How one tiny habit can help you build People-First Product Leadership skills this year
Learn the secrets to always prioritizing your people, so you can become a stronger leader and build an empowered product team
We often go into the new year with starting “new” approaches top of mind, whether it be personal, professional, or a bit of both. Tackling any change or building any skill is a big undertaking and best addressed by continually taking small steps. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model is a good way to start. It emphasizes three elements that must converge simultaneously for a behavior to become a habit:
Motivation (M): The desire or willingness to do the new behavior.
Ability (A): The ease in doing the new behavior (aka the tiny habit).
Prompt (P): The cue or trigger to do the new behavior.
As we already have a common desire to improve our craft, LinkedIn and Maven seemed to be the perfect places to share the start of my People-First Product Leadership newsletter. The notion being to focus on habits you already have motivation - and are in motion - to do. Thus I’m applying Fogg Maxim #1: Help people do what they already want to do: improve their craft.
Every one or two weeks, I will be curating and sharing articles which directly align with the principles of People-First Product Leadership. By subscribing, you will receive a notification (an event, prompt) which reminds you to take time to learn, to improve your craft. Which flows nicely into there must be a New Tiny Behavior, aka the simple version of the behavior you’re seeking to introduce. The newsletter will be a short read (5 to 10 minutes) and save you from the sifting and sourcing of new product leadership content. At the end, I’ll include a reminder to “celebrate” and let magic occur after taking another step to continually improve your product leadership expertise.
Subscribe today and start your tiny habit. Then celebrate! You’ll receive content which takes 5 to 10 minutes to read and applies directly to building your product leadership expertise.
Now let’s dive in…
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini
As a product leader, you are continually working with and seeking to influence others ranging from stakeholders, leadership, and your own team.
In his original book Robert Cialdini describes six key principles of persuasion: Reciprocation, Commitment & Consistency, Social proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity. Readingraphics includes a great visual (see below).
In the updated edition, Cialdini adds “Unity” to the mix. According to Cialdini, the Unity principle moves beyond surface level similarities. Instead unity is described as “the shared identity that the influencer shares with the influencee”. For example a community often has common characteristics that individuals use to define themselves.
As discussed in People-First Product Leadership, a product leader seeks to create an environment which encourages outcome-driven thinking powered by experimentation and empowerment. This article from McKinsey calls out these characteristics in a section which focuses on “great product managers”.
…such managers obsess over usage data and leverage it to do everything from knowing customers and informing the product road map to making product retirement decisions and helping users capture value more quickly. They embrace active field testing and experimentation to get data so that they can continuously improve the product.
…CEOs we spoke with are clear that providing product teams with the autonomy to experiment, try new tech, and develop their own solutions is critical. As mentioned, this starts with providing product managers with the freedom and accountability to lead their cross-functional teams as they see fit to deliver on a given goal. This autonomy can be supported with key mechanisms (such as objectives and key results) to drive accountability for outcomes and with automated functions (such as testing) that not only speed up development but also put in place guardrails to limit risk.
I left out the reference to product-sense. Even though it is a phrase currently in vogue, it is a skill which can be developed over time and is not a unique characteristic only available to a select audience.
How senior product managers think differently
Here is an article which aligns with People-First Product Leadership right at the start. “[it] isn’t about how to get promoted to senior PM, but about how to advance your thinking and become a better PM.”
The first portion of the article focuses on ensuring the problem is correctly defined. Only afterwards can the solution be accurately considered. Doing so requires thinking beyond the status today and considering the future environment in which the solution will be introduced.
Looking back to look forward
Kate Leto is a powerful product leader and one of the inspirations for People-First Product Leadership. The following selections in the article stood out to me:
Leadership isn’t about what you do - the strategy you advocate, the frameworks you use, or even the metrics you hit. It’s about how you do it.
While the idea of being a “leader” may be exciting for some, it’s also overwhelming and vague for others. Many feel unprepared for leadership roles.
Leadership, like product management, is a craft. It’s something you continually learn, experiment and iterate on.
As a leader, your behaviours and actions have a direct impact on your team, organisation and even customer. To truly lead, you need to better understand yourself.
Tools for better thinking
Our last link for this post is a bit of fun. The site utools was shared in Lenny’s community Slack. The description goes: Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.
As a product leader or someone involved with product, it’s likely you’re always in search of templates and tools to keep your team and stakeholders engaged.
There were a number listed that were familiar to me plus a nice offering of new ones that I’m looking forward to testing out when the opportunity arises.
Now to wrap up by celebrating with a Lancaster photo depicting the weather we’re having in San Francisco right now. Enjoy!
