Collaborative Innovation Within Product Community Cohorts
Collaboration versus Competition:
For the first time, leaders are leaning on each other in the right way, naturally, letting down their previously built walls and openly discussing strategy with their direct competitors. Those in leadership roles–product managers in particular–are going to reshape the future of leadership as we know it, and they need our support.
Right now, product leaders don’t get enough credit. They carry a lot of responsibility within an organization but are often left by the wayside, or their role isn’t fully understood, creating tension and mis-aligned expectations. Organizations need strong product leaders with high agency to pull together their product, engineering teams, and non-technical stakeholders.
Creating Community for Product Leaders
Being a product leader can be an isolating role and at the beginning of this year, I started to think about ways to support product leaders. I wanted to bring product leaders together to show that one point rings true across the board: no one has it all figured out. The undefined nature of the PM role is part of the process. It’s likely that you’ll never find “the way”, so being able to work through uncertainty is the name of the game. I wanted to create a space for product leaders to share their challenges, learn from each other and feel less isolated and more supported.
When lockdown hit, I accelerated the idea of bringing together the product community and kicked off a first cohort in April 2020 which brought together a diverse group of product leaders. They came from a wide mix of roles – product managers, product founders, strategists, and tech leads - their scope ranged from software to hardware, with varying degrees of experience.
These leaders made the commitment to join the community without judgement and with an openness to learn. At the beginning of each session, I had each of them share what was on their mind or capturing their attention, and the group collectively decided on what topic or challenge we would start to unpack first. And we were off.
Learning together
By far the biggest theme throughout the 16 weeks of running this group was communication. It starts with the basics: keeping documentation and setting clear expectations at all stages of product development. But in order to get there, we learned that product leaders need to adapt to whom they’re communicating, especially in times like these.
Product leaders have to juggle different roles. Within their own team, they need to set goals – agendas are crucial for milestones and roadmapping. They also have to act as a bridge between tech and non-tech in the organization. Here, it helps to use analogies and craft a vocabulary that everyone can use and understand. And with stakeholders, it’s important to (what feels like) over communicate.
It’s been challenging to adapt to fully remote levels of communication. The cohort shared that when it comes to hard conversations, writing your thoughts out in advance, and assuming good intentions on the other side is a good place to start. It can also help to prepare a visual to talk through during the discussion, to have an engaging point of reference. Afterwards, ask the person to write down what they understood from it to ensure there were no misunderstandings.
This kind of preparation is necessary now because working remotely has taken away the ability to pull people aside for a chat. It means that we all need to put more time, energy and effort into structuring and thinking about the message we want to get across.
Finding your footing
A major part of our discussions was finding confidence in uncertainty. How do you know when to switch up leadership styles? How do you balance what works for your team and what your organization embodies? You do this through becoming a high agency leader. Having high agency is about finding a way to get what you want, to get what would be best for your company, without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances. High agency leaders’ strategy comes from solely focusing on the places and areas that they can control. High agency leaders have an ownership mindset (acknowledge their mistakes), resilience, self-confidence, creative execution, and influential communication through emotional language or storytelling.
You want to feel confident to do what you know your team needs without asking permission, to harness the power of your personal agency. This community of product leaders helps you achieve just that. In our sessions, I could see the energy and excitement of members when they shared their insights with the cohort and built upon each other’s findings.
What the Product Leaders Felt
After the session I decided to take the pulse of a couple of participants and their takeaways were uplifting and revealed to me that they had found and established a real sense of community amongst one another:
“I think coming together with a lot of different people from different backgrounds who are working on different kinds of products, different kinds of companies, you just get much more of a sense of how we don't have everything figured out yet. And how we are reinventing the wheels in some ways and that translates to very different kinds of processes and very different kinds of products and very different kinds of thinking, which I really like”.
–Mirte Becker, WeTransfer
Along with the feeling that not everyone had it figured out and that that was something to be alright with, the cohort also discovered that they had created a space where they were able to dive deep and at the same time, be openly vulnerable with like-minded thinkers in their market space:
“The kind of conversations that we've had with everyone in the cohort are truly unique, we've been able to talk about really, really sensitive things. Everyone has been pretty wonderful about the things that they have experienced at their workplace. And not only that, but also the things that they have been experiencing outside of it. I don't think you'd get an opportunity to discuss those things with like minded people outside of work that much and it was a good platform for me to do that”
– Pranjal Daga, Cisco Innovation Labs
As these leaders came together and sourced strategy and shared their perspectives on managing during the crisis, they found themselves working alongside their direct competitors in a never before experienced kind of harmony:
“I think Gillian has a good way of facilitating conversation among peers and groups I think that's important especially if they are not involved, I am now in the cohort and batch, I guess you can be vulnerable to each other but there is normally somewhat of a mini competition going on and then it is also not easy to just tell people what is happening. But when Gillian is coming in, with people who have no previous professional connection to each other and discussing the common issues. I think that is super supportive and clear and that is a gold mine”
– Earl Valenica, Plentina
What happens now
What I have taken away from hosting these sessions is that when provided with an open environment to seek the counsel of other leaders within the same space, previous walls built around appealing to market competitors and leaders in tech bouncing ideas off of one another are dropped, and the dialogue develops into an unfiltered brainstorming and ideation session.
If you’re interested in developing your leadership style in these uncertain times, you might be interested in talking to us about some of our remote offerings.
At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
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