelancers and subcontractors came into play. And then I wrote on my business cards project lead and lead conceptual designer, because I never understood how you can lead a project without owning the content and knowing what’s going on in the project. But then I started working with Big Enterprises and I learned oh, the project leads over there. They basically don’t have a clue of what’s going on content-wise in their projects. They just maintain Genshawts and milestones and stuff like that. So I realized what the industry basically calls what I’m doing is called product management, and that’s how I finally found myself in product management and I started writing product manager on my business cards. And then I took several roles as a product manager, interim roles as a freelancer, then interim leadership roles years later. Then I also found myself in a full-time employee position in a company in Germany, a bigger company, where I was a director product then and nowadays to come to the second part of your questions question nowadays I do product coaching and consulting. So trying to give back what I learned over the years a bit more than 20 years in the digital industry now trying to help individuals and organizations to become better product individuals or organizations.
Randy Silver :
And one of the things you learned, and the thing we’re going to talk about today is about leadership teams and being cross functional. So, before we go into the details around it, just remind us what do you mean by a cross functional team and what’s so important about it.
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, I think most of us have experienced cross functional teams At least, I do hope so. It’s the teams where we put together people from various disciplines Building tech products. I would say the core of a cross functional team is probably product management, for sure, engineering and UX. That’s typically the core of a cross functional team, and we aim these three different parties to put together, to join their different perspectives in order to build innovative products in the end. And that’s what it’s all about and, depending on the context, we might add marketeers or content managers or analysts or whoever is needed in order to build a successful, winning digital product.
Lily Smith :
In terms of the leadership of these teams. What’s the challenge there? How is it, how is leadership developed for these teams?
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, that’s something I’m asking myself as well. So from what I’ve observed is we in the industry, we learned that building modern tech products requires cross functional teams. That’s what many organizations did. They read it in the books, they saw that their competitors or wherever they got inspired for this. Maybe they just copied over the 2012 Spotify org model and then they had cross functional teams as a result. But from my experience, what I’ve seen in various organizations, we have barely reflected how to lead those teams properly. So when I’m talking to managers and then when I look into to organizations, I often see that the leadership team, that the leadership style, hasn’t really changed from leading functional teams to leading cross functional teams. The only difference maybe is that, yes, we know there are now different people in those teams, but we still have a director product being responsible for the product managers. We have a director UX being responsible for the UX people in the team and we have a director engineering who typically leads the engineers. And for me, the core question is how do we change the style we lead? Because I think it really needs to change. We want cross functional teams to collaborate on I level in order to build innovative products, and I think the same needs to happen on the leadership level. So we need to collaborate on I level in the leadership teams as well. So we need what I call cross functional leadership teams. So I think the time is over for having siloed artifacts like a product strategy that only reflects what the product managers are responsible for, and then a UX strategy for the X department and a tech strategy for the engineers, because that is, in the end, a cacophony of voices. We just burden to the team and we let the team alone with trying to translate in between all these different documents and stories. I would want leadership teams to speak one voice to the cross functional teams so that they have clarity of direction in the end.
Randy Silver :
You talk about speaking with one voice there. That often comes from a disagreeing commit type of thing, because it’s rare that everyone agrees about something. So how do you make that work? Who’s actually in charge, or is anybody in charge on a cross functional team?
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah. So first of all, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s all about disagreeing commit. If we want to take decisions and if we want to move fast. And I think in the old style of leading cross functional teams in, where we still stick to our habits in leadership which we learned in functional silos, there we just we don’t need to disagree and commit. We can write our product strategy, we can write our tech strategy, we can write our UX strategy, but the conflicts will sort of pile up in the cross functional team and they need to get resolved there. We leave the product manager alone fighting against the tech strategy in order to push feature development forward, and these kinds of classical conflicts I guess many of the listeners can identify to when they work in cross functional teams. So the first thing I want is I want these conflicts to be clarified on the leadership level already, so that we don’t leave teams alone with these conflicts. And then the one thing I would want in order to achieve that is having a joint product strategy which inherits the tech and the UX perspective, and I personally think the terminology doesn’t help there because we call it a product strategy. It’s kind of associated with the product management discipline, but it needs to be more. We are building tech products. They are only successful if we manage to join forces on UX, tech and products slash business side, and therefore I think it needs one artifact where we tell our story like where are we today? Where are we going to? Where do we want to be in the future? How are we going to get there? Which are the problems we want to solve? Not sure if that answered your question properly.
