Petra Gross’ Post

Thrilled to connect again with the amazing Marty Cagan for his ‘Transformed’ book launch. His books and workshops have served as a valuable reference guide for Product Managers around the globe, and I can’t wait to read this latest one! Thank you Brainmates and Adrienne Tan for bringing the Sydney Product community together and hosting this wonderful event.

What are some proven strategies to master conflict resolution and influence stakeholders? We explored this question with Ant Murphy when we welcomed him back to our Product eXpert series event. Key takeaways from our chat are: * You need to have empathy - Understand your stakeholder’s motivations. Approach their perspectives with curiosity and ask yourself “what keeps them up at night?”. * Take an evidence based approach - Create a third reference point, such as a roadmap, that you can both react to and debate the pros and cons. You can tease out what is an opinion vs. data and fact. * Say ‘No’ without saying No - the people who are best at influencing don’t say ‘No’ a lot. Instead ask questions such as “How does this fit into our current strategy?” to better understand the stakeholder’s assumptions and beliefs. * Confidence is a proxy for competency - we need to project confidence which will project competency and can earn more trust. But we need to have conviction in what we’re saying. * Consistency is a proxy for reliability - small actions can erode our trust worthiness. If you say you are going to do something, did you do it? Thank you for all of your insights and inspiring stories Ant. We’re thrilled that you were able to join us again and look forward to having you back!

How important is commercial acumen when it comes to Product Management? Recently I sat down with the great Kirsten Mann to talk about the importance of building your commercial acumen muscle, which a core foundational skill to Product Management. Kirsten described commercial acumen as a balance of understanding how the customer will get value out of what you’re creating but also how the business will generate value out of it. Key takeaways from our chat are:  - A lot of Product teams are too focused on the building of their Product. Not enough attention is spent on how they are going to sell it or go to market. These are two sides of the same coin and need equal attention. - Building the commercial acumen muscle is like going to the gym. Just start now. Start with getting your head around the financial language and get comfortable with the basics of profit and loss, returns and margin. - Place calculated bets. Discovery comes at a cost so don’t just do discovery for discovery sake. Do discovery on things that are uncertain.  - When presenting to stakeholders, start with the punchline first and work backwards providing context and summary points. Lastly, seek feedback on your presentation from that champion in the room, someone who is invested in your presentation and can give you constructive feedback. Thank you for all of your insights and inspiring stories Kirsten. We’re thrilled that you were able to join us! #bettertogether

Still riding the 80s high from our "Stronger Together" offsite where we channeled our strengths and toned our Product muscles. As we celebrated our achievements for the year, it was a very proud moment to see all of the contributions from our incredibly talented team to our Product Practice. Achievements which we have used in our day to day to do our best work, and achievements which we've been able to share with our partners across the Group Product Alliance. As we head into this financial year, and start to unpack the many opportunities ahead of us, we will continue to channel the amazing energy from our offsite. Tap into each of our strengths and flex our Product muscle, as we create better experiences together for a better tomorrow. #bettertogether

I’m thrilled to have hosted Rich Mironov, a Product Leader and author of “The Art of Product Management” as guest speaker at our ProductX event. Rich spoke to us about ‘Reducing Product Waste (And Still Achieving Great Outcomes)’. What is Product waste? According to Rich, Product waste is building something that the world doesn't need, or won't pay for. In our chat we covered key questions such as - How do we do better at deciding WHAT to build, and extracting more customer value out of the same engineering effort? And how do we balance the broad needs of our overall customer base against internal stakeholders who each have different priorities? The key takeaways from Rich’s presentation are:  - Product Management delivers value through investment in discovery, focus and making hard choices. Not from velocity, throughput and development tuning. - Product waste happens early, before the first line of code is written. Try to get ahead of it and figure out if something is going to work taking the most cost effective approach. - Conduct discovery with real end users (vs. stakeholders). We respect and listen to our stakeholders but conversations with real life customers who will use our Product is essential. - Stakeholders are not focused on the process. We need to share insights we have gained through discovery and together we will get to the right outcomes. We gain respect and humility by WHAT we have learned, not by HOW we have learned it. Thank you for all of your insights and wonderful stories at ProductX Rich. We’re thrilled that you were able to join us! #productmanagement #woolworths

