The Surprising Secrets of Exceptional Product Leaders | Jessica Hall | TEDxPearlStreet

[Music] [Applause] so i'm in a unique position i get to talk with and observe lots of teams making mobile apps websites and other digital tools most of these digital initiatives will fail seventy percent according to mckenzie hundreds of billions of dollars will be lost lost on products customers don't want to buy lost on products that don't even make it to the customer lost on services that just don't work people call me because they're struggling my job is to help them figure out what their customer needs and how to get it to market i work with a lot of ordinary cheap product officers ordinary chief technology officers ordinary product leaders and every once in a while i get to meet a product leader who is exceptional these exceptional product leaders they're growing their revenue and their customer base they're getting all the attention you want all the talent you want i've seen what makes them exceptional and i want you to know what it is you may think it's their great ideas that make them exceptional and they do have great ideas they also have mediocre ones and bad ones too somehow we got this notion that the idea was the important thing to go from an idea to an app on your phone takes a team of people with different skill sets making lots of decisions on what to build and how to build it so it's not their ideas that make them exceptional you may think execution their ability to get stuff done now see you can get a lot of stuff done and doesn't mean that anybody wants to buy it so it's not their execution that makes them exceptional i've seen what makes them exceptional because all of them do the same thing and they do it in more or less the same way they teach their teams how to think how to listen and solve customer problems now i feel kind of dumb standing up here and saying this listen and solve customer problems because i'm probably not the first person to do it but here's the thing i sit in your meetings i watch your teams make decisions then i go talk to your customers you may say the words customer focus customer obsessed you may put lots of sticky notes up on the wall but your teams don't know who your customer is and they don't know what they need how do i know well when i ask you who your customer is and let's say we're talking about a business-to-consumer b2c product you tell me it's for a soccer mom all the soccer moms out there except that doesn't really help me understand her i mean are we talking about a soccer mom with two kids a job and a nanny maybe she has a very different life from one who's got an aging parent autistic child who has to do multiple pickups and drop-offs who has to co-parent who has to maybe take public transportation because she doesn't own a minivan that her kids play soccer is the least interesting valuable viable data point about her now if we know that she's struggling with finances nutrition how to work from home full time while also taking care of her small children full time which by the way sucks if we understand that about her then we can do something about it now in the b to b world business to business we hear a lot about titles like heads of marketing except you know heads of marketing can be really different depending on the size of the company the revenue the business model the industry but some of them are dealing with ad fraud they're being scammed by fraudulent clicks they don't know where they're coming from they don't know how to stop them they don't know what tool to integrate with all their other tools but if we know what their challenge is then we can do something about it see years ago demographics might have been enough to help us understand their customers and that might have worked because they didn't have very many choices so they settled they settled for us but now we have lots of choices and new things are coming out in the market every day which means you need to be deeply objectively clear about who your customer is and what they need you need to get out of the building do the research look at the data find the patterns that aren't biased to help you understand what they need and it's not enough that you as a leader understand and need just tell your teams what to do because you're not the one doing the work see we've got the customer the customer uses the product the team uses works on that product every day making lots of decisions about how to prioritize things or what they should look like then we've got the product leader and way over here is the ceo see top-down decision-making just doesn't work they're too far away from the customer to understand them it takes too much time to go from the ceo to the team that means they're not responsive they're not adapting they're not thinking in order to go from the ordinary to the exceptional we need to change the way teams think an ordinary team will think about following the development process getting the work done on time meeting the specification if that's what they they're thinking about that's what they're focused on that's what they're going to do it's what we taught them to do a team with an exceptional product leader we'll be thinking about what is the customer need how can we help them how by helping our customer can we help our business grow how a team thinks matters so let me show you an example so this is a manufacturer and they make the market leading products for decking railing stairs and other outdoor items the amount that they know about substructures and stairs will blow your mind and that's why they're the top choice for contractors but they wanted to get in the market for the do-it-yourself diy builder so they hired a team to build a digital designer tool for them but the team didn't know anything about how to build anything that wasn't software they didn't know what kind of person does it themselves instead of hiring a contractor they didn't know what kind of support that diy builder would need to guide them through all the complex and expensive decisions about what needed to be in their design and their project what this team knew how to do was to learn really fast so they spent hours and hours with experts building scale models of decks they spent lots of time talking about railings i kid you not hours and hours and hours on railings they went out and they talked to diy builders they did prototypes and they showed them they made sure that every decision they were making on this project was to help that diy er have the confidence to take the project on have the guidance that they needed to do it well