Full Impact, Fractional Time - Taking Ownership, Diagnosing Chaos, & Driving Impact

Speaker A: Welcome to Practical Product Management, um, the podcast where we talk about how product management is done in context, not just by the book. So Marilyn and I are back with season two. This is episode two of the season and we're talking to Peter, who we both know. Um, and so I'm going to throw to you Peter to tell us about you and then we'll dive into some questions and talk for a bit.

Speaker B: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. I hope I do a good job of being practical. So, um, I am a product person in the uk. I've been doing product at startups and big companies and medium sized companies for probably the late 90s. Um, I guess I didn't know it was called product until 2012 when I, I interviewed for a product role at Amazon, which I think both of you know deeply and I think that's how we've connected in the past. Getting to know each other is really through like I geek out about Amazon from an academic sense. You guys have actually lived it. So I think there's probably some difference there. And yeah, I've been a founder and I've worked at startups and I'm now doing fractional work across a number of different companies. Currently two, I was doing five last year. We'll talk about that a little bit as well and sort of really figuring out what it means to be doing fractional stuff rather than full time. Like fractional CPO is. I'm probably gray haired enough to be able to say it's CPO type stuff. So. But I love it, I love every second of it. And yeah, I'm uh, excited to talk about it with you both.

Speaker C: I love it. Fractional. So a super good to see you again, Peter. Um, welcome to our chaos. I know that I've talked to both you and Leah about this notion of fractional product management and one of the things that we've talked about in the past is like, you know, product takes a degree of um, ownership and so it help, help me understand, help our audience understand. Sometimes I pretend that people listen to us, uh, help us understand like fractional. That seems like very different and kind of new. What does fractional mean in, in the context for you? And then for a company or someone that wants to bring in someone fractional, what's that look like for?

Speaker B: So I think it's really different. It's different in different roles that I have at the moment and I think it's different in different people. It depends. Um, and I don't think there's a good answer on this. But it's basically, it's sort of defined by what it's not. Right. So it's not full time. That's kind of clear because you're doing it a fraction of the time. It's not a consulting base rate. I mean, some people call it consulting. I think it's not. It's probably closer to part time more than anything else. You know, sometimes you have direct reports, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you sit on a leadership team, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you sit on, you know, going board meetings, sometimes you don't. It depends on what the client needs. And sort of. I think you earn the right to get in the door, and then you have to keep earning the right to. To have the job. You know, the. I think getting in the door is probably mainly about there's a problem that the company's got and they want some experience, but they probably don't want to pay the full rate for that experience. Or they. Or they're not at a stage where that makes sense. And so they probably bring someone in to do a surgical job on that problem. And then in my case, it has expanded, uh, out into other things beyond that. But it's not like a discrete consulting task, which is like, oh, come into three months and then you're gone. It may look like that to begin with, but it tends to sort of expand to fill what the problem set is. So I don't know. That feels like a really unsuccinct answer.

Speaker C: No, it's perfect.

Speaker A: It's perfect.

Speaker C: And I think it fits our podcast completely because we always say it depends on, um. And so I feel like you just fit right in. Um, I want to sort of pull out what I think I heard was the difference. The consulting roles in my head are usually like, you come in and, uh, you offer some advice, but you don't actually own the outcome. You don't actually control the problem space. You're consulting. You're giving the gift of wisdom to other people that will actually own the problem. It sounds like in this instance, you're actually taking ownership of the challenge, which is slightly different from consulting. Is that correct?

Speaker B: In my case, it is. Because I've done advisory roles, I've done consulting roles, and while I enjoy them, I like getting my hands sort of stuck in and helping and taking ownership. Right. I mean, I've had. I don't really like, um. With the exception of Leah. And, um, we haven't actually worked together. I just kind of handed off one of my roles to Her. I don't know what everybody else looks like who is being a fractional person, but I have a real pride in the outcome. And it's all, it's super. What I love about it is on the whole, your incentives are aligned with the customers because. Or the client. I don't like any of these words. But effectively you only get your next job through reputation and through doing a good job. And so you have to be deeply invested in doing a good job. And know I've had clients say to me that in referring me to other people, uh, that I act with the kind of intensity of a founder. And of course I'm not a founder, but I, but I like that description because I think it just gives you a certain amount of skin in the game rather than, you know, oh, here's a PowerPoint and like, here's a really expensive day rate and we'll be here for three months and then we're gone. Whereas it. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Um, no, I love that. I don't find. And uh, I think that we've talked about this in the past too. Leah. Isn't that like you have just described people that have the product mindset, like, we are owners. When people ask me like, you know, you know, if you had a magic wand, what would you want to do? My answer is always, I want a big ugly business problem and I want enough autonomy and people to solve for it in a fiscally responsible way. Like, give me a disaster and I am like, I'm in heaven.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's great. And I mean, I think I don't want to go back to uh, a full time role. So I think the history of the term fraction is quite interesting because after the mass round of layoffs that ah, sort of started in 22, 23, I think there are a lot of people on the market. I think there still are a lot of people on the market. In my experience of looking for jobs after I got laid off from my last full time role at a big bank, which is obviously the same place that Marilyn, you and I met. There's this sort of glut of people there and it's really hard to differentiate yourself and do a good job in there, particularly in the interviewing kind of stage where how do you know a good product person from somebody else? So, you know, I think one of the things that I love about this is you can, if you're careful, like there's no politics in a lot of the places that I work or if there are politics, you can just about stay like either Upstream or downstream of them, depending on how it looks like. Because you have like the way that I work is I kind of, I sell myself in days. Like you buy me for a day of the week. It's not in hours and it's not on retainers or anything like that. And I. Maybe we'll come on to this in a bit. But I do that to, to create boundaries so that I can stay super focused on a client for a period of time. Like that creates a natural kind of scarcity in your time that allows you to say yes or no to things which you know when and if you, you can say that to yourself in your head, am I going to do this or am I not going to do this?