Lily Smith :
I think it probably answered it and then some. I’m curious how this problem of leading cross functional teams in silos kind of is impacted by the size and the scale of the business as well. Having come from quite small companies myself, I feel like I haven’t really experienced that problem much in my time. But I can imagine with the layers of leadership in much bigger organizations this can be really kind of compounding this problem of how these teams are being led across the business and can presumably lead to quite a lot of confusion and misalignment if those leaders aren’t connected up in the same way as their teams beneath them.
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, and, to be honest, my experience was first of all collected in smaller setups as well, and I was pretty surprised how bad larger organizations are at handling this, because I naturally expected yes, there is this clarity in every organization, because how else should you build successful products? And the more and more I get to see big organizations and even large enterprises, I’m pretty surprised that it works. Still, it somehow works. But I think there’s so much room for improvement and we can do better leading in those complex setups, because, in the end, it is all about reducing complexity. When we have a large organization with multiple teams let’s say, 50 teams building one product together leadership is there to reduce complexity, so that these teams can do their best, and I think, therefore, it’s so important to be closely aligned on the leadership level. And just imagine a product where you have multiple teams being responsible. Let’s imagine any e-commerce platform where you have buyers and sellers and then you have part of the organization being responsible for the buyer experience, part of the organization being responsible for the seller experience, and somehow you need to align all of this Somehow. You need to make sure that it makes sense what the teams and the buyer part do versus what the teams and the seller part do, and therefore I think it needs a shared document on top. A shared story Like this is only one product in the end. It’s one digital product that we are going to deliver to the market and therefore we need this one message we sent in this organization so that people know what the direction is.
Randy Silver :
You say one message, but we’ve all had the experience the Rashomon type experience where everyone comes in and agrees it’s an elephant, but then they walk out and one person is describing the trunk, another person the tail, another person the legs. So is that a danger when you’ve got product and design and marketing and sales and tech all agreeing on the strategy but then going out and communicating it to their own teams Exactly?
Tobias Freudenreich:
And that’s why I’m a big fan of doing this together and no longer in the meetings we are used to from having functional organizations. I think there are so many leftover artifacts from these kinds of organizations and it would be beneficial to have more meetings where we join forces, like, imagine, an all hands meeting. And I’ve been in that situation myself as a director product in an organization where I realized, oh, we have a huge gap here between product-business and the tech side and we have kind of a finger pointing culture where you say, okay, tech is just lazy and business is just crazy. And that trickled down to the teams. And when I started as a director product in that part of the organization, I was pretty happy that I found a partner in crime with my engineering counterpart who saw that very same problem. And what we did was we decided for something I cannot pronounce properly in English role reverse communication. So we switched roles when we communicated. So when we invited everyone to all hands meetings of our unit, then we made sure that I will speak about the tech part of the strategy, whereas my tech counterpart spoke about the product-shash-business side of the strategy. And this way we made sure that everybody understands oh, this is aligned and it’s no longer going to work out that I blame tech for being lazy and I blame business for being crazy, but we are in this together and we need to join our forces in order to achieve that. So we made sure that we told this story in mixed roles and we made sure that we’ve been on the same stage at the very same time, listening to what the others are saying, in order to make sure that this communication is frictionless.
Lily Smith :
Randy, what’s the most effective way to learn from the best in the industry? Connect with other PMs and sharpen your skills.
Randy Silver :
Why really? You must be talking about MTPCon London happening this year on the 20th of October.
Lily Smith :
You know it, and this year’s lineup of speakers is shaping up nicely we have Tim Harford, behavioral economist, award-winning financial times columnist, data detective and BBC broadcaster. That’s all of those things. It’s just him. Plus the legend, that is Mark Abraham, product director at Backbase.
Randy Silver :
There’s also Randy Psydu, who’s the former CPO at Reliance Health, and Claire Woodcock, who’s the director of product for machine learning at Mozilla, and many more, including a great friend of this podcast.
Lily Smith :
That’s right. And don’t forget Workshop Day on the 19th of October. There are seven full day in-person workshops led by experienced product managers who share their secrets and tips for success.
Randy Silver :
And finally there’s the Leadership Forum, an exclusive event for senior product leaders, with carefully curated speakers, guests and delicious food.
Lily Smith :
So grab your tickets for MTPCon London today at mindtheproductcom forward slash London.
Randy Silver :
How did you prepare for that? Was it, was there a difference in how you made sure that you were had a sufficient depth in the tech strategy, or did you speak at a high enough level, or yeah, so I’m pretty sure.
