Uncertainty Is the Strategy: Stop Waiting for Clarity | Tania Nemes

Productized Podcast: Okay, so next up, I want to introduce our next speaker. That's Tanja Nemesh. And super excited to introduce First of all, you know, in terms of background, she's the director of product management at Dyna Trace. ⁓ And previously was at Adidas heading up their mobile team.

So I met about two years ago at Proud Conference in Romania. And we'd kept in touch And last year sometime, she shared with me a really inspiring story. And was this story where, you know, I found myself taking notes and screenshots of what she was sharing. So I'm gonna give you any spoilers on what this talk is about, so I'm gonna let her share her story.

Let's welcome to Tanya Nemesh. Yeah, so story time. story starts somewhere. For me, this particular story starts ⁓ twenty twenty three.

At the time I had been director of product for Adidas and Adidas training for already a year. So these were the Adidas ports apps. Specifically ⁓ end Q2, we we had a team energized, we had clear targets, it felt like we had So that's why you need to take it one learning, one data point at a time, one step at a time. So, what was the first shift for me as a product leader?

And I like to call this a proximity. And what I meant by that is actually getting closer to reality to understand what your next step is. not talking about micromanaging, I'm not talking about taking control, ⁓ getting close to the execution ⁓ you learn faster than you're failing. So let me make this concrete for you so you know what I mean.

As I mentioned, were having the Adidas Sports apps. In this case, it's Adidas running. To things around, I became obsessed to understand why we were losing so many users. ⁓ Was because of the pandemic, ⁓ the after the pandemic, or was it something else?

I was a data nerd by nature, and I had a fantastic sports scientist ⁓ data scientist the time. ⁓ And we started going wild about understanding what's happening with our users. We created categories, we saw transitions, then we saw the opportunity. We were losing millions of users per month.

And actually, most of those users were coming based on behavior that they were always already showing in the previous month. If started to do one activity or just an app session, the next month, ⁓ 60% of Would not open the app, and 80% of those users will never be re-engaged. Boom, we had our opportunity. This was the space we wanted to influence.

We wanted to reduce the number of, as we call them, dormant users. So this was the space where we wanted to focus. So what did I do next? I took this learning and I went to the team and I said, this is the opportunity.

This is the metric that we have. I have no idea, no answer for you how to get there. Please destroy it to pieces. Why isn't this working?

Why is the metric not sufficient for us to make decisions and move forward? already knew some things that would come up, ⁓ the team over delivered on that and completely crushed me with questions. This is too lagging. We would learn too late when things would influence it.

There were so many questions coming in. And it's very humbling for a product leader to go in a meeting in front of many leaders your direct team and say, Hey, I don't have an answer. But it's even more humbling to leave that room with more questions to which you don't have answers. it was exciting for me because I knew ⁓ I needed to do as a leader.

I every question and then I went back to the drawing board. You don't need to look into detail just to understand. Every question me meant another opportunity to learn ⁓ and have moment forward. So we went back to the drawing board, we had the learning, we went back to the team, we asked for feedback, more questions were came in.

⁓ And then we made and create tens of mirror boards and Power BI dashboards and spreadsheets to really understand step by step how to make this thing concrete. And I couldn't have done this alone. I wanted to be closer to the team. I wanted us to meet in the middle from a strategic point to also an execution what they needed for me to be successful.

in the end, we got to something a lot more concrete that you see here. We had the same goal, but the KPI changed. The users we focused on changed. The behavior we wanted changed.

all of a sudden we wanted to get users from one activity to three activities, but not just any activity. One activity every week of a certain direction ⁓ of a certain distance. Was clarity? You could say so, but I never sold it as clarity.

It was the learning we had at the time ⁓ to the team move forward. ⁓ And I couldn't have done this if I was away and just connecting information from senior leadership to the team. ⁓ I needed to create this information for the team. one thing that I want to ask product leaders in general here is: are you close enough to reality to know what your next step is?

And it's not, go there. Go with the mentality of first learning and then leading. It really makes a difference for the team if you're there and creating that learning, ⁓ that data point for them. And speaking learning and answering questions for people, the second shift.

Was around how we worked on product. I'm sure you've heard about this a lot hypothesis. Think of every product work that you have as a hypothesis. I'm not saying nothing new here.

