Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Make Soup!
The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things."
Ronald Regan
Children's author Marcia Brown tells the story of a hungry traveler who comes to a village with only a pot. He requests food but is turned away at every door. Eventually, he goes to the stream, fills his pot with water, places it over the fire, and adds a stone.
The villagers come by, curious about his strange actions. He tells them he is making a tasty stone soup, then adds that it would be even better with seasonings, meat scraps, and vegetables. Soon, his pot is full of delicious soup, which he shares with everyone in the village.
Product managers often feel like this traveler asking for resources to create products that customers and the business need, but they lack control over those resources. It feels like our pots are empty, and no one is willing to help fill them. Successful product development requires various skills and resources from across the organization, but it is hard to get others to help. How can we make our own “stone soup”?
Department heads have their own goals, KPIs, and targets to hit and little or no extra resources to spare for outside requirements. Getting managers to give up people or other resources for something that doesn’t directly move those objectives forward and may slow progress is a hard sell even when they see how it may benefit the business as a whole.
While you can appeal up the chain of command and complain that no one is supporting you, a better approach is to find ways to help others WANT to help. Let’s look at a few strategies that might help others willingly fill your pot.
First, show how collaboration benefits them. Humans by nature look out for their own and their own group’s interests and are hesitant to do anything for others that doesn’t benefit them. This means you must help them see how contributing to your soup helps them make theirs. Things like cross-pollination of talent, helping production understand that their involvement will help prevent production problems in the future, filling a solution gap for sales, or giving marketing a sneak peek to help them get an early start on marketing stories and strategies. Help them understand that instead of sacrificing resources, they are gaining influence over what is developed and how. .
Next is quid pro quo, or “You scratch my back, I scratch yours.” With its access to different parts of the business, customer insights, and analysis expertise, product management has valuable resources that can be useful to other teams. For example, I once worked with our European sales team on developing a product in partnership with a major global client. Later, while reviewing a plan from the US sales team for the same client, I found that the European and American sales teams were not aligning their strategies for this important global client, so I brought them together. This helped both the sales teams and my product team while fostering a relationship where sales were more willing to help with our projects.
In several other cases, key stakeholders didn’t fully support product management and viewed our work as unnecessary. I sought ways to assist them with their goals, like aiding with business cases and proactively talking with them to find and fix product production and delivery problems. This enhanced products for quicker delivery saved them time. Eventually, they started reaching out to our team for assistance and were more willing to help us as well.
Promote your achievements. The C-Suite lives on data. In large organizations, they are not able to visit every workspace and talk to every customer but Product is much closer to both. Additionally, while not directly generating sales or implementing cost-saving changes, Product is often involved. However, while sales can show revenue and marketing can show leads, the impact of product management is less clear. Nevertheless, you can showcase your impact by showing how new products contributed to sales both directly or as part of a cross-selling enhancement that brings together several products for a larger solution, thus boosting sales of adjacent products. We can also show how product training improved sales and delivery. These data provide valuable insights to executives, both at the departmental level and at the C-Suite. When they recognize how product management is a revenue generator and not just a cost center, they are more likely to support your projects and contribute resources to your further success.
Express how vital input from across the organization is. I enjoy speaking with our customer-facing teams like sales, customer success, and product delivery. Product management relies on customer feedback, and while we try to connect with end users, our customer-facing teams engage with far more. Most product managers recognize this, but do we say it out loud? Does production know how vital their insights are to help engineering build the best, easiest-to-build products? Does customer service understand how much we need their input to identify where products need to be improved or where there are gaps in our portfolio? When people understand their contributions matter not only to product management but to the whole business, they are more likely to contribute.
“If you could get all the people in the organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
Recognize team efforts openly. In presentations, reports, or discussions, point out the team's success and name contributors. Praise individuals to their managers and celebrate the team as a whole, not just yourself. In a past project, my team created a solution that won a corporate competition. To my dismay, since I submitted the paperwork, I received much of the recognition. Some team members felt overlooked and I agreed. To make things right, I proactively highlighted their contributions by nominating one as Innovator of the Year, including the entire team on the patent, and publicly touted their contributions in interviews. Most importantly, I urged competition organizers to change their approach and recognize the whole team, not just the leader in future competitions. This publicized the team's hard work across the company, thereby encouraging more collaboration from managers and willingness to volunteer among prospective team members.
Finally, coordinate. Be in constant contact with each team member’s managers to understand what else your team members are responsible for doing and work together to help them prioritize their tasks. Stay flexible but still insist that your requirements are met. This may mean delaying delivery for a few days so that the team member can take care of something more urgent at “home.” Nevertheless, make sure your requirements make it into their list of priorities. If your project derails the team you are borrowing the person from, you will likely have a much harder time getting help the next time.
In conclusion, great accomplishments are rarely created in a vacuum. The best products require input, insights, expertise, and hard work from a diverse team. Being unable to access these resources is key to creating and managing a healthy, vibrant, and successful product portfolio, creating the best innovations, and building solutions that solve your customer’s real core problems. However, few product managers have the authority to requisition the needed resources. Instead, they need to use informal influence, emotional intelligence, and diplomacy to get others to willingly help turn their stone into a hearty and delicious soup.
Let us help. At Customer-Led Innovations Consulting, we help businesses and product leaders build organizations that understand and solve their customers’ most pressing needs by bringing together talent from across the organization and beyond to create truly innovative solutions. Click the “Free One-Hour Consultation” button above to schedule a time to discuss your business and start building your own product strategy.
