Randy Silver: The conversations that create impactful products

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:04]:
Randy, my friend, welcome to the show.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:08]:
It's great to be with you. How you doing?

Randy Silver [00:01:09]:
I'm doing all right. Thanks for the invite.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:12]:
Absolutely. I always enjoy our time together. One of the things I wanted to start off this conversation know, I think you have one of the more interesting backgrounds of any of the product people I've met. Not that there is a typical product background, but I believe you were a music journalist for quite a while, right?

Randy Silver [00:01:27]:
I was. And I know so many people who were musicians or djs and other stuff before getting into this. But yeah, I was on the other side of it. I came out of school with a degree in an arts degree in biology and journalism and somehow used that to become a music journalist for about ten years.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:44]:
Right on. What kind of music were you covering?

Randy Silver [00:01:46]:
I did everything except for blues and classical and jazz. Really? I was Amazon's first hip hop and children's music editor.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:55]:
Okay.

Randy Silver [00:01:55]:
I did lots of rock and indie stuff, did folk, I did alternative country, I did dance. I had a lot of fun.

Andrew Skotzko [00:02:02]:
That does sound fun. So I'm curious, do you have affinity for all those different genres or how do you translate your ability to critique that many genres? Because I know two genres, not twelve.

Randy Silver [00:02:13]:
I'm not going to say I'm an expert in all of them. I think actually it's one of the things that got me into doing this and the weird transition from music to product. Part of it was when I was asked to be Amazon's hip hop editor. My knowledge was an affinity, not a deep knowledge. I may not have been the best person they ever hired for that role, but what I was really good at was hiring other people and helping to make prioritization decisions about what we should cover, listening to them, taking recommendations. So one of the things I'm proudest of from that part of my career is somebody wrote into Amazon's customer service saying, hey, I'd love to write for you guys. They put him in touch with me. Turned out he went to my high school and so some nepotism there, but he had some quality stuff.

Randy Silver [00:03:01]:
And I said, yeah, why not? I'll give you a try. And that led to more and more and more. And I'm not sure where he is now. I've lost track him. But for a while he was one of the lead music writers for the New York Times.

Andrew Skotzko [00:03:11]:
Wow.

Randy Silver [00:03:11]:
And I gave him his first paying gig. So it's that kind of thing that I really enjoyed and I was able to identify with our customers. Amazon in the late ninety s, the profile of their hip hop buyer was not someone who was a lot more knowledgeable than I was.

Andrew Skotzko [00:03:29]:
That makes a lot of sense. It's really interesting just even hearing that little vignette because in the time that you and I have known each other, a couple of themes that have stood out to me very strongly about you already show up just in that story from way back then, which is like, you're very community oriented, you're very relational, and you're really good at communicating with people. And those are all things that I think are very great qualities that you bring to the product space. But it's just so interesting to hear that. That just seems like that's part of how you roll and how you always have.

Randy Silver [00:04:00]:
Well, to be honest, I was an okay writer, but I think I was a pretty good editor. I was good at assigning people to things that I thought they'd be a good match for. And I was good at working with the writers, the other editors, the designers, the developers, helping them all put stuff together that we design out different stories, they'd work on different bits and they would all come together. And we tried to make something into a cohesive whole that greater than the sum of its parts and was trying to delight our customers, our users, our readers. And same thing when I was working at magazines and in print. Same thing when I was doing it for Amazon. And I realized as my career went on, I think I still do the same job. It's not really any different from that perspective.

Randy Silver [00:04:45]:
It's how do you get a whole bunch of people to work better together to create something that's delightful and useful and of interest to customers? Yeah, same thing, different toys, different techniques, but same attitude.

Andrew Skotzko [00:04:57]:
I love what you're pointing out here because for me, that really is pointing at something that I think isn't talked about that much in our space. Like, we talk a lot about the craft of product management. Right? Especially when you're the product manager, you're the PM, you're owning some feature set or perhaps even a whole product or whatever your scope may be. What we don't talk about very much is product editing. And that aspect as you move into higher, little more senior roles and you're no longer necessarily the front line of it, but it's not really talked about too much. So I'm curious, when you think about that, how did your time as a journalistic editor shape your work as a product editor?

Randy Silver [00:05:38]:
Yeah, I think it's not just journalism. I've seen this in other places, too. There's a guy, I'm probably going to butcher his name, the pronunciation of his name. It's Javier Grillo Marwa. And he is a showrunner out in LA. He worked on lost, he worked on Dark Crystal, a bunch of other shows, and he put out this free 25 page pDF and I'll give you the link later. It's called the eleven laws of showrunning. And this is one of my bibles.

Randy Silver [00:06:07]:
I absolutely love this because everything he does in developing a tv show and trying to tell people how to be a good showrunner is pretty much the same thing we do in product. The biggest difference is they make a story decision and they have to support the decisions that they made, but they don't have to support the legacy code. So there's not so much of the same kind of technical debt. They have story and decision debt, but not the same level of technical debt that we might have. They don't have to maintain it in the same way, but all these other things. Make decisions early and often. Know what your show is and communicate it regularly. Expect varying levels of competence from people.

Randy Silver [00:06:48]:
All these other things, these eleven laws, they're so relevant to what we do. And he says it better than I do, so I'll just reference him.

Andrew Skotzko [00:06:56]:
Yeah, I remember when you first told me about that. I went and I read it a couple of months ago and actually, it's funny, I have it teed up on my iPad to read tonight anyway, so I'm so glad that you brought this up again. And it occurred to me one of the things that also we talk about a lot is that product management is a role with high responsibility and low authority. Right. We're responsible for a lot, but we do not have tons of formal power. Is that different in these other editing spaces you're talking about, whether it's journalism or showrunning or whatever, it occurs to me that a showrunner, if you're an executive producer on a tv show or something, you'd probably have a lot of power.

