[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Stakeholder Management

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody and come on in. So we are just getting started here. So big welcome and glad you could all join. So today is our product expert fireside series that we’re running here at ProdPad. And we’re joined by Melissa Appel, who we’re going to introduce you to, but we’re going to be talking about.

Thanks. How to say no to the CEO. It’s all about stakeholders management tips. So we’re going to introduce Melissa properly, but a little bit of housekeeping before we jump into it. So as this is a series of webinars that we’ve run here for quite a few years now, ProdPad. We’ve got this big.

Backlog of these things. You can go back in history and do the archive and catch up on these. We’ve had some amazing guests from all over the world coming to speak. And there’s always a focus on amazing experts with excellent insights, a focus on the content and the learning and the sharing, people coming in and sharing their experiences and what they’ve learned over their years and years of working in the [00:01:00] product space.

So today is going to be recorded and it will be shared with you. So you will have a chance to share this out with your peers, with your team, with whoever else. And you are going to have a chance to ask questions. So feel free to use the chat to chat and talk about what we’re up to today. If you have questions, jump into the Q&A section in Zoom and that way everyone can see your question, but also can give them a thumbs up so we know which questions are the most popular and that way we can prioritize those.

So a little bit about us before we kick off this is ProdPad. So ProdPad is a product management tool that was built by myself and my co-founder, Simon, when we were product managers ourselves. Who here has used ProdPad or is familiar with it? Would love to hear from some of our advocates in the chat there.

So ProdPad is a tool that was built by product people for product people. And. It’s a tool that gives you visibility and [00:02:00] transparency to the rest of the team about what’s going on in your product space. It’s a tool that allows you to manage your roadmaps but also the more strategic stuff like your ideas and the experiments you’re running and helps you capture all the feedback and analyze it and figure out what you should be building ultimately so you don’t build the wrong stuff.

You can try it for free. So we’ve got a completely free trial version, and we also have a sandbox version of ProdPad, which has preloaded data, so you can go in there and see how example roadmaps look and how it fits together with your OKRs, and you can change stuff in there and play around with it.

So basically a sandbox you can play in. So give it a try and let us know what you think because our team is made up of product people and we’d love to get that feedback and we’re constantly shipping new updates. Anybody who’s used it knows that there’s an update every week in there. So we’d love to hear your feedback on it.

In terms of updates, here’s one that’s that, that’s that’s out, but also constantly improving [00:03:00] and something new that’s coming out as well as our Slack integration. So our Slack integration allows you to connect ProdPad to Slack which is where your team is constantly having conversations and allows you to if people are having conversations, grab ideas from there and pull them into ProdPad so nothing gets lost, but also post updates back out to your team so they can see them and interact with them, have their comments synced back from.

Slack, or soon from teams directly into ProdPad. And it also is a place where you can interact with our new Copilot. And people are probably wondering what I mean by Copilot. It’s a tool that is basically there as your AI sidekick and Copilot. Has been clued into what your OKRs are, what your objectives are, what’s on your roadmap, what your vision is, what experiments you’re trying to run, what experiments have worked and what hasn’t worked, what all your customers have been saying.

And so now it has all this insight and it can. Answer your questions. [00:04:00]So you can say, Hey, I’ve got this new idea. Can you log it and prioritize it based on what’s our, what’s in our actual company goals? Can you help build out our product vision or can you analyze our strategy and tell me what’s missing?

Here’s a picture of my roadmap. You can upload an image. Can you turn it into a Now-Next-Later roadmap? Hey, could you summarize all the feedback from this user? And tell me if there’s anything on a roadmap that I should be talking to them about. So some really powerful things you can do with this now.

It’s like ChatGBT, but it’s clued into what you’re actually working on. So, this is currently in private beta. If anybody wants access to this, we’re building out a private beta user list to test on this just say copilot in the chat and our team will hook you up with it. All right. So if anybody wants access to the private beta of copilot, let us know and we will get you in on that.

And I’m laughing at Aaron Kessler’s chat message in the chat about what AHA has put out there is their own version saying that it’s not, it [00:05:00] doesn’t work. ProdPad AI is just miles and miles ahead. I was demoing to Aaron the other day and he was mind blown. So if anybody wants to see this thing, let me know, say co-pilot in the chat and we’ll hook you up.

So, well, that’s enough about us, isn’t it? All right. Thanks for sitting through that. I could talk about a product for days and days, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re talking about how to say no to the CEO. Which I find hilarious because I’m a product person turned CEO, but I still think it’s hugely important that product people know how to do this and 

Melissa Appel: saying no to yourself and 

Janna Bastow: saying no to myself.

Exactly. Exactly that. And, um. I encourage my team to, to build up tips on this. So I’ll be sharing this link with them afterwards and making sure they watch this. And Melissa, I’ll be looking for actionable tips that I can share to make sure that they know how to say no to me and also for other people.

So I want to introduce Melissa Appel. So I [00:06:00] know Melissa through actually through Phil Hornby. Phil Hornby is one of our partners. If you check out ProdPad, we have a number of amazing partners that we work with. Phil introduced Melissa because she’s the host of Product Culture. We did a fireside chat together on their platform last October and Melissa was the host and it was very gracious, had great questions and is also just whip smart.

And I thought, ah, really got to chat to her more, but also since then she’s published a book called aligned stakeholder management for product leaders. And I think this is a topic that’s really key that we need to talk about more. And so we got talking about what we might cover on this subject. And the really key one came up around stakeholder management, but particularly upwards to CEOs.