Tobias Freudenreich:
So what we did is there was for sure a different level of detail in the different meetings, like in all hand meeting, I think we speak more on a high level. And then you might have engineering only meetings, where you speak about tech details, right. But on the higher level, we made sure we are super aligned, Like when you meet one of us at the coffee machine. It doesn’t matter if you meet the head of product, the head of UX or the head of engineering. You get more or less the same answers maybe not in the same level of detail. And that is, by the way, the very same thing I expect from every cross functional team. I tell my teams, like when I meet you at the coffee machine, it doesn’t matter whom from that team I meet, I want to have the very same answer on a very different level of detail, but if you are closely aligned, I expect to get the same answer. What are you currently working on? What is your roadmap? What is important right now? What are the struggles? That is what we expect from good teams who are closely together, and I think the teams can expect that from leadership as well. So, basically, to answer your question, not the very same level of detail, probably. And how did we make sure to have this alignment? Yeah, through a lot of communication. So it requires a lot of prep work. It requires you to come together and that’s, by the way, a fun fact, something I learned from various leadership teams. It’s not super common that these people meet on a regular basis. It’s not that they have standups or weekly one hour sync meetings, as we know that from product teams, who have standups and planning and refinement and retrospectives and all of this it barely happens on a leadership level that they come together in a cross functional setup and work on stuff together. This is the starting point. I think how to fix that right. You need to spend more time together and you need to talk about the strategy and you need to work it out together and have all these discussions to clarify the conflicts.
Lily Smith :
And is this cross functional leadership all about strategy, like if you work cross functionally as a leadership team to develop the strategy, then everything else just flows from that, or are there other aspects of working with your other leaders that you need to think about as well?
Tobias Freudenreich:
So I guess strategy is an important part of it, vision as well. I’m a big fan of Martin Ericsson’s mental model of the decision stacks. So all the artifacts mentioned in the decision stack are there to provide guidance to organizations and teams, and I think the leadership team is responsible for providing that guidance through providing the right context. We want to lead by context, not by command and control At least I hope so, but this is, for sure, only one part of the equation, right? I’m a big fan of this definition of people, process and product. So we should reflect all these three dimensions because we need all of them in order to, in the end, deliver products that are successful. So we need the right people in place with the right competencies, we need to give them a good organizational structure with lean processes, and then, for sure, they need some guidance in terms of what’s the product we are going to build here, what is the vision and the strategy An important part speaking about the product, but also important to reflect what’s the team, health, where do we run into issues in the people set up, let’s say, and which processes could be improved? So, on all these three dimensions, I would want the leadership team to align and to speak frequently in order to act accordingly.
Randy Silver :
So is this only about the leadership team? As the head of product, are you speaking to your peers only in the other teams, or do you speak to anyone else?
Tobias Freudenreich:
I think it’s as with every product manager on the operational team level. I would want you to do some stakeholder management and for sure you need to do some upwards communication and you need to make sure that the efforts are aligned. Let’s go back to the example of the platform product. Yes, for sure, when you are the head of product, being responsible for the buyer part of the experience, you should speak to the folks in the seller part of the organization as well and make sure that you are aligned there and make sure that you identify on a high level conflicts that need to be resolved, for example, by setting proper product principles, as Martin often times speaks about, which may help us to resolve conflicts between those different parts of the organization.
Randy Silver :
Apologize. I meant in the other direction. So do you want to speak to the director reports to the CTO, for example, and do you want your director reports speaking to your peers on the cross-functional leadership team on a regular basis?
Tobias Freudenreich:
I think that is something that can be super helpful. It needs some courage, I guess, and it needs a very open, transparent culture, but I’d be a big fan of this. I’d also be a big fan of skip level one-on-one swear. From time to time, you speak to the manager of your manager. It’s something that’s, in many company cultures, hard to implement, but I think it can be super beneficial in order to let the communication flow properly and transparent. And, yes, it would be great if the product manager speaks to the director tech and the director of UX from time to time. And let’s not forget about the director analytics and marketing and customer care and legal. It would be good to have that alignment. Probably not scalable if we want them to speak on a daily or weekly basis, but what about having a coffee every month?
Lily Smith :
Yeah, I think that’s great. I definitely encourage a lot of extra communication with my product team across the whole of the business and you see the benefits of that like really quickly for sure. You mentioned earlier about Martin Erickson’s decision making stack and we’ve talked about strategy and process and principles as well and kind of having principles which help that cross functional team make decisions. There was one other element I wanted to kind of get your views on, which is the goal setting side of things and goal alignment. So how do you see this working or how would you like this to work in a sort of ideal world where your cross functional leadership team is sort of working really well to set goals across the whole product organization?
