T-shaped skills and more
Last week I was at a strange meeting: Three guys in a room asking me a number of questions about how I hired talent into my team. I told them I typically look for T-shaped people. The audience composed of hyphenated types (will explain in a bit what that means) didn’t get it. So I shared what I learned and my own interpretation of the well known definition for T-shaped people types and a few others. Since then I’ve scribbled it in cocktail napkins more than three times this past week explaining to a friend or colleague the same subject. At this point a revisit of the topic in a blog post is overdue. So here it is…
T-shaped, I-shaped, hyphenated and A-shaped…what do they all mean?
If you Google or lookup Wikipedia, you’ll find plenty of links on the subject (see Wikipedia for T-Shaped skills). The CEO of design firm IDEO is a well known advocate and adopter of recruiting people with T shaped skills. There’s even a book on the subject of T shaped people sparking creativity and innovation. Here’s a topical summary of the subject of people types and shapes nevertheless.
I-shaped people types are those that have a very narrow, but expert domain skills in one specific area. A researcher who has spent his entire life in science in one area is more like an I-typed person. These are the people that can solve a problem like a ninja – focus and specificity.
T-shaped people types are those that not only have the strength of a specific domain area (i.e. the I-shaped), but a broad set of other domain skills too to collaborate and build things with others.
If you are exceptional with two domain specific skills, and have broad cross domain skills as well, you fit in the A-shaped type. (A modern day Da Vinci or polymath)
Hyphenated people type is for those that have no specific domain skills of full competence, but have a broad range of skills across domains. Examples of hyphenated people types include career project managers or general managers at large organizations who have never built anything but a project plan.
So why know or understand these people-shape types?
The first reason for the above is to figure out what kind of an organization you are in and where you’d be better suited to be at. Startups for example need to have lots of T-shaped people because there’s no place in a startup for a hyphenated person – dollars are scarce, time (to market) is usually short, and if you want to attract outside investment, you better have an A-class team. Stellar professional services firms too develop their teams this way – where you have a lot of domain experts with specific industry knowledge, sometimes in more than one area, and can operate across domains.
Contrast that with working in a large stodgy firms. Over time, the same people that have risen through the ranks to executive positions, either loose focus on what got them there (their I’s) or fail to develop new I’s and simply become hyphenated people. And that breeds a culture of more hyphens throughout the organization as they start to hire or encourage and retain more hyphens. Quickly, this can lead to a culture of mediocrity where domain knowledge disappears and the organization simply fills itself with groupthink.
The second reason is to assess and plan your own career development. If you are an I type today, you could plan to expand on your domain knowledge and become more well rounded in other domains and become the T-type. If you are a T-type, your stretch goal is to get to an A type polymath (here’s a recent HBR post on the value of being a polymath now). If you are a hyphenated type, it is time to spend the time learning and practicing a craft.
There is a third reason outside of planning your own career development or knowing which type of organization would best serve your needs. And that is figuring out where to compliment your own team by developing your team, including yourself, or hiring the right set of people in your team. Few people recognize or master this concept. Insecure managers often have difficulty hiring smarter talent because they feel threatened by that while smart managers embrace talent to challenge the status quo in their otherwise or soon to be mediocre organization.
This is particularly important for product managers and what separates them from being or becoming hyphenated project managers. Product managers that collect tasks around the room, track status or relay information amongst product development teams will perish if they don’t have deep domain skills or broad cross domain skills. Because, product management is a strategic T-shaped role. As the folks at Pragmatic Marketing would say, Own it, no excuses.
A couple of years old but still relevant: IDEO CEO Tim Brown: T-Shaped Stars: The Backbone of IDEO’s Collaborative Culture
- Prabhakar (@PGpopalan)
Tweet this: New post by @PGopalan Reviewing T-shaped skills and more wp.me/pXBON-3ge #onpm #people #culture
What Happened to All Those Strategic Product Managers We Hired?
NOTE: The following is a guest post by John Mansour. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information
The words “strategy” and “strategic” are draped all over most B2B product management job descriptions like a cheap suit. But many organizations don’t realize the consequences of hiring product managers with skills, talents and experience to be strategic, setting expectations accordingly, and then placing them in situations that require nearly 100% focus on execution. It’s a reality for many product managers and it’s as counterproductive for organizations as it is for the individuals.
On the bright side, the fix is relatively simple. The key is to recognize the difference between hiring a team of “strategic product managers” and structuring a product management team that’s strategic to the organization.