Randy Silver [00:07:34]:
Yeah. In tv I think you might do. But think about if you're the person who wrote the script for a film, you're generally out of the room by the time they start production. True, tv is a little bit different, but there's a lot going on there. I think ultimately what it comes down to is if you don't own PNL or have some input into it, then you're not really all that respected for these things. You're just seen as a cost center and not a profit center, no matter how good your ideas are, no matter what you're working on. So the real challenge is the language we speak is one around costs. And how do you change the perception? How do you communicate and have a better relationship with the rest of the business to be a real partner rather than a client or a cost center or a service center within the business?

Andrew Skotzko [00:08:23]:
100%. It's funny, this is very relevant to a topic you and I were talking about last week in an article that I'm about to put out. Probably by the time this episode releases, it'll be live. So we'll link to all this stuff in the show notes. But yeah, I cannot agree with you more strongly. If the listener can see me, I'm nodding like a bobblehead here. But yeah, it's this idea that I guess the way I think about it is we love to talk about. It's like we want all the freedom with none of the we.

Andrew Skotzko [00:08:52]:
We've been talking about empowerment for know, at least four years since Josh Seiden published his book outcomes over know. We've been chanting that like this sort of sacred mantra. And then when sometimes the accountability piece comes around, we don't like it so much and we're like, oh, wait, I have to be accountable for revenue impact or roi or so like, wait, what?

Randy Silver [00:09:12]:
I think sometimes the frustration is you see something, you see an opportunity. You're a product manager for an area, or you're head of product for a product or a piece of something. And you spend all day in it, you know every single thing that's wrong with it, you know every single opportunity to squeeze more usage, more revenue, more, to make it better. And so you have the list of things that are going to get you. Let's make up a number. If I invest the next month or two in this, I'm going to make us an extra 5 million this year. And that's brilliant. Think about the bonus you're going to get for bumping up revenue for 5 million.

Randy Silver [00:09:53]:
What you don't know is the team down the hall needs the same amount of effort, the same amount of resources. I hate calling people resources, but you know what I mean. The same amount of investment and their idea is going to generate 50 million. And you feel bad when they're chosen, they get supported instead of you because it's almost like an insult to you that they got chosen. And your ideas, no one sees your genius and what your team generates. And the problem is we're not working together very well. We should be clubbing up with them on how do we make that 50 million opportunity work? How can we contribute to that? And after we finish all the 50 million opportunities, then we should get the 5 million opportunities done. Obviously this is based on effort and all kinds of other stuff, but all things being equal, I'd rather do the 50,000,001 than the 5,000,001 if I'm the CFO, if I'm the CEO.

Randy Silver [00:10:47]:
And if you were sitting in a different seat, so would you.

Andrew Skotzko [00:10:50]:
Exactly. Yeah. One of the things that you and I were speaking about recently, that is top of mind for me in this is language, right? We were talking about how we have to change our language. We love our jargon in product. We love it. It's like, guess what? No one cares. They do not care. Like, we have to speak the language of business.

Andrew Skotzko [00:11:07]:
Like, how about ROI, profit, market share, revenue, expected value. Right. If we can't actually articulate in a measurable way the impact of what we're doing, can we really complain that much about not getting a seat at the table? Honestly?

Randy Silver [00:11:26]:
Yeah. Part of the problem with this is some of that language that business uses is just as. Actually, let me ask, do you mind if I curse on this or no?

Andrew Skotzko [00:11:36]:
Oh, fire away.

Randy Silver [00:11:37]:
Okay, so some of the language that we use in business is also bullshit. Totally. We say some of those terms about expected revenue, expected value, things like that. And a lot of times that's just made up on a spreadsheet. No one really knows. It's the illusion of control that people are going for. And we spend all our time doing experimentation and discovery and things like that to try and nail it down and try and reduce the losses, reduce the problems that we're going to have along the way. There are actually terms that people in other parts of the business use to do this.

Randy Silver [00:12:12]:
Georgie Smallwood, who's at Moonpig these days, she had this great line at the mind, the product leadership meetup a couple weeks back, or a couple months back now, where she talked about she was working with a group of people, and she had convinced them that discovery was really worth doing, and they had made time for her and the team to do it. And that lasted for about 20 minutes. And then they started saying, why aren't you just getting on with it? Why aren't you doing stuff? And she realized, even though she'd spent a lot of time and invested in explaining what discovery was and why it was important, they didn't get it. So she stopped saying discovery, and she started saying, due diligence.

Andrew Skotzko [00:12:49]:
I love it.

Randy Silver [00:12:49]:
And there's no difference, really, between product due diligence and product discovery. It's just they would never move forward on any project without doing their due diligence.

Andrew Skotzko [00:13:00]:
Exactly.

Randy Silver [00:13:01]:
As soon as she starts speaking their language, they go, oh, okay, it's that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:13:06]:
Oh, I get. Yeah, right. Because language is a hook into mental models. And so if we are not hooking into the mental models of our peers and our collaborators and other parts of the business. Come on. Of course we need to meet them where they are. I think it's the simplest way to say it, right? If they speak a different language, guess what? In product, we're always translators anyway, so.

Randy Silver [00:13:25]:
It'S changing the perception of you as a call center, of you as a service, as you as the other, or an impediment to getting things done, to being a partner and being someone that they really trust.

Andrew Skotzko [00:13:38]:
Yeah. No, I'm so glad we're going here because we're going to link to all this in the show notes, but you gave a great talk at mind the product recently about sort of this sort of four p framework you had of priorities, people, process, but then really, it's about perception. So I'd love you to just tee that up briefly, and then let's keep exploring and see where this takes us.

Randy Silver [00:13:54]:
Yeah. And thank you, by the way. So, for ages and ages, I thought I was good at my job because I was able to understand what are the priorities that we should be working on and try and ensure that we're only working on the things that were really important and not working on the things that weren't. So we were able know, as John Cutler says, we're able to limit our work in progress. We were able to concentrate and work on things, and not perfectly, but I knew what we should be doing most of the time. And then I like to think I'm pretty good with people. And I hired some good people, I empowered people, I worked with them well. I didn't just empower them by letting them be autonomous, I let them be autonomous within boundaries.