So Melissa’s an exec coach with a passion for helping product teams build high performing teams and navigate complex stakeholder relationships. She has over 20 years experience as a product [00:07:00] management predict practitioner across a variety of customers from startups to large corporations. So as I said, she’s the coauthor of this book Aligned where she shares her expertise on managing stakeholders expectations, especially when it means confidently saying no.

So. With that, I want to say a big welcome to Melissa. Everyone says hi to Melissa.

I’m Alyssa. Thank you so much for joining me. And great to have you here. Would love to get a little bit of background on why you wrote this book aligned and what sort of challenges led you to to get there. 

Melissa Appel: So it was a book that I wanted to buy for the people on my team and it didn’t exist.

So I, I actually initially thought about writing a book on just saying no to stakeholders. And then I met up with Bruce McCarthy, who’s my co author and he’s I think [00:08:00] he can be more than that. So it ended up being more than that and saying no is one chapter. But I had somebody on my team who said yes to everything and somebody on my team who said no to everything, but like in a very succinct way I’m not going to tell you why just no.

And so it was two extremes. And I felt like we could do better and I wanted to get my thoughts. It’s down on paper as far as the variety of nuances of how you might say no and it turned into much, much bigger topic, but it’s still something that kind of goes through the whole book as far as how you can say no to something together with your stakeholders after building trust and rapport and after going through and figuring out what your goals are so you can make better decisions.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, I love that. I love projects like that come out of this need because it didn’t exist before. Right? That’s really where ProdPad came from. I needed something to ultimately help me say no to my CEO because I was the product manager back then. It wasn’t a matter [00:09:00] of saying no, it was a matter of saying not yet, because here’s what else is on the board.

Remember what you asked me for last week, and this is what our goals are. So no to that new thing that you just came up with. Right. Right. So yeah, love that it came out of this burning need for this for this book. So tell me about the context in which you were operating at that point. What was your team like, were you the, did you have a particularly tricky set of stakeholders?

Melissa Appel: There’s always tricky stakeholders. I feel like if you’re in a place where all of your stakeholders are amazing, there’s nothing to do, in real life. No, I had somebody who said, said yes to everything. And then sort of was upset about that after he had said yes to everything, because he was like, but I can’t actually do that.

So I learned with this particular person that if he says yes to something, I say. Do you actually want to do it? Can you actually do it? And I had to get him out of a situation with the stakeholder where he had said [00:10:00] yes to something. Essentially, this is more of a personal yes than a product yes, but he had said yes to like helping roll this thing out.

And he’s I don’t really want to do that. I want to make the next thing. So I went to the stakeholder and he said yes. Like I wouldn’t have asked him. Or I wouldn’t have committed to him if he had said no I just want to know. So that was a little bit like, you just have to talk to people and people are generally understanding of these things as long as you go through it together.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, that makes sense. And I can imagine somebody saying yes to something. What kind of problems was he running into? 

Melissa Appel: Well, so I had another person who said yes to a lot of things that were like, well, it’s just easier to say yes, but then you end up disappointing them at the end when you actually can’t do it.

Cause you know, you can’t do it rather than disappointing them. Like it’s better to disappoint them right away than to disappoint them like months later when they’ve been depending on this thing and making plans for it. So having, it’s kinder to your [00:11:00] stakeholder to say no right away than it is to get to the end and Realize what you knew in the beginning, which is that you can’t do.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That sort of comes back to a really good expectation setting. Somebody who’s saying yes to everything isn’t setting good expectations and is setting realistic goals for themselves or for the company. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. I had a coaching consulting client Earlier this year and they came to us and they said, we have a delivery problem.

We can’t deliver on our promises. And I talked to a bunch of people and I said, no, actually you have a culture problem. You have a psychological safety problem because people are telling you what they know you want to hear, which is the wrong estimate because they know how long it’s actually going to take, but they’re afraid to tell you that you’re going to get mad.

So they tell you what you want to hear and then you can’t deliver, which then at the end makes sense. Sense. Right? Because you could never deliver that in the first place. They just didn’t tell you. 

Janna Bastow: Oh, right. Okay. So they were shortening it because it sounded nicer in those conversations, but of course it wasn’t doable in [00:12:00] that time.

Right, 

Melissa Appel: right. Then you make promises to know you can’t deliver on, because somehow it’s expected through the culture of the group, and that’s, clearly you can’t deliver if people are giving you the wrong estimates. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Francesco Bianchi in the chat, he’s one of our partners as well.

He’s called it out. He said, it’s so often a matter of lack of psychological safety 

Melissa Appel: and 

Janna Bastow: that actually cuts the other way as well with people who give estimates that are too long as well. Right? When you say to somebody how long is this going to take? And they go, Ooh, well, internally, I know it’s going to take, roadmap and then the product manager goes, well, five days.

We know that could turn into seven days. So I better make it, a total of ten days. So a two week thing and the roadmap just gets longer and longer, right? The time frames get longer and longer because they don’t want to get it wrong. Because if it does take longer, that one time it took longer, they got in trouble if it weren’t.

Right. It was like this blame culture as opposed to the psychological [00:13:00]safety that was built up. 

Melissa Appel: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It does go both ways. They’ll tell you it’s too short and be wrong. They’ll tell you it’s too long and be wrong. Nobody can predict the future. This is the thing that I often tell people.

It’s if you want me to be exact, Like six months from now, when we’re going to deliver something, like there’s no way to accurately predict that. I’m probably going to be wrong. And besides the fact that six months from now, you might not even want that thing anymore in the first place. 