I want to share with you the spin we took on it and the impact it had for us. For us, every product work was a hypothesis, but more than that, it was a question that needed to be answered and not an answer itself. If you think about it, if your product is just a list of hypotheses that you want to disprove and not an execution plan that you want to follow, then there's no room for failure, which is the thing that we f feared the most in From Adidas. We had ideas from the organizing team behind the Boston Marathon.

We had ideas from the Adidas runners community in Colombia. We had from our customer support, our engineering team, we had many ideas. The change that we did is that we looked at this, all of those were hypotheses. It didn't matter if the idea was coming from senior leadership ⁓ from a specific market, ⁓ all became a hypothesis with a supporter behind it.

And then we were inviting anybody. To really tore them to pieces. for example, let's take the idea: ⁓ your weekly running streak and points. So, the here that came from the AdiClub team was that if users do activity on a weekly basis and we reward them with AdiClub points, then more users will three activities within a month because they will do an activity every week.

And we opened up to whole team, and then people started asking questions. Why should people care about these AdiClub points? Is gamification the right method to incentivize users to do activities? it really the right means to force people to do an activity every week?

And the questions continued and continued. And how our conversation switched: in saying, please disprove and please help me learn and understand why it's right decision to invest or not invest in this idea. And beyond that, also changed how we were communicating with each other. Every interaction that I had with my direct reports and with others started from the question: what did you learn since the last time we checked, we had a check-in?

company demo, every team demo was no longer focused on what did we deliver, but actually, what did you learn since the last time? And learning can take from can come from different ways, right? It can come from metrics being changed because of something you launched two months ago. ⁓ It can come from a campaign that you're doing, it can come from a competitor analysis.

It didn't matter. Importance was to create this shared knowledge of learnings that when we took decisions, it was obvious what was the right decision and everybody would be behind it. So the question I wanna ask to you is like for every work that you're doing, what's the hypothesis behind behind it? And more importantly, what point, what learning tells you that this won't work?

I think most of you have an answer to the first part of the question, but very few have an answer to the second one. if you start ⁓ those questions why this thing wouldn't work, as opposed to trying to prove why these things is working, that's you may will make the difference, especially at times when you need to be careful about where you put your investments. And the last part which I'll just brush over, and for this I have other talks which I can share with you, is people.

This was another shift that I did, especially because as a leader, this is part of my DNA, caring about people and how they work with each other and the team behind it. as I was getting comfortable with uncertainty, ⁓ wanted also them to be uncomfortable with this. As leader, when things when things get messy, ⁓ you tend want to remove the uncertainty for the people around you. You want to create some sort of a path, a clear plan for them, maybe even add a process.

⁓ To make things more straightforward. I stopped doing that. And it's not because I didn't care about them or because I didn't have the time to invest in these things for the people, because my principle was different. When the context is volatile, I people to anchor themselves in themselves and not in the context.

I wanted them to understand themselves better than the context. So when things shift, and as you know, things always shift. They didn't need clarity because they already had the data points themselves. They knew exactly who they are, what they need to work, what they don't need to work, and all everything that had to do with their working style and their experience.

this was and this principle can be applied in different ways. At Dynatries, right now, we also have a lot of uncertainty because different teams need to move. So my focus is actually to build, to bring, to build. ⁓ Strong leadership teams for each domain.

So they anchored themselves in that team. At Adidas, with the uncertainty that we had, I really needed to have strong PMs that anchor in themselves. I started investing a lot of time in not how do we build the product or prioritization frameworks or and understanding everything that's in the market, but understanding themselves better. This is example, and I I have a load of Workshops and ideas and tools that I can share with you afterwards, also some talks I did on this particular subject.

But just to give you an idea of what I mean about this. So I don't know how many of you know about this. This is called the strength continuum. it starts from the idea that every strength that we have is also your weakness.

If you optimize your strength, that's when people perceive it as a strength. If you overplay it, that's the moment it becomes a weakness for you. So take for example the first one, which is curiosity. When you optimize it, you see the big picture, you understand everything, you come with great ideas and you're innovative in what you do.

When you overplay it, what happens then? You get lost in the noise. You're curious about so many things. You take decisions later than you should because you are distracted about everything that you want to know.

your whole strength can be. Both a strength and a weakness for you. And I wanted everybody to understand how they can go on this whole spectrum. And more importantly, the conversation that we had afterwards is exactly what you see on the side.

do you know ⁓ you're overplaying or optimizing your strengths? What are the data points, the signals from how you work with people, from your environment ⁓ tells you where you are? So, this was the type of conversations and workshops and coaching I was doing with them to make them sure to understand, I said, to root themselves in themselves and not in the context, and therefore always needing clarity move forward. So, as profile leader, a question that I have to you and to ask yourself am I giving my people clarity or am I helping them to learn without it?

