Contextual

Category: podcast

  • Podcast: Steen Andersson – Head of Product at Atlassian

    Podcast: Steen Andersson – Head of Product at Atlassian

    Steen is Head of Product Management at Atlassian.

    He was Google Drive’s Group Product Manager, VP Product at Nitro after they acquired his startup Sensedoc.

    Before that he was co-founder of 5th Finger which actually got acquired (not once but) twice! by both Microsoft and Merkle.

    In this podcast we are talking how Atlassian grows Product Management talent and other goodies from Steen’s startups and roles. 

    Don’t miss where he shares Atlassian’s Four Pillars of Great Product Managers.

    Some of the topics covered:

    • What are the qualities of a great product manager at Atlassian?
    • Can you grow these skills or are they already growing on trees?
    • Do PMs spend X% of their time with customers or triaging requests?
    • What ratio of PMs to devs in a group?  (Is there also a scrum master?)
    • If we contrast with Nitro (being a smaller company) – is the role/skill different?
    • How Atlassian use JTBD or “Top Tasks”
    • Whats the hardest part of deciding what come next?
    • Do you have a story about Feature/Roadmap Bias

    A particularly AWESOME element is that he shares their “four key pillars of being a great Product Manager”.
    Check it out on Soundcloud.
    The Contextual Product Manager · Steen Andersson – Head of Product at Atlassian

    Are you looking to get more users to love your mobile and web apps?  Click on the buttons below to get your 14 day free trial or contact us for a demo! 


    Get Started


    Get a Demo


    Contact Us

    Part 1 Transcript

    David Jones: [00:00:01] Hello, Hello!

    [00:00:01] Steen Anderson is with me today and he’s the head of product management Atlassian. He was also at Google Drive as group product manager and he was V.P. of product at Nitro which was a smaller company but an interesting company. And that was after his startup called since Doc was acquired so we’re going to cover that a little bit too. Before that he was also a co-founder at fifth finger which actually got acquired not once but twice. Believe it or not by both Microsoft and Merkel and today what we’re going to do is talk about all things product management. How are you Steen?

    Steen Andersson: [00:00:34] Good. Great to be here.

    David: [00:00:35] Yeah. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it. So this is a warmup for another fireside. We’re going to do so that’s gonna be fun.

    Steen: [00:00:41] Yep.

    David: [00:00:42] I don’t know whether we want to have a fireside in Australia during summer. It’s a little bit warmer for that.

    Steen: [00:00:48] Like a beach a little beach barbecue maybe.

    David: [00:00:50] Yeah I was wondering whether we should wear the sort of like the San Francisco Christmas bed jumper or whether we should wear a white shirts. I’m not sure what’s the right thing.

    Steen: [00:00:59] Yeah. We’ll make it fun.

    David: [00:01:02] OK, so let’s kick off, just where you’re at at the moment. So what are the qualities of a great product manager at Atlassian?

    Steen: [00:01:08] I mean that question is a great one it’s a it’s one of those age old mysteries that everyone ask. You meet a new Product Manager in a back alley way and you ask him that question. Look, we’ve done a bunch of work just recently actually last year. Is it a review the way we think about PM hiring and also appear PM promotions, ah, ladder and how we think about identifying talent and success and and recognizing that and what we did. And we actually spoke to a number patterns across the company, we’ve got 120 now. A good number there. And across the senior leaders we got together and so shared with some senior folks from Microsoft folks like myself that have a variety experience of start ups as well as Google. And then my boss job Joff, is from LinkedIn and there’s a bunch of different good good sets of experience. And we actually looked at what is the sort of the common overlap of answers to that question. And we came up with these four key pillars of PM excellence or how you going to call it. They broke it into these 4 categories. So ONE is: “leads and inspires”. So a great PM needs to be able to lead a team inspire a team that’s the first thing and a lot of depth behind that we can talk about if you like. Second thing is being a “master of the PM craft”. So thinking about like all the tools in your kit bag to help you understand how to think about roadmaps and prioritization to like you know think of creative ways to drive a team through particular challenging process to come out the other side; How to ship with velocity; all these techniques to just you know operate and be a great PM. The 3rd one is “delivering outcomes” and delivering outcomes comes back a lot to things like metrics, understanding what are the key levers we have to play with and how to appropriately use those to drive business outcomes like driving MAU or driving revenue or innovating in a way that’s really differentiating that sort of thing. And the last one is “being a great communicator” and the meaning of Great Communicator is really key. I think you make great PMs you’ll tend to find a common pattern that they really grab you with the way they talk about the problems they’re working on and just how they think about their space and all things in the world and so being an awesome communicator but written, verbal and presenting are critical. So thats how we think about what makes a great PM and it’s exciting to have some of that clarity and alignment in the organization now to sort of allow everyone to work on those things and help grow their teams and hire a great to have common lens right.