Have you heard about the ‘Chocolate Covered Broccoli’ theory? Nir Eyal author of ‘Hooked: How to build habit-forming Products’ enlightened us at our WooliesX ProductX event with many stories, but this one I had to share. Gamification - points, badges and leaderboards using gaming mechanics in non-gaming environments - tends not to work in most settings. Gamification is great when the internal trigger is boredom because it entertains. But in a work environment if the internal trigger is anxiety or workplace stress, people don’t want points on a leaderboard, they want certainty and assurance not games. This tends to serve what we call ‘chocolate covered broccoli’ in that environment which is when we take something that people should do, but they don’t want to do it, so we put chocolate on top of it and hope they will eat it. But, no one likes chocolate covered broccoli. The rule is always to have the link between the internal trigger and the variable reward. Many times people start with the solution but don't have the problem right. Thank you for all of your insights and wonderful stories at ProductX Nir Eyal. We’re so grateful that you were able to join us! #ProductX #SharedLearning #WooliesX

A big highlight for me recently was sitting down with Cal Henderson, co-founder of Slack to chat about staying connected in a post pandemic world, learnings from Slack’s Future Forum, and the important ingredients for great Product innovation. Cal’s perspectives were incredibly insightful and I wanted to share my key takeaways from our conversation: * In a hybrid working environment we have lost serendipitous meetings and relationship building that we used to get from hallway conversations - these are incredibly important to the fabric of an organisation. There are online tools that can replace it which is OK but it’s not quite the same. * Organisations more than ever before need to be intentional about the kinds of work that are best done in person, which tends to be people around the table doing creative and planning work. * If organisations are not taking risks that can fail then they are not going to be particularly innovative. The right way to take risks and build innovative products is to learn from what you’ve done and be willing to reapply that as opposed to giving up and trying something different. * It’s important for organisations to look at how they reward people who take reasonable risks and how they create a culture of trying again and again - if they only reward people whose bets pay off then they’re not encouraging them to take risks. You encourage what you reward as a culture. Thank you for all of your insights and shared learnings at WooliesX ProductX Cal!

Recently we kicked off our first Chapter Time Showcase at WooliesX - an opportunity for Practice team members to share and celebrate the initiatives they have worked on during Chapter Time. I’m proud to work for an organisation where Chapter Time is core to our Team 1st commitment, as a way of bringing consistent investment in meaningful growth and development, connecting with others for shared learning programs, and driving innovation across the business. Congratulations to the teams who showcased their initiatives! We walked away inspired and energised with ideas we’ll be bringing back into our own Chapters. Thank you also to my co-host Matthew Kind who did a stellar job leading the Q&A. #Team1st #SharedLearning #TeamConnection

I’m thrilled to have hosted Corinna Stukan, a Product Leader and author of “The Insights Driven Product Manager” at our WooliesX ProductX guest speaker event. Corinna shared practical tips on how to avoid common metrics pitfalls, and get more insights from data, to make better decisions as a Product leader. This topic really resonated with myself and the team. Some great reminders from the talk: 1. Be aware of vanity metrics - looking at metrics in isolation which may not tell the whole story. 2. Track both lagging and leading metrics. Leading metrics are less accurate but important to measure early signals. 3. A Product North Star helps you measure customer value and connects the dots between customer behaviour and your business goals. 4. Create an open insights-sharing culture where you view data as a way to capitalise on mistakes. Thank you for all of your insights and shared learnings at ProductX Corinna! We look forward to having you back soon. #WooliesX #productmanagement