Speaker A: Is.

Speaker B: Is this the best use of my time? Which is a very producty kind of way of looking at things. But you can also use it as a razor to kind of. Yeah, often I find that I'm hired by the CEO, uh, or the kind of leadership team often reporting to the CEO. And it's like, well, would you rather I do this or would you rather I do this? And you can kind of shape your role to the stuff you do and don't want to do at the same time. And if you're getting pulled in a certain direction and you like that direction, you can say, I'm feeling the pull towards this thing. I think I can help there. Would you like me to help? Or I can feel myself being pulled towards this thing. I'm not sure it's a great use of my time. Do you want me to do that or not? Which. It's very, very. You can do that to your manager in a full time role. But it's a little bit more nuanced than like, I've got this many hours a day and this many days a week to do this class.

Speaker A: I, uh, mean, so for those watching, what you don't know is that obviously you, if you watch us, you know that Marilyn, I know each other. Peter reached out to me and was like, hey, I have these. I have an extra. I have a fractional role and I need to do more somewhere else. Are you interested in a fractional role? So I actually took one of Peter's roles. So that's what I'm doing now. I started in December and he handed over to me. And I would say what I've been learning is exactly what you just described. The, the ask, in some ways is very much what the ask was when I was a full time cpo. But I can only do it three days a week. Which means there's no room for nonsense. There's no room for me to spend time dilly dallying around on something. Every minute counts for the three days that I am at that job, right? And I have clients the other two days. So I don't have, I have to have really strong boundaries and be like no, I can't. If you need me for that then I've got to, you know, like yes, I could come to the board meeting but that means something in my schedule, right. And so it's uh, it's been really interesting to me because it's actually made me think about where when I was a full time CPO did I spend some time that I'm like I could have not been doing that. Right. It's actually made me think about the job differently if I was doing it full time. I think I would. If I ever do it again full time, it will, I will go back into it in a way that I'm like, listen, I got, we gotta cut some stuff out.

Speaker B: It gives you a, you know, again I'm going to use that Amazon jargon, it gives you a bias fraction because like there's a, you know, you can't go in. The onboarding experience is interesting because you know, in a corporate job the first 90 days, you know, split it into 30 day plans. Um, don't fall into the action trap. All this sort of stuff you can, you can't really do that in a fraction of. Because people want impact really really quickly and. But you also, the reason that people say don't fall into the action trap is because you have to build relationships. And so you also do have to build relationships and build trust but not in the kind of slow long term politics and career management. I think that's one of the things that I'm making this up there. But the stuff that you were talking about just now, uh, in your full time role, the stuff that you spent your time doing, maybe a lot of that was managing up uh, and optics and kind of like self interested career progression. It's great to not have to worry about that stuff. And it may be naive but um, or maybe m. Naive of me to think that I don't have to do that. But it happens I guess in uh, other ways and I love it because you're just focused on doing the job. The big hairy problem, Marilyn that you were talking about, you know, the gnarly problem, it's, you can just focus on that and it's, it's almost, I find it Very, very pure product work in many ways, because the problem can often be we don't understand our customers, or we've got the wrong people in the wrong roles, or we're structured, or our product is like, we've lost product market fit or like, it's quite. And you're operating at that high. I don't know. I absolutely love it. I'll, um, stop talking.

Speaker C: But I, uh, that's how, uh, I like. As I'm sitting here listening to you guys, I am reflecting on. I think that really big focus on time spent and impact is something that I wish that I would have had focus on in the past. I think you get drug into a lot of stuff that's not value add, and you don't actually look at every hour as, um, am I investing in the right things? Am I going to get the right ROI on this meeting or this set of conversations? Um, and I love, uh, I love that perspective because I don't think most people approach their day like that.

Speaker B: I don't know if you ever met Marilyn, the person who hired me to the bank that we worked at together, but I met up with her for a drink. She's now left there. Uh, met up with her for a drink, and I sort of confessed something to her about my new setup. I was like, I think I had more impact in the first six weeks of being fractional than I had in six years of being at this big bank. And that's partly because a lot of what we were doing there wasn't set up to have that impact. I think you and I, we were doing different sides of the same job on different sides of the Atlantic, basically trying to introduce product thinking, product discipline, product structure into a deeply unproducty kind of organization. And that it was a game of millimeters. You, you know, you're very rarely in touch with customers. You're very rarely shipping stuff, you know, but that impact is so nice to be able to do it. And it's so addictive that you do realize when you just get further and further away from it, how you kind of like, what's happened to me. I used to do this stuff.

Speaker C: I used to talk to customers. So. So funny. Um, because I think that organizations really feel it like what you're describing as being apart from some of the core product behavior every time I walk into a new company. And. And Leanne, you and I have talked about this at length, like, where's your roadmap? Who's your customer? What do they say? What do they want and they're like, well, but we can't. And it's like, you know, pardon my French, but that's bullshit. You can. And what's stopping you? Except for you. And some fear. Like there's fud. There's FUD in the air that's stopping you. And, and it's so funny. I was reading an article today, um, I was reading an article today on Reforge about product, uh, market fit collapse and how the acceleration of what we're developing and um, how the acceleration of AI and how the acceleration of customer expectations is causing product market fit collapse across industries in a really remarkable way. I just think that there's going to be such a profound found pressure on companies to be more focused and it kind of feels like you guys are cracking the nut on this simply by saying you don't get me full time. So how are we going to focus?