Janna Bastow: Or to be that precise about it, you’d have to spend a year and a half in planning to get it that perfect.

Right. So there’s like this. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. So like now I can give you an estimate and like my estimate is going to get better as I get closer, but you have to be open to that lack of certainty right now. Otherwise, I’m just going to stop giving you estimates altogether. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. So, So, when you’ve got high level stakeholders, you like CEOs or board members pushing down on requirements or timeframes or, [00:14:00] requesting that things are done or get to a certain scope or whatever.

How do you recommend for product leaders to push back without damaging that relationship? 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. I think it all starts with building a good relationship. In the 1st place, right, building, building that trust and the process that I usually advocate for that I’ve used is to align on goals 1st and then future decision making is easier.

Hey, this is a great idea. Does it align with the goal that we’ve set? Does it align with the ICP that we’ve chosen? Does it align with the strategy that we’ve agreed on? If it doesn’t, then we can say no together, but you also have to build that trust that ICP is an ideal customer profile. Um, you have to build that trust that they trust that my process is going to come out with good results, right?

Because if they say like, why should we have to prioritize? We should just do the thing that I said. [00:15:00] Then there’s not enough trust to go through the process and make the decisions based on the direction and you end up going all over the place. So if you can start from the beginning and build that relationship, build that trust, then you can say, okay, I’m Let’s agree on our goals.

Let’s align on how we’re going to be making decisions. Let’s align on our prioritization criteria. And then everybody is transparent. Everybody knows how everybody’s thinking. And you can go through and say no together. Because if you just come in and you’re like, no, we’re not doing it. They’d be like, all right, I’ll find somebody else who will do it.

Janna Bastow: That’s such a good point. I often find that as product people, we’re having to say no a lot. And it’s not out of spite, right? You can’t do everything. No, we have to choose. But what you’re talking about is making more visible the product management, Criteria, the constraints, the system, the operating system behind it all.

And if everybody else can see the operating system the reason for the nose becomes much more obvious. It’s more that you [00:16:00] haven’t said no. The product management system has said no. And you just help slot the thing into the right place. By pointing out, well, this has this and this is this and this.

And therefore this is obviously a no because these other three things were yes. And we know they’re yes, because you said that this, and this had to be like this. And so you’re 

Melissa Appel: helping your stakeholders make their own decision about what to prioritize. Or not by helping them through that I had a stakeholder once who came from a consulting company like McKinsey or something and never worked in a place that created software and he’s I don’t understand why we don’t have enough engineers to do everything we need.

I’m like, because you just never you never have enough. Right? You always have. And he’s just here? I’m like no it’s really, this is just the way the world works. So I have to start from scratch to say here’s how it works. We only have so many engineers we need to choose and even just, he didn’t understand that to begin with.

So kind of meeting people where they are and making sure that they understand.[00:17:00]

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, it’s actually really important for people to realize that these constraints can be really healthy for the business, right? And that it’s not a matter of just adding more engineers and saying yes to more things. Because saying no to the right things is actually healthier for the business.

Right. A team that expanded and had 10X the engineers doesn’t necessarily mean that they built more features. They probably just ended up stumbling over each other and getting stuck in the process of how do you manage 10 times the number of engineers as a team that was smaller and having a bunch more features of stuff rather than actually saying, here’s the things that we need to do.

Melissa Appel: Yeah, it’s not 10 times the number of engineers that have 10 times the amount of success, even if you have 10 different features, right? Because you have to build the right things. You have to build the things people want and are willing to pay for. And [00:18:00] that’s going to drive your mission and drive your business.

So, there are better ideas than other ideas. It’s not like any idea is like a terrible idea. Yeah, but you want to focus on the things that are going to drive the most success and defining what success is, what it looks like, what your goals are, how do we know we’re good, we’re successful at the beginning, can help you make better decisions about what to choose to work on.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. So how do you use a mixture of data and storytelling to convince stakeholders when they’re facing resistance to these strategic decisions? Yeah, absolutely. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah, so it’s actually interesting. I changed my perspective on this. After having written the book, it’s like writing something, teaching myself something.

So I always thought Oh, like hard facts are the best way to go, but that’s because that’s the way I make decisions. So some people make decisions. They like to see the numbers. Some people are like, okay, this is numbers, but I don’t understand how people are feeling. So some stakeholders might want to.

[00:19:00] numbers. Some stakeholders might want qualitative evidence. Some might want both. So thinking about how your stakeholder makes decisions and what their perspective is and how they approach things is helpful to figure out how to appeal to them or how to convince them or how to bring the right information so they can make a good decision.

Yeah, 

Janna Bastow: That’s really smart. There’s something really there about speaking the language of your stakeholders and making sure that you get it in a way that they understand it. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah, some people don’t want to hear the emotional stuff. They’re like just showing me how many people were buying it.

Whatever. How many people have this problem? And some people are like, okay, I see the numbers, but I don’t understand what people are actually thinking and sometimes. That emotional appeal, like showing a video of a customer struggling, can really work with some types of stakeholders.

Janna Bastow: And sometimes it takes interpretive dance, if that’s what it takes. Yeah.

Melissa Appel: Getting the people around the person to [00:20:00] buy in, and. Hitting them from different directions. And it’s not like you’re trying to manipulate people, right? You’re just trying to say have you considered this? This thing that you really want to do is just not aligned with our goals.