Randy Silver [00:14:36]:
They knew what their limits were. They knew how to communicate and collaborate with other people. We tried to create an environment where the teams could succeed, and so that was working pretty well. And then we went to work on our processes, because there's nothing worse than a team that knows what's supposed to do, has all the right people, has all the right possibilities for it, and then is stuck doing just so much admin that they don't actually get anything out the door. So understand what you do, get the right people and make sure that they have the ability to ship value. And for the longest time, I thought I was really good at my job because I did those three things and I kept running into the same brick wall over and over and over again. And it took me a long time to realize that there is a fourth thing. It's that the fourth p of perception.

Randy Silver [00:15:21]:
And this one's fundamental, this one underpins everything else. And it's if your partners, whether they're other product teams, whether they're your boss or a stakeholder, whether it's sales or marketing or legal, it doesn't matter who it is. If they don't agree that you're working on the right things or that you've got the right people, that you're only as good as the weakest person on your team as far as they're concerned, if they don't agree that the processes you're doing are adding value to them, then it doesn't matter. You've got to find a way to make sure that you're working, not just the right way. According to our books, and again, at the MTP leadership, Matt Lemay had a great line about it doesn't matter if you do it by the book, grow the fuck up and do the job that your job is to deliver value, period. To help the company be more successful. For whatever definition of success you're going to have, whether it's usage, whether it's revenue, whatever it is, that is your job. If you aren't doing that.

Randy Silver [00:16:20]:
It does not matter.

Andrew Skotzko [00:16:22]:
Bingo. Yeah. No, I can't agree more strongly. And that echoes everything I wrote in that piece that we were just talking about. It's funny, I actually had a line in there that I think I cut from an early draft that literally just said, grow the fuck up. Like, stop whining. Grow the fuck up. Yeah.

Andrew Skotzko [00:16:39]:
No, I love what you're pointing to because it also reminds me of our mutual friend Alan Albert, who is brilliant at value discovery and value based pricing. And this thing is like, in all of our spreadsheets and all of our analytical approaches to what we do and all that stuff like you were saying earlier about expected value or fill in your business term here we forget that at the end of the day, value is basically subjective, and if it is not perceived, it literally does not exist for that person, for the perceiver. Right. Two people can perceive the same shared, quote, unquote, reality in utterly different ways, and therefore it doesn't exist in their reality. And it's like we just forget that because we're too close to it.

Randy Silver [00:17:21]:
I think, yeah, we get really lost in the weeds on things all the time. And this is the thing. Being able to step back is hard. We're so busy all the time, people don't like to share information, finding a way to build those relationships, to get that understanding, to really become, as I keep saying, a trusted partner at the right levels. It's hard work.

Andrew Skotzko [00:17:45]:
Yeah, this stuff is not easy. It's like this idea that if you want to oversimplify it a little bit, it's like, well, sometimes we perceive these partners who are, let's say, skeptical of the value of product. Sometimes they're fair. It's fair that they're skeptical because they're not perceiving the value. And it's like, well, if that's there, we can almost oversimplify to say there's one of two things happening. Either a, they are not perceiving the value that we are actually creating, in which case this is like a communications and perception problem, or b, we're actually not creating that much value. And we need, like, neither of these is acceptable. And so it's like, whichever one it is, we got to deal with that.

Randy Silver [00:18:24]:
Rich Mironov has a really good story about how, when he goes into companies, if sales is selling the wrong thing, if they're coming in with requirements that don't align to the know, they're trying to turn things into a feature factory. Just give us this and we can close this sale. Kind of thing. First thing he does is he pulls their bonus measures and takes a look at that. And if what sales is trying to do is generate short term revenue deals of any kind, but not what the company has agreed is the long term plan of what the ideal customer profile is of what they're trying to sell, then he sits down with the CEO and rewrites the bonusable measures for the sales team. I mean, obviously this is an ideal situation. Rich is great. He's done this stuff a lot over the years.

Randy Silver [00:19:10]:
You can't do that when your company is in existential crisis mode and just needs the next deal to make payroll in a couple of months.

Andrew Skotzko [00:19:16]:
Right.

Randy Silver [00:19:17]:
Obviously there's always an it depends kind of answer on this stuff, but if you've got a healthy enough Runway, if you're trying to do the right thing, if everyone's agreed to go to the next level, this is the kind of stuff you have to do as a grown up, 100%.

Andrew Skotzko [00:19:30]:
Yeah, I remember when he shared that with me when I had him on the show, and I loved that move. And it's also like, well, looking at their incentive structures and what they get commission on, it's like, well, if they're getting commission on services revenue, well, guess what? We're going to end up with a lot of customization and work. That is not the kind of product work we want, and it's going to destroy us over time, and it's kind of our own fault. So we have to take that hard look in the mirror. So I want to go a little bit deeper here, though. Randy, talk to me about. So let's say we've got people, and I think this is reasonably common out there. We've got folks who are, they're doing good work.

Andrew Skotzko [00:20:05]:
They really are setting good priorities. They got good people on the team, they're doing a good process. All those first three things, and yet this problem remains so very likely. It is a perception problem. What do we do about it?

Randy Silver [00:20:17]:
Glad you asked. Sorry. Feel very cheesy. But I'm going to do the self promo thing for a moment. So I put together a canvas for the.

Andrew Skotzko [00:20:26]:
Please.

Randy Silver [00:20:27]:
I know. So I put together a canvas for this. It's called the product development, the product experience canvas. And the idea here is, it's worth doing it yourself. It's got those four boxes on there of priorities, people, process and perception with some trigger questions for you. And it's worth sitting down and doing by yourself. It's a good exercise to spend 15 minutes every once in a while looking at this and saying what's holding us back? Do I actually have good answers to these things? Do I know what's going on? And just pick one or two things that feel like they're holding you back. It's worth doing it with your team at retros every once in a while, but it's also worth doing it with your stakeholders.

Randy Silver [00:21:10]:
Sometimes where I found this to be the best value for me is there are times where I've had partners in the company that I did not get on with. We did not agree on things. It was holding the team back because our functions weren't working well together. And try as I might, I couldn't sort it out. It wasn't something that was working using my normal techniques. Bringing this approach changes it, because now I'm not talking to the stakeholder and arguing back and forth with them about things. We're trying to put something down on paper and say, what is it that you see? What is it that I see? What is it that we both see that is causing problems? What is it that we are actually trying to get to? And let's make sure that then we talk about how do we work together to do that. It's not always going to be easy.

