Asking the right questions

Are you good at asking the right questions in the right context?

Here are some questions I will ask more of.

When you hear things are impossible, problematic or difficult, try to lift the cognitive load of reality and let the person play with the imagination, and solutions may become more accessible.
  • What would it look like if it were possible? What would it look like if it were easy?
  • Imagine a miracle happened and your problem was solved. How would you know?
Instead of examining something problematic, difficult or bad in isolation, try to get clarity from contrast.
  • "This is so hard / bad / problematic ...", ... compared to what?
Have you met people who are very confident and firmly believe they are right and that they know the answer or solution? Be curious, and ask some questions.
  • How do you know that? How do you know that this is the right thing to do?
  • What leads you to that conclusion or to that assumption?
  • What might happen if it's wrong?
  • What are the uncertainties in your reasoning?

When you are presented with new strategies, directions or processes, don't you sometimes wonder ...

  • Do we have to change in an obvious way in order to execute this strategy?
  • What do we need to do in order to deliver on this? What do we need to stop?
  • How do we know if this new strategy, process or whatever is successful? How do we recognize a successful execution?
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed and stressed over all the problems and opportunities that should be addressed and solved.
  • But what happens if we do nothing? Maybe that's a question we should ask more often.
Have you ended up in a deep rabbit hole where the discussion leads nowhere?
  • What are we trying to accomplish here?
  • What are we up against here?
  • How would you like me to proceed? How can we solve this problem?
Learning is important for me. These fun questions are difficult to answer, but they at least trigger some reflections.
  • What have surprised you the most?
  • What's the most difficult thing you did the last X weeks/months, and what did you learn from it?
I am not good at small talk with new people, so here's at least one opening I use.
  • What are you currently working on that you are most excited about?

What questions do you tend to ask and why?

Battles to be won, jobs to be done

In Equinor, we have now helped hundreds of people applying jobs-to-be-done to discover what their stakeholders are actually trying to accomplish or achieve when they use or are about to use their products.

It is about understanding the problem that you are trying to help someone solve.

Why? The extent to which their product helps their users and stakeholders accomplish their job to be done determines the value they perceive from their product.

We want to spend our scarce resources on products that the users and our business really want and need.

The four key takeaways?

First, look beyond the straightforward functional tasks

This is not about listing a bunch of functional tasks that your users and stakeholders currently perform. You instead need to understand their why and what they really seek to accomplish and achieve.

We see that the ones that struggle to come up with a meaningful value proposition have identified jobs that correspond more with straightforward tasks their stakeholders currently do.

Second, don't forget unmet or underserved jobs

When we do this with existing products, we tend to focus on the stakeholders and jobs the product currently serve, and we forget to explore unmet or underserved jobs or stakeholder segments.

What are the things they want to get done that your product (or any other product in Equinor) currently don't help them getting done? Are there any underserved stakeholder segments where your product could play a role?

Third, people also have social and emotional jobs

We experience that people are trained in articulating functional jobs, but their eyes light up when we introduce them to emotional and social jobs.

By exploring the emotional and social components we see value propositions that resonates better with their audience.

Fourth, test your assumptions

We stress the fact that the jobs the product teams come up with are educated guesses and assumptions you need to test afterwards. You can't figure out all this in a Teams meeting, a workshop or by using the right AI prompts.

You need to test and validate the jobs and the value proposition with your audience.

You are your narrative

You are not you in an organization, but you are what the stories tell about you. In many different organizational contexts, you are your narrative.

That's one of many things from Christian Vandsø Andersen (rest in peace) that made me think.

The narrative shapes us, and it shapes those around us. We try to live up to it.

How many people know the real you? Are they hiring you or the illusion of you - the story told about you?

And who created your narrative? Someone was characterizing you. Somehow, down the road, your story was shaped into what it is today.

People are cognitively lazy when it comes to others. When someone asks "Hey, do you know Steffan?" the easiest thing to do is just to repeat the description that you just heard instead of making up your own.

Changing an established, dominating story in an organization is quite tricky, but not impossible. You can influence what is being said and how the story is told. You can become the author of your own story.

But you have to make sure it's not just a "story told", but also a "story lived". It has to be based on behaviors experienced by several people.

To take control of your narrative is to take control of what you do and select the important "stars in the star signs".

Didn't get the job you applied for because they wanted someone more strategic?

When you introduce yourself in meetings next time, drop a potential piece of your narrative.

"Well, I am first and foremost known as a strategist. I enjoy helping other teams and I'm often invited to help build strategies in various parts of the company. I'm not saying I'm an expert strategist - I think it's mainly because I don't mind lending a helping hand that people call me a strategist".

The words will spread, and invitations will start to drop in, requesting strategic help. The expectations to you will rise and you will start living up to it.

This will lead to some successful strategies which people begin to talk about at the water cooler.

The next time you apply for the same strategic position, it's not unlikely that "I hear you are quite a strategist" will be the opening mark from the recruiting manager.

How do you shape your story?

"Magic@Work" by Christian Vandsø Andersen

The canvas strategy

What's your take on the canvas strategy by Ryan Holiday?

The idea is simple. Find canvases for other people to paint on.

Be an anteambulo. A roman term for the one who clears the path in front of their patron. Making way, communicating messages, eliminating distractions and waste and generally making the patron’s life easier.

If you clear the path for the people above you, you will eventually create a path for yourself.

The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas dictates the painting.

It's not about kissing ass and making your boss -look- good. It's about providing the support so that others can be good. It's about finding the direction someone already intends to head and help them focus on their strengths.

Bill Belichick, the now six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach, made his way up the ranks of the NFL by loving and mastering the one part of the job that coaches disliked at the time: analyzing film.

He strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for and therefore didn't want to do. He was like a sponge, taking it all in, listening to everything.

His insights gave the other more senior coaches things they could give their players. It gave them an edge they would take credit for exploiting in the game.

He became a rising star without threatening or alienating anyone. He mastered the canvas strategy.

In the canvas strategy you are the least important person in the room - until you change that with results. Greatness comes from humble beginnings. It comes from grunt work.

You focus all your energy on finding, presenting, and facilitating opportunities that help other people inside the company succeed.

Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. What reputation and relationships would that help you develop?

You help yourself by helping others.

You trade your short term gratification for a longer term payoff.

Strong product people

It's hard to get better if you don't know what better looks like

The product leader

A product leader leads the product managers building ships (products). They hire the best shipbuilders, create a proper environment for building ships, and they provide their people with the support and tools they need to do great work. The ships your teams build can only be as good as the shipyard that produces them.

The product manager's job

It's the product manager's job to come up with a product solution that is valuable to the user, usable by the user, buildable by your engineering team, and still viable from a business perspective. It's all about finding a balance between these four dimensions.

Again, what's the job you said!?

  • Go out there and listen to your users and customers to understand their problems and how you can possible solve them.
  • Conduct several experiments and prototypes to test your assumptions and various solutions before building them (to minimize the risk of building the wrong thing in a beautiful way).
  • Maximize value but minimize the effort to build the actual solution and make sure the winning solutions can be built by the team in a reasonable amount of time.
  • Deliver the product and optimize (or even innovate on) it based on feedback.

By this definition, a product manager is not a person who only collect requirements, write concepts, and maintain a backlog without making any decisions.

Do you know what better looks like?

If you don't know what makes a good product manager, how do you make sure your product managers know what they are expected to do? How do you hire the right person? How do you show them their necessary areas of personal growth?

Help your product managers understand what you think makes a good product manager. Help them identify their gaps to see what they should get better at, and help them understand what better really looks like.

Product vision, product strategy, goals and principles

For some organizations, product vision, strategy, goals and principles are very scary things - so much so that they avoid creating some or all of them. People think that it's a complicated and difficult process.

In fact, it's all about decision making. These things provide the guardrails for making decisions and prioritizations faster, and better. You need that, because there will always be more work than there is capacity to do it.

How can I grow and learn as a product manager?

  • I can learn by consuming books, podcasts, blogs, conference talks.
  • I can apply what I have consumed and learned to my daily work.
  • I can reflect and get feedback on what I have applied.
  • I can contribute back to the community and my colleagues by showing up at events to share my experiences, teach others, write articles, onboard new product managers, and become a mentor.

"Strong Product People" by Petra Wille