Either we change our goals, right? Or maybe this isn’t the right direction to go. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So in your experience, having seen this, have you seen any really good examples that you can share where product managers have said no to unrealistic demands and how did it go?

Melissa Appel: I’m trying to, I’m trying to think of it. I’ve said no before to something that was completely impossible early in my career. I’m just waiting for a consultancy. And we did a client who essentially wanted us to make a perpetual motion machine. And we’re like, it can’t work.

They were looking at getting energy out of stationary bikes at gyms and they wanted to get more energy out of it than went into the system. And I’m like, you can’t do that. They’re like what if we add more gears? I’m like, [00:21:00] no, that’s not going to work. Um, but I think the places where I’ve seen people have the most successes is where they go back to the goals.

It’s not just my opinion versus your opinion. It’s here where we said we want to go. This thing isn’t aligned with it. What should we do here? Right. Should we change our goals? Or should we not do this thing? Or, here’s this thing that you want. Here are the other things that you wanted in the last couple of weeks.

Can you just stack rank them? Just put them in order, right? Because a lot of times people are like, everything’s number one priority. Everything’s number zero priority. But if you force somebody to rank them then they have an order and you say, okay, great. The idea you just came up with is second to last.

And we’ve said, we can only do three of them. So. What do you think we should do? Well, I guess we shouldn’t do it. Right. So going through the process, I think. 

Janna Bastow: That there was a 

Melissa Appel: question in the chat. That I thought was interesting. Oh, [00:22:00] right. 

Janna Bastow: Linda. Let’s just ask. Yeah. How do you handle a situation where stakeholders do not want to set a vision for the product and want to be in the weeds all the time.

Melissa Appel: Yeah. So some people do love being in the weeds. And I think for that, there at least has to be a, even if you don’t have a product vision, you have company goals, whether it’s revenue or growth or something, right? And so maybe if a stakeholder doesn’t want to set a vision, they might respond to a vision.

So sometimes. Ideally, you’d have a collaborative process, maybe with the stakeholders say what do you think? Where do you think we should be going and maybe have several stakeholders in the room and have, a brainstorming kind of session where you say we want to make something that works for everybody.

Let’s get all our ideas. Sometimes stakeholders are just not willing to do that. They’re like, I don’t have time or whatever. This is stupid. So you say, great. Well, this is my vision for the future. I would love your [00:23:00] feedback on it, right? Either, you’ve been here longer than me, or you’re in this industry, or I would love your, I trust your advice, I want your feedback.

And so sometimes it’s easier for people to respond to something that exists rather than participate in the process of coming up with it from scratch. Again, it depends on your stakeholder and what they like, how they make decisions, how they prefer to do it. So you can use a variety of different techniques, depending on who it is that you’re working with.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. This is why I like the concept of a roadmap as a prototype, right? Because what you’re really doing is you’re using the roadmap as a flexible document where you check the assumptions of where it is that you think you’re going. So you’ve got. probably a half baked vision that you’ve got from the founding team or from the execs or whatever.

You’ve got various ideas or suggestions on what direction you can go. And you’re basically saying, okay, so based on all these inputs, all this insight I’ve pulled from different directions around me, I’m sitting in the middle here. I think it means that we should go [00:24:00] here, in this order. And I could be wrong, but just by putting it down and then sharing it back to the different players, you’re going to get reactions and people are going to go whoa, that doesn’t line up with our vision.

Well, this is our vision. Is this, are we agreeing? Are we disagreeing? Let’s clarify where we need to clarify. And by putting it out in front of people, you start getting that insight. And by Getting it out in front of people and checking those assumptions, you’re strengthening them, because you’ll change things around.

You’ll realize, oh, actually, we don’t need to go this direction. We need to go around this way instead, and that’s going to get us there faster. Or we don’t have to solve that problem because, this does it instead. And you’ll end up with a better strategy. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah, I love the idea of a roadmap as a prototype, right?

Like test and iterate. That’s what we do with our products. And that’s also what we can do with our product direction. Like some people, they build a thing and they wait until the end. They’re like, is this what you wanted? And they’re like, no. But you could get that answer a lot sooner being like, here’s what we plan to build.

Is this what you [00:25:00] want? If they say no, at that point, you haven’t wasted a lot of time on development. And so you have to check in with internal stakeholders as much as, and maybe in the same way as checking in with customers because internal stakeholders have. Just as much sway and as customers, a lot of times if it’s the head of marketing or sales and they’re like, I don’t want to sell this or I can’t sell this or this doesn’t make any sense.

I can’t tell a story around this. You want to know that at the beginning, rather than at the end. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey, let’s dive into this because Jordan says it’s related to Linda’s question. How do you handle situations where multiple high level stakeholders seem to have competing priorities despite ostensibly being aligned?

The SVP asks for a specific thing from the product and the CPO wants to see something else. Yeah, 

Melissa Appel: So there’s a, I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is I’ve got into a situation where I bring all the stakeholders into a room together and often what happens is they end up arguing with [00:26:00] each other and seeing each other’s perspectives with me as a facilitator.

So I don’t have to like to go back and forth and say do I do what you want? Do I do what you want? Let’s just come together, can we talk about this together because it seems like you’re saying this and it seems like you’re saying that I would love to, make sure that we’re all on the same page.

And so a lot of times that will happen and they’ll actually start to understand each other’s perspective, a little bit more through that conversation. Another thing is to think about the extensive ostensibly aligned part of it, right? You might go to a meeting and everybody’s yeah, this looks good.