Randy Silver [00:21:58]:
Sometimes you might need a third party to get involved. If you and your CTO, for example, aren't getting on, then maybe you need a CEO, CFO, COO, somebody like that to come in or coach or facilitators to come in and help facilitate the conversation. It's not always going to be easy. We don't choose the people we work with all the time. That's why they pay us. But it's just a framework for having the right discussion, making sure that you've got something down on paper that you can agree to work on together and say right over the next couple of months, this is the problem we want to solve. This is what we want to commit to, whether it's us directly, getting our teams to do it, getting other people involved together. But we're going to try and make this better.

Randy Silver [00:22:44]:
And having that conversation makes a massive difference. You're heard, they're heard more importantly, and you hear them and you've got a commitment from them of what it is that they want to be fixed. It's not always going to be easy. It's not always going to be perfect. Not everyone is perfect and honest, and we're not always great at these conversations. But it's better than what I was doing before.

Andrew Skotzko [00:23:08]:
It's using our empathy. If somebody said about a customer, right? If a PM on our team or an engineer said about the customer, they just don't get it. They just don't get it. You'd be like, okay, that's not an acceptable answer. It's not their job to get. It's our job to make it obvious for them and intuitive for them. It's like, well, what if we held ourselves to that same standard with everyone else in our company, right? What if it should be as easy for our CFO or for sales to understand the value of what we're doing as it is for a customer to use the product and get the value they want from it? So I love this idea of taking an empathetic approach and kind of getting out of our own little orbit.

Randy Silver [00:23:48]:
I've had a few clients lately where I've been running discovery courses with them, and not everyone is customer facing. Not everyone is a product manager. But the principles of discovery work regardless. And one of the things that we've talked about, Teresa Torres is as smart a person as it comes to with this, but all of her techniques work just as well on internal customers, on your internal stakeholders. There's nothing wrong with trying to sit down and do motivation mapping about them, making sure you understand what it is they're trying to do, what they want, making sure you talk to them at least once a week. All of those things are just as valid and just as useful.

Andrew Skotzko [00:24:28]:
One of the things I've noticed as well, whether it's Teresa's approach or Itamar's with the evidence guided book, any of these all, we're all using different language to kind of point at the same principles. One of the things that I found is that everybody, not everybody, almost everybody, responds to empathy and curiosity, and most people are far more reasonable and rational than we want to give them credit for when we're upset. And so if we actually invite them into a conversation that's a little more evidence based, they're often willing to play ball with that. If we do that from a stance of curiosity and empathy.

Randy Silver [00:25:02]:
Yeah. One of the techniques I like the most is if you're having trouble with people, or even better, when you first go into a company or a team or an area, sit down with all the stakeholders and do an informational interview and explain to them, this is informational from an Udalu perspective, I want to orient myself, so I need certain information from all of you. I'm going to do the same interview with questionnaire with all of you. And one of them is, what is it we're trying to do here? What is the definition of success? What is your bonus based on things like that? What do you see as the biggest problems right now? Asking those questions. Because if you find out that you're getting totally different answers from people who are stakeholders, from people who are partners, then you've got a totally different problem. It's not just figuring out who to make happy, it's figuring out how are you going to reconcile this. It's whether you may be going to someone higher up the food chain than you to say, we've got this problem. We need a bit of a workshop.

Randy Silver [00:26:01]:
We need to get everyone together to agree on what we're trying to do. It might be just saying, okay, maybe the person there before you or the way the environment was set up was lots of one to one conversations. Maybe it's just bring them all into a room together and saying, this is where we are right now. This is a proposed pathway, but I want to hear all your thoughts together on it. There's lots of things you can do to make it obvious why decisions are being made. Solicit other people's involvement and try and change the environment and the way things are working so that you can have better conversations. Stations.

Andrew Skotzko [00:26:40]:
Yeah, I want to talk more about changing the environment here in just a second, but really quick, just to give people a few more actionable handles on that. What else would you ask in that informational interview? Because I think it's a brilliant technique.

Randy Silver [00:26:49]:
I've actually got a sheet on this one as well. I'll give you the link later on. But yeah, I specifically ask questions about what is it that they're working on right now. What are the biggest problems that they see at the moment. What is their current goal for their team? What is their goal? And ask of my team. Actually, one of the best questions that came up from someone else was, we have that Colombo thing of you always at the end of an interview, ask, is there anything else I should have asked you? What else should I know? And this great person, Kit said, you should ask me how I like to be communicated with. And I loved that. And she was absolutely right.

Randy Silver [00:27:32]:
She had just come from one company since taking over something else. They were using archaic systems that she hated. Said just whatsapp me, just slack me or WhatsApp me. I won't respond to anything else very well. That's the best way to get me. I really appreciate you communicating with me that way. Love it and things like that. Or how often do you want to be communicated with what kind of decisions? Do you want to be involved with things like that? Is it really valuable? We get our communication tone wrong with people all the time.

Randy Silver [00:28:01]:
Just asking them makes a big difference, especially at the beginning of a relationship.

Andrew Skotzko [00:28:05]:
Oh, 100%. It actually really reminds me of, there was a great article years ago, I think it was on the first round blog. I remember doing this. It was like the indispensable document every manager needs. It was basically saying like, hey, let's say you just got into a new role. Write like a one sheet or a one pager on yourself that you can give to the people you work with. And it's like everything they need to know about working well with you. Right? What are your communication preferences? How do you like feedback? Where are your sensitivities so they can be responsible about that? What are you most worried about? Just kind of all this essential stuff that you would love to know about somebody you're really trying to work well with.

Andrew Skotzko [00:28:41]:
And it's like, you can lead with that and open that door. And if you show someone a document it like that, I think most people will probably respond really well and offer back a lot of the similar information which you also want.