Speaker B: I mean, it's not that simple. Right, Right. It'd be great if it was. So first of all, I read the article as well, Brian Balfour on product market fit collapse. In some ways I agree with it. In some ways it's just classic disruption theory, which is there's customer expectations and customer expectations rise as new entrants come into the market. And that means you've got to. The bar keeps on getting raised and you've got to meet that. And if you don't meet it then you will lose product market fit. And I think AI is a good example of that. But it can happen without AI, without AI. And I've certainly worked on some projects like that in the recent past. Uh, I think I just want to go back to what you were saying earlier about when you said what's stopping you? I think this is one of the, this is one of the privileges of the role and it's also what makes it really hard for the team that you're coming in to work with is that oftentimes you come in and you kind of do a short listening tool to build trust and do the rest of it and you come back and you're saying, well, you should talk to your customers and you should go back to your first principles on your product and you should do less. And you should, you know, and like. And you know. And that kind of resonates with the leadership team. But then the product team are like, but we've been saying that for years and this has happened in a number of places and I think. And it's hard, right, because you realize that you have a lot of privilege coming in as the kind of fractional CPO who's, you know, you kind. I kind of often feel like I swing in and I just say the things that everybody else is doing happens. And. And I don't necessarily have any superpowers other than having done it before. And being brought in often by a board member or an investor or a kind of CEO, uh, reference or something like that, which is like. It's the difference between saying it and knowing that you can do it. And I think that's the hard bit is it's not just, oh, we should talk to customers. It's like, okay, this is how we do it. Let's do some customer interviews together. I'm going to show you, and then we're going to listen to it and we're going to unpack it, and we're going to use some framework that's appropriate to this to kind of do that stuff. But you can kick down doors that were previously hard to kick down doors, and that can hurt people. And to the whole. Because they feel frustrated that they haven't been able to achieve it themselves. And there's a very, um. I guess I haven't seen it talked about that much. But the. One of the things I'm very interested in product is the people in that product. Like, products are part of a system. You've got customers in that system, you've got employees, you've got executives, you've got all these other things. How that stuff fit together is often the most broken part of the thing. It's not just software or the marketing or anything else like that.

Speaker C: Um, but on the flip side of that coin. So I fully understand that you come in and you're like, we should do these things. And people are like, you're a jerk. I've been saying that for years. I'm so frustrated. I could have been the cpo. Um, but aren't you just a catalyst for them? Hey, guys, I know you've probably been saying this for years. I'm, uh, going to help you do it because it's kind of my role to just come in here and break down some of this, um, like, almost like re. Get some flexibility in the system so you can flex those muscles again that have completely atrophied here. I know you know how to do it. I know you've been saying it. So let's do it together. And aren't you in some ways, yeah, you're going to frustrate people, but aren't you in some ways liberating them as well to go Back to what the core is and how, how has that differed for both of you? So, like, I know you're being like, you're both doing this role now. Like, what are your experiences with the people in the system?

Speaker A: I'll go first so that Peter can chime in on the top of what I've been, what I'm doing because he did it before me. I like, I think, I think what I hear both of you, and I agree. I think the tricky part is you have to have a conversation with the conversation I'm having. So I'll mention what Peter say about this is take advantage of my position to do the thing you've been wanting to do. Like, let's do this thing, because now I can push this. So instead of having your feelings hurt, then I'm saying the thing you said. Take advantage of this. Yeah. Uh, right. Take advantage of me in this spot and let's push it. Right. Come with me. Right.

Speaker C: Or, or lead with me.