    David: [00:03:48] So number (1) and number (4) are really skills that can belong to a range of different jobs not just product managers; the metrics in (3) such as driving MAUs and things like that well that really is an outcome. So that sounds like number (2) is the one that’s kind of like industry specific is this the sort of thing that you have to find people that are already, you know in the industry or already doing product management or you know can you grow these skills or do you have to pick them off a tree?

    Steen: [00:04:17] You look at it you can totally grow all these skills. I think like anything in life there is certainly people who naturally have the predisposition to either find it easy to learn these skills more than other people or maybe they’re really passionate about them slaves at one time and energy into it. So all “grow-able” . I think the PM craft side, the master of the PM craft is, certainly yes, it’s more domain specific. I think the challenge for us is, as you go up the PM ladder to different higher levels of seniority it does become more difficult to find people who have depth of experience in that area. But I think as you go “up”, the “sliders” is on each of these four pillars change as you go more say some ways like leadership and inspiring. More important, more seasoned, more senior you go. But they’re all all important at each level. In terms of how we think about I can talk a bit about how we think about finding and hiring and so what we look at getting teams from. If that’s helpful.

    David: [00:05:15] Yeah go for it because I guess what I’m hearing is that if you’ve got somebody that’s coming in as a line PM then they could be theoretically a developer who wants to actually move into another thing as long as you feel as though they’ve got the potential to have leadership and communication skills.

    Steen: [00:05:31] That’s exactly right. I think again this these pillars help us qualify that person or sort of quantify that person and they have that that sort of product “gene” potentially and the passion and they can communicate their ideas and that sort of thing and they are a clear thinker. The biggest challenge for us is hiring PMs, for sure it’s challenging. I think in our business unit last year because we have fairly technical products we do have this natural tendency to want to hire people who also have an unstated 5th leg which is some sort of technical knowledge.

    David: [00:06:03] Yeah. Yeah. It’s really different to some sort of consumer product where there’s where there’s a lot of touchy feely stuff or things that many people can kind of just relate to as a user “in a sense”.

    Steen: [00:06:17] Yeah exactly. I think if you go outside of high tech and the word Product Management can relate to things like you know the marketing programs for a cereal packet like there’s a very different broad spectrum of the title. But in the bounds of high tech and suddenly it’s certainly challenging. And so we have a few programs we do things we do. We look at for the sort of more entry level PMs. We run an APM program – associate product manager program. It’s somewhat based off the sort of great leadership done by Google and then Facebook and LinkedIn and now a number of other sort of leading tech companies in the US globally. That’s basically a acceleration program for first time coming out of university. It’s a two year program; they do two one year rotations through different teams of the company. And that’s designed to give them a breadth of experience exposure to domains, different teams, different folks to learn from and accelerate their growth strategy, so after 2 years they can become PM and being highly productive. The long term goal there is to bring those people in at the entry level and grow them to be long term leaders of Atlassian. We might find they go and leave the company for a while and then come back at some point the future, we don’t want people to expect to come here and be here for like 20 years. That’d be great but that’s not realistic nowadays. Yeah. This idea of like helping see the industry, have people coming and going, but creating these long term PM leaders that have affinity with our business and our values is certainly part of the focus. So to that is the entry point. We have intakes in Bay Area and in Sydney and also New York we’re starting up next year. So that’s sort of that’s the APM channel. We then have to straight hiring we do pay PM level up to sort of all that through. Now hiring entry level PMs is not too hard in most places. We look at if they have got foundations of those four pillars to have a basic level and that means studied engineering computer science necessarily but they need to know enough of ground you know what is a programming language like they’ve dabbled with code and with computers enough they can understand the basics and found that the fundamentals. That’s often enough, but, if someone’s got like no technical companies competency whatsoever or interest in it. We find that it’s like we’d rather hire someone who has that versus not. It’s just doesn’t it just you know not it’s much harder to be successful. So that’s one thing for us at least.