Randy Silver [00:28:51]:
Yeah, I love the manager readmes.

Andrew Skotzko [00:28:54]:
Thank you.

Randy Silver [00:28:58]:
That's why I've heard it called before. And we actually talked to Diana Stepner last night exactly about this, about people first, leadership and how to do that. And manager readmes came up from her, too. There is a bit of an issue I've seen sometimes with it, where it can be seen as a bit presumptuous when you just hand someone else and say, this is how you need to act with me. So I would always lead by asking them first and then following up with my readme afterwards, or figuring out, is it best to just hand them a document or to talk them through it. But the act of sitting down and writing yourself is really useful because it tells you how you want to communicate it to other people.

Andrew Skotzko [00:29:42]:
Just like anything else, the act of writing itself is thinking. It clarifies how we think about things, helps us understand ourselves better, which is only going to help us work better with our peers. It also reminds me of, I'm looking at this book on my shelf, my bookshelf right over here that I read so many years ago. But it was actually really helpful. It was called mastering project management. And it's like in product land, we're very squeamish about ever being considered like a project manager. But it's like, you know what? That is a key part of everything. We do.

Andrew Skotzko [00:30:11]:
We got to get stuff done. And I remember in that book, the most useful thing I got from that book was there's a template in there for what he calls a roles and responsibilities conversation. And it's been over the years, like, one of the single most useful things that has ever helped any difficult work relationship is you just sit down with this person and you just draw three columns on a whiteboard or miro or whatever, and you just talk about it. You just say, okay, great. Hey, I just want to get clear, so we're clear here with each other. What am I responsible for? What are you responsible for? And what do we have to share responsibility for? And just because I'm responsible for something doesn't mean you don't have input or say on it and vice versa. But it means I've got, at the end of the day, it's on me, and it almost doesn't matter. I find where things end up in those columns.

Andrew Skotzko [00:31:01]:
What does matter the most is that you have the conversation and make it explicit.

Randy Silver [00:31:05]:
Yes. Every tool that I use, every tool that I come up with or recommend is always in service of. How do we have better conversations with people that will clear up as product people? We don't do much. I mean, we do a ton, but we aren't responsible for actually producing something ourselves by ourselves. I think the only thing we're really responsible for is creating better environments, creating better understanding, and having better conversations. I'm going to reference three people in a row. I love giving credit to other people, but so much of what I do is referencing other people. So let's see.

Randy Silver [00:31:44]:
Wonderful product person here in the UK named Monica Turska. When I asked her to describe what is it that product managers do? What is it that we actually do? I always had a terrible, very flippant answer that my wife liked, which is, I go to meetings so other people get work done. Okay. Which is kind of true functionally, but it's flippant. It's not very helpful. It's not very useful. Monica's line is so much better, and I use hers now, is we help people make better decisions faster. Yep, sometimes we make them, but sometimes, a lot of times, we're facilitating it.

Randy Silver [00:32:17]:
And to have those conversations. The next one I want to talk is Christina Wodtke also has some really good stuff in her last book about a team, charter team, canvas, roles and responsibilities, all those kinds of things. I love the stuff that she's got. And a guy over here in the UK, again, Roman pickler, if you know him. Roman's got something on his site in his resources, a decision making guide. And it's a little more specific about product management than I like. But I love the idea of it's helping people to remember. Sometimes you can make a decision and then inform people.

Randy Silver [00:32:50]:
Sometimes you need a unanimous consent in advance. Sometimes you need informed consent. But think about the type of decision that you're empowered to when you have a decision coming up. Is this one you're empowered to make? Is this someone one that you have to get unanimous consent, majority consent, informed consent, things like that. It's really useful as a flowchart to just remember sometimes you can do this stuff, or sometimes you need to be really careful and have those in depth consultations first.

Andrew Skotzko [00:33:19]:
No, I love that we will link to all that stuff in the show notes, including the conversation I had with Christina on this podcast a long time ago. She was one of the first guests I had on. She was very gracious with her time when this show was just a little infant. No, I really love what you're pointing at. It's something I've been thinking a lot about, actually. A recent episode on this show was with a wonderful coach named Pam Fox Rollin, and she's an executive coach, does a lot of work in Silicon Valley. She and her partners recently put out a book called Growing Groups into teams, and it's a fantastic book on leadership.

Randy Silver [00:33:49]:
Love it.

Andrew Skotzko [00:33:49]:
Highly recommend it. And we'll link to all the stuff in the show notes. But one of my favorite line of that entire book, and it so resonated with me, and when I got a chance to talk to her about it, she's like, yes. That's the core of it, was this answer to the question of what is it that leaders do? Right? That's an old question, and there's been many cuts at that question over the years. And my new favorite answer comes out of their book, and that is that leaders build futures that matter through conversations.

Randy Silver [00:34:17]:
I like that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:34:18]:
And I was like, oh, man, that is so good. And then when I started to map that into product, I'm like, well, what does it then product leaders do? I'm like, well, we build products that matter through conversations because we have to talk to all these people to build a product and get them to build a product that matters, to build a future that matters. And we have to do it through conversations. So I love what you're pointing out here with the decisions and the discussions. It's really resonating for me.

Randy Silver [00:34:41]:
Yeah, I don't think that I do anything else at this point. I mean, whether it's communities or advisory work or anything else, I have conversations with people to try and help them have better conversations with other people, or I facilitate conversations for them because it's really difficult for people to change relationships with others if they have to be both a facilitator and a participant. So sometimes bringing in an external facilitator, whether it's someone in your company or someone external, it's a really valuable thing. It makes a big difference. And sometimes it's the only way to change the conversation or to change the relationship.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:19]:
Yeah, I've seen that as well, because in some of the advisory work I've done with clients, half the time I'm like, wow, what is it I'm actually doing here? And sometimes I'm just holding a frame and stewarding a conversation along because they can't, because they're too in the conversation. And it can be amazing that that's the thing that makes the difference. But I want to pivot here really quick and go a little bit deeper into this idea of changing the environment. It's something we were touching on a little bit earlier. And we talk about, think about culture change. Environment change is sort of a notoriously hard thing, or at least it's perceived that way. How do you think about it?