Speaker A: Right? Right. I think that's one thing. The other thing I think that's interesting is that you aren't in the relationships that they've had before you got there. Just like when you take a new, a new job. Right. Uh, but you're taking this, you don't, you're not in those relationships now. You're sort of dragged into some of the noise of it. Right. But you also have the, the capacity issue of I can't, I'm not facilitating this because I only have these, this number of days or hours or whatever you're doing. And so you can give tips, you can give hints, but you're not going to, you're not going to now fix all of the inter. Dynamic pieces you're focused on. We're going to fix this. And the dynamics may fix themselves on the way or they may not.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: And so that's kind of where I find myself in this kind of interesting spot where I'm like, come with me. Take advantage of this. I've been doing this for 25 years. Take advantage of this. Right. Um, but I don't know. Peter has, I mean, like, I would say that the, the message following Peter has been interesting because there is this, like, you're both very strong, you have very big personalities and you say the thing and people do it. And I'm like, yeah, and we also do it very differently. Like, yes, we both have big personalities and do get things done, but we also have, we do things very differently in some ways. Right. And so I think it's interesting what people are reading from the ability to just step in and get things focused and move. So I don't know. Peter, you.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. Well, no, I agree, but it's really complicated because. So, first of all, like I said earlier, to get brought in, there's gotta be a problem, and there's always problems. But the leadership team has to realize there's a problem, which often comes a long way after there actually being a problem. And it's almost like you have to hit rock bottom, and you have to realize that this is a big problem and we're going to have to get through it. And if we don't get through it, we're probably not going to make it. And we need outside help to do it, and we haven't got it on our own. Which probably doesn't coincide with the people inside the business saying there's a problem. They're probably already burned by that point. So I think there's that. So already I found myself in multiple companies saying, I know you've been saying this for a long time, but that doesn't mean that it's been heard. And it may not have been heard partly because of the way you communicated it, or partly because, uh, the leadership team wasn't ready to hear this because they hadn't hit rock bottom. Like, some of that you can reflect on. If you've said it and it hasn't landed, you can certainly reflect on that and think, could somebody else have landed that in a different way? And if they could have done, that's your work is to work out how to land that better next time. But if the answer is no, and it's just a sort of timing question, that's a different consideration. And in that case, the way that I often frame it is like, well, yeah, because you get to know these people pretty quickly and you've got to work out what their view of product is. And on the whole, uh, it's the same. They say what they want to have. Right. And on the whole, it's aligned, uh, to what I want to create because I think it's generally a good thing. There's degrees on that. But, like, we can invoke Kagan at this point, but it's broadly Kaganistic. Right. But the way that I position it is like, let me do the kind of difficult work at the leadership team to kind of get them on track and see that there's a different way because they're receptive to me, because they've brought me in, because there's a problem and all this sort of stuff. But the outcome of that will be that I have set you up for success and that therefore you can now do the thing that you've said you've always wanted to do. Like, and I will be here. Who has done this before? Not a million times, but enough times to know what good looks like and how to get there. Let's rejoice on that positive thing. And the vast majority of people get there and enjoy it. And often you see like a night and day shift in it, but it's not always true. And I think, and this is more difficult is because sometimes getting what you want is scary. And it means there's no barrier left between you and there's no excuses, there's no like, boogeyman, there's no like, you know, baddie. There's no exogenous kind of thing going on. And that is really scary. And that's. And it can be scary for all sorts of reasons. And that's where, yeah, things change and it's really difficult. But one of the things that I really love, for example, is absolutely teeny tiny teams, like three, four, maybe five people, but uh, probably four. Often one designer product person and two engineers. And in a scrum team where you've got more than that number of people, you can kind of hide. And it's not always clear what's going on. In a teeny tiny team like that, it's really hard to hide. So these issues come out quite quickly. And that's partly because a lot of this work and a lot of the hard work I find of being fractional is the diagnosis part. Uh, like what in the system that I was talking about earlier, what is actually broken or acting exerting force on other part of the system in weird ways. I love that diagnosis piece because it's so, so complex. Um, but, but often it's. And it's often human. That's the, that's the fun bit about it, which makes it unpredictable. Um, sorry, that was a long answer.

Speaker C: But like, no such a good answer. And it, I think it goes back to something that Leah and I talk about a lot, which is people build software. So this is, this is at its heart, uh, getting people, getting people aligned to a problem for people, um, so that you can actually solve a business problem that makes sense. So there's sort of like this, this triangle, um, effect. And I, I love that you guys are talking about the fact that like you're coming in and doing product type work, but you're doing people work. And I'M I don't know if you guys are a fan of or have read the book Tribal Leadership, but there's all the, like, I love this book. I bring it out all the time. I'm send it to you. Um, Leah, we can put it on our, our, on our web page. Um, this, this group or this about how people act and interact because we're, we're at heart, ah, you know, tribal people. Um, we don't, we don't do well alone. We're, we're not the most ferocious. We don't have teeth, we don't have fangs. We've survived largely because we operate in systems and groups. Um, and those systems can be very broken in ways that pit people against each other, um, pit companies against other companies, and then pit companies or pit groups of people against larger holistic problems. And your goal as a leader is to identify the behavior of the group and try to move the group through, like, really toxic. You know, everybody hates everybody. Um, to group A, who hates group B. Um, to, you know, our company wants to beat that company, to we're trying to solve for cancer. And those mindsets you see in company after company where like group A really kind of wants to take down group B even though it's harmful to the company. Um, and not because they don't believe, but because there's some sort of fear pattern set up or, you know. So I think it's really interesting that as you've described what, how, what you guys do, you're not just bringing in product practice. You're not just being, um, the cpo. You're actually looking at the system of behavior and trying to create enough of a boundary around a space so that you can move forward quickly and solve a business problem when you land that, because obviously you're not solving the system. Um, how do you have those conversations with the company about some of the symptoms that you've seen that created the original problem? Because if you just like, like launch a new thing and bounce, that problem still exists in the ecosystem.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you want to go first there? What's your like?

Speaker A: Um, well, I was, as you were just describing it, I was thinking. I was actually thinking about Peter and following Peter in this role. I, I think in order to do this job, you have to, I mean, it's true of all product managers that we have to be. We have to have empathy.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But I think the fractional role requires real humanity because you're going to come in and you're going to have hard conversations in, off, in Often very direct ways. And you're going to say the thing, as Peter says, and I get said to me in the job I've taken now, um, not to me, because I don't say the thing, but people are saying, like, I'm gonna say the thing, because that's what Peter told us, taught us to do.

Speaker B: Talk about the elephant. Like, you point at the elephant and like, this is the thing. This is what we're talking about, huh?

Speaker A: Yeah. And so I do think. I think that that directness when we talk about. And maybe I'm not exactly answering your question, but when we talk about this role and when I've talked, people have asked me about it, they're like, well, you have to. Must have to get in there and be really honest and direct. And I'm like, yes. And I have to do that with extreme kindness and empathy and with a heart that says, I know that I haven't been here while all of this has been going on and that I'm judging something quickly, so tell me where I'm wrong and talk to me about how it feels, but we've got to get to this now or we won't get to there. Right. And so it's the speed at which you need to work, but with empathy. I don't think everybody's cut out for this. So that's. I mean, like, uh. I'm not sure I'm directly answering your question, but I don't think it's. I don't think everybody could come in and do this job. I think Peter's great at it. I think you could be great at it, Marilyn, because you're a deeply empathetic person and care deeply about customers and. And the team and. But I don't think just anybody can do this.