    [00:08:36] And then as we look to the senior levels, the senior levels are hard for us because we’re looking at folks who’ve got experience. And some markets like Australia or even parts of the US like in regional parts of the US you may have or Europe you might not have the development path. It’s a bit like trying to hire a top grade cricketer in the US or a top level gridiron player in Australia, your just not gonna find it because there isn’t that sort of nurturing from young level right the way through to develop that talent so well that’s way too easy. You know you grow it ourselves or bring it in from another country or region.

  • Standups, OKRs, Rituals & Cadence

    Standups, OKRs, Rituals & Cadence

    In this video, I discover that our team is the only one in the room NOT doing daily standups!

    Seriously, Richard explains the disciplines they use in a remote WFH world (Melbourne was locked down hard, hard, hard at the time of recording). So we discuss some of the challenges they have in executing on the OKRs.

     

    You can get this on Soundcloud or see all our podcast links here.

    The summary is:

    • Airwallex form “squads” that are spear-headed with Product Manager, Designer and Lead Engineer
    • There is an over-arching SME strategy.
    • Quarterly and Annual OKRs trickle down through the organisation.
    • opportunity decision trees (Teresa Torres, see Opportunity Solution Trees for Product Teams to ideate potential solutions to OKRs”
    • Triaging of solutions (see Don’t build shiny objects)
    • Monday planning meetings – where broader goals for the week within sprints are agreed
    • Daily standups (!)

