Communication: A Breakdown

On any given day, a product leader might be clarifying strategy with executives, listening to customers, writing a spec for engineers, or offering feedback to designers. So while product management is a role of decision-making, research, imagination, and enough technical skill to enable effective conversations about feasibility, at its juicy center our product work is characterized by communication — in many forms. Communicate well and you’re likely to succeed in product. Product leaders need to write, to speak, to present, to convince, to inform, to explain, to synthesize, to facilitate. Every day.

In this issue of the Pollinator, we focus on this theme of communication for product leaders and teams.

Interestingly, one of the most memorable lessons I ever learned in product communication came from a consultant from SDG, the very firm where I now lead our product discipline and which is publishing this very newsletter. At the time, I was leading digital product and UX for an organization who had hired SDG to help with strategy, architecture, and development on a major user experience and data integration initiative. This was a multi-year project, with many complexities, many types of users, and serious implications for our business. A good communications strategy was critical. The SDG consultant recommended a simple acronym to organize our communications strategy: IOU, for in, out, and up.

It’s simple, but effective — and I’ve never forgotten it. IOU reminds us to attend to the different types of audiences who need to understand our product. Designers and engineers (in) need to understand our users’ context and needs to make decisions about functionality, priority, and technology. Customers (out) need to understand how this product solves their problems, while co-workers outside the product function need to understand implications for their own work. Business leaders (up) need to understand our hypothesis of how this product will generate business results or solve market problems.

The consultant who taught me this nifty little IOU acronym is now SDG’s COO, by the way. That’s just more proof that high-quality communicators make high-quality product leaders.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Turn and face the strange: Communicating outward, to external audiences

Check it out: How to Communicate Product Changes to Users. Heather McCloskey, User Voice.

This is a thorough, thoughtful piece on a particular problem of outward product communication: communicating product changes. Change can be disruptive to a customer base, so planning these communications and executing them with sensitivity and transparency is essential for product success. Heather McCloskey recognizes that effective change communications to customers will reduce friction, jump-start adoption, and — my favorite — “pre-empt the haters.”

She outlines the value of different tools and formats for communicating changes, from social media posts to phone conversations with important customers. And she even dedicates a passage to communicating the end of a feature or product, one of the most vexing communications challenges for a product manager. Her advice ranges from the practical (“Give them something else to be excited about”) to the polite (“say thank you”). All of it is sound.

Driver eight, take a break: Communicating inward, to engineers and other product team members

Check it out: How to Communicate with Engineers. Richard Holmes, Department of Product.

A warning: the imaginary dialogue that Richard Holmes of Department of Product uses to open his post on communicating inward, with engineers, is a bit harsh:

But I suppose it does reflect the nature of communication between product managers and engineers on dysfunctional teams. Holmes’s thesis is that “nothing guarantees bad products more than a bad relationship between a PM and engineers.” With that established, he sets out to make sure that product leaders are equipped to build great relationships with the engineers on their teams. And core to those great relationships is communication.

I especially appreciate Holmes’s efforts to trace effective communications among members of a unified product team to the attitudes of the product’s users, as in this passage:

He also uses a great analogy for engineers: they’re like cats. Communicate with them accordingly.

Some of his tips are a bit trite (“remove barriers“), but all are useful. Holmes recognizes that healthy and open communication makes effective teams, and effective teams make strong products. And that’s the cat’s meow.

New car, caviar, four-star daydream: Communicating upward, to executives

Check it out: Mastering the Language of Money: Bridging the Gap Between Product and Executives. (Webinar recording) Rich Mironov (guest) & ProdPad (host).

On the day before Thanksgiving here in the USA, I attended this webinar hosted by Janna Bastow of ProdPad, featuring guest speaker Rich Mironov. Their topic: how product managers can “master the language of money.” Mironov is a deep expert in B2B product, an experienced coach and consultant, and an engaging writer and speaker.

Mironov recognizes that many product conversations with executives and sales leaders are really discussions of priority, which are in turn discussions of financial value. He advised, wisely, that we frame any such discussions with financial context. For example, don’t hesitate to express dollar amounts when evaluating requests to deviate from your roadmap or fulfill a special request for an important customer. Mironov calls a dollar sign a reverse dog whistle: when we display one, then the audience pays attention.

I also appreciated Mironov’s description of how executives, sales, and marketing teams think about success. They’re concerned with closing the next sale or retaining big customers. In such context, “no, that request from a customer is not part of our product vision” sounds like a paltry excuse at best and insubordination at worst. One of his great tips: give a sales leader a single “magic bullet” that they can use to override your roadmap’s priorities for the sake of a customer. But they can only fire that bullet once.

I thought the webinar was a great way to kick off the holiday season, and I plan to attend others in ProdPad’s series. You might want to as well.

Other helpful resources on product communications:

• How product management and marketing create launch success. Anabelle Zaluski, Notion. Annabelle Zaluski writes from the perspective of a marketer, not a product maker — and that’s what makes her brief post so useful.

• Communication Practices for Increasing UX Maturity. Tim Neusesser, Nielsen Norman Group. Venerable UX firm NN/g shares a framework for user experience communications, featuring an excellent hierarchy diagram. “I have found this intentional step of identifying & understanding your audience crucial in building understanding within the organizations we serve.” —SDG’s Jared Johnson, who alerted the editor to this NN/g article.

• Three Communication Habits for Product Managers — And Everyone Else. Joey Muething, Align Product Manager. A working product manager provides practical tips on facilitating huddles, making formal team announcements, and managing up.

• Stakeholder Management Tips for Product People. Roman Pichler. Well-known product consultant Pichler offers helpful insights on communicating with the powers-that-be who influence the product-to-be. I love his “form a stakeholder community” tip.

• How to Communicate your Product Roadmap to Stakeholders. Product Plan. The team at Product Plan advises product managers on the mechanics of maintaining an evolving roadmap and keeping everyone informed, framed in a cycle of plan, prioritize, execute, release.

• Politics and the English Language. George Orwell (1946). OK, this one’s not directly related to product communications, but Orwell’s legendary 1946 essay remains a seminal work on language, culture, clarity, and power dynamics. It’s one of my favorite essays ever, and I think it’s absolutely relevant to contemporary business communications.

Outside the Box

OCEARCH is a non-profit organization that uses a sophisticated data model to help scientists understand the ocean and its largest inhabitants. The OCEARCH shark tracker is a dynamic visualization of the movements of sharks who have been tagged and tracked by OCEARCH’s scientists. I enjoyed tracking the movements of individual sharks by name, like Penny, a 10-foot white shark who most recently was tracked cruising off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Check it out at https://www.ocearch.org/tracker/.

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned business and technology consulting company. From ideation to implementation, we help transform organizations through well-made and well-loved digital products. Utilizing our customer-centric approach, and our wide array of capabilities, we deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and success for our customers.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.