They haven’t really looked at it deeply. They haven’t really thought of it. So one thing you can do is a technique that we use in the book called mining for conflict. And there’s a couple of ways to do this. For example, you can say, okay, It seems like we’re all on the same page, but I want to go around the room and everybody say something that they think could possibly go wrong or name a risk that you think might happen if we take this direction.

And so it gives [00:27:00] people the opportunity and the permission to say, well, I guess I’m aligned, but I can see this problem, or this works for me, but not right now. Like maybe we could do it later. So sometimes that helps. Sometimes people don’t want to share that room with other people.

So you might go around after the meeting to each individual and say, Hey, it sounds like we’re aligned in the meeting. I just wanted to check on with you 1 on 1 to see if you have any issues with the direction that we’re going. And so you might get that feedback 1 on 1 and then you might have to actually have that meeting again after you talk through everything and make sure you’re actually.

Janna Bastow: Oh, that’s a really good technique. I like that. It reminds me a little bit of does anybody know the colored hats? There’s probably a better name for it. And maybe somebody can link to an article or a thing on it, but it’s where you have, one person is wearing the red hat and it’s their job in the meeting to come up with the risks, right?

Somebody wears the white hat and they just talk about what could go right. [00:28:00] Somebody else talks about the benefits and somebody else talks about The emotional side and somebody else talks about the logical side and you just have, I think it’s six different hats that everyone wears and it removes them from their own persona and puts them on a role where their job is just to go do this thing.

And somebody’s job is to just talk about all the negative things that could be happening. You get to play devil’s advocate or angel advocate, whatever it is, right? 

Melissa Appel: Yeah, no, I like that. It’s okay, what could go wrong with this? Or what do you see as a problem or right? And it allows some of those.

unspoken hesitations to come out. There’s another technique, which is a fist of five, right? Zero, one, two, three, four, five. And so you might say, okay, how confident are we that this is the right direction to go? And everybody has to give a number. And so all at 

Janna Bastow: same time, right? Yeah. 

Melissa Appel: Story pointing or whatever.

But you might get some vibes and you might get like a one or a two [00:29:00]and you might want to ask them in the meeting, you might want to say okay let’s follow up on that. Cause I want to hear more. And that can often just give people a little bit of a permission, like a low stakes way of saying like, all right, I’m aligned, but I’m not that calm.

Janna Bastow: And also let’s not forget that it’s a bit playful, right? This sort of thing gets people talking. It gets people, moving gets their brain activated so they’re not sitting there going on some other memo about this thing that we’re doing, it gets them in a room, and the creative juices flowing around what could work what couldn’t work, you know what they’re up against thinking about the challenge in a group situation where they’re sitting here going yeah let’s come up with a number let’s come up with this let’s get our hands out and play.

Right. I think it’s pretty cool. 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. There’s like a bunch of questions now. 

Janna Bastow: Let’s tackle some of these. All right. There was a 

Melissa Appel: one from Valentina. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, Valentina, that’s one I just found as well. So, do you have any recommendations for CEOs that go very easily into panic [00:30:00]mode and cross boundaries very easily by jumping in on tasks that are not their own area?

Melissa Appel: Yeah, a couple of thoughts there. One is that sometimes when a CEO or a high level executive comes in and wants to get into the details, it’s because maybe you haven’t communicated well enough, right? They don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t trust what you’re doing. They’re like, I need to do this myself.

So sometimes a way to hedge on that is saying Okay. Hold on. Here’s all the things that we’re doing. Do you think there’s something else that we should be doing? Do you think we should be doing anything differently to give them the visibility and what you’re already doing? So they don’t feel like they have to come in and do it themselves.

And a lot of times that helps or You can even give them a task like, Hey, we can actually really use your help on this or getting alignment with this person or, give them kind of something to do. It sounds silly, but give them something to do. So they feel like they’re helping.

And it’s probably something that’s valuable for you anyway. The other thought I have is, [00:31:00] what really constitutes an emergency. There’s a lot of emergencies going on. And we write about this in the book that, Not everything is an emergency, even if it’s, salesperson or CEO is Oh my God, we have to do this right away.

Sometimes it might be an emergency. Sometimes it might not, this is the panic mode thing. Thinking about whether or not something is an emergency is thinking about what else you’re already doing and how it compares, right? So what is the cost of delay? What happens if we don’t do this thing right away?

What if we do it next week or next month or next quarter? What’s. What’s the worst that will happen? What’s the opportunity cost? If we do this thing now, what is it that we’re stopping doing and what value have we already depended on that providing? Risks, right? What’s the risk if we do this now, if we stop doing this other thing?

What’s the risk if we don’t do this thing right away? And is that risk so bad? And then dependencies, right? If we don’t, if we do this thing instead, if we make all these changes and go into panic mode, what else is dependent on the stuff we would have been working on? Do we [00:32:00] already have a press release about something we’re about to launch and you’re telling us not to launch it and that’s going to affect our public image or whatever.

So thinking about, what kind of worst case scenarios or what we lose or what we gain by doing this, right? thing right away and go ahead to panic mode. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Such good advice, such good advice. And I actually want to jump on this with another question that’s come in through the Q and a area.

I’m going to prioritize these because they come in and they’re easier to organize than the chat. So I’m going to give these priorities. And this one had an extra vote on it as well. So it’s the most popular question. So do you think David asks, what if your CEO or owner wants to do everything themselves?

How can we help them refine that vision? Or sorry, what if they want to do everything? Sorry, not do everything themselves. They probably want it. How do we help them refine that vision or choose areas to focus on for the next year? 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. It depends what stage you’re in and how big your company 

Janna Bastow: is.