Speaker B: That, uh. I think that's exactly right. And. And I'm m. I know I'm not. I'm not brilliant at it. I learned stuff every time, and I screw it up every time. Right. But where it's really interesting. So I'm thinking about the first. The first fractional role that I got was. Was amazing for me. And I'd been on, you know, been out of work for six months, got laid off in the pit of depression. And in this case, a board member said to the CEO, founder, you probably need, like, he'd obviously had a problem. I don't even know what it was. To this day, you need a fractional product person. And they went off to look for a fractional product person. And they found me when they. In My experience, and this has been true in a number of roles, what they're looking for is someone to do the, what I call the functional work. Right. It's like fix off, like, unfuck our engineering team. Right. That's basically it. It's an unfucking job. And that, uh, allows me to get the swearing in just there. Right. So you've got to, you've got to do that, really. That's what you're being hired for, and that's what you're being observed for, and you've got to move quickly on that. But that's not all the job. There's, uh, a. The people part of the job. They will never hire you to do the people side of the job or not. In my experience, they won't because they think the functional layer is more important than the emotional layer, but actually the emotional layer is more important than the functionality layer. And I think the. But there. It's only by doing the functional stuff that you earn the right to operate at the emotional layer. And often the emotional layer is actually about building very, very close, almost intimate relationships, often with the founders and the CEO, uh, where you're saying the thing to them that nobody else is saying to them, and that is that nobody is going to put that on a job description. And, you know, and that's the real, real privilege of it. But yet. And you've got to operate at those two things. But this is the first area of focus. And so. And so from a diagnostic perspective, you have to come in quickly and be like, what is most broken here? Uh, and so it's an imperfect diagnosis, but it's like, you know, I'm not going to use some weird medical analogy, because that would just go down a dark hole that we don't need to. But what is the most acute problem here is probably this thing here. Let's fix that thing first of all. Then we'll do this thing. Then we'll do this thing. And the pattern recognition over time that we've all got, as experienced product people, you can have a high conviction of being right in those things. Maybe not perfectly right, but over time this gets better. And then you kind of graduate up into that side of it and that. And that. Yeah, I think to everything that Leah was saying earlier, you've got to focus on the, what looks like an engineering or a product problem first of all. But pretty quickly after that becomes all of the people stuff. Because often engineers have got the most intense feelings because they're hiding them the most. You know, it's like, um, so, yeah, it's that whole mix of stuff. And that's what's so great about it. Like, yeah, because anyone can be an armchair Kagan and be like, you know, you did. Have you done this? Yeah. So, for example, like, you know, ah, this. The role that we share. It was relatively easy for me to come in and start asking questions about customers. And that being clear that I think there was room to be done on understanding customers and framing what customers wanted in a different way. And I would say that the cheat code for me is I've worked with this incredible, incredible researcher, uh, for the last five years who uses jobs to be done and does a mix of qual and quant and bringing him in to run. Like every company should hire this guy Ryan to do this work. Um, because it is like a cheat code for saying this is what's important. This is who your customers are. This is how they think. This is what they care about. This is a statistically sound prioritization of the way that those things compete with each other. You have that stuff, you can point everybody at it and everything else should follow from that point. And what's great about it is I'm sort of, you know, it's not my work. It's okay, he's my buddy and we've worked together. But like, it's independent of me. I'm not like, he's often engaged by the CMO or somebody else who should be understanding that stuff. If you can find those pressure points where there's a clear, there's clearly room for improvement. That makes all of the other stuff all together much, much easier.

Speaker C: I love it. I did jazz hands because like this notion, I think that the times when I've been able to move large organizations, large, complex, emotionally, organizations like forward, the fastest is when you do do that. When you take that time to do that analysis and present it in a way that everybody can look at. Because not everything is important. Some things are mission critical to solve. Uh, I mean, everything's a problem. But what problems are most important? What are the relationships between problems? If you solve a. What's the resulting impact on the ecosystem? Like, this is not something that that should, uh, be debated. It's, it's. There are ways to know. Yeah, you should know and then you can do. And then you can fix the emotions.

Speaker A: Well, and then once you know, I think one of the things and same same with me in this role, but because Peter did a lot of that work, but also in roles I've had in the past. Once you dive in and you do that diagnostic and you say, what do our customers really want? Who are they? What are we? You know, how are we doing this? You can also diagnose where people are trying to do something else.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: That is not focused. And even when you say, we're going to focus and then you see these little sneaky things happening and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's really easy to come back to it once you draw the line to, this is what we're doing for our customers. Anything else we're doing, we need to have a conversation about. Ditch it. Or we have to talk about it.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And it. You can really hone in on it in a way that you can't if you don't do that research. And people are like, yeah, but it's important, right? And you have some voice over here. Voiceover.

Speaker B: It's just opinion. Then you've. Then you're in a fight of opinions. Right? Which is. And we know how that ends up. Uh, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, it becomes a different game of politics in my mind.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Like, because now you're like, this isn't politics, this is data. We're focusing here. If you don't want to focus there, then you want to be someone else or do something else.

