Lead on Purpose

Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

Tag Archives: value


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Leading product strategy and execution

Building software platforms and applications that customers love, and will recommend to their peers, takes extreme focus and hard work. There are many moving parts to product success, including understanding your market and the problems customers in the market face, and building solutions that solve those problems.

Successful product leaders understand the value of both strategy and execution: Strategynecessary for building products that perform well into the future. Execution requires the focus and discipline to do things now for near-term product releases.

How do you succeed in both of these two seemingly dissimilar aspects of product management?

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Why it’s important to think bigger, and play bigger

Creating great products and building successful companies takes a tremendous amount of work, insatiable initiative and a penchant for perseverance. It requires thinking differently than others think, and even differently than you have thought in the past.

To make big changes requires a whole new way of thinking, yet few college programs or study courses sow the seeds of innovation and creative thinking. You need to see the world differently, to think differently. To create winning products and companies you need to play bigger.

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Why it pays to show gratitude

No matter what we are facing in life right now, there are things for which we can, and should, express gratitude. The act of focusing on the good things helps us keep moving forward during the tough times. In the long run, it pays to both feel and express gratitude for others and the good things happening around you.

When asked how they set themselves up for success, the most common response from thirty well-known high achievers was expressing gratitude. Staying positive and having an attitude of gratitude are common practices of some of the most successful people in the world.

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Combining Mindfulness, Value and Leading Edge Product Management

Guest post by Barry Libert

Mindfulness is all the rage in the leading management circles of the world.  Leaders from major corporations like Google, Microsoft and Aetna are all beginning the practice.  In fact, according to HBR, “Time Magazine recently put ‘The Mindfulness Revolution’ on its cover, which could either be seen as hyping the latest business fad, or as signaling a major change in the thinking of executive leaders.  I believe it’s the latter,” said Medtronic’s Bill George. But the question is not whether mindfulness will help leaders lead with purpose, but rather will it help them lead with clarity towards the ‘true north’ of value.

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How to lead with integrity

One of the most important characteristics of leadership is integrity. Integrity means you are true to your word in all you do and people can trust you because you do what you say.

The word integrity has deep meaning and is often intermingled with words like honesty and truthfulness. It connotes a deep commitment to do the right thing for the right reason, regardless of the circumstances. People who live with integrity are incorruptible and incapable of breaking the trust of those who have confided in them. Every human is born with a conscience and therefore the ability to know right from wrong. Choosing the right, regardless of the consequences, is the hallmark of integrity.

In a recent Forbes article, Karl Moore and Chatham Sullivan discuss what integrity means and why it’s so important:

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How do you build the right culture in your company?

People in countries, organizations and companies tend to behave in similar ways. The term culture has come to represent this idea: the way people think, behave or work. The culture of a company can have a major effect on the value—in terms of products and services—that a company provides to its customers.

A recent Gallup study analyzed data from more than 30,000 employees in various industries to determine what characteristics led to companies creating a high-performance culture that improves top- and bottom-line business metrics. The analysis revealed six crucial components on which companies should focus: Continue reading →


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Why leaders need a long-term vision

Why are you in business? What drives your daily activities—your long-term vision or making the numbers this quarter? If you’re a board member, do you incentivize your executives to make a long-term contribution for the company or to keep the shareholders happy this quarter? If these questions cause you any discomfort, your priorities might be out-of-line with your core values.

In a recent interview with McKinsey & Company, Bill George—Harvard Business School professor and former Medtronic CEO—said the following: “Anyone who’s willing to postpone the long-term strategies to make the short-term numbers is in route to going out of business.”

In the full interview—Bill George on rethinking capitalism—Mr. George discusses important topics including insisting on the long term, managing expectations and creating lasting value. I recommend you spend a few minutes listening to Bill’s interview; it’s well worth your time.

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The Product Management Perspective: One of the key aspects of product management is creating a