How to use product vision for a daily morale boost.
Give teams a purpose and improve performance.
As a leader, you have an enormous responsibility to motivate staff and help fuel positive morale. A product leader is concerned with more than just the morale of the product managers who work for them but, more broadly, all the individuals working in product development, including designers, engineers, data scientists and product managers. The desired outcome is motivated cross-functional product squads inspired to achieve the product vision. This week's Confident Product Leader focuses on how to help teams feel their work has a purpose, regularly and explicitly linking OKRs, projects, epics and tasks to the product vision.
“Feels like being stuck on a treadmill running hard, going nowhere.”
Product managers, engineers and designers tell me they often need more motivation and clarification about the importance of their work. Too frequently, the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion - when the boss dictates) strikes, and they are told to deliver a feature. Still, the team does not understand why or believe it will be helpful for the customer. Often, the only context shared with the product engineering team is that an important customer must have the feature, and a mountain of cash depends upon it.
There may be a backdrop where the leadership team has to highlight a business objective, such as acquiring new business or reducing churn. However, for most product teams, the impact of building a new feature for one customer is difficult to reconcile with acquiring new customers (plural). The product manager will feel frustrated as they don’t understand the underlying problem the customer is suffering or the desired outcome they are expecting. Without this knowledge, how can the squad be sure they will deliver a solution that makes a difference?
Individuals in the squad need help managing their time and cannot make optimal compromises. All product development is full of significant and micro compromises ranging from architecture, code reuse, testing strategy, code flexibility, configurations, user interactions, error messages, user journey flow, etc. With an understanding of the direction of travel, individual contributors, such as engineers and designers, are forced to make the best guess at the ideal compromise or avoid any compromise. The latter is likely to significantly multiply the size of effort, time needed, and cost to deliver the feature. For the individual contributor, operating in the dark can impact morale, quickly becoming a doom spiral and causing stress and negativity. Teams in this situation often display one of three learned behaviours depending on the leadership reactions:
Heavily overestimate the effort for every user story, epic, or task to buy themselves protection from the chaos they expect will follow.
Demand overly detailed product specifications, turning engineers into order takers instead of problem solvers and accidentally killing innovation.
Commit to work and deadlines, with a team-wide acceptance that it will never be completed on time. Still, it's easier to tell leadership what they want to hear—resulting in disappointed salespeople and customers.
Sounds familiar? Regardless of the learned behaviour, at its worst, it will accumulate into a culture where the product engineering teams feel their worth is low, their work is unimportant, and staff retention becomes challenging.
In one organisation I worked with, a product manager said, “Working here feels like I am running hard on a treadmill going nowhere fast”.
I asked, “What do you want to feel instead?
They replied, “I would be happy if I felt I was making a small difference”.
Making a difference
The visible output from a product team is new, removed or improved features in a product. Now and then, it's an entirely new product, although it's made up of new features. Like the philosophical thought experience “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, does shipping features no one uses to make any difference?
The product vision should describe the desired experience of users and how it will impact their lives and organisations (not a list of features). Connecting feature development to who it helps and how it helps them transforms the work from an arbitrary task to a meaningful activity. Humans are primatively wired to exist in tribes and help one another. We all want to help each other. When we help others, we get a biological hit from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. Furthermore, it builds self-esteem, reinforcing a feeling of mastery and is in line with most people’s internal values. Mastery and purpose are two of the three critical ingredients for motivation, so connecting product vision to individual tasks has multiple benefits and rapid rewards.
Leaders must help teams connect their work to the bigger picture, which is about improving lives and helping people, not making invisible shareholders more wealthy.
When individuals feel a sense of purpose, the most mundane, tedious task can become meaningful and satisfying. Leaders who help individuals link their efforts to the bigger picture create positive and motivated cultures. This is expressed in the cliche example of a stone cutter being asked what he was doing with the response, “I am building a cathedral”, instead of “I am cutting stones into thousands of bricks, day in and day out”.
Positive and inspired morale is only half the win from connecting product teams to the product vision. Armed with the bigger picture, those compromise decisions can be made more confidently. This confidence will contribute to setting teams up for success and optimising the value created for the effort spent. The effort and time to deliver will be reduced.