    Transcript

    David: but what’s what’s your approach today: how does onesquad really work? What’s thewhat’s the way you attack things? Is it okrs? Is it JTBD? (“jobs to be done”). How do you get things into sprints etc Richard: OK, so in terms of how we make decisions and work.So quarterly OKRs are used to govern essentially the outcomes that the team is shooting towards. Those OKRs ladder to our to our SME strategy so we’ve got our SME strategy.We start with. We then develop OKRs on a quarterly basis and an annual basis thatstrategy and then what the team does is identifies the opportunities they think are best placed to move those OKRs and essentially that then eventually translates to a bunch features they (the squad) want to deliverwe then run a a fortnightly uma fortnite cadence which is essentiallyaboutwhich includes a bunch of rituals aplanning meetinga showcase it’s got uh some weeklyplanningto segment that up and and dailystand-upsokay so just ritual is that a productproduct word or is that an air will xword or is that a secretjust a ritualit’s a rich word is it maybe it’s a richword but we have these yeah we have aset of meetings that essentiallyderive that fortnightly cadence and thatfortnightly cadenceessentially when you put a bunch ofthose together um they’re constantlytrying to make progress towardsthose outcomes those akr’s that we’dagreed at the start of the quarterright right okay all right and is thereis there one of those particular ritualsthat actually really matters a lot morethan the others like which is thewhich is the one that you must keep ormust not miss orum in terms of the ones that arecritical look ii’m a really big fan ofstand up i think stand-up’s reallycritical to have that daily check-inand as part of that trying to ensurethat the team is consistentlyfocusing on the outcomes that we’retrying to deliver it’s very very easy tomy my view is that if you if you’re notdisciplined around stand upit’s very very easy to kind of graduallyveer off the path over the course of afortnight andyou have a goal at the start of thatfortnightlyum tayden so you’re like at the start ofthe fortnight you outline a goal this iswhere we want to get to in two weekstimeif you’re not reinforcing that on aday-by-day basisbasis it’s very easy to get to the endof the fortnight i’ll look back and gobooks uh i’m not where i wanted to gohow do i end up hereso i think when i you knowso much of what is done in productdevelopment is it’s about collaborationand communication and so much of itabout is just reinforcing the samemessage all the time and we can get intothis in terms ofsome of the lessons that i’ve learnedover my career but it’s very very easyforteams to veer off the path away fromoutcomes towards outputit’s very easy to veer off the path ofexperimentation uncertainty and tryingto nail down something that is certainwhich isin many cases look at this shiny thingthat i’ve builtand so trying to embed that into yourday-to-dayum check-in with the team i thinkand so we’re doing we’re doing tuesdaysand thursdays for stand-up for stand-upsyou know our team our team’s about nineandand so tuesdays and thursday afternoonswe make sure we time it so that theoffshores cancan can be involved as well too we usedto and this is areally interesting transition from acovert perspective was thatwe used to get together in a physicalspace and talk about things andjust by default we would exclude peoplethat weren’t in the time zoneand it was really bad it was reallyculturally bad to do thatso we fixed that just by us being allremoteand you know it’s improved communitycommunication a lot but tuesdays andthursdays are you saying that you’redoing every daywe do every day far out okay yeah and onon mondayon monday we plan and that includes atthe end of the planning it’s like righthang on where are all the tickets whereare we atbut then uh tuesdays to fridays there’sa stand up every dayand this would you know that that’si’ve i think i don’t think i’ve everworked in a teamthat hasn’t had a stand up every dayright so we’re lazy we should be ashameddeeplyi don’t know whether i mean we mighthave it wrong right like this who’sdoing daily stand-ups hereeverybody but me okaythat’s it team’s in troublebut uh you know so that’s that’s anessential discipline for you in thatsituation do you find people now thatyou know remote that people are kind ofdrifting off and maybe they’re justworking on something else while they’relistening to the other people talk howdo you how do you actually make surethat’s a great that’s a that’s that is aum that’s a major risk and and what youknow what people can do is they can putthe screen that they want to work on infront of the camera and be looking atthe camerawhile apparently looking at a camera anddoing work right and doing other stuffthat that’s a that’s a key issue youknow how do you get around that the onlyway to get around it is teams reallybought into the outcome they’re tryingto deliverum and where the team’s going aheadbecause when they are bored in they aregoing to be paying attention becausethey know thatum paying attention in that moment isreally important togetting you know helping the teamachieve what they want solike i think in some respectspeople’s engagement in meetings in avirtual in a virtual worldis a really good gauge of the level ofengagement your team has withwith you generally um i mean i don’tknowit’d be great if there was some way imean it’s a little bit creepy andyou know it’s invading privacy but insome respects you could actually seewhat people were doing on their screensduring meetings in a virtual environmentyou’ve got a nice measure of facebookyeah yeah it’s interesting thatsomebody’s going to solve this sort ofremoteyou know body language thing as a way ofunderstanding itit’ll probably be a snapchat a snapchatfilter or something like thatthat’ll do it

  • Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource.

    Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource.

    Call it: Customer Success, Customer Care, Customer Support, Tech Support, HelpDesk – these teams and people are the first line of feedback from customer and the reality is they carry a lot of data from the intimacy and volume of interactions.

    In this Fireside Rachael Neumann (former director of Customer Experience Strategy at EventBrite and now Head of Startups AWS ANZ) talks about the psychological or emotional user experience.

    After an anecdote about how she discovered a different way to implement a product feature, I challenged Rachael about whether she was actually doing the Product Manager’s job.

    Rachael made an important point:

    “But it’s very powerful when you have someone who sits between customer and product because two things happen. If you just have a customer team:

    • they tend to be seen as a cost center instead of a strategic center.
    • They tend to be the first function that is off-shored and
    • they tend to be kind of pushed off to the side and
    • BUT they are basically speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used.

    And on the other side you have product managers who all think that they’re Steve Jobs and that they can create products from the vision of their mind…..and never shall the two meet.”

    Rachael’s comment is fairly incendiary but rings true – as teams get larger the Product Management function gets busy with backlog, internal meetings, analytics and lots of other inward-facing actions.

    The original methodology of Customer Development interviews is largely abandoned as its one of the least pleasant thing  to do AND its not usually incented with KPIs.

    What Lens do you use to view your Product? Design or Emotion?

    Careful, this is a trick question – your customer is only going to view THEIR experience of your product through their EMOTION.

    Rachael’s comment “speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used” has 3 ramifications:

    1. devaluing this data is a lost opportunity.
    2. your analytics platform never communicates heat or anger of the customer.
    3. qualitative human input  from your CS team is a valuable dimension that you’re tools simply cannot capture.