The Strategy Dilemma
Every organization needs its product management function to be strategic for obvious reasons. Ironically, the manner in which most product managers are directed, evaluated and compensated has little if anything to do with strategy. Worse yet, too many people believe “the lack of strategy” is a systemic problem within the product management discipline when it’s really an organizational problem that’s amplified in product management. Unfortunately, it goes largely unnoticed because no one thing seems to be horribly wrong.
Most organizations build a team of product managers with individual goals instead of creating a unified product management team that’s a strategic asset with a single organizational mission, and therein lies the problem. To that end, companies over-treat the symptoms – people, processes, skills, tools, etc. instead of the root cause – the fundamental structure of the product management function. With a proper structure in place, the right people, processes, skills and tools accelerate and improve desired outcomes exponentially.
A Unified Team Structured for Outcomes
A product management team that’s strategic to an organization consistently meets two criteria that go hand-in-hand. They deliver solutions that help your target buyers/customers advance their strategic agenda in measurable ways, which in turn helps your company advance its market position in measurable ways.
For example, financial services organizations and U.S. healthcare providers have been inundated with regulatory requirements that drive up the cost of doing business and eat into profit margins that are already on the decline. Strategic value arrives in the form of products and services that help organizations in these markets meet compliance requirements at a significantly lower cost. Alternatively, solutions that offset those costs in a measurable fashion have equal value. A strategic product management team attacks the compliance challenge from one or both angles and leverages multiple products and services for maximum impact!
If you consider how incredibly difficult it is for industry issues of this magnitude to be addressed by any one organization, imagine trying to do it with a product or two. But this is what organizations expect product managers to do when they’re hired to be “strategic” without realizing it’s difficult if not impossible within the confines of an individual product manager.
The Complexion of a Strategic Product Management Function
A B2B product management team that’s a true strategic asset to an organization consists of two complementary areas of focus, markets and products, integrated within a single product organization. Both elements make significant contributions to a single overarching market & portfolio strategy and both elements own execution of that strategy at a market or product level. The results of those efforts deliver strategic value to the organization.
The Strategic Part
The market function, 10-20% of the team, uses comprehensive quantitative, qualitative and competitive industry data to “set the table” for the organization’s market strategy by painting a single consensus picture of target markets at a level that transcends all products. Team members in these roles have a full-time focus on markets with no product responsibilities.
The product function, 80-90% of the team, combines horizontal business-practice expertise (e.g. new methods for driving add-on sales via customer service) and product knowledge to “set the table” for the organization’s product investment strategy in each target market. Individuals in these roles have a full-time focus on aligning new/emerging business practices to product solutions in markets that are strategic to the organization.
It’s a unified team that combines both elements to form the ideal market and portfolio strategy most suited to helping the organization meet its short and long term goals on an ongoing basis. Senior executives ultimately make the decisions, but they’re doing so with a holistic integrated view of target markets and high-value opportunities mapped to proposed product investments across the entire portfolio instead of many competing versions for each product.
The Execution Part
The market function repurposes the same quantitative, qualitative and competitive information to ensure the organization’s differentiating value is communicated relative to each target market via marketing and sales.
The product function, now armed with comprehensive market data and guided by a single overarching portfolio strategy, no longer has to stress over “finding time to be strategic for my products.” They can more easily budget their time between product initiatives related to high-value market solutions (from the portfolio strategy) and the daily care and feeding of products that keep the squeaky wheels at bay.
As product management goes, so goes the rest of the organization. When product management is structured with many individuals, each expected to be “strategic”, it results in an organization going in many different directions with competing influences, spreading its resources too thin to achieve a leadership position in any one area of strength.
The burden is on the organization to rethink the manner in which it structures product management if it wants an asset that has real strategic value to the organization. Most anyone who’s talented enough to be hired into a product management role is capable of being strategic. They just need an environment that recognizes the key difference between a team of “strategic product managers” and a product management team that’s strategic to the organization. Setting appropriate expectations during the hiring process can only help the cause.
Tweet this: What happened to all those strategic Product Managers we hired? wp.me/pXBON-3g2 #prodmgmt #strategy #innovation
John Mansour is the founder and president of Proficientz, a company that specializes in B2B product portfolio management. This article was originally published on the Proficientz blog in January 2012.