And don't get me wrong, there's a room for both of them. You just need to know. When you're applying it and why. Because one of them creates dependency, whereas the other one creates capability.

And you need capability in time in uncertain times. Now, the way I presented all of this seems very clean and smooth, and everything was and everything, it wasn't like that. And on the honesty side of things, actually it wasn't easy at all. We ⁓ we a lot in the thinking process, even though we had this way of working with.

Data points and learning, sometimes we still kept things longer than we should. at the same time, when things got super we went back to the process. We went back to the things that we knew. ⁓ So didn't matter how much we were changing things, we fell back on the comfortable.

It's the natural thing to do. Additionally, what also you experience as a product leader, and I also experienced it extensively, is that it's exhausting. The twenty months that we went through this of uncertainty really like tired me in ways I didn't expect at. And not sharing this for sympathy, by no means.

I'm sharing that if you're going through this as a product leader, know that what you're feeling is not because you're doing things the wrong it's because you're doing it the right way. So what were the results? Because we started with this question was I failing ⁓ or ⁓ I being impatient? Well, some things I already teased.

We had faster decisions, less alignment, because again, we didn't have plans. We were just building on this learning loop and just going one step at a time. And momentum came back. At least this is what the teams were feeling.

Additionally, what we also saw was that we had at the end an 86% employee retention rate. this was big. 20 months after you have a third of your company being let go. Having this high retention rate is something that we as leaders were very proud about.

having good feelings and having a good team behind it doesn't really mean anything ⁓ the survival of the product unless it translates into business value. So, what did this mean in terms of business value? We also saw here huge results. So, based all the things that we changed, one year later, then we had the layoffs, we went 60% above company goals.

And we had many goals, and I know that Matt here is the is not a fan of that, but at the time we really had many goals. three of the goals that I want to mention here, just to see how it our s ⁓ ways of working translated into them, is saw an 80% increase for active goal ⁓ mac active users for our target goal. And we didn't this by artificially ⁓ going into cheaper markets. We achieved that by increasing the number of active users.

This meant users who were tracking activities with our app. because more people were in the app, more people were tracking within the app, more people identified with the brand Adidas, ⁓ more wanted gear to support them in their journey. So we also saw a 23% above for our sales from the Adidas Sports apps. So yeah, we weren't failing.

We actually were ⁓ successful the end. But we weren't successful despite the uncertainty or because we endured uncertainty. We were successful because of uncertainty, because it forces us to think differently and not starting the comfort of clarity and certainty that is to come. But actually, because we then shifted the way we thought.

We were in this feedback loop when it came to how we worked, how we led, and also how we build our product. at the moment. I'm still very much, I still feel the weight of every decision. That didn't change.

I'm very, I'm taking some of the failures more personal than I should. I'm still impatient. But one that significantly changed for me is that we don't no longer need clarity to move. And I don't want to create environments anymore when people are dependent on clarity.

We don't need We always need the next data point. And once we have it, start moving. And then have the next one and then move again. with that, I want to thank you.

And if you want to stay connected and also share with me your stories and everything you have on the matter, I'm more than happy to connect. Here have my email addresses and also my QR code to LinkedIn. ⁓ I some talks on the people side. There are a lot of patterns and workshops and methodologies that I'm happy to share with you in a zip folder if you want to try ⁓ different with your teams and with.

Stakeholders, whoever you want in your organisation. And with that, I say thank you. Thank you, Tanya. You know, I find that story so inspiring and just really beautiful.

It's such a fantastic example how Tanya has applied this mindset of puzzle setting and puzzle solving, really, to solving such complex problem and under such difficult circumstances. And so the inside scope I'll share with you. ⁓ So some you know that I'm working on my next book about this topic of puzzle setting and solving. And Tanya's example is actually something that I'm going to be writing about as a case study.

while we're at it, I'll share one reflection that I have from Tanya's talk and just one learning and what I would try next. You know, I love that framework of the continuum how you can either optimize versus overplay strength. That was something that was to me, and that's definitely something that I plan on using. when I'm coaching teams or people that I work with.