Randy Silver [00:35:51]:
I think recently I've come to the realization that every engagement I have because I'm not doing line product management anymore, because I'm either doing leadership or coaching and advisory with leadership, or if I'm coaching, even if I'm coaching and advising individual product managers. But what I've come to realize is every project, no matter what everyone else thinks it is, is a transformation project. Product people are transformation managers. We're change agents by definition, because we're brought into a company, even if they have good innovation processes, good product processes. We're being asked to fundamentally change the product that there is, to add new features, to change the way it works, to take Away old features, which is both shipping code, but it's also changing behaviors within the company. It's changing the way that the operational works. The other side of it is a lot of times we're also being asked to change how things are delivered, the process of going to market and rolling it out as well. It's not enough to just put code into production that doesn't deliver value.

Randy Silver [00:37:00]:
Getting sales, getting marketing, getting support, getting everyone else on side to really understand this is a critical part of the job. So what you're doing is change management or transformation all the time. Years ago at one of the mind the product conferences, they had someone in who asked everyone to raise their hand, say, how many of you are in sales? And like two people raised their hand, and she's wrong, you're all in sales. And I've been to other seminars that say that, and I don't like that framing of it. I totally get the message. A lot of our job is convincing people, and there are amazing sales techniques that we really should learn that are of incredible value. I don't want to think I'm in sales, though. I want to stay in product and advisory in the areas I'm doing.

Randy Silver [00:37:46]:
I know I'm selling myself, selling my services, selling my company all the time, but I like to think of it as more of change and transformation management. And that way I'm a partner rather than. And the best salespeople are partners as well. And tars and feathers people to say sales is slimy and evil. They're not. They can be. But I've met some terrible slimy product managers and delivery managers and engineering managers too. No one has a monopoly on being on the side of the angels.

Andrew Skotzko [00:38:14]:
That's a nicer way to say it than I was going to say it, but I like your way. Yeah, no, that's really well said. So if we take this as a given that we are all in product change agents, catalysts, call it whatever you want to call it, how do we actually do it? Because it is a hard thing. And I know we've been speaking about perception, so that's clearly a piece of it. But to make this a little more tactical for people, how should we think about actually approaching this in our work, especially assume we're stepping into a new role, for example.

Randy Silver [00:38:45]:
Yeah, I think it comes back down to a couple of things. Perception and empathy are really the key things. What do people really want? And working with them to help build the trust, getting yourself onto the positive side of the trust bank before you make withdrawals from it is a really key thing. And we say that a lot, but we usually start with, well, they hired me, so they must want this. And there's a big difference between a company saying that they want something and actually believing it and following through on it. And it's hard.

Andrew Skotzko [00:39:19]:
It is.

Randy Silver [00:39:20]:
The people I see who are best at this are the ones who pay real attention to it, who build the relationships, build the empathy. They don't assume that they have buy in or permission to do things. They work their ass off to create it. The other side of it is patience and know the resilience side and I know that's come up with. We both did the SVPG workshop for coaches last year and that came up a couple of times. It's incredibly important. This job is so hard. It is so frustrating.

Randy Silver [00:39:56]:
Even the best people, especially the best people know this one. I had an amazing boss years ago at an enterprise who was the calmest person I've ever met. And every single day he lost battles. But he also won battles. And what you would see is slowly but surely over the course of a year or two, he would win the wars. And I hate the battlefield metaphors. But the point is, he didn't get frustrated, not publicly, anyway. Never really let it phase him.

Randy Silver [00:40:29]:
He understood there was a much bigger picture and he could afford to be gracious and lose on some things because it didn't matter. He was trying to set up enough things and do enough work in the background to set things up so that eventually, inevitably, it would go in the direction that he was recommending, even if other people couldn't see it right now. In the longer term, it would go the way if he had the right strategy, it was better to keep his, again, battlefield metaphor. Better to keep his powder dry and wait for the right opportunity instead of trying to push it and destroying a relationship.

Andrew Skotzko [00:41:05]:
So this boss of yours, it reminds me of one of the best bosses I've ever had as well. Very similar dynamic, just seemingly unflappable, right? Just so calm. Cool as a cucumber. And I know we got frustrated, but it reminds me something I was thinking about recently. We talk a lot. I wrote a short little newsletter nudge recently about equanimity. And it's a word that doesn't get used a lot in our circles. We talk about resourcefulness.

Andrew Skotzko [00:41:33]:
We talk about being relentless. Like Paul Graham of Y combinator. Right? He's said for a long time that being a great founder, that the core thing is to be relentlessly resourceful. And I think that totally applies to fraud of people like you're pointing to. And I think one of the things that really helps in being relentless in that way is that doesn't always mean that you're pushing as hard as you can in every single moment, right? That can be a recipe for burnout. But it's this idea of equanimity, which for me, my personal connection to that comes out of my meditation practice and Buddhism. And it's a big word in that world. And the definition of equanimity is mental calmness, composure and evenness.

Andrew Skotzko [00:42:13]:
Of temper, especially in a difficult situation. And I can't think of anything more helpful for doing this really hard job than that.

Randy Silver [00:42:21]:
Yeah. Remembering that the job isn't all there is, that you have friends, you have family, you have hobies, you have things outside of it is really helpful. It can be really hard. We had Marty Kagan on our podcast a while back and we challenged him about something that was in one of his books and he's since walked it back or clarified it is probably a better way of putting it, which is. And the problem is that people had misinterpreted this for a long time. And it was the idea that to be a good product manager, you had to work a ridiculous number of hours on the order of 80 hours, 60 to 80 hours a week.

Andrew Skotzko [00:42:57]:
Right.

Randy Silver [00:42:58]:
And that meant you couldn't also have a life outside of work in a proper way.

Andrew Skotzko [00:43:04]:
Right.

Randy Silver [00:43:05]:
You had to be too involved. And what he clarified is this is an anti pattern. This is not a good thing. This is what he's observed most of the best product managers doing. It isn't a recommendation. And the reason that most of them had to do it is because they were doing two jobs. They were doing the product job and the project or delivery job as well. I don't know how common it is where you are, Andrew, and the clients you've got and the people you talk to, but here in the UK, delivery management, I've worked with some amazing people and it is an art.

Randy Silver [00:43:39]:
And I always recommend getting a good delivery manager on your team or as part of a you. It's not like a scrum master. You don't necessarily have to have a one to one relationship between a product manager and DM, but having the appropriate people at the right levels, making sure that things get shipped and working with the teams to get that going is incredibly important and it frees up the product manager to actually do their know. There's been a lot of talk, if you want to talk about, know, year in review type stuff, there's been lots of talk about Brian Chesky this year and what Airbnb did.

Andrew Skotzko [00:44:21]:
I was wondering when we'd go.

Randy Silver [00:44:22]:
I know we talked about this ourselves. Yeah, I know we talked about this ourselves the other week in a private conversation. I think there's a lot of misinterpret now. I don't know Brian Chesky, I don't know anyone at Airbnb. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. But what I saw publicly was an admission that they hadn't empowered the product managers to do the right job, that they hadn't created an environment where product teams could be successful. And they were reorganizing things in such a way that product managers could actually do the really important work of working on strategy, of working on ideas, of coordinating what to do and making sure the teams were working on the right things and empowering the dev teams to get on with delivering it. I think it's a really positive thing the way they've done this and the fact that they've recognized that this was a problem, that the strategy alignment and coordination, the conversations at that level weren't happening and changing the structure of the organization to go for that.

Randy Silver [00:45:21]:
It's messy, but I think it's a really good thing. And I wrote an article about this a while ago about how Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, is a dumpster fire. Right now, Airbnb is in the stages of reclaiming and getting on the right track. And Tumblr of all places published this. Amazing thing about this is what we're trying to do. This is at the high level what our core goals are. These are the two or three things we're doing in each area to try and meet those goals. And now we're going to get out of the way and let our teams actually do it.

Randy Silver [00:45:57]:
And the maturity to be able to communicate that not only within the company, but publicly, that's a lot of work to get to that level of management maturity.

Andrew Skotzko [00:46:06]:
Totally.

Randy Silver [00:46:06]:
And I think that's where we want to try and get these people to. That's our job. If we can get companies to that, then we're doing a great job. It doesn't matter if we're sitting there and know about every single feature. If we can do that, then we're doing the right job.

Andrew Skotzko [00:46:18]:
Yeah, I think that's well said. The whole Airbnb thing, there's been such a defensive reaction within the broader product community, and I think it's because I think it goes back to everything we've been talking about here, right. It feels like our professional identity is under attack and that people are questioning our value and to some extent they are. And honestly, that's an okay thing for management and leadership to do. Every part of the business has got to contribute and drive ROI and back to perception of value. If they're not perceiving it, then that's a real problem and it's fair for them to consider it. But I think for a lot of us, a lot of product folks, it triggers our insecurity and then we get very defensive and reactionary, but we don't really stop to consider, like, is there any truth to what they're pointing at?

Randy Silver [00:47:03]:
Yeah, we have to realize that every founder did our job at one point before handing it off. And they probably knew if they're not the technical founder, then they knew they had to hire devs to do the engineering work. They knew that they could probably get someone off fiver or something like that to do design work up to a point. And they probably have some great ideas and they want to be the art director, but they know they're not going to make pixel perfect designs on a regular basis. But product management, because we don't have a tangible shippable thing that we uniquely do. If you fire a product manager, it's going to take a while before you really notice the effect. And you may have done the job ahead of time. And we know what to ship.

Randy Silver [00:47:47]:
Just do the thing. I said, what my mom said, what my last client said, whatever. It takes a while for our value to be missed, if they even recognize as such. So it's hard to get there. So we have to have that perspective ourselves and that understanding. What is it that people need from us? And it's not an us and them business and tech side of things. It is, how do we create a team where people understand that we have that empathy? We are working very consistently with them to help and make the right decisions faster.

Andrew Skotzko [00:48:28]:
Absolutely.

Randy Silver [00:48:29]:
So one of the things I've got is a different definition of a product team than most people have. Most people say it's a product manager, design and research, a copywriter, if you're lucky, engineering manager in devs, delivery manager, whatever. To me, that's just a group of people that are going to put code into production and make it pretty, if you're lucky. I don't think that's a product team. I think a product team is a group of people can do four things. They can ask a question, get an answer, understand the answer, and make a decision, take action based on that answer. So that means if you are customer facing, that means you've got sales, you've got support, you've got marketing, you've got legal, all as part of your team in the room making decisions. Maybe not every single day.

Randy Silver [00:49:16]:
That doesn't mean they have to come to stand up and do Jira tickets and things like that, but it does mean that they need to be there at the quarterly planning, at the very least to say, what is it we're trying to solve? What are our okrs? What does success look like and what are we going to judge ourselves on and how are we going to work together to do that? And you all have to know each other's aim and be able to coordinate with each other on a regular basis. And that comes from Jeff Patton. I think it's a four sentence version of a long talk that he did that I saw years ago, and I've loved it ever since.

Andrew Skotzko [00:49:49]:
Yeah, I'm just going to borrow that, too. Yeah, I love that you have a question, you can get an answer, you can understand the answer, you can make a decision, and you can take action on it. So for me, it's five bullet points. But that's a beautiful synopsis. And it's funny what you just said there. It really speaks to. I want to give another shout out again to the conversation I had with Pam Fox Rollin that we'll link to in know one of the things in their book, growing groups into teams. The fundamental question there is, well, what's the difference? What's the difference between a group and a team? And the answer that came out of that, that I really liked was that, you know, that what really makes a team a team and not just a group of people, like a working group, is two things.

Andrew Skotzko [00:50:30]:
First is a shared promise, and secondly is a commitment to coordinate, to deliver on that promise. And that's what I hear and what you were just pointing at, right? Like you've agreed we are signing up for something together, that we are going to do this thing together, and then we have agreed we are going to work it out together and collaborate and do what we got to do to deliver on that promise. So going back to Christina Wodtke, it's like shipping code isn't done when the code ships. It's done when you do the thing, when you solve the problem. Right. If no progress has been made, the.

Randy Silver [00:50:59]:
Job is not done when value is realized. Absolutely. It's a challenge, and this is the challenge we've all signed up for in product roles. This is not a line management job.

Andrew Skotzko [00:51:07]:
Nope.

Randy Silver [00:51:08]:
That's not what this is about. It's not about who reports to you. It's about who you can influence and how you can make a difference. And it doesn't matter what your title is, if you can't get the right people in the room and help them to make a decision, then you're not doing it well enough.

Andrew Skotzko [00:51:23]:
Yeah. Ultimately, what has to happen is you have to get the right people in the room, make a decision and get it into action in order to deliver progress, I. E. Value. Until that happens, the job ain't done.

Randy Silver [00:51:34]:
That's it.

Andrew Skotzko [00:51:35]:
All right, I feel like we should just drop our mics right now.

Randy Silver [00:51:37]:
Yeah, I think we're all great. Done.

Andrew Skotzko [00:51:40]:
Put a pin in it. But yeah, just one other thought that occurred to me, as you were a few minutes ago, you were talking about how it takes a while, or it can take a while for folks to realize the missing value of product. Right. Like every founder said, well, I did that job once. And so my quick question there is what is it that you think they perceive at first? If they think, oh, it's so obvious, just go do this to them. That probably is true. And then what is it you think they'll notice in, let's say it's a few months, what will become very obvious to them that isn't obvious now is maybe another way to say it.

Randy Silver [00:52:14]:
Yeah, I think this comes up a lot of times when companies are scaling, because when you're small, you can take a lot of shortcuts, you can decide something in the morning and have it ship that afternoon, because you only have one customer or no customers, and it's a very tangible thing and there's only a few of you sitting around the table, so there's not too much to coordinate virtually or in reality. And as you start to scale, you have all kinds of other things. You have operational responsibilities, you have multiple customers, you have second and third and fifth and 6th order effects of something. You can't keep the entire system in your head anymore. So you have to have conversations, you have to have check in points. And it's not necessarily as easy to do this as you start to grow. But if you're no longer involved in some of these day to day conversations, if you don't see the complexity of the system now, then it's easy to fall back on. Well, we used to do it this way.

Randy Silver [00:53:10]:
These people I hired must not be as good as I was at it. So it takes a while to. And there's a lot of maturity to understand, no, this is a much more complicated system. You still need to see change at pace sometimes. And we put process in the way of things where sometimes we treat things that are at an early stage like they're at a late stage, and we put in levels of governance that we don't need to for trying things. We need to find the balance between how can we experiment at pace what is good enough sometimes versus what is good, what is a two way door versus a one way door decision, all that kind of stuff. But it's really hard when you don't give people enough context to make the decision right. There's a metaphor.

Randy Silver [00:53:57]:
I heard someone talking about how you run a company, and sometimes it's a street plan where you've got roundabouts, and sometimes it's where you have red lights. And red lights means you have to stop and wait for a green light, even if no one's coming from any other direction, you have to stop and wait. So maybe that's like you have to wait for the governance meeting that might be next week to make a decision, and then you have to wait for the next governance meeting from another team to make another decision and nothing ever gets shipped. It takes forever to do anything. But that's also something that needs to be done in a highly regulated situation or a low context situation where people don't understand the consequences of their actions and they're not communicating well. Roundabouts is when you get to a certain decision point, you have to look both ways and you have to make the judgment. Call yourself and maybe you communicate the decision you made and someone will call you and say, hey there, wait a minute. Before you get too far down the line, you're being empowered to make a decision and go for it.

Randy Silver [00:54:59]:
If no one else is coming, if there's nothing else, right? It's hard. It takes a lot of responsibility, it takes a lot of trust, and it takes a lot of context to make that work. But if you can build a roundabout based culture, then you're empowering people. Definition of leadership that I really like is the ability to delegate decision making effectively. If you have created a culture where people at multiple levels are more often than not making the right decisions, and that you don't need to be consulted as a stopper before they make these decisions, then you're building a company that's able to be nimble, that's able to be agile, that's able to react and be more successful.

Andrew Skotzko [00:55:40]:
I love it. It's also, by the way, a really good acid test of your strategy and if you actually have one, because if you have a strategy, but it still requires everybody in the company to get into a room to make a decision, that's not a very useful or effective strategy, and it's not helping better decisions happen faster, especially as the company grows and we have to have more decentralized decision making. So yes to everything you just said, and I love that metaphor of traffic lights and roundabouts, that's a great metaphor. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Randy Silver [00:56:08]:
I wish I knew, too, to give credit for on that one.

Andrew Skotzko [00:56:11]:
Randy, this has been so great. And every time we're talking, I just want to keep talking, but at some point, we have to sign off and you need to go eat. Just would, first of all, thank you for everything you're doing as a community builder, as someone contributing to our field and just always being a pay it forward kind of person. So, first off, thanks for everything you're doing. And I guess just in closing out, what would you like to leave listeners with?

Randy Silver [00:56:34]:
Well, first, I want to thank you because every conversation I have with you, I walk away having learned something. So this is right back at you. And one of the best things I got out of participating in Marty and the Silicon Valley product groups coaching the coaches course was this amazing community of other coaches that I get to hang out with and learn from all the time in terms of what I want to leave people with. Just remember, this is a really hard job. It's okay to question yourself and ask these questions. You don't always have to have the right answer straight away. You have to be able to work with other people to get to the right answer, though. And a lot of that is about conversations and relationships.

Randy Silver [00:57:18]:
Competence is there. You can't not show up. You can't not be able to deliver, but you have to be able to do it in a way that works with people, and that's almost even harder.

Andrew Skotzko [00:57:30]:
Beautifully said. Beautifully said. It's conversations with people that ultimately deliver value. And that's the thing. Right on. Well, Randy, thanks again for being here and keep doing what you're doing. We'll see you out there in 2024.

Randy Silver [00:57:41]:
Fantastic.