The challenge for many businesses is encouraging the right voices to step forward while eliminating the office ogres who use their position or access to valuable information to intimidate others. This is not an uncommon problem as recent data suggests that 35% of workers deal with an office bully according to research from staffing firm OfficeTeam. Managers and staff need to face these troublemakers head on. No one should get a pass for negative behavior, it undermines teamwork and performance, no matter how valued that individual may be. As the saying goes “one bad apple can spoil the bunch.”

5 Tips to Keep In Mind

In order to ensure you are encouraging the right voices here are some things to keep in mind.

1. Seek out divergent opinions. Organizations should encourage team members to take a wide range of positions and not keep their opinions to themselves. Often company culture knowingly or unknowingly suppresses the honest opinion of employees who are more often punished than rewarded by voicing a divergent viewpoint. However, properly channeled corporate bravery can pay dividends. Leaders need to realize that diplomatic dissent can actually help the organization avoid debacles. If everyone is afraid to tell the emperor that he has no clothes the outcome can be disastrous.
2. Reach deep. Leaders tend to listen to the closest concentric circle of trusted advisers who act as a sounding board and to bounce ideas off of. Too few executives reach deeply enough into the organization to get candid viewpoints. Lower ranking employees tend to shy away from voicing their opinions if they hear executives table their opinions first. (If you have ever had a post interview session with a job candidate and had the most senior person table their view of the candidates fit and then ask for opinions from the rest of the interviewers you likely know what I mean!) Let lower ranking employees table their opinions before the most senior employees that way they can be encouraged to be candid without fear of being impolite.
3. Devils advocates are valuable. Encourage team members to play devils advocate and stake out contrarian points of view, even if they don’t reflect their personal opinions. Piercing questions about assumptions being made, potential risks or consequences prevents group thinking and tables a wider array of perspectives that can improve organizational decision-making.
4. Canary in the coal mine. How a leader reacts to an appropriately presented question or comment that goes against the corporate grain sends a signal to everyone in the company about the risks or rewards of stretching the bounds of the existing culture. If an executive adroitly addresses the question or comment and sincerely thanks the person who asked the question it encourages those who have something meaningful to say and contribute. The inverse also holds true.
5. In repetition lies danger. When jobs and cultures become routine it is a sign that the culture is enabling complicity with the status quo. The telltale signs are employees who settle in, keep their heads down and do as little as possible. Complacency breeds a lazy risk averse culture. Heed the warning signs.

Conclusion

The truth is contrarian viewpoints should be more highly valued than they often are. How well does your organization enable the voices of contrarians and address the antics of the office ogres?

You know who you are!

Source: Investors Business Daily, Manage Office’s Ogres by Sonja Carberry

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Stand-Up Frequency Matters and Significantly Impacts Performance

Survey respondents were asked the following question “How effective are stand-ups in your organization?” Here is what they told us.

When asked to share their experiences with stand-ups, product team members clearly value well run and regularly conducted stand-ups. Forty percent of respondents report that regularly conducted stand-ups are an effective cornerstone of the product development process.

These best-in-class organizations are followed by another 41% that report stand-ups are effective, but not conducted on a regular basis. Unfortunately 19% of survey respondents indicate that stand-ups are either ineffective or contentious and a waste of time.

Reflecting back on findings from past studies, we know that 20% of product teams report issues with cross-functional hand-offs and transitions. Analysis from the 2013 study revealed that while some hand-offs are more problematic than others, poor hand-offs and transitions are responsible for degradation in team performance.

Conclusion: True

The regression analysis demonstrates that stand-up meetings are vital to effective product team communication and help eliminate or reduce issues that impede high performance. It also shows that product teams that invest the time and energy necessary to make stand-ups both effective and part of their daily routine will see significant performance benefits.

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In fact, effectively collecting and prioritizing customer feedback requires a variety of activities that need to be appropriately led and funded. These include the actual collection of the data, centralizing these inputs, prioritizing the inputs as well as weighing their relative values. Simply collecting the voice of the customer is not enough.

We were interested in understanding how much time product managers and owners are actively investing with customers in the field. This includes directly talking with customers, conducting market research, sales support, tradeshows, etc. So we turned to product team members to better understand their perceptions.