Connecting teams to the bigger picture helps set teams up to make decisions without encouraging the HiPPO effect. In the right environment, which needs to be physiologically safe, teams with a clear purpose will deliver innovative solutions that make a difference to the customer and deliver the wow factor. Entire teams focused on how to help the customer solve their problems more easily, quickly, and with more significant impact will perform better than only the leadership or founder thinking about this.
The aspiration for all outcome leaders in product development is for teams to be happy because they are making a difference. The outcome habit of connecting teams' work to the product vision is simple and costs nothing but supports enormous results. Like all outcome habits, it is not a silver bullet that, on its own, will transform culture, but it is a crucial habit to practice.
Real-world example
A coaching client of mine, let's call her Kelly, is a VP of Product in a series A startup with four product managers collaboratively working in four cross-functional squads. Most of the squads were happy, good morale and productive, but one squad was definitely out of sorts.
The squad, with low morale, told me they were stuck doing endless integrations, which felt like a pointless and never-ending task. They explained how when they completed one integration, a new one would appear. The pressure felt high, and each integration was always wanted yesterday. It felt like a never-ending death march. The engineers said they were bored, and each integration was independently built with a lot of boilerplate code. They were worried their coding chops were getting stagnant. The VP of engineering had moved all the prized engineers as far away as possible from the integration work. It was seen as the sweatshop of product development.
The reality was integrations were vital to this B2B SaaS company's success. Strategically, integrations reduced friction, sped up onboarding, and broadened the obtainable market. The integrations were also crucial to future innovation. Having deeper data from the customer's domain opened up new opportunities to create value and improve the accuracy of the automation the product supported. The potential was even more significant if the integrations were two-way, not that any were today.
The product vision hinted at an experience where insight from Kelly's product would enhance the value created of tasks in the customers' ecosystem of applications, i.e. data from their app would increase the value from the workflow in other applications used by the customer. Through a business lens, this two-way integration would dramatically improve the product's stickiness and increase the subscription rate, directly contributing to ARR growth and increasing NRR, which would change the company valuation for their planned series B fundraiser. The integration team's work was crucial.
Kelly needed to unlock the potential of the integrations squad. First, she revised the product vision, which only hinted at the opportunity. She made it clear and concrete. She communicated this to create a catalyst for a mindset change in the integrations squad, but she knew they had a backlog of one-way integrations that simply had to be done.
Secondly, she shaped a specific story (not an agile user story) written with the integrations squad as the audience, and it connected their typical activity to the vision. She increased her time with the squad by dropping into their sprint planning and randomly appearing at their stand-up. Her only contribution was to tell a version of the story each time, making it relevant to the current workload. She celebrated customer feedback and quotes related directly to the integration effort. She helped the team see a connection between weak integration and high churn, meaning unhappy people the company had failed to help. Over a concentrated time, she started to see more positivity in the integration team morale, so this kicked in phase three of her plan.
Finally, she started to change some of her messaging. Instead of only connecting current tasks to the big picture, she began to join the team's existence to the currently unrealised aspects of the product vision. It took little time for the more positive team to start suggesting how they could work differently to create efficiencies so they would have time to tackle two-way integrations. This continued connection to the product vision permitted Kelly to challenge the team with aspirational OKRs, which, only one quarter ago, would have been laughed at by the team and Kelly's peers.
As a strong leader, Kelly deployed multiple tactics to transform this team. Still, one essential habit that prevails today is directly connecting the team's work and tasks to the product vision.
How to connect a team's work to the product vision.
Unsurprisingly, you need a product vision first. Ideally, your product vision expresses the experience the customers will enjoy rather than the details of features. You have to remind the team and repeatedly show them how their work connects to the product vision.
There are four key topics to communicate every time you help an individual or team connect their activity, tasks or objectives to the product vision to reinforce their purpose. This might be delivered as a couple of sentences in a meeting or on Slack, a few paragraphs in an email or thirty minutes of a presentation - it can be highly comprehensive or a brief reminder - however, the four points are always present.