So 

Melissa Appel: if you’re in like a zero to one phase, like you might [00:33:00]choose to do a bunch of things in an experimental mode, if you’re still trying to find product market fit, or, if you have this giant customer wants this thing, you’re like, maybe we go there. I think in that case, defining success criteria is helpful, right?

Okay. If we do this thing, we want to get six or seven similar customers in the next six months. So we want to think about it in that way. We’re not just doing this thing for this person. We’re moving in this direction and we’re doing this experiment. In a later stage company, right? It’s hard to go from the zero to one to the kind of one to a hundred because we’re used to doing everything right.

And we say, like, why not? Why not take this customer? They want to pay us money. Why wouldn’t we do that? But at a certain point, you have to learn to say no to some things so that you can say yes. Yes to other things. Otherwise, you just become a custom shop. And if you don’t want to do that, right, you want to be scalable and sustainable.

You want to build something that more than one customer might want to buy. Then you have to decide [00:34:00] both what we’re doing and what we’re not, what we’re not doing. A lot of times a vision is helped by saying, okay, here’s their vision of the future. I’m like, here’s what we’re doing. And here’s what we’re not doing.

And it’s uncomfortable to say no to clients, to customers. Right. Especially if you’ve been in that growth mode, but it’s. It’s really important so that you can say yes to other people. 

Janna Bastow: That’s a really good insight. Thank you. Excellent. And there’s another question here. Maybe you can weigh in on how to interpret and respond in a tricky situation with your boss.

So, somebody anonymously put this one in where they said that they’ve had a case where they’ve had a disagreement with their boss, just a professional disagreement over the structure of a meeting agenda, something as little as that. And they sent an email to the boss, a non dramatic email, but the response came back saying, I recognize you’re disagreeing a lot lately.

I’m not used to this from you. Where is that coming from? How does this person respond? How do they [00:35:00] interpret that? 

Melissa Appel: My first thought is that emails can be interpreted in a bunch of different ways. So even if you think it was friendly, they may not have read it that way. So I always advocate for having an actual conversation about it.

But I think, if your boss is reaching out to you and saying I’m noticing this lately, however, they said it they’re opening it up and allowing you to give them feedback. And I think. Seeing it as an opportunity to have that conversation as opposed to this person doesn’t want me to share because I think they do the way the question is worded, right?

Where’s that coming from? You could say it was just actually this 1 thing, but if you’re saying I’m disagreeing a lot lately, what else are you seeing that maybe I’m not seeing? And can you tell me more about that? I don’t think I’ve changed, but if you’re observing something, I’d love to hear more about it.

So turning it around a little bit on them and saying I have, I don’t think I’m [00:36:00] disagreeing with you a lot lately, but maybe, maybe you’re seeing something that I’m not, what am I missing here? 

Janna Bastow: That’s really good advice. Yeah. Yeah, definitely opens up for further feedback and a productive conversation.

Excellent. Yeah. All right. Hope that helps. Whoever that was who sent that through and hopefully helpful for other people as well. Matthew asked a question here. He said what would you recommend if your founders want to be all things for every customer with no focus or discussion or definition of the ICB?

Melissa Appel: Um, clearly you don’t have enough resources to be everything to everybody. But then you do end up going down that route of we’re a custom shop and you end up accumulating a lot of support. Of products, right? So if you want to be everything to everybody, then you end up building a whole bunch of different stuff.

Now you have this giant portfolio. Each thing is sold to one customer, and then you end up using your resources to support all of these different things. And then you run out of [00:37:00] resources to build new things and you’re just supporting existing things. Right. So, one thing that I’ve seen an engineering team do really well is to figure out what percentage of each squad is spent on keeping the lights on, which is just bugs, support tickets.

Maybe it’s a, actually like runtime or uptime kind of things, but like what percentage of the team’s time is spent on just keeping the lights on for the existing stuff versus building new stuff. And you can show that to your founders and say, listen, At a certain point, we’re going to run out because this line is going up.

Like we’re spending more and more of our time just supporting existing stuff. And at a certain point, you’re not going to get anything new. So we really have to choose what we’re going to focus on so that we can reduce this maintenance costs that we’re seeing. So sometimes if you’re talking to founders, think about what they’re thinking about, right?

They want to know that their money is being spent on the [00:38:00] right things. And so if they realize that most of their money is spent just on upkeep and they can’t grow, then they might be like, Oh, okay. Well, maybe that’s something I want to change. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good way of measuring it.

The amount of time on business as usual or just maintenance versus everything else. Matthew had added to it, he said, is this just, Janna’s agency trap? And I’d have to agree with that. I think it does touch into that territory. And by agency trap, I’ve talked about this a bunch of times.

It’s the concept that your team ends up spending more time building for one off. Yeah. Clients, as opposed to figuring out what your market needs you to go towards and building towards that. Are you spending any time on discovery or are you just spending it on delivery for one off things? And if you’re spending it just on delivery for whoever it is, who comes by flashing a checkbook at you, then you’re probably stuck in an agency trap, acting like an agency and not like a product company.

Melissa Appel: Yeah. And eventually you’ll just run out. And then there’s the [00:39:00] idea of resources. There also, it’s like looking at short term money versus long term money. There’s the idea of, like it, a consultant, right? You, there’s only so many hours in the day. You can only sell so many hours, but if you make something that you can just give it to like a book, right?