Speaker C: It strikes me that, um, you know, you guys seem like you described yourselves being brought in at time of crisis and that knowing what to do in a data driven way and providing the focus is critically important. I think being able to sort of play with, uh, the upper quadrants of the Ansoff matrix comes with privilege. Right. You don't do that when you're in times of crisis. You focus your resources. I'm getting, getting the team rallied around what matters. Um, how does that, like, how do you have those discussions? Because I'm sure the board and the founders are like, yeah, but what if we did this thing over here? That's new product, new market, Crazy, crazy. Um, how do you, how do you pull that back in or at least control it in a way that allows you to move the core the way you need to in order to have the impact?

Speaker B: So when I said it's a cheat code, the research just really helps because if you believe the research and you believe the research has been done in the right way, which is you start really broad with an audience, but you're not seeking to validate assumptions you already had, you are going in cold and just being like, what's stopping you from buying our product? And then you Unpack that stuff. If you believe in that and the work that's being done. You say you do quality, you know, you might do 20, 25 interviews there. Uh, you get the patterns, you then do the quant to make sure that you're not biased by the people you spoke to. You're talking to the right people, you're paying money for it. Professional researchers, like you should believe in that stuff. It just becomes so clear because it's like, we've got to do this and then this and then this and then this and anything. Yeah, a CEO can always say that's great, but I want you to do AI. And it's like, great, you're the CEO, we can do AI, right. That's fine. That's like, it's a disagree and commit moment. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. But how many leadership principles am I going to be able to get out? That's two.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So I'm going to say obsess about your customers as well. So that's just um, but you know, I think that research allows you, you've got to have backbone. You've got to be able to like stand up to the leadership team and be like, I will do whatever you say, but this is what my professional opinion is. And, and, and I, and I have high conviction in this thing because of the research and everything else. I, I haven't really, I haven't really. You know, part of that as being as, as Leah was saying, like strong personalities is that in my limited experience of doing this, that tends to be enough to kind of have those conversations. You don't shut those conversations down, you just talk about it as a trade off again with these teeny tiny teams. What I like about that is you have one team, one thing. They can't work on more than one thing, then they lose focus. So you might like in a tiny startup sort of companies, uh, that I work in at the moment it's like two teams, three teams. Maybe that is your choice set. So which one of these things do you want to stop doing in order to do, to do the AI thing? Uh, and it's probably going to take two quarters, six months to be effective on it.

Speaker C: Like capital allocation process.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean I talk in consequences, right. Like we can talk about that, we can spend our time on that, but we can't do it all. So we will need to put something down. Like these are, you know, I always use the, I'm holding all the things, right. These are the things I'm holding. If you want me to pick that up. Up. I got to put something down to pick that up. So. And these are the consequences of that decision if we. We can do that. And, And. But it's very. For me, it's often like, these are the consequences. This is what we would have to do. I. This is what I think, based on my experience and what you hired me for. This is my opinion. Now, what do you want to do? Right. And I think there is a. I mean, these, like, like we said, like, I think even in my CPO roles or my VP of product roles, they're bringing me in because there's a need. And if you don't want to listen to me, I don't know why you hired me. Right? So it's like, we can, we can have it, we can debate it, we can talk about it. I can give you, you know, there's. I can decide that. Okay, I'll go with you on this journey. But if you're not going to listen, I don't. You don't need me. Right?

Speaker C: This is.

Speaker B: This is the core, uh. I. I'm currently obsessed with decision making and reading books about decision making and like, in a very amateur way, but I think decision making is the core existential job of product, and that in order to make those decisions, you've got to be aware of all your biases and. Or you got to try. It's basically impossible. Uh, you know, so I guess earlier in your career, you're just like, well, I'm. I'm just right a lot. And I can make those. Like, I can make those calls on my own experience. But as you get further on, you look for, am I synthesizing the right things to. And that's where the research really helps is because, like, well, I can say I think it's this, but that's just my opinion. I'm probably wrong. Whereas the research takes you in a different direction. And I think helping. It's very, very hard and lonely being a founder or a CEO, because you're making a lot of decisions that you. I mean, having done it, you don't have high conviction in it. You don't. And the stakes feel really high, particularly when they're big. If you've got a pivot or something, that's a really scary, really scary choice to make. So how do you get the inputs to make the right decision with imperfect information? That's the, uh. And I think that's where product really helps inform strategy is you just, you just, you. You're like, what are the missing inputs that we need to make this decision. And let's go after those.

Speaker C: First of all, what an incredibly insightful conversation. Uh, like you guys have given me so much to think about. Um, and that's just such a, it's such a privileged place to sit.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean I think it's a, I think it's an interesting, interesting like I said for me having this, this being my first time doing this, there are some things that I'm like fascinating now I'm rethinking the jobs I've had, even my last CPO

Speaker B: role and going, oh, say more.

Speaker A: I could have done this differently.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Or you know, like I think there were so many things. Like I mean I worked, I worked my last, my CPO role when I was CPTO at a company. Uh, it was very similar in terms of the company and space that I'm now in again. And there are things that I'm like, oh, I danced around because of the politics and the uh, founder relationships and what I was. Because I wanted to be there long term and I wanted, I wanted to sink my teeth into this thing. And, and I'm realizing that this is a, I just didn't do some things that are, that I know to do like really being faster, being to the, you know, getting to the point, doing the research right away. Like there were things that I didn't do at the outset of my last role because I was exercising my 30, 60, 90 day plan that I'm like that if I ever do this again, I will not be executing in that way. Like it's going to be different. Like because I'm learning something doing this, that I'm like that thing and the way I did it before.

