This week I hired someone to my team where it was clear, almost from the earliest conversations, that this person would make the process of onboarding as smooth and straightforward as possible.

They were incredibly engaged when we discussed the role he would be taking on. He was asking thoughtful questions — and many of them. He wanted to get not only a sense of our market and our priorities as a company but where we were in that journey.

He also asked for more materials to prepare himself, which of course I was only too happy to oblige.

Of course, it doesn’t always go this smoothly.

Depending on the size of your company and how fast you’re scaling, there can be an urgency just to get vacancies filled and a hope that onboarding will consist of simply putting the new hire to work.

The risk here is forgetting that the opposite of welcoming people onboard is leaving them adrift — where they spend more time trying to figure out your business’s processes and culture than actually working towards the outcomes you need them to achieve.

True product leadership is about making sure that doesn’t happen. You need to think not only through the new hire’s first 30, 60 and 90 days but even farther out, much in the way you would plan out the development of a product from ideation to bringing it to market.

Here are some of the best practices that have worked for me:

1. Write a success brief

You won’t truly align new hires to a product vision and mission if you don’t write it out for yourself at the outset of your search. I call these “success briefs,” and they get everyone else in your team (and possibly the wider organization) on the same page regarding:

• Why this person is being brought on
• What they’ll be working on
• Who they’ll need to meet and work with
• How we’ll know if they’re successful
• How we’ll keep them (and ourselves as managers) accountable

You may be able to template about 80 percent of these success briefs if you’re hiring a number of people for similar roles but every employee’s mission is going to be unique. Don’t let these success briefs become stale or outdated, and commit to approaching them with fresh eyes for each new hire instead. It’s important to discuss with the key collaborators what a great candidate will look like, what they will be working on, and what they will achieve. You want the team to be excited to work with their new colleague when they finally join.

For example, my most recent hires include a product designer who is based in the U.S. working on acquisition and activation of small business customers. The other new hire is in Europe and is a product manager working on expanding on expanding the B2B platform. Even if they weren’t separated by geography, these are completely different worlds. They need completely different guidance for getting up to speed.

Particularly in early-stage startups, every single hire you make is important, so the success brief should be as specific as possible. As you expand into new markets or segments, you’ll likely need to create new success briefs as well.

2. Give them the VC treatment

When companies go on the road to seek a funding round, they make sure their audience gets as comprehensive an overview of the company and its target users as possible. The same is not always true of the people we hire to develop the products for those users.

Try this: create a pitch deck not unlike what you would create for a venture capitalist, but in this case position it for onboarding purposes. It should go over:

• Your mission and vision
• How customers are solving their problem today
• How your company and product is changing this
• Your products’ key value propositions
• Where you will compete vs. partner and integrate
• Your ideal customer profiles
• Segments you’re going after and how you’re ranking them
• Your progress in serving those customers so far
• Your three-year strategy and current roadmap
• Your go-to-market strategy

Maybe your company doesn’t have all this packaged together. That’s okay: do it yourself. I did, and the deck is about 45 slides. Imagine you were in the position of the person being onboarded and ask: “What would I want to know to have the best context to do my job?”

3. Help them discover the oddities

At one point, joining a new company meant you got the same desktop and phone as everyone else, and you shared a printer with the rest of the people working on your floor. Today, your team might be working remotely and have a much greater choice of devices and tools for collaborating.

In some cases, it won’t be clear which tools are actually the best to use because there are many of them in play. In my own career, I’ve worked at companies where chat wasn’t used at all, where proprietary collaboration tools were encouraged but not really used, and others where Slack replaced email completely.

Companies typically fail to provide enough guidance to their employees on what to use and when. The tools and their usability aren’t usually the problem, since in most cases they were designed to be easy.

What you need to do as a product leader is help them discover the oddities — the names of specific Slack channels you use for certain tasks or projects, for example, or places where information tends to be stored and shared.

This goes beyond tools, in fact, and extends to processes and culture. For example, before joining Productboard, I led product at the mobile health and fitness startup Freeletics. Daily, at 3:00 PM, most of the company had a ritual of stopping work to do a set of pull-ups. You want your new hires to know that this will happen.

That may seem like an unusual one, but there are other “ceremonies” and traditions in meetings or workflows that employees should understand as early as possible so they can approach them with comfort and confidence.