Vision
Connection
Risk
Impact
Let's break each one down, starting with vision. Outcome leaders seek to reinforce mission control, not command control, so you must set the context with the vision. Ideally, this is a concise reminder of the product vision.
Next, you pick a specific aspect of the product vision, a particular user experience or customer KPI and connect it to the activity or objective being discussed. This must be done very specifically, with no broad brush and no ambiguity.
With the connection made, remind everyone how not achieving the activity or objective will impact progressing towards the vision. Focus this primarily on what the user will not experience. Finally, state clearly and concisely how this will support the business goals, not just the product vision, for example, ARR, churn rate, etc.
If the objective is to reduce integration delivery effort, an example might be,
Vision: “We want our customers to 10x their marketing return through more relevant and timely content. Our product should help a customer optimise ALL their content creation.”
Connection: “Anyone writing content in the broad range of applications they use should seamlessly enjoy our product assistance. Reducing the time it takes us to implement an integration from weeks to hours is crucial so we can help the customer in more their applications.”
Risk: “If we can’t reduce how long an integration takes, our customers will be left alone with no help in many content creation activities and will continue with average-performing content.”
Impact: “More integrations mean more traction and a stickier product. Our ARR and churn rate will improve.”
Or a more concise version of the same thing might be,
“We aim to help a customer optimise all their content creation, and reducing our integration lead time means we can help customers with more of their applications. Without this, customers will be left unassisted in more of their work. Getting this right will support our ARR and churn rate.”
This simple communication strategy is highly effective and will deliver results rapidly. You can practice this behaviour and make it a habit every day, possibly every meeting.
How do you know it’s working?
Great leaders connect individuals with the mission. A famous anecdote was in 1962 during the space race. President Kennedy was visiting NASA buildings and paused to ask a janitor what he was doing. The janitor replied, “I am working to put a man on the moon, Mr President”. The janitor was connected to the mission and was not merely cleaning the building. Instead, he was vitally contributing to NASA's endeavours at the time.
Teams will start to make the connection between their work and the purpose for you. They will ask questions that relate to the mission. They will start to justify decisions based on their relevance to the mission.
Common mistakes
As with other simple strategies, their simplicity makes them challenging to do. The biggest challenge is being concise in your communication. It can be much easier to say one hundred words instead of a couple.
Another common challenge is anxiety kicks in. You might feel that you said that yesterday or last week and feel self-conscious about repeating the message. As a leader, it is your job to repeat the message. Research shows that an individual needs to hear a message seven times before remembering it, which still means it can be forgotten or slipped into the back of a person's thoughts. By repeating the message, you keep it at the front of everyone's mind.
When trying to be more concise, it helps to be focused. It is tempting to go broad, cover edge cases, and make your message suitable for everyone. When the message is for everyone, it is heard by no one. Be specific. This makes your message relevant to an individual's experience and will foster a strong focus.
Top tips when getting started
If this does not come naturally to you, or you are struggling, try these tips to help:
Plan your message before the meeting. On a page, draw four boxes, one for each topic: Vision, Connection, Risk, Impact and write a few words (not sentences) in each.
Make one message about one item. You can pick a different aspect next time. Remember, your goal is not to drown the team in context but to give them purpose.
Data suggests that we forget 75% of what we hear in a training course within one week, so repeat yourself.
Consider, or better still, write down answers to the following questions to help you make this happen:
What is the smallest way to start this habit of explicitly linking vision to team or individual activity? For example, you might start in 1:1 meetings with your staff.
What existing behaviour or task can you connect this habit to? For example, you will prep this message when you prep for a 1:1 meeting. In a team meeting, when we track progress against an objective, I will connect the objective to the vision.
When will you reflect to consider how well you are doing this?
Finally, right now, commit - when will you start doing this? For example, the next meeting or tomorrow. Why not sooner?
If you have questions, please comment below or message me on LinkedIn (if we are not connected, just drop me an invite).
Further learning
You might enjoy watching the career analyst Dan Pink explore motivation in this TED talk. My e-learning hub has storytelling and active listening training to help you understand and empathise with your teams and stakeholders.
If you want more help, you can find out about product leader coaching with me at my website www.righttoleft.co.uk.