Speaker B: So I mean there are, but there are perverse incentives as well. So in a full time role, like you say, you don't want to piss off the CEO, uh, you don't want to piss off your boss, you don't want to piss off marketing or whoever, the kind of other key stakeholders. And basically I spent my whole career pissing off people. That's my kind of superpower, particularly in large organizations. I was world class at being annoying and um, saying the thing that you're not supposed to say and sort of partly I think that's why this role suits me is because you're the first intent. Let me just finish that bit first. Was like really, you've got to do a job and your job is to make yourself redundant as a, as a fractional leader. It's like I'm going to get you to this point and then, and then we're done. And like, it's just, and that's easy when you've got other work queuing up behind you. Because, because it has, it has this sort of thing like, okay, I can m. Move. I've done the job, I've done job well enough, I can move on. You know, but that's again, talking about saying the thing. And I use a Netflix analogy here. You almost have to kind of have the keeper test with the uh, CEO. Every or whoever is, is sort of, you know, hiring you. It's like, am I still adding value? Are uh, you, do you still want to keep me here? You know, what am I working on? The most important things. What's the thing that I have to do next? Like that I think you have to, you have to keep moving and you have to find higher value things. Like you should be fixing things and moving on to higher value things is basically.

Speaker A: Is there anything that you would say is like, um, and now I'm just pumping you for information. Is there, is there anything that makes it easier for you to sort of set the boundaries or kind of say like, this is what I am doing in this space and I'm not doing that. Like, how do you go about that boundary setting?

Speaker B: I literally tend to write it down with the, like as part of the initial engagement. It's just like, I will, I will start working on this. Maybe it's encoded into something like okrs or probably not. Um, these are my top three priorities, you know, and I normally have a one on one with the CEO, uh, every week or whoever is sort of my line manager. And I will, every couple of weeks I'd be like, okay, things are changing. I'm going to say these are my top three priorities. I like three things. I might only be able to do one or two, but this is what I'm doing and that's still the right thing for me to do. And then maybe every six weeks to every quarter, you're like, how's this going? Because one of the things I've learned, uh, to counteract those perverse incentives and to manage my own psychology and to kind of have the psychological safety where you can say the thing to the person that's paying your bills. It's hard, right? If you're going to challenge this person directly in a way that if anybody else did it, they might really take offense about it, you've got to be able to do that and be like, they're not going to be Vindictive and just fire me or whatever else. So one of the things that I found is having a kind of clear, uh, termination period and notice period and other things. So it's not just because when I went in I was just like, you know, you can hire me, you can fire me at any point. I can fire you at any point. It's like a one week notice period. Like actually that doesn't work very well in when you're moving up to that emotional layer and being quite challenging. I think you need to be a little bit more explicit in those things.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I think, uh, that's fair. And I do think that there's a. I don't know if it's my specific situation or not, but I think what I find really fascinating is that I don't. The relationship is different than when I worked as a CPO full time CPTO in my last company in that, uh, I felt like that was competitive. Like there was an interesting. The founders felt like they. If I was more loved than them. M. There was a competition happening and that might have just been them.

Speaker B: And that's fine if like the CEO's time was zero sum basically, or CEO's affections was zero sum.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this feels more like we're in this together. I'm here to do this thing. I'm with you. I'm here to help you move the thing from here to there. And I'm on your side and it's okay if they love me, but I may not be here in six months.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Or what, you know, like. And it doesn't feel like it feels like I can be. I actually feel, oh, uh, I'm gonna see if I miss. I can get emotional. I feel like I can be myself in this role in a way that I couldn't in past roles. That's amazing because it has an element of if you don't like it, send me pack in. It didn't work out. We'll find you someone else. Right. Which I think is always true, but it just feels differently.

Speaker B: It's transactional, but in a very nuanced way. Right. And that's what I said right at the beginning, sort of about the incentives. Being alive is like, I. If I'm adding value, I'm still here. If I'm not, I should kind of move on. But the scope of what that is sort of evolves. Uh, I mean, that's, you know, partly one of the things, because I just found you on the Internet. Right. I was like, you know, fractional CPO to replace me. And I think yours was like one of the first three. I feel like I was super lazy, but it worked out really well. But like. And I said, oh. Because you just think, oh, everyone, everyone at a CPO level who's done a CPR role can do the job. But there's always like, that's the functional side of it. The emotional side of it is like the fact that you were an active coach and had active coaching clients, I think was a really good proxy for that emotional intelligence that you need to be able to keep pushing the scope and say the thing and poke the bear and all those cliches. Right. It's um,

Speaker C: Yeah, that's like my superpower.

Speaker B: It's true. But you probably do it without being annoying, whereas I just do it and the bear. Like. Or it's like that scene in the Revenant.

Speaker C: You should do a research survey on that. I'm not sure you're right.

Speaker A: No. And I think, I mean, I, Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. And I, I, it isn't. I'm fascinated. What I'm learning in this, this, this new space for me, but also what it will be in the next time I do it and the time after that. And you know, like, I think that's it's.

Speaker B: But it is such a privilege, honestly. It's amazing. Like.

Speaker A: It is. It really is. And I will. I do recommend if you can follow someone in the job, follow Peter. Because, um, you've got three things. You're. He's like, here are the three things. And you're like, okay, uh, hold my three things until I change one out. Or you know, whatever.

Speaker B: I podial the things. Which one should I put down?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we're doing a lightning round. Are you ready? And Marilyn, you're going to play.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because you haven't gotten to say much. Marilyn.

