Why context and culture matter in leading with objectives
If you're familiar with Marty Cagan's work, you've heard the saying:
"Product Leaders assign teams problems to solve"
Marty elaborates on this in his latest book “Transformed”, reminding people that:
"To execute on the product strategy, the leaders need to ensure that each product team has one or two clear objectives they have been assigned, which spell out the problems they are being asked to solve"
It’s difficult to disagree with Marty. However, it’s not that simple…
In reality, the way leaders assign these objectives and what these are, depend highly on:
Cultural norms
Team seniority
Type of objective
Leader's competency
Even though Marty acknowledges the importance of context (thus, the principles versus a prescribed recipe), one challenge with his work is that it strives for simplicity.
On the one hand, this is great as it reaches more people and helps them grasp the high-level, very important, theory. The world would be a better place if more companies would try to improve in that direction.
But, on the other hand, it can cause a lot of pain and frustration because simple descriptions and recommendations are being taken literally, without being contextualized.
Blunder... Here’s why. Let’s start with culture.
1. Cultural norms
Imagine a product leader entering a meeting room with her team and starting:
"Alright team, I've defined the most important objectives for you to solve in the next quarter. I can discuss these problems if you have any questions. I'm looking forward to start brainstorming a few ideas with you on how to potentially solve them, hear your suggestions, and give some feedback!"
In the US, this meeting and initial tone of voice would be ok. Not a problem.
But how about in Scandinavia? Hmm, mixed feelings...
What about India, or China? Not so sure either.
You see, Scandinavian countries are extremely egalitarian. This means "the best boss is a facilitator among equals", as bestselling author Erin Meyer puts it in her book The Culture Map.
China and India, on the other hand, tend to be extremely hierarchical. Which means "the boss is a strong director who leads from the front".
That's the norm.
As Erin argues in her extensively well-researched book, “Yes, every individual is different. And yes, (...) you shouldn’t make assumptions about individual traits based on where a person comes from. But this doesn’t mean learning about cultural contexts is unnecessary.”
The reality is, chances are that if you're a Product Leader in a tech scaleup in Oslo, and you come to your team with a set-in-stone specific objective for them to solve - people could look at each other, seeking eye contact from their colleagues, and think:
"Has she decided on these already, or is this still up for discussion…??"
There’s a risk that it wouldn't be very socially acceptable if these goals were not up for discussion at all.
Because, well, that wouldn’t be the norm…
So, what would be a better way to assign these objectives if you were in Oslo or cozy Stavanger, surrounded by fjords?
"Alright guys, I drafted what I believe to be the most important objectives for us to solve in the next quarter. Let's discuss these. Tell me what you think, and what I am missing."
Please note a few things:
The leader brings a draft to the meeting. After all, she has a role to play. And her role is to lead. Providing a direction is needed. But also note that she's seeking feedback from the team. She's inviting discussion. She's facilitating. And she's most likely genuinely open for change.
The use of the word "us" versus "you" tends to fly better in Scandinavia as it reinforces the aspect of "facilitator among equals"
Do you see the nuance?
In this case, the intention is not to merely assign an objective for a team to solve.
As a leader, your goal is to make sure you learn about what your team thinks the direction should be, foster a healthy (and hopefully intense) debate, seek diversity in who’s speaking, be open to iterating your first proposal based on the feedback you got, and land on something that you’re confident in - as well as your team.
An important note: while you’re not making decisions by committee (you really shouldn't) and hoping to get 100% consensus, some discussion and being open to change is culturally expected in more egalitarian cultures, like Scandinavia or the Netherlands.
Contrarily, if you're leading a product team in India, please don't expect that you're going to have an intense discussion and feel deeply challenged as a leader in a very direct way - like a Swede would do effortlessly with some snus in his upper lip.
In fact, you'd be lucky if the team would openly challenge you - and in between the lines.
You see, in India or China, "disagreement and debate are seen as negative for the team or organization. Open confrontation is inappropriate and will break group harmony or negatively impact the relationship".
In some cultures, leaders are expected to simply have the answers (unfortunately).
There's even a significant difference within European countries, even though it's a small geographical area.
The truth is: in China, for example, hearing from your leader and direct manager say:
"I'm looking forward to start brainstorming a few ideas with you on how to potentially solve them, hear your suggestions, and give some feedback!"
could be eventually daunting and unexpected.
It could signal that you're about to evaluate them. Not a good feeling…
In fact, if you're an expat VP of Product in India, and you're having this exact meeting on Objectives with a Director of Product (who reports to you) and all her team is present in the room - everyone will most likely reserve themselves and let the Director do all the talking.
Why? Because India is quite hierarchical and top-down when it comes to decision-making. That’s the norm. Skipping levels is also not always acceptable… That goes both ways (the VP contacting the team directly and vice versa. You follow the hierarchy).
Again, cultural nuances, but with the potential to significantly impact how you assign teams problems to solve.
2. Team Seniority
Ok, same example:
"Alright team, I've defined the most important objectives for you to solve in the next quarter."