4. Let them unlock achievements at the outset

A big part of onboarding is obviously integrating new hires to the team.  Many companies set up a buddy or mentor system. I think this is a good idea, but it works better when the pairing isn’t random. Product leaders might want to assign a buddy in the same discipline as the new hire, or someone they will likely be working with directly.

Don’t stop there, though. As part of onboarding, I try to find an activity a new hire can complete in their first week. This accomplishes three things:

• It makes sure they’re set up with all the tools and information they need to really get things done.
• It gives them a strong sense of accomplishment at the start of their time with you.
• It sets the tone with the rest of the team that this is a person who gets stuff done.

There are always going to be differences in personality and working style across a team. For the most part, though, people just want to work with colleagues they’re inspired by and that do good work. Your onboarding process should accelerate the process by which they prove they have those qualities.

5. Extend ownership of the onboarding plan

When I brought on my new hires I spent time thinking, “If this was my job, what would I do in the first 30/60/90 days?” Obviously I did this because I wanted to provide them with guidance. But one of the first tasks I gave them was to put together their own plan.

A week or two later, I regrouped with them to see how their plans were coming together and how they were going to approach it. This took us out of the manager/subordinate dynamic and allowed us to talk simply about ideas.

This is where your listening skills as a product leader become all-important. Every couple of weeks, you should expect an increase in the level of detail and nuance in how they talk about the domain they’re working on. If after 45 days you’re having the same conversation over and over, they’re not getting the context they need and you will need to step up to help them reach competency.

Setting your product team up for success

Onboarding really takes longer than 90 days. It’s a process where you keep coming back to the fundamentals with each hire to ask yourself:

• Do they build connections with colleagues?
• Do they truly understand the product?
• Do they truly understand the market you’re in?

It’s not only worth it to do a good job of onboarding for the candidate. You’ll benefit directly as well. With a PM, you’re hiring really smart people to solve problems. As they get onboarded, you may find they can spot adjacent problems or opportunities that you hadn’t thought about, and in six months they could tell you about how to have the most impact for the business. By that point, they’re not just onboard — they’re indispensable.

“In most product companies, the role of true product leadership is largely missing in action. Instead, there are mainly facilitators, responsible for staffing the in-house (or even worse, outsourced) feature factory, and keeping the trains running on time.”

Originally published on Productboard.com

Based on his previous book's success, Inspired, Marty Cagan was invited to meet with many organizations far beyond Silicon Valley to discuss how their product teams are being run. In his latest, Empowered (with Chris Jones), he admits that what he and his team at SVP Group found "wasn't pretty."

No product strategy. A view of technology as an expensive adjunct. Little in the way of coaching and misguided approaches to hiring.

This all adds up product teams filled with unmotivated people, feeling disengaged from the customers they're supposed to serve, and failing to deliver the innovation their companies desperately need to stay competitive.

Leading ordinary people to make extraordinary products

It's usually tempting to breeze past the page where an author dedicates their book to someone. In the case of Empowered, Cagan pays tribute to someone whose philosophy informs much of what's covered later on: the late Bill Campbell, a business coach who advised companies ranging from Apple to Amazon and Google.

Cagan offers a key quote from Campbell that helps define "empowered" product teams and how they are developed:

Leadership is about recognizing there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

Of course, we all know this is often not the case in many organizations. Managers often see their job as living in the strategy (clouds) and then, when it's necessary, to conduct one-on-ones with team members. At worst, new hires are thrown in the deep end with a sense of, "If you can swim, there's a paycheck waiting for you." Cagan emphasizes that it's the manager's job to get their team onboarded and up to speed to succeed in the organization.

Throughout more than 80 chapters, Cagan focuses not only on coaching techniques and PM development plans but also on considerations around team topology, setting objectives, improving cross-organizational collaboration, and, ultimately, the hard work that long-term business transformation requires.

Key takeaways from Empowered

Some of the best advice in Empowered might seem familiar, even obvious, but the trick is in following it. This includes:

1. You need to be very specific when identifying the most critical business problems a product team should solve.
2. Your role as a leader is in helping everyone on the team achieve the competence necessary to solve those problems.