Like you can give that to as many people as you want. It doesn’t actually use more effort to make more of them. Right. And so when you’re doing custom stamps, custom stuff for everybody, it’s in that previous mode where there’s just only so much you can do versus creating some sort of feature or product that can be used across the board for a whole bunch of different customers.

Then you’re like. Printing money, 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Not that books 

Melissa Appel: print money by any means. 

Janna Bastow: It’s printing as to whether it’s money. But it does mean that you don’t have to rewrite the same thing over and over again. Every time somebody asks you a question, I’m tempted to write a book just because of that.

The amount of times I’ve answered things about the agency trap, for [00:40:00]example. I’m like, write a book about this and be done with it. You have 

Melissa Appel: a question here.

Janna Bastow: It’s in the backlog. Don’t worry guys. I’m going to write that book later. Excellent question. All right. So, another one here from oh, I’m going to put them in order here. Dupayan had a question. I said they said do you have any guidelines for when an email is the best modicum versus when a face to face or virtual call or whatever is a better mode of communication?

Melissa Appel: Um, I think I’ll just use the old product manager mantra of it depends. It depends on you. It depends on the person you’re communicating with. It depends on whether this is like a deep topic that needs some conversation or whether this is simply an update. It depends on whether the person needs some time to digest what you’ve said.

Sometimes even sending like A document with the ability for them to comment on it is better than an email. If somebody needs time to digest and think [00:41:00] about it and get back to you something like a document with commenting kind of encourages that async collaboration versus an email, which is just a one, one way thing.

There’s also if it’s a really hard conversation, sometimes, you don’t want to spring it on somebody, but also you don’t want them to stew about it. So you can combine both, right? Hey, here’s your performance review. Let’s talk about it in an hour or two as opposed to you having a month to think about it before we talk to each other.

So I think it’s a combination. But if you have any thoughts that what you’ve written down may be misinterpreted, I would say a face to face is probably Better. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Absolutely. That makes sense. And whatever it is, it’s probably not a voice note.

Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably not that. Yes. [00:42:00] Excellent. Really good question. All right. So there’s another one here. None of the three people have voted on this one. Maria asked, how do you handle a CEO who has recency bias with the feedback or priority of things that have been shared? Back to how truly urgent this is versus what’s in the roadmap already.

Melissa Appel: Yeah. I was actually hired for a job a while back because a customer came up to the CEO at the user conference and complained about something like, we need somebody to fix this. So I was thankful for that job, but normally you have to think about, The emergency thing again, right?

Okay. This is really good information. Is this related to something we’re already working on? Is this related to a goal we have? If not, how important is it that we address this? And if so, maybe we need to change our goals. And sometimes if you say to somebody well, in order to rationalize addressing this, we need to change our goals.

They might be like, oh, yeah, we No, I like our goals. Maybe we shouldn’t change our goals. So maybe we shouldn’t do this [00:43:00] right away. So, again, going back to, here’s what we’re already doing. I’ve done this, I’ve done this a lot by somebody saying no, somebody, it’s really important.

I’m like, okay, well on our roadmap is something that’s supposed to deliver like a million dollars in cost savings or whatever. How does this rank up against it? Okay. Well, I guess it’s not that big, but it’s still really important. Great. Can we consider it for next quarter? 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, that’s a really good way of doing it.

And ultimately, the urgency versus importance thing still has to come down to, well, what is important for the business, right? Urgent just means that it is important now. Does it have a drop dead deadline? If you don’t do it by particular time and therefore, is it important that the business does it and you have to look at, does the business want this to be done?

And therefore, is it willing to give up on something else? And, you’ve got to communicate that upwards and get that answer. As a collective, really to understand what’s [00:44:00] going to get booted out. And obviously it can’t be used for everything. Cause if everything urgent gets done, then nothing else ever gets done.

Melissa Appel: Right. Yeah. There’s another question here of a common definition of emergency or urgency. Oh, yeah. Good one. A lot of our teams have that for bugs. Right, that you can triage bugs based on how many customers does this affect? Is there a workaround, right? Those kinds of things. So I think it definitely does make sense to have a common definition of what’s an emergency, right?

Say we have a new competitor that comes into the market and they’re eating our lunch, like that’s probably an emergency. That’s probably something we should react to. But if a new customer comes out with a new feature. But we’re not actually even sure if people are using it and we have something that does something similar.

Maybe that’s not an emergency. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely that. And remember that these are just labels that we give things to help communicate them. Ultimately something needs to be communicated in terms [00:45:00] of, it has to be done by this period or has to be done. In order for this other thing to happen, communicate that, right?

You can’t just call something an emergency and expect people to jump. Especially if you make everything an emergency or urgent or whatever because everything isn’t. So you’ve got to be careful with the labels and if it’s useful, or if you can be specific about what you need from it, it’s an emergency because the servers are melting, literally, okay, go, or because we will lose this deal by Friday, go.

Melissa Appel: Or because there’s a global pandemic and things have now changed. There’s 

Janna Bastow: a, they’re not like, everyone jump. Yeah. That was a week. Yeah. All right. Good stuff. Speaking of global pandemic. So James here had a a point. He said, okay, well, all this, Good stuff about having people in the room and saying, no how does that work when, for all these teams who are still mostly or completely remote or virtual.

Yeah. 

Melissa Appel: So I’ve always found that actually being in a [00:46:00] room with somebody like. For a day or two on some sort of offsite where a strategy planning meeting or something with some sort of social activity, then breaks down barriers once you go back to your hometown and get back on zoom. So if you’ve met somebody once, I feel like that’s really helpful, even if you’re not in the same room with them every single day, so, figuring out opportunities to go and meet somebody.