Truth over Harmony
Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony wp.me/pXBON-3fM #culture #truth #trust
A few days back I hired someone for a short term project. Before the start of the project we met a couple of times where we discussed the requirements, what assistance I was needing and how the expert I was hiring could help me.
A few days later, this person sent me a report that was four pages long and an invoice for the time worked on the report. At this stage we had not even started the actual project and here I was staring at a bill. I knew she had worked hard and spent time on the project, but the work was not what I really needed or what I communicated. I wanted to hire this person and get the project done, but also make it clear that I was not happy with the preliminary report which I felt wasn’t even necessary to start the project.
So I sent her an email that I would pay the full invoice amount and hire for the whole project, but that I was not happy with work I had not asked for. I got an email back from her that she would not charge me for the report and was happy to go forward with the work as originally intended. She said she prefers Truth over harmony. I paid her the full invoice amount.
This was the first time I came across that phrase. I googled and found it is widely used in business partnerships and parenting. I loved it. The concept is simple. If we pursue truth, harmony will follow. If we pursue harmony, truth isn’t guaranteed. In fact, often we see “status quo”, “work around”, “evolutionary approach”, “slow grinding”, “beating down”, “win-win”, and various other strategies as the direct outcome of ignoring truth over harmony.
So here’s my question. How often are you able to pursue truth over harmony at work?
- Prabhakar
Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony wp.me/pXBON-3fM #culture #truth #trust
Truth over harmony
Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony wp.me/pXBON-3ff #culture #truth #trust
A few days back I hired someone for a short term project. Before the start of the project we met a couple of times where we discussed the requirements, what assistance I was needing and how the expert I was hiring could help me.
A few days later, this person sent me a report that was four pages long and an invoice for the time worked on the report. At this stage we had not even started the actual project and here I was staring at a bill. I knew she had worked hard and spent time on the project, but the work was not what I really needed or what I communicated. I wanted to hire this person and get the project done, but also make it clear that I was not happy with the preliminary report which I felt wasn’t even necessary to start the project.
So I sent her an email that I would pay the full invoice amount and hire for the whole project, but that I was not happy with work I had not asked for. I got an email back from her that she would not charge me for the report and was happy to go forward with the work as originally intended. She said she prefers Truth over harmony. I paid her the full invoice amount.
This was the first time I came across that phrase. I googled and found it is widely used in business partnerships and parenting. I loved it. The concept is simple. If we pursue truth, harmony will follow. If we pursue harmony, truth isn’t guaranteed. In fact, often we see “status quo”, “work around”, “evolutionary approach”, “slow grinding”, “beating down”, “win-win”, and various other strategies as the direct outcome of ignoring truth over harmony.
So here’s my question. How often are you able to pursue truth over harmony at work?
- Prabhakar
Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony wp.me/pXBON-3ff #culture #truth #trust
4 Ways to Improve Customer Service in Critical Times
I had a couple of telling customer service experiences recently that I wanted to share. There are some lessons that all companies can learn from this experience. I’ve listed them out at the bottom of this post.
Incident 1 – You can backup, you just can’t restore
I use an online service to maintain backups of this blog. For a small monthly fee they automatically back up the blog and provide a flexible mechanism to restore. Thankfully I hadn’t ever needed to restore anything…until about 2 weeks ago.
Something got corrupted in the blog database. I noticed it on a Sunday morning and thought, “OK…Sundays are a bit slow, we get less traffic on Sundays, so it’s a good time to restore the database.”
I logged into my account on the service’s site, selected the appropriate backup from several days earlier, clicked the Restore button and waited, and waited, and waited.
The progress bar sat at 0% for about an hour. I knew something was amiss and thought, “OK, user error, let me try that again.”
I tried once again, and once again the restore process sat at 0% for a long time. After a couple of hours I decided something was definitely wrong and sent an email into the Support Team at the company. The Support team doesn’t work on weekends. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but for something mission critical like addressing problems in a database restore, it was a big problem.
Late Sunday evening, I gave the restore process one last try and let it run overnight. I got up the next morning to check on the restore and it was still at 0%. At that point, I sent several harsh emails to the company expressing my frustration with the process.
Later in the day on Monday, the problem was resolved and the restore happened and the blog was back, minus a few comments that had been posted since that backup had been done. But why didn’t the restore work in the first place?
Turns out I had encountered a “bug” in the restore process which they’d fixed to allow my restore to work. I’d really love to know exactly what the “bug” was.