As Cagan points out, many leaders haven't reflected deeply enough on what will truly move the needle for their business. You could choose goals like "drive more revenue," for example, but double click on that, and you may realize the real problem is that not enough users who try your product are sticking around and converting into paying customers.

In other words, empowering product teams starts with giving them meaningful work — all while doing your part as a leader to ensure they have the right skills to win against the problem space assigned to them.

This second point — about getting people to competency — was driven home repeatedly in a session where I got to hear Cagan speak in Hamburg a few years ago. He stressed that, while it's easy to say, "This person isn't a good fit," you have to ask yourself what you as a product leader have done to help that person get to where they need to be.

Leading an empowered team, Cagan argues, means identifying where there's a skill gap that needs to be closed either by reshuffling people, hiring for a new role, or both. The book goes deep into every aspect of staffing, making the links between competence and character, the importance of onboarding, and even conducting performance reviews.

This leads naturally into chapters that delve into arming empowered teams with a strong product vision and principles, a strategy that employees can rally around, and evangelizing the value product teams bring to the organization as a whole. This isn't just about culture, he adds:

It comes down to the views they have on the role of technology, the purpose of the people who work on the technology, and how they expect these people to work together to solve problems.

Cagan acknowledges that these kinds of transformations take time and suggest approaches to minimize the "blast radius" of essential changes by running a pilot program.

The ideas in Empowered are backed up with a series of leader profiles. These include Shan-Lyn Ma, CEO of wedding planning startup Zola, DesignMap partner Audrey Crane, and entrepreneur/VC Avid Larizadeh-Duggan.

Who's the book for?

Empowered could appeal to a cross-section of business professionals, but they would probably fall into one of three groups.

First would be a startup founder or new CEO. If you were in the process of getting a startup off the ground, Empowered would give you a great idea of what you should expect from the product leader you'll eventually hire.

Of course, the CEO is often the first product leader because of startups' nature, but Cagan's book could help ensure they can have a shared vocabulary as they begin handing off that work to someone else.

Meanwhile, for aspiring product leaders, Empowered offers a window into how they can grow in their careers. The book covers many topics that don't come up a lot in everyday conversations in organizations.

Even if you're already in a product leadership role, there are always areas to improve. In that sense, Empowered could be a jumpstart guide into thinking about different aspects of what it means to help your team — not just in terms of articulating a vision but the details of managing people.

Should I buy it?

If you want to be a better product leader or become a better leader in general, I think this book is the most substantial and affordable resource that's out there. It's a no-brainer to buy it in terms of the breadth that's covered and the knowledge and insights. It's also a fast and easy read, given that it compiles what primarily began as a series of blog posts.

Most companies start with the CEO and the senior team as the organizations' key subject matter experts. As you grow, though, you need to find ways to develop that same expertise in other people. That usually happens by giving them opportunities to solve problems that matter — and, as Cagan writes, by helping them to feel allowed to work the way they need to deliver extraordinary results.

Originally published at Productboard.com

When I was Head of Product for a startup a few years ago, I must have spent more than 60% of my time on operational tasks. When not running product team meetings, having one-on-one conversations with individual product managers, or getting feedback from customers, I was busy creating presentations and writing emails to share what we were doing with the company’s executives and other departments. All of this left me with very little time for what I consider to be the most important part of being a product leader—developing strategies for building products that customers love.

Today, I’m at Productboard, a larger business with multiple product teams spread across a range of geographies and time zones. It would be simply impossible to take on the operational work required by our product organization and focus on the big picture at the same time.

Fortunately, we’ve embraced the concept of product operations. To meet the challenges that come with increasing complexity, product leaders have learned lessons from engineering and design that created dedicated operations roles to help their teams run more effectively. Now, a growing number of product organizations have product operations positions.

While investing in product operations will benefit your business in many ways, the three areas it impacts the most are organizational alignment, customer feedback, and processes and tools. In this piece, we’ll examine each of these individually.

The 3 key benefits of product ops

1. Creating cross-organization alignment

As product organizations become larger, teams often become more specialized and each one focuses on different parts of the product. However, if these teams work in silos and do not know what other teams are doing, someone very important will notice: the customer.

If you’ve ever used a digital product and noticed a frustrating lack of cohesion as you moved through the experience, that’s probably the result of a disconnected product team. Alignment across product teams is critical for a consistent customer experience. It’s equally important for product teams to understand the goals and needs of the rest of the business so information can move seamlessly across functions.