and by helping that customer they were going to help this company grow in the diy market see the way you think your mindset it matters it shapes and guides and frames the decisions we make every day the small ones and the large ones the research of carol dweck and others has taught us that it's not only possible to change someone's mindset to change a team's mindset an entire company's mindset you can change their performance exceptional product leaders change the way their teams think to focus them on solving problems of the customer and helping the business grow here's how i know i'm in the presence of an exceptional product leader within the first the first five minutes of talking to them about what they do they're going to tell me their customer story they always do see exceptional product leaders tell their customer story to every prospective new employee to every stakeholder to every investor and to their team every time that team is about to make a major decision they've done the work to have the clarity and the details about who their customer is and what we are trying to accomplish as a team and they need to say it over and over again to make sure their team understands it if i meet you within the first five minutes you don't tell me your customer story i start to wonder is that because storytelling is hard because i can definitely tell you that it's complicated and takes some practice or is it because you've gotten so busy in the day-to-day work of trying to make things happen that you started to forget who the customer is that it's been a while since you talked to one that you started to lose focus on the big goals and objectives we're trying to accomplish with our company and if the story is started to get fuzzy for you if you're not quite so sure what does that mean for your team what goes in one of these exceptional stories matters so let me tell you one about the common application if you or anyone in your family has applied to college in the last let's say 20 years they probably use the common application every year millions of high school seniors go online they choose the colleges and universities they want to apply to they enter their essays their data they get letters of recommendation and then they send it off hoping to get into colleges of their choice the mission of the common application is access equity and integrity in the college admissions process so when they started to figure out what do we do in mobile they were really thinking about their students in particular students like this one no one in her family has ever been to college she wants to be the first she doesn't have fancy coaches she doesn't have a well-equipped college counselor at her school she's got to keep up with her schoolwork extracurricular activities that will look good on the application and a job and maybe family commitments too she's got to do all of that while handling a complicated process of lots of different essays and recommendations and data points she needs to collect and submit on time don't you see what she's up against don't you want to help because that's what this team did and it guided every decision that they made about what to build when and how to build it see what goes in one of these exceptional stories has a couple of key hallmarks and i want you to know what they are the first is that an exceptional product leader creates a detailed picture of the customer among a sea of people i know which one is their customer they've created a picture that's clear they helped us understand what they're trying to do what they're up against and what they could achieve if things were just a little bit easier next they talk about how the market has continually failed to serve this customer how they don't understand their needs they don't see the opportunity they're not able to adapt or innovate which means the market is open for an organization or a company like ours to come in and do something special lastly they tell the team how the product is going to help they paint a picture of the future where the customer is thriving and achieving their goals where a company is serving the market and it's growing and healthy we're contributing to our community they paint this picture in such a way that the team is willing to commit to the work knowing full well that it's going to be complicated and it's going to be hard and absolutely nothing is guaranteed now i met a lot of exceptional product leaders are really ordinary product leaders who can do these three but the truly truly special can do one more and for most of us it's kind of scary they tell their team that they don't have all the answers most of us want to be seen at the leaders who have the brilliant ideas the great strategies who always have an answer when the team comes to us it's a lot harder to say that you don't know to say things like i know about our customer but not everything go find out i know the opportunity is there but not exactly how to take advantage of it let's go figure that out i know that things will change i know that we will get things wrong and when we do we'll figure it out together see what makes them truly magical and exceptional is that they both can paint a compelling vision of the future that we all want to get to but yet they leave plenty of space for their team to fill with their ideas their contribution their experience and what they learn from interacting with customers it's these two things together that make them so exceptional except it's not magic this is something that you can learn to do too having a high performing team making a successful product is possible you can figure out how to do this you can learn to do this and it will suck at first but you'll get better along the way and i promise you that it's worth it here's your first step start telling your story if you don't know who your customer is go look if you can't understand the market opportunity and uniquely identify what is available go find out create a compelling vision for your team and welcome them to contribute their ideas make it safe enough for them to tell you when you're being a dumbass tell your story to everyone you meet tell it all the time it will suck at first but it will get better the picture will become clear the team will be more effective you'll lead your team to something exceptional go make something great together [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 29,372

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Business, Design, Innovation, Leadership, Product design

Id: V1RiMIM8t0I

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020