Keep in mind that this service does exactly 2 things — it backs up a database and it restores a database. That’s it. No other extraneous features. It’s simple and that’s why I chose it…assuming it actually worked! What was I paying them for every month?
Incident 2 – Oops, our typo brought down your blog
About a week later, as I checked the blog in the morning, I saw that my blog was down. It wasn’t displaying posts, I couldn’t log into the admin area and the error message pointed at the backup service as the problem. I immediately went to Twitter to see if others were affected. I found 1 or 2 tweets from people indicating a problem with their blogs. No tweets from the company. I also checked the company’s blog to see if they’d posted anything. Nope. The last blog post was from the previous week.
So, I send a couple of urgent emails into their Support team to get help. Several hours later they fixed the problem and my blog was back.
It turns out that overnight the service pushed out a patch to “a small number of customers” — their words –to close some security holes. But, there was a “misspelling of a word in the code that caused a PHP error”– again, their words – and it brought down the blogs it was sent to.
When I found this out, I was livid. Last week, I couldn’t restore — because of a “bug”. This week a typo in their patch brought the blog down.
And while they apologized via email and credited 1 month of the subscription, their view that the issue only affected “a small number of customers” and thus no public announcement on Twitter, their blog was required.
4 Ways to improve customer service in critical times
There are many things companies MUST do to provide REAL customer service. Sadly, many companies, while well intention, fail to understand the basics of customer expectations and what they need to do to help customers through rough waters, especially when it’s the company’s fault!
1. When there are problems, OVER communicate
Large or small, when customers are impacted by the service provider’s mistakes, OVER COMMUNICATION is required.
A single email to individual customers impacted is necessary, but it is NOT SUFFICIENT. There’s nothing wrong with admitting to mistakes. As the Support Engineer wrote to me when I reminding him of the restore problem the previous week:
We all make mistakes but our team will always be transparent and correct issues as fast as possible. We can’t guarantee that we won’t ever make a mistake but we always try our best to prevent them.
Transparency is good, but there’s transparency that primarily benefits the company (e.g. sending private emails) and there’s transparency that benefits the customer and the company (e.g. being public and proactive). It’s the latter that is better and more important.
Be public with your errors. I will trust a company MUCH more that is open and up front, and I’ll give them MUCH more leeway if a problem occurs. Why? Because I can clearly see what happened, know why it happened and know they are or will actively work to fix it.
2. A “small number of customers” is BIG, if I’m part of it
Don’t ever say that “it only affected a small number of customers” as a reason for not following rule #1. It’s only a small number of customers if I’m not part of it. If I’m part of that small group, then it’s a BIG number!
Bean counters, lawyers and hack PR people use phrases like that to try to diminish the impact and thus culpability (legal or otherwise). Being part of a “small number of customers” that were impacted makes the problem worse for me, not better. How unlucky was I? Why did the problem impact me? Why not other people. Trust me, that phrase doesn’t help in the least.
3. If you’re going to compensate, go the extra mile
My blog was impacted for well over a day by incident 1. It was down for an unknown number of hours due to incident 2. Neither of these were the result of anything that I did incorrectly. And these incidents happened within a week of each other. I spent several hours of my time trying to understand what had happened and trying to fix the problem. Crediting me 1 month of subscription service and an email saying mistakes happen is a far cry from a satisfactory resolution.
When addressing these kinds of issues, just like it’s better to over-communicate, it’s better to over-compensate for the customer’s loss or inconvenience. Not only will this stop customer griping, but it would likely turn that potentially disgruntled customer into an evangelist for your company. Imagine the glowing blog post I would have written had the compensation been a bit more generous.
4. Service IS the new Marketing
If companies don’t understand this, they don’t understand the economic and social pathways to success. Service has ALWAYS been important, but now good AND bad service stories will be shared rapidly and repeatedly. I’ve even done that on occasion. Bad customer service is just the nudge most people need to start looking at your competitors. Think about that.
There are many stories of great and not-so-great customer service experiences. It is claimed that the “United Breaks Guitars“ saga had a material impact on the stock price of United’s parent company. Every time a customer faces problems (whether “user error” or not), there is an opportunity to create a POSITIVE memorable experience that that customer will share and broadcast. Given the broad set of options most people have for products and services, it’s shocking that more companies don’t empower their employees to — in the words of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh – deliver happiness .
Saeed
Tweet this: 4 Ways to Improve Customer Service in Critical Times wp.me/pXBON-3fb #prodmgmt #custserv #service