Before we look at the response data, how much time do you believe product managers actually spend in active customer engagement? Have a number in your head? Good, now lets take a look at what product team members told us.

“How Much Time Do Product Managers Spend in the Field in Your Organization?”

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Respondents surveyed indicate that more than 40% of their product managers spend at least 15% of their time in the field and 12.5% of this group believe their product managers devote more than 30% of their time to fieldwork where they talk to customers, conduct market research, attend tradeshows and interact with others in the field. On the other hand, more than 43% of respondents – a slightly larger group – see product managers (43.3%) spending 15% or less of their time in the field, a good portion of this group (14.8%) seeing their product managers rarely leaving the building at all.

Conclusion

The data shows that the majority of product team members believe that their product managers and owners are spending  a significant amount of time in the field actively engaging with customers. Survey respondents indicate the 69% of product managers and owners spend between 1% and 30% of their time with customers. With the majority weighing in between 1% and 15% – narrowly edging out the 15% to 30% responses.

However, the picture is not as rosy as it appears! Nearly 15% of product managers do not leave the building and when we examined product manager and owner responses – we got a different answer! It turns out that product team members have a rosier view of how much time is being spent in the field than the product managers and owners do.

I will share that data in next week’s post. Stay tuned.

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As a product management consulting and training organization we have seen the balance tilted in every conceivable direction. From product management holding sway through the informed use of objective data to sales teams driving the process based upon their perceptions of market needs guided by first-hand customer interactions. And everything in-between.

A Personal Disclaimer

Before I wade too deeply into this subject I need to share a bit of my own personal history. I began in sales and carried “a bag” for years. I have also run a sales team. I hit my plan every year and I could have stayed on that career track forever. However, for reasons I don’t need to get into here I decided to alter my career trajectory. Now that I have framed a bit of my history let’s get back to the question at hand.

How strong of a voice should sales have in the product development process? The conclusion that I have come to, having stood on both sides of this line, is that product management needs to collect objective data from a variety of sources, including sales, and look at the information dispassionately against the needs of the market and the organization. In the majority of instances the data will point the way toward the appropriate decisions but sometimes these decisions are situational. When situational decisions arise the call needs to be made by executive stakeholders and framed, whenever possible, with a data supported recommendation from product management that balances the best interests of all parties.

Trust is a big factor. Product managers that have an effective working relationship with the sales organization often get the benefit of the doubt. Having a sales history prior to becoming a product manager also lends a modicum of credibility (if fleeting). The sales team knows you understand the pressure they are under and their pains. In sales, if you don’t perform you don’t typically last too long. Organizations are not hesitant to upgrade the talent pool. There are plenty of sales professionals around.

From the Sales Perspective

Unlike product management things in sales feel much more immediate. You are planning for calls weekly if not daily. You have monthly goals that are closely tracked and often shared publicly to spur competition which roll up to your annual target. Effective sales leaders know how to spread the sales plan and typically build their annual plan knowing that a certain number of individuals are not going to make it. So they hedge their bets by increasing the individual allocations accounting for this under-performance. You can understand why sales professionals are often insistent – they often have a lot at stake both personally and professionally.

Product managers often lament the sales people that continuously ask for “one-offs” that are outside their thoughtfully constructed plans. After all, product professionals are asked to think longer-term and to focus on aggregate market needs. At the end of the day, the short-term needs of individual sales professionals don’t always neatly align with product management’s plans.

This is where executive arbitration matters. If the requested individual enhancement makes the plan for the company at the end of the quarter or year it may make sense to deviate from the well-crafted longer-term plan. If the “one-off” doesn’t have a material impact on the business another call will have to be made.

Like all relationships in life, the product management and sales relationship needs to be built on a foundation of trust. However, our data shows only 9% of product development teams are fully aligned with their sales organizations! Most organizations are dealing with a relationship that is not fully optimized. Sales is certainly not an adversary. They are under a lot of pressure and often coddled but they have a lot to add to the product development process. On the flip side, it is important to note that one customer does not represent a market need and that the quality of information degrades each time it is exchanged.