Now imagine the problems to solve in this case are:
Reduce order processing time
Significantly improve UI/UX of Product X
If the team is quite junior, especially the Product Manager, it might be beneficial for the objectives to be more specific. Some extra help prioritizing them is also key.
A junior PM may be unaware that reducing order processing time by automating it will likely impact Sales (easier to close deals), Customer Success (fewer complaints about delays), Marketing (a potential selling point for campaigns focused on efficiency), Finance (improved cash flow and reduced operational costs), and more.
Whereas improving the UX/UI may not be the biggest business priority - in case the team needs to make that trade-off.
Or is it that simple? How bad is the processing time, really? How far off from customers' expectations and other players?
And what's the business impact of improving the current user experience? How bad is it? For whom? Product X happens to be a B2B product, so should they improve the experience for the customer or the users?
Do you see the challenge?
A junior team may need some extra guidance and very clear context to make good decisions.
The specificity of the objective can help. As in, making a broad problem to solve more narrow based on how senior the team is.
Even though this is an option, I still prefer keeping them more open (careful: not fluffy) and investing even more time detailing and communicating the context and doubling down on coaching and unblocking, if needed.
This was something Hope Gurion and I discussed a while back in our conversation.
So, we’re talking about more junior teams now.
But the opposite is also interesting: a more senior team.
In that case, assigning objectives might be totally unnecessary in the first place…
With the right context available, a strong team should be totally capable of defining what the objectives should be. Not just the key results.
Christina Wodke (author of Radical Focus) and I recently discussed this on my podcast.
In such a case, the Product leader managing this team, would lean more on her coach hat (instead of manager) and provide feedback on what they’ve drafted. There might be a negotiation, but the whole thing wasn’t really an assignment.
It was much more fluid than that, and “bottom-up”.
3. Type of the Objective
Some objectives can lean more towards the ambitious side. Others are more conservative.
Some may come as high-integrity commitments trumping everything else you're doing, while others may be less critical and more high-level.
The way a leader assigns a high-integrity commitment like “Integrate with platform X by the end of the month” (an output) is very different than when she assigns the objective “Improve customer retention” (a classic problem to solve, framed as an outcome).
Let me explain.
High-integrity commitments usually require extra context - especially if you’re dealing with a senior team.
Why the urgency? Why are we dropping everything else to do this? Why this platform? Why the deadline? Who asked for this? Why?
Assigning these types of commitments also requires you to be mindful of the personalities in the room. You may want to have some extra 1:1s or conduct the conversations in a different way - so that you get a different type of buy-in from some specific people (you probably know who those are…)
Some out-of-the-blue high-integrity commitments are not fun to deal with, and could even be demotivating for some teams.
They should not be the norm. They should be the exception. This is very important to understand. But, in the real world, they do happen...
So imagine this: a product team is finally making significant progress with building a new product to reach a very specific outcome they had defined. Suddenly, they’re asked to shift their focus into building a search experience because Partner X asked to - and the CEO has agreed to deliver on this ASAP without consulting the team first.
Well, first of all, not ideal… But again, these things happen - whether we like it or not. In this case, the CEO might have felt that the company’s survival would depend on such a delivery. So, for the CEO, it was a no-brainer to just say yes! and get that contract signed.
But what happens in the next few days will put the product leader’s communication skills in check.
You see, such an extraordinary request requires extraordinary context, and extraordinary communication (the assigning part).
Why was this so business-critical all of a sudden? Why now? What options did the CEO have? What motivations? What was at stake, really? Why is this partner so crucial for the survival of our company? And so on.
Providing extra context to the team accompanying such a high-integrity commitment is important.
Not only because of the team's health and happiness. But also because it’s valuable context on real business constraints that the team should be aware of, which should also help them solve that particular problem in a better way.
Yet again, context will shift how you approach setting and assigning objectives.
4. Leader's current competency
What about if the leader assigning the objectives is not yet competent to do so?
We're not in the game of merely setting objectives (and assigning them). We want the right ones. And that requires a lot of work, competency, and collaboration.
Defining which problems to solve requires, first and foremost, insight. It requires you to say no to many other bets that may sound equally interesting.
Strategy should be painful.
In order to make an informed bet, you must have a product vision and strategy in place, be up to speed with your business needs, customers' pains, industry and domain, board motivations, overall company strategy, etc, etc.
In the ideal world (and what some books would describe), this perfect product leader is up to speed on all these things, is open for input yet very confident in a certain path, is able to navigate the organization effortlessly to bring insights from every direction, is a visionary (or at least, an excellent facilitator to bring the Founders' visions to paper), is business-savvy and fully understands her business constraints and needs, and so much more.
But in reality, we're all humans and it can take time to get to this level.
Not to talk about the system surrounding these leaders, and preventing them from even doing this job well or hindering them from becoming the great leaders they aspire to be.
When a Product Leader is not yet up to speed (there might be several reasons for this), expecting them to define and "assign objectives to teams" can seem unrealistic - and even dangerous.
When this is the case, the leader must play more of a facilitator role and rely more heavily on the expertise and judgment of the team.
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Sometimes, things sound straightforward and simple. But in reality, it depends - and it’s messy.