How product ops can help

When product teams become islands, product operations is the bridge that connects them to each other as well as to the rest of the business. Product ops ensures that every team knows what the others are building, where their pieces fit together, and how that affects the product as a whole.

Along with product managers, product ops acts as a primary point of contact for company executives—especially the Chief Product Officer—while also surfacing and interpreting the most recent and relevant product data for them. Coordinating with sales and support on customer feedback is another way that product ops helps keep the product team and business aligned.

Product ops ensures that every team knows what the others are building, where their pieces fit together, and how that affects the product as a whole.

2.     Capturing feedback product teams can use

Product teams require two types of feedback to ensure that they’re always building what customers need. First is product data – the analytics that show which products and features are used the most (and least). While individual product teams will pour over the numbers most relevant to their area, they often don’t connect them to the bigger picture.

Data tells product teams what’s not working, but only customers can tell you why. Meeting customer needs is the reason why products exist, and it’s critical to get insights into the problems they face. It’s so important that Productboard built a tool to help product teams capture and organize customer feedback more effectively so teams can leverage these insights to build better products.

How product ops can help

In theory, the more data, the better. In reality, a firehose of analytics and customer comments can overwhelm product teams. Unless data is properly managed and evaluated, product organizations often default to reacting to the most recent information or the needs of the loudest customer.

Product ops provides perspective by taking a more holistic view of what the data is saying and connects the dots between each team’s metrics. It acts as a filter for customer feedback, analyzing all the information for prominent problems, recurring themes, and areas of opportunity.

By collating what each product team needs to discover, product ops can also coordinate customer interviews and product testing more effectively than each team trying to do it on their own.

Unless data is properly managed and evaluated, product organizations often default to reacting to the most recent information or the needs of the loudest customer.

3.     Bringing everyone together with processes and tools

Many Productboard customers use a similar phrase to describe the value of having a more effective product management process: their teams now “speak the same language”.

While this is usually meant metaphorically, it highlights the benefit of literally using the same vocabulary—a common trait of high performing teams. Shared terminology not only enhances efficiency, it helps everyone on the team feel part of something bigger.

This idea extends to shared processes and tools. Each team may have a different product focus, but if the way they document progress, lay out a roadmap, and capture feedback is the same then it builds unity and makes cross-team communication and collaboration much more effective.

How product ops can help

A key part of the product ops role is to champion and maintain a useful degree of standardization. While a product manager can establish set ways for capturing feedback or communicating information, the hard, time-consuming work is actually in maintaining that process and ensuring that it evolves to meet the changing needs of the product organization.

The same is true for the tools used by various product teams, where standardization has even greater implications than enhancing efficiency. By finding the right tools to meet everyone’s needs, product ops can secure the product team’s valuable information from being stored on insecure personal apps or being lost to the business when an employee leaves the company. And of course, consolidating systems can save the business money.

While a product manager can establish set ways for capturing feedback or communicating information, the hard, time-consuming work is actually in maintaining that process and ensuring that it evolves to meet the changing needs of the product organization.

When product ops is more than just operations

Product operations is the oil that keeps the product engine running smoothly. And it can be even more than that. One of Productboard’s customers has grown by acquiring local businesses in different global territories. While each new branch maintains its own local brand, the company standardizes all the behind-the-scenes operations.

Sharing back-end technologies and processes makes each brand more efficient and profitable, helping the business scale massively in just a few years. Product operations has been a key driver in implementing this critical alignment for each new acquisition. For this company, product ops is not just the oil, it’s the fuel powering the engine forward.

The time is right for product operations

With the product function expanding, becoming increasingly complex, and driving greater value at a wide range of businesses, product operations is having a moment. If you want your product managers to focus on creating strategies to achieve your business mission, then you need product ops to coordinate the tactics on-the-ground.

If you want your product managers to focus on creating strategies to achieve your business mission, then you need product ops to coordinate the tactics on-the-ground.

Product operations keeps all your product teams moving in the same direction while helping them to remain close to customers and the rest of your organization. By creating internal alignment, capturing usable feedback, and uniting teams through processes and tools, product ops will ensure your product organization stays innovative, continues to evolve, and consistently delivers great products that keep customers engaged.