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, I love speaking about the ideal world, and then that’s also speak about how it works in practice. So I’m not only a big fan of Martin Erickson’s decision set, but also of Josh Sidon’s definition of output, outcome and impact. Just as a quick wrap up, I think output is pretty clear to everyone. That’s the features we built, but we tend to forget it’s also the features we remove. So we should remind ourselves that removing features is also output, because it could provide value for users in terms of simplicity or something. Then the outcome would be the value we want to deliver for users, hopefully measured by a change of user behavior and not only by qualitative metrics like user satisfaction or customer satisfaction. And this we do in order to have some impact, at least in most companies. We need to have some impact in terms of providing value for the business or generating value for the business, and it’s always this chain of output, outcome and impact and these three steps in that chain. They are connected, from my point of view, by hypothesis, and the first between output and outcome I used to call the tactical hypothesis, and the one between outcome and impact would be the strategical hypothesis, and in my ideal world, the leadership team is responsible for setting the strategic hypothesis. So we know from the business strategy, from the company strategy, we know what impact we need to generate. In most companies it’s about revenue, profit, numbers of subscribers, whatever it is. And from there, I think the leadership team needs to build a product strategy that basically answers one question what are the outcomes or the outcome bets we want to place in order to generate that impact? And that is what a leadership team should own from my point of view, saying okay, what are the user problems we want to solve or the values we want to deliver for users in order to achieve that impact? Whether or not we achieve that impact, it’s an hypothesis. We’re going to find out as we go right. And then the product team would be responsible to build the tactical hypothesis, figuring out which outputs do we need to build in order to deliver those desired outcomes. And that is again the risk of the product team whether or not they are going to make it. So they hopefully do experiments and they’re going to find out over time which outputs are capable of driving outcomes. So the ideal goals in my ideal world would be outcome-centric goals where the leadership team says, okay, inspired by the strategy you hopefully all know about because we repeat it in all hands meetings, so everybody knows our product strategy. Based on this, we think this quarter we need to set the following outcome goals and team A is responsible for goal number one and team B is responsible for goal number two and if our plans work out, then we’re going to see the impact manifest at the end of the quarter or maybe, as they are most of the times lagging metrics, we might see it in two quarters only.
Randy Silver :
Toby, you’re so unsure of yourself on this, so let’s go to something you are sure about. Hopefully, If you’ve put this in place, you’re having all the right meetings, you’re collaborating and communicating well. What are the signs that it’s working? I mean, I’ve been in plenty of situations where people thought they were doing a good job but may have missed it. So how do you know this is going well?
Tobias Freudenreich:
I’m going to inspire you with, like my gold standard of we properly implemented cross-functional leadership, and that would be I listen into a daily stand up of a product team and the engineer would argue for not pulling that story from the backlog because it doesn’t align with the product strategy. So this would be, from my point of view, a clear indicator that we implemented it properly, that the artifacts of the decision stack are used for the discussions within the teams, and that is something I would want to see over time that we really reference to these documents, because we must never get, we don’t build a product strategy just to have a product strategy and to have a nice document we can put in Confluence and then forget about it. A product strategy will only its only value is if we execute it and if we are successful by executing it and in order to execute it, we must use it on a daily basis in all our decision making in the product teams, and that’s something I would try to measure. I would try to listen into the discussions on team level to see whether or not these documents became vivid parts of the discussions.
Lily Smith :
Awesome. So Assuming well, in some scenarios you might not be the leader. That’s like striving to work in a more cross-functional way, and you might actually be one of the ICs on a cross-functional team suffering from not having cross-functional leadership in place. What do you suggest people do in that situation?
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, I think that’s the most common situation for most of the people listening, probably because we are not in the ideal world, we are in the real world and I’d say everybody can contribute to achieving that kind of alignment. Like Randy already asked, if I would recommend people speaking to the other directors, that would be a good starting point in that kind of situation. I guess, not relying on the rumors you hear about as tech strategy, but speaking to those who are responsible and then making sure to explicitly express where you see the conflicts, maybe between a product strategy you see some artifacts and the tech strategy, and then you can use your voice in order to express it. Or, even better, you could try to resolve these conflicts and then align with the leadership team If they agree to the way you are resolving those conflicts. That could be a good starting point and I think every individual contributor, regardless from the discipline you’re working on, can contribute to this. So how do you say that? Say when you see something, that’s probably a good tactic.
Lily Smith :
I guess, or the alternative is get yourself promoted and sort the leadership team out.
Tobias Freudenreich:
Yeah, that’s also a good advice.
Lily Smith :
Tamiz, it’s been so great talking to you today. Thank you so much for coming to discuss cross-functional teams and leadership. I think it’s one of those things as well where you don’t necessarily think specifically about that type, that style of leadership, or the impact of having of leading cross-functional teams might have on your individual leadership style. So it’s been really nice talking about that today. It’s been good.
Tobias Freudenreich:
My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.
Randy Silver :
Thanks, Derby.
Lily Smith :
The product experience is the first. And the best the 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 Hamburg-based band POW. That’s PAU Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg 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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