One time can really help break that down. I know that’s not possible for some people. But I think we’re all getting used to like this being face to face. So, even if you only see somebody. It is the same as if you’re in person, right? You see somebody in meetings, but you’ve never had a one-on-one chat with them.

Sometimes that’s helpful, even if you’re seeing them in virtual meetings and you wanna have a one-on-one virtual chat. I think those are often really helpful. But there’s definitely challenges, right? [00:47:00] Because you’re not. Situational. You’re just like staring at a box.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. One of my devs said something really interesting at our, one of our off sites years ago, because we weren’t a big team, but we didn’t always have the chance for everyone to work with everyone else. Right. We had backend devs, we had marketing over here and not everyone had a chance to get to know each other on the same playing field.

But he said, we were just like, When we got together, we got, we did all these activities, right? We did a treasure hunt and we had different groups cooking each other dinner, and we had all these sort of different bits and pieces where people would work together or hang together or play together, whatever it was, right?

And what he pointed out was that it was creating mini networks. So he’s well, now I have the group that I did this thing with, and now I have the group that I did this thing with, and he was creating. We were creating many networks that we could go to that would allow him to use in his working life.

And actually you don’t necessarily need to be face to do that. Even during the pandemic and even now we still do virtual get togethers. We do mini games via [00:48:00] zoom and put each other on teams and play online. Right, we’ll play whatever that game is where you have to kick each other off the spaceship every once in a while among us.

We’ve done stuff like that where you’ll be on each other’s teams and you’ll play and you’re creating little networks amongst each other. And that just helps the team get to know each other so that they can say no to each other. Or if they had said no, they could kick each other off the ship.

Melissa Appel: Yeah, forming connections, right? You can form connections and hear a project you’re working on together or a social activity or, just starting your 1 on 1’s with hey. Do anything interesting this weekend? That’s right. We’re like, sorry about the noise. We’re doing construction. I just figured out that my foundation has some problems, which is actually a true fact for me.

Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: All 

Melissa Appel: right. A little bit about yourself can help. It’s for conversation. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, that’s perfect. All right. Great question. We will end on one more because five people have put their thumbs up on this one. So Jordan said, do you have any tips for [00:49:00] communicating to senior leadership about the negative impacts of the requests often framed as urgent, often additive work already prioritized in flight work?

Melissa Appel: Yeah. So there are obvious negative effects like the team and burnout and just like uncertainty. But if you think about what the senior leadership is interested in, and what, how they’re being measured. For success and what’s important to them. It might be the team, but it might be other things you can try to communicate the negative impacts as this is bad for you to forget.

Like it’s bad for the team, but it’s also bad for you. Thinking about it, well, we can’t do everything. So when we add stuff, we have to drop other stuff. And that stuff was going to provide value. And now we can’t provide that value. So we’re losing something. So, back to getting to know people before this emergency comes in, try to [00:50:00] understand the stakeholder and think about how they’re being measured.

What does success look like for them, for their department? Right. So for sales, for example if they’re coming for a new request for this one customer, say well, if we do this for this customer, we can’t do this other thing for this other customer that you asked for last week. So like you have to choose or, Hey, if we stop doing these one off requests and focus on this initiative that we’re doing, that’s going to help a bunch more customers, you can just sell it to everybody.

You don’t have to do anything custom and that makes your job easier. So thinking about it from their perspective, like what’s bad for them. If your team tackles this emergency, I think it is more helpful than just. It’s talking about why you don’t like it. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. That’s really good. That’s really good advice.

Thank you for that. We’re not going to have a chance to answer any more questions because we’re running up against it. But, Melissa, I do want to ask, how do people find your book and find you to reach out to you with any more questions? 

Melissa Appel: Yeah. Oh, I should have [00:51:00] added that to my little box here. You can find my book on Amazon.

Just look up Aligned and Appel and you’ll get it. Otherwise you get some sort of protein mix or something that’s called Aligned for some reason, I don’t know. 

Janna Bastow: We’ll send a link to it out to everybody else who’s listening in. All right. And someone’s put it in the chat. So that’s great.

Perfect. 

Melissa Appel: Thank you. Thanks, 

Janna Bastow: David. All right. Good stuff. A couple of things to follow up on here. We are going to have another couple webinars. So keep your eyes peeled for this one and get yourself signed up. I’m going to be taking you through how to keep your senior stakeholders informed without any headaches.

So practical, tactical. So, we’re going to be talking about a couple of strategies that we’re going to talk through that’s going to be on October 30th, same time, same place. And our next guest that we’re going to be welcoming in is James Gunucka, who’s going to be coming over on November 7th, talking about how to [00:52:00] transition from product management to product leadership.

On that note, I want to say big thank you to Melissa. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your knowledge today. It’s been really good to have you here. The comments have been absolutely fire. I’ve not been able to keep up with them. We got through most 

Melissa Appel: I want to read them afterwards. 

Janna Bastow: I’ll send you the questions from the comments.

And if you want to follow up with anybody that you can absolutely do so. But I really appreciate everybody jumping in and yeah, thank you so much. And for everybody who asked about getting a demo of that co pilot, you got your name in there earlier. We’ll get you started on that.

And if anybody wants a trial of ProdPad go to ProdPad.com, start your trial or hit up ProdPad.com slash demo. And we’ll walk you through a demo of it. All right. Thank you, everybody. Take care and enjoy the rest of your week. Bye for now.