As leaders continue to shepherd their organizations through the relentless storms of the pandemic, they find themselves entering an unknown world. This new world is marked by spiraling global economic inequality and fast-advancing technology. Every year, a large majority of product launches fail. With added uncertainty borne from the pandemic, product leadership will only become more difficult. Many incumbent companies and brands that remain limited to their existing products will continue to compete in the red ocean of features or price. It will leave customers’ needs to be addressed by the more innovative companies.

Product managers have become increasingly central to company success over the years, with their choices, decisions, and actions. They are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the product and, by extension, the company itself. The role demands them to be leaders, not just managers. And more so in the current crisis, we need better leaders, not only better managers.

Managers are problem solvers who relate to people according to the role they play in the decision-making process. While leaders, who bring an entrepreneurial culture, are more concerned with what the decisions mean to the stakeholders and the organization. They relate to people in more intuitive and empathetic ways, i.e., they can take in emotional signals and make them meaningful in their respective relationships. This ability allows them to navigate around chaos and uncertainty, something highly required in the current scenario.

The three tenets for product leadership are proposed here, which can help product managers transform into product leaders and define a new path forward for their organizations:

1. Stakeholder Lens (to avoid marketing myopia)

2. Emotional Intelligence (for effective leadership)

3. Design Thinking (for practical solutions and customer empathy)

I. Stakeholder Lens

The late Harvard Business School marketing professor, Theodore Levitt, coined the term ‘Marketing Myopia’ in a 1960 article by the same name [1]. He described it as the phenomena of businesses missing the big picture of what customers want. Organizations invest so much time, energy, and money in what they currently do that they’re often blind to the business they’re in; and thus blind to the future. Levitt used to tell his students, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Companies are successful when they focus on customer needs, not their own products and services, which can be replaced by competitive alternatives. Product managers need to decide if these alternatives are the ones they make themselves or if their competitors produce them. The product should be the necessary consequence of marketing effort and not vice versa. After all, we should remember that marketing is satisfying customers’ needs through a product or service, while selling is merely getting people to exchange cash for your offering.

Avoiding Marketing Myopia

Product managers can prevent marketing myopia through ‘stakeholder lens.’ Primarily, they need to switch from product orientation to consumer orientation, i.e., change their thinking from products and features to ‘jobs to be done’ for the customer. The late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen proposed the ‘Jobs to be done’ approach to building products. He emphasized that people don’t buy products but hire them to do a specific job [2]. Further, product managers need to also listen to all of the stakeholders who contribute to the company’s success, such as employees, suppliers, competitors, shareholders, media, and community members.

This is easier said than done. It requires leadership from product managers. They need to continuously ask themselves: what are we really doing for the customer? The product is not the business; solving the customer need is. It can sometimes mean leading significant changes in the product to stay current with customer needs. The pandemic’s aftermath has forced most to think about staying current with customer needs. This has led to changes in the business models, changes in existing offerings, and led to new offerings to meet those changing customer needs. However, it is something that needs to be done even beyond the current crisis.

Product managers transform into leaders when they regularly help their companies to be more consumer-centric and relevant through their work. The pandemic has shown that no one can predict the future and shouldn’t try. However, product leaders can help companies be better prepared for whatever the future would bring.

II. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor your and others’ feelings and use that information to guide your thinking and behavior. A high degree of emotional intelligence can help people identify what they’re feeling, what their emotions mean, and how they can affect other people. This concept was popularised by an American psychologist Daniel Goleman in a 1996 article [3]. He argued with his research that the best leaders have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Technical skills and smarts matter, of course, but they don’t guarantee success in leadership positions. At the same time, EI is twice as important for jobs at all levels. EI accounts for nearly 90% of the difference between average and star performers in the top tier.

Product management is a people-first role. They should know how to play well with others and put the team first. Understanding what makes people tick makes it easier to get the best out of them and identify a problem. That makes the tenet of EI crucial for product managers to transform into successful product leaders. Daniel Goleman, with his research, identified five components of emotional intelligence. Individuals can improve upon each of these components. Let’s look at each one so that product managers can recognize these qualities in themselves and see how they can become more effective.

The five components of emotional intelligence :

1. Self-awareness

   Having self-awareness means thoroughly understanding yourself and your effect on others. It is also characterized by a self-deprecating sense of humor and confidence. Self-aware people know their abilities and can play to their strengths. However, they don’t overreach and aren’t afraid to ask for help. Leaders who can see themselves clearly also see their companies clearly. So they must continuously judge capabilities-in themselves and in others. Shipping products can be a race against time; by improving on this component of EI, leaders can also become exceptional at time management.

   Improvement tip: Maintain a digital journal

2. Self-regulation.

   This means controlling disruptive impulses and thinking before acting. Signs of self-regulation usually include thoughtfulness, comfort with ambiguity and change, and integrity. Leaders who are able to control their feelings create an atmosphere of fairness and trust. It also helps leaders roll with changes instead of panicking.

   Improvement tips: Commit to hold yourself accountable and face the consequences rather than blaming others when something goes wrong. Practice deep-breathing exercises to stay calm.

3. Motivation.

   Motivation is the most common component in all great leaders. Motivated people are highly driven to achieve beyond expectations. They’re passionate about their work and love to learn new things. They also want to be stretched and are always raising the performance bar. So they like to track progress-their own, their team’s, and their company’s. They’re optimistic even when the going gets tough. Motivation and optimism are often contagious and is essential for product leaders.