Speaker C: So I've been talking the whole time. What are you talking? I've been throwing out the questions.

Speaker A: Okay, Quick fire round. Best book for product managers to read.

Speaker B: There's one that came to mind. Hard thing about hard things. Ben Horowitz. Just because managing your own psychology and shit always goes down. And when shit goes down, you got to be able to navigate through it here. First of all,

Speaker C: mine is, uh, unrelated. Um, but I think it's very helpful and it's called the mom test because I think we tend to over complexify friggin everything. And you need to simplify and communicate in very clear, concise ways.

Speaker A: I love it. I, um, recommend Everybody read, especially product managers, the Perfectionist, um, guide to Losing Control. One of the best books for people who love, like, doing control. Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, question two in the lightning round. What is your best productivity hack? How do you, how do you stay productive?

Speaker B: I think knowing my circadian rhythms, like, when am I best at doing stuff and using a calendar to just, like, make that happen. So I'm much better at thinking, writing slide decori in the morning before lunch and meetings in the afternoon. So I. Anything that requires a lot of brain power in the mornings, people power in the afternoons.

Speaker A: Yeah. Marilyn, you got one.

Speaker C: I think the, um, I think knowing who you are and what gives you energy and what takes energy from you and trying to balance those things are really important. Um, if I do too many things in a row that suck energy from me, my productivity goes down and I notice those things in my calendar. Um, I often work with my EA to just, like, create patterns in my calendar that give me those recharge moments, but, uh, to, like, just watch my energy levels through the day and make sure that I'm getting as. As well as giving.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. On that point, like, I think Marilyn and I, we've done the, uh. I use the six types of working genius in my coaching business, and Marilyn and I are discerners and galvanizers. We love this stuff. But if we have to do the wonder stuff too much or the tenacity stuff too much, because we have the exact same score, our personalities are exactly the same in this particular assessment. And if we have to do too much of it, it's a drag. And then you have to try harder to do those things. Even if you can do them and do them well, you just have to put more energy towards doing them. And so I, similarly, I have to know what gives me energy and what doesn't. The other thing I have learned to do is give. Try as much as possible to give myself half an hour when I start and a half an hour when I end from a productivity perspective, to just clear the decks, like, come in, look at everything, get a. A bit of a feel for the day and what kind of energy I'm going to need. And at the end of the day, look at the situation and try to clear the decks again and go back into my life. So I try very hard to have blocks at the beginning and end of my day that allows me to think for a minute, how did this go? Did it work today? What do I need to do differently tomorrow?

Speaker C: So that's something I do also Like, I travel nowhere without Sharpies and post its, like,

Speaker A: post it notes. Marilyn knows the only way to annoy me is to put a post it note on my desk. I'm like, what is this? What do you want? Do it. She used to put posting notes in the middle of my monitor. And I was like, All right, last quick fire question. Best advice you would give a product

Speaker B: manager, young product manager, focus on the customer. Just do that.

Speaker C: If I had to say one word, it would be humility. Like, you need to learn. It's okay to not know. You invest. In fact, you must not know. Uh, you must find ways to know. Um, try everything. Like, like the humility, the. The ability to be humble and, like, break over that. Like, you are the CEO, so you must be an asshole. Um, that's key to your success.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Yep. I, um, think the thing that I probably say the most to product managers that I coach is very tied to that. Like, is very much, um, you know, it is say, I don't know. And then for help.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: If you don't know and don't know where to go find out, say, oh, I don't know. But does anybody know? Anyone who knows that?

Speaker C: How. How will we learn that?

Speaker A: Yeah, how are we going to do that together? It's, uh. So like, I, you know, I grew up in a. Like we talked about before, I grew up in a. In a church house where, you know, my dad was a preacher. And every. Everything we knew everything, because you could point to the Bible. And I remember the first time I realized, like, oh, my gosh, I don't know stuff. And the Bible doesn't answer that. Right. And. And that uncertainty is. Okay, that's. That's what we're here to do, is figure it out. And so don't go in and be like, I know stuff.

Speaker B: Like, you know, I think I was late in my career, I think this really happened at the bank, was realizing that owning what you don't know is a superpower that. That unlocks new things. Whereas, uh, going in and pretending you know everything is. Is the inverse of that.

Speaker C: Like, whereas actually, like, seek joy in the unknown. Isn't it cool that you like. And there's so many tools you can use to figure out stuff and to, you know, the qualitative information, get the quantitative information test quickly. Like, there is this whole litany of tools, isn't it? There's such a large amount of joy and uncertainty and unknowns.

Speaker A: I love it. Well, Pierre, thank you. This was so much fun.

Speaker B: Thank you. I've had a blast.

Speaker A: I think we can probably think of another reason for you to come back and do it again, because this was a lot of fun. So, um, thank you for.

Speaker B: In London. We'll do it in person. That's what we should do.

Speaker A: Yeah, that'll be so.

Speaker C: I'm coming. I'm coming. Hold on.

Speaker B: It's a Barry White song, I think,

Speaker A: probably. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. And if you are watching this, ping us and tell us, you know what about this was interesting for you. What would you like us to share with you? The three of us would be happy to get back together. If there's a topic that you think, oh, I want these three people to talk about this. Tell us. Tell us what those topics are and share. Share what, um, what books you like, what, you know, uh, advice you'd give as well. Or productivity hacks. We'd love to share those. So you can look for the resource guide on our website for this. All the books we mentioned, list them there. The article we talked about, I'll list it there. Um, and we will see you next time. Bye.