Conclusion

So in the end, sales is an important partner in the process. One voice mind you, but one that needs to be paid attention to. Executives at the end of the day set the tone on the balance. Will it tilt in the direction of the needs of the market or the needs of individual customers? Based upon this decision, conscious or otherwise, senior leadership holds the key to the resulting culture of collaboration or conflict that results.

What has been your experience?

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Setting the Innovation Context

Innovation is a frequently discussed topic which ranks highly with senior executives. Most believe that innovation is a critical area of investment in order to remain relevant in the marketplace and to continuously nurture a healthy product portfolio. While innovation and disruptive product development rank highly, the actual implementation of innovation processes and the development of disruptive products tends to be a combination of both art and science.

In order to increase the science and decrease the art many senior leaders strive to infuse innovative thinking into the DNA of their organizations. This is not easy to accomplish as a wide variety of factors can adversely impact successful implementation. Size of company, culture, skills and talent levels and a host of other factors all contribute to the long list of risks.

As part of our ongoing research into high performance product teams we have been investigating who is responsible for leading the definition and development of innovative or disruptive products within organizations from the perspective of actual product team members. The survey is ongoing but we have already identified a pattern – a continuum of leadership that is reflected in the data.

I would argue that the data is not rocket science although I am sure it will stir up some controversy as there are many opinions on the subject of who should lead the development of disruptive products and innovation processes. Since our research is not complete the preliminary findings may change before all is said and done but it is pretty clear at this point that size of company impacts who leads.

Preliminary Findings

In companies of less than $50 M in annual revenue the CEO and/or company founder are perceived by product team members as having ownership of these processes and activities. Once a company crosses this annual revenue threshold team members tell us that leadership shifts. Respondents indicate that product managers lead, or should lead, the incubation and development of disruptive products for companies with annual revenues above $50 M and up to approximately $2 B. The closer you get to the $2 B in annual revenue line leadership tilts in the direction of a “special cross-functional team” appointed by senior executives.

The preliminary data clearly illustrate a continuum of leadership. Once the study concludes we will publish our findings. We believe the data will spur discussion as individuals and organizations tend to have strong views of who should lead these critical activities given the associated high risks and rewards.

Tell Us What You Think

We would like to hear your point of view! Who is responsible for leading the incubation and development of disruptive products in your organization? And just how big is your company?

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“Honestly, Work Just Sucks for Too Many People”

There’s a sense in the prevailing market that “I just have to do my mindless job.” However,Bock doesn’t believe it has to be that way. The Google way is grounded in the following principles of making work better:

• Transparency
• Effective goal setting
• Frequent performance reviews
• Less middle management

Less hierarchy is particularly important as Google believes that this encourages employees to solve problems for themselves. Emphasis is also placed upon encouraging frequent assessments of employee performance – as well as that of their bosses. This flat organizational structure is predicated upon being able to hire the “right” people regardless of their background. Mr. Bock states that the right people generally possess the following characteristics; smart, conscientious and humble. Of course, Google has significant advantages in attracting talent that may or may not be applicable at your company. And Google can be choosy. He indicates that the company hires fewer than 1 in 200 people who apply for open positions!

When hiring, Google employs a hiring-by-committee approach. Whereby each interviewer asks a candidate questions derived from a standardized list. Follow-on interviewers must ask the same questions, for easy comparison, and to eliminate interviewer bias.

Once hired and productive the company’s emphasis shifts to keeping employees happy at work through “people analytics.” This term refers to data gleaned from management experiments that the company conducts. Some of these practices are immediately noticeable such as free food and few middle managers. Other data-derived practices such as increased pay for maternity leave and the resulting 50% decline in new mother attrition are less visible but no less meaningful.

It Remains to Be Seen if These Hiring Practices Are Scalable

Not all organizations can be as selective. So it remains to be seen how scalable Google’s hiring practices truly are. However, Bock points to other organizations that have come to similar conclusions about hiring practices, notably, Costco and Wegman’s. Mr. Bock believes that while wages are important the act of giving employees freedom to act on their own makes them more likely to behave as an “owner” taking responsibility to the next level across every part of the business.

Google’s resources make it possible to do a wide variety of things to improve employee hiring practices and retention. Would these practices be applicable at your organization?