   Improvement tips: Remember the things that make you love your role and what new skills you need to make your work more interesting. Note at least one good thing or lesson learned from any undesirable situation.

4. Empathy.

   It is the ability to read between the lines of what’s said. It helps leaders to understand and support group dynamics. Empathy does not mean trying to please everybody - that is impossible. It means considering other people’s feelings when making decisions. It helps to know when to push hard and when to use a light touch. The pandemic has made it more crucial than ever to support team members and foster collaboration in remote environments.

   Improvement tips: Take the time to look at situations from other people’s perspectives; have one-to-one meetings/video calls to pick body language cues.

5. Social skills.

   This isn’t merely friendliness - it’s friendliness with a purpose. Socially skilled product managers are great at building and leading teams. They are expert persuaders. EI’s other components tell them when to make an emotional plea and when to appeal to reason. They are also excellent collaborators: Their passion for the work spreads to others, and their motivation drives them to find solutions. Social skills let leaders use other components of emotional intelligence.

   Improvement tip: Practice communication skills

III. Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a design methodology that combines a user-centered perspective with rational and analytical research to provide creative solutions for complex problems. It is mostly an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies. It leads to solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. It can be seen as a way of thinking, working, and as a collection of hands-on methods. It focuses on understanding the people for whom the products are designed and observing and developing empathy with that target user. 

Phases of design thinking

There are various versions of the design thinking process today, and they vary from three to seven phases. However, all design thinking variants embody the same principles, which were first outlined by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon in ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’ in 1969 [4]. We will focus on the model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) and adopted widely:

1. Empathize - Learn about the audience for whom you are designing through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences

2. Define - Re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways based on insights

3. Ideate - Brainstorm to challenge the assumptions and create a wide variety of innovative ideas for possible solutions

4. Prototype - Build a representation of the ideas so that one can experience them and interact with them. And, in the process, develop more user empathy

5. Test - Return to the original user group for testing and feedback and, in the process, refine prototypes, learn more about the customer, and distill your original point of view

Stanford has a detailed guide of the five phases [6]. But we should note that the five stages are not always sequential. They do not have to follow any set order. They can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The phases can be seen as different modes that contribute to a project, rather than sequential steps.

Integrating Divergent and Convergent Thinking

We can integrate divergent and convergent thinking into each phase of the design thinking process to support each phase’s learning. Divergent thinking is a creative, non-linear, free-flowing way of thinking. It explicitly ignores potential constraints and limitations to generate as many possible solutions to a problem as possible. All ideas are welcome, and none should be questioned or dismissed. The goal is to have as many options or “choices” on the table as possible. Once the product team gets comfortable with this free exploration, it will generate a vast amount of ideas and approaches that deal with the problem in one way or another.

After collecting a wide variety of different and unique choices, the next step is refining the most promising concepts and making choices. They are examined against the known context, constraints, available resources, timelines, technical feasibility, etc. The ideas worth pursuing further are selected. When repeated for each phase of design thinking, this combination of divergent and convergent thinking results in a series of divergent-convergent steps refining the idea funnel to reach the goal [7].

Improving products by analyzing and understanding how users interact with them is at the heart of design thinking. The idea is also to ask significant questions and challenge assumptions. Once the conditions of a problem are questioned and investigated, the solution-generation process will produce ideas that reflect that problem’s genuine constraints and facets. Design thinking offers a means to dig deeper and do the right kind of research, prototyping, and testing to uncover new ways of improving the product, service, or design. It also prevents product leaders from developing over-engineered products that exceed cost targets and don’t meet core consumer needs.

Summary

Steve Jobs famously noted, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” Building successful products is inherently difficult. The remote working team structures borne out of the pandemic should force product managers to rethink the innovation and collaboration needed to achieve great products. This new dynamic places more importance on product managers’ roles and skillsets involved in orchestrating and integrating product-development processes. The three tenets of product leadership - stakeholder lens, emotional intelligence, and design thinking - can serve as cornerstones for product managers to become successful product leaders. It can help them build breakthrough innovative products that resonate with the customers and support their companies’ critical business objectives; in this challenging time and beyond.

Endnotes

[1] Levitt, Theodore, “Marketing Myopia”, 1960, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia

[2] Christensen, Clayton, Cook, Scott & Hall, Taddy, “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure”, Dec 2005, Harvard Business Review. https://store.hbr.org/product/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure/r0512d?sku=R0512D-PDF-ENG

[3] Goleman, Daniel, “What Makes a Leader?”, June 1996, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2004/01/what-makes-a-leader

[4] Simon, Herbert, “The Sciences of the Artificial”, 1969, Cambridge, M.I.T. Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sciences-artificial

[5] You, Xinya & Hands, David , “A Reflection upon Herbert Simon’s Vision of Design in The Sciences of the Artificial”, 2019, The Design Journal, 22:sup1, 1345-1356, DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2019.1594961. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2019.1594961

[6] Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design, “An Introduction to Design Thinking: Process Guide”, Jan 2010, Stanford University. http://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf

[7] Ananthakrishnan, Uttara M, “Managing IT Projects: Lecture 2”, Jan 2021, Foster School Of Business, University of Washington.

[8] Interaction Design Foundation, “The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed”, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed

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