    In the next post we’ll dive deeper into this statement about customer anger.

    But for now, consider whether you are interacting with customers enough and feeling their heat. Is it possible that Product people are introverts and will naturally arrange their day with tasks that avoid hand-to-hand contact/combat with customers.

  • Onboarding guru Hulick on JTBD

    Onboarding guru Hulick on JTBD

    If you are a Product Manager, Designer, you have probably heard of onboarding guru Samuel Hulick. Even Customer Success people are aware of his tear-downs of early experiences in mobile and web apps. We’ve even emulated his approach with a few posts on this blog. 🙂

    In his latest “Value Paths” podcast, he laments a  misconstrued use of JTBD.

    “it is mind-boggling to me how much of Jobs To Be Done is sales and marketing-oriented rather than product-oriented”. 

    Contextual agrees with Hulick that the role of JTBD is most profitable when designing user experiences in your product. To read some of our other posts take a look, here, here and here.


    Situation, Motivation, Expected Outcome
    Source: HBR

    Hulick and his co-host (Yohann) attempt to refine JTBD with into Value Paths:“Path Design is how you get users from where they currently are all the way to the results that they care about.”

    It’s an interesting approach that attempts to corale many of the UX tasks that Product Teams undertake. Often when disciplines are new, they are a collection of activities and example-based approaches that people attempt to copy and reproduce in a cargo-cult like manner. Some activities become perennial best practice and others are just hacks that work for a short time or in a specific eco-system.

    A classic example of a hack in customer acquisition is spam – it works for a while but burns a lot of prospects and email filter systems constantly improved to stop the spam.

    In onboarding a more subtle “hack” is to try to capture ALL  the user’s details (do you really need their phone number?) at registration time before they can evaluate the product.

    Hulick: “Because if the user goes from the marketing website, to the onboarding third party plugin, to a sales survey, and then finally gets into the dashboard of your product, they might feel like they’ve gone through like seven different products along that way, where for the user it should feel like one continuous thing.”

    We’re Building Processes, Not Products

    This is a key insight: As product designers we are fixated on the features and functions of a particular module in the product. Per the example above “user registration”. All your attention and discussions about design “crowds out” that the user has a journey to achieve a result. Their trial of your product is a several A-to-B processes to assess if they “hire” your product, they will get their needs met.

    The podcast is worthy of your attention – here are some other powerful takeaways:

    “The key to path design is clarity on the end outcome (what the path results in). Every time the user engages with the product, it is within the context of the end outcome; so every interaction should be framed against it.”

    “There are infinite paths between “where users are” and “where they want to be.” Thinking of the critical pathway (the actions or stages the path must contain by necessity) is a compression algorithm — it compresses that near-infinite, unordered information into a single hierarchy.”

    You can find the Value Paths podcast:

     

  • Product Managers as storytellers

    Product Managers as storytellers

    Google Product Manager for Duo, Amit Jaiswal does a walkthrough of the importance of storytelling skills in Product Management. 

    As we’ve discussed elsewhere with Atlassian’s PM Lead –  Product Managers have many touch points with company and product stakeholders – Amit suggests how a Product Manager should be communicating internally and externally. 

    Often a Product Manager does not have the organisational clout (power/authority) they need to get concensus. So Amit suggests that the communication style must be: “lead by influence, rather than lead by authority”.

    Audiences

    Amit outlines several audiences for the Product Manager:

    1. investors or supporters of the product (the first ones that must believe to get the product team funded and built)
    2. Customers, prospects
    3. Internal team members (and its role in staff retention).

    The last point is particularly interesting post-COVID – in previous years all the cool companies were able to create perks for staff such as funky offices, fully equipped kitchens, free lunches. When everybody works from home you must be very sure that your product mission is compelling to your team members! ????

    MVPing your story

    Amit runs through some structural elements he learned to do with not overbaking your story and in startup parlance, create an “MVP” (minimum viable product, or perhaps “minimum viable pitch”).
    Amit mentioned a few sources:

    The course: Storytelling for Influence

    The online book: Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audienceshttps://vimeo.com/486249258

    Banner Image Credit: http://www.discipleblog.com/