Source: The Wall Street Journal, At Google, the Science of Working Better, Christopher Mims, March 30, 2015

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Actuation Consulting has been conducting a worldwide study of product teams for three years and respondents continually tell us that only a minority of product teams are performing at a high level. There are many factors that contribute to lower levels of performance and we have statistically analyzed them for years. So this year we incorporated the following question into our global survey.

“How Effective is Your Product Team in Identifying and Incorporating Industry Best Practices?”

As it turns out the answer is a bit shocking. Only 21.83%  of respondents report that their organizations invest significant resources in keeping in tune with industry best practices and that their culture allows the product team to experiment with new ideas.

In other words, an overwhelming 78.17% of respondents are not committed to actively identifying ways to be more effective. This data illustrates that continuous improvement is not a central part of the majority of product teams’ DNA. Organizational resources, focus and culture all contribute to this startling finding.

Passive Monitoring to Completely Ignoring Best Practices

According to the responses, over half of the teams surveyed passively keep an eye on what is going on in their industry and occasionally introduce innovative new ideas into team activities. Nearly one quarter of those surveyed feel they are too busy managing their workload to devote any time to keeping up with new developments in their industry let alone incorporate new practices into their workflow.

Barely a fifth of respondents indicated their organizations actively monitor emerging best practices in their industries and encourage experimentation with new ideas. Just over 2% of respondents hold that best practices are too far afield from their day-to-day challenges and pay no attention to new ways of approaching challenges in their industry.

The Catch 22 Paradigm for Product Teams

Product team members have made it exceptionally clear that only a fifth of product teams aggressively seek continuous improvement and are allowed to do so with the support of their organization. It is no wonder then that the majority of product teams continue to operate at sub-optimal performance levels. In many ways this seems like a catch 22. Organizations that are not investing in their product teams improvement actively or passively will continue to wallow and wonder why their teams are struggling while those that empower their teams to take risks and continuously seek improvement will continue to thrive.

Where does your organization stand?

Greg Geracie is the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management©and the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge© (ProdBOK).

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List of Possible Responses

When asked about which performance metrics product managers are being held accountable to respondents have a variety of possible options to choose from. Here’s the full list…

• Topline revenue
• Profitability
• Customer satisfaction
• Market share
• Velocity or throughput metrics
• Our product managers are not held accountable to metrics (but support attainment of company goals)
• We don’t have product managers

A Single Metric Is Prioritized Consistently Across All Verticals

While we’re still in the final stages of collecting survey responses it appears that there’s one dominant metric that crosses all the verticals. The majority of survey respondents, regardless of vertical, indicate that customer satisfaction is the most dominant metric currently being used to measure product manager performance.

The data is really interesting as it becomes increasingly variable once you dig deeper into the data. Each vertical breaks down into a different set of weightings. There doesn’t appear to be a consistent pattern from one vertical to the next. When our survey closes at the end of this month we’ll be able to complete the analysis. Once complete we’ll share our findings on the weightings for each vertical.

In the meantime, we would love to hear from you. What performance metrics are product managers in your organization being held accountable to? Are your product managers being held accountable to customer satisfaction?

You can let us know by clicking this link.

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This increased focus on user experience has been particularly beneficial for end users – but it has also forced organizations to re-calibrate the way they think about product management and how to best serve the needs of the end user.

The Product Management and User Experience Relationship

Product managers and user experience professionals share a common interest in creating as much value as possible for the end user and doing it in ways that are intuitive. As such, both functions make ideal partners throughout the product development process.

Only a select few possess the underlying skills required to act as a highly evolved product manager and a proficient user experience professional. It’s incredibly difficult for both to be done equally well simultaneously – although stretched product managers in less mature organizations may need to do so due to resource constraints.

Role commingling may be necessary but it’s far from ideal. Organizations that separate these functions tend to have a leg up as specialization allows product managers to focus their attention on the needs of dynamically changing markets while a user experience professional concentrates upon the end user’s interactions with the product or service.

Like product management, user experience resources are very valuable and often in short supply. Therefore, the actual use of these resources can vary widely. Options range from product management and user experience existing as independent functions collaborating together to achieve a common objective – to product managers attempting to cover the user experience ground or contracting with specialized third parties to fill in a user experience skill set void.

The types of tasks that product managers and user experience professionals can partner together on is also quite wide-ranging. For instance:

• Qualitative market research to better understand the needs of the market and end users
• Market segmentation targets and demographic data
• Interviews, surveys and observing key stakeholders to identify problems and validate possible solutions
• Development of story boards, prototypes, models and wire frames as well as use cases, personas and mental models

Clearly delineating these two roles is ideal as both functions can then focus upon what they do best, not in isolation, but in partnership.

The relationship between user experience and product management continues to evolve as user experience expands its reach across an ever-increasing number of organizations and industries. The actual practice of user experience as well as the function’s interrelationships and reporting structures tends to vary from organization to organization.

Focus of This Year’s Market Research

The evolutionary nature of the user experience role and its impact on organizations intrigues us. We’re actively conducting market research on the interplay between these two roles as part of our global Study of High Performance Product Teams.

In fact, user experience rose to the surface of our ongoing market research. This is because UX came up as a factor in our regression analysis for the first time last year. We’re particularly interested in three things: where user experience currently reports, where respondents think user experience should report and the actual activities that user experience professionals are doing in organizations.

We would love to hear your thoughts on these topics. You can share your experiences with us by clicking here.

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Our Sponsors

As we kick-off the fourth year of the study I want to take a second and acknowledge this year’s gold level sponsors without whom our efforts would not be possible.

Project Connections provides resources to help project managers, teams, functional groups and organizational leaders drive results whether it is strongly kick-starting a project, improving cross-functional collaboration, providing training and support, or implementing best practices.

Sensor Six is a leader in helping organizations prioritize product ideas based upon data, enabling roadmap creation and tracking progress in real-time.

The Authors

Part of what makes this study so unique is that it enjoys such wide support. For instance, the five contributing authors each represent a particular functional point of view.

Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting, represents the product management perspective

David Heidt, Principal of Enterprise Agility and former IIBA Chicagoland chapter president, represents the business analyst community

Matt Jackson, President of Jackson Consulting, represents the voice of the project management community

Ron Lichty, Principal of Ron Lichty Consulting and co-author of Managing the Unmanageable, represents the engineering community

Sean Van Tyne, co-author of the Customer Experience Revolution, represents the user experience community

Our Promotional Partners

We also enjoy the support of a wide array of industry associations and organizations who help to distribute the survey link and provide a platform for us to communicate the findings to executives and product team members world-wide. This year’s list includes:

The Boston Product Management Association (BPMA)

The Chicago Product Management Association (ChiPMA)

Orange County Product Managers (OCPM)

The IIBA Chicagoland

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA Chicago)

The American Society for the Advancement of Project Management (asapm/IPMA USA)

Engineering Leadership Meetup Group in the San Francisco Bay Area

Silicon Valley Code Camp

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA)

The Output of Our Research Into Product Teams

Each year we ask a standard set of questions that enables us to closely monitor industry trends including product development methodology adoption rates, how product teams perceive the effectiveness of their performance, and a wide range of other topics. Additionally, we have devised a new set of questions based upon what we have learned from previous studies and what we are witnessing in the marketplace in real-time.

If you are interested in seeing last year’s study – to get a sense of the output of our market research – you can download the 2014 study here.

For those of you who don’t enjoy reading white papers (we know you are out there!) there are four pages of infographics summarizing key data points that are very Twitter friendly. You can access them by clicking on this link.

Want to know how your product team(s) compares to others in our database? We have free online assessments you can take which benchmark your team against others in our database so you can see where you stand. There is one for product team members and another for executives.

This year’s new questions focus on user experience trends and reporting relationships, the impact an improving economy is having on product team turnover, backlog ownership and much more. We would love hear your thoughts on these subjects. You can add your voice to hundreds of others by clicking on this link. The survey takes six minutes to fill out and it’s very user friendly. All responses are anonymous. There is an option to self-identify if you decide you would like to participate in future studies or be the first to receive this year’s white paper.

If you provide us with your contact information you will be entered into our random drawing for a new IPad Mini!

We want to hear from you! Your perspective matters.

Authors Note: If you are interested in sponsoring future studies or learning more about this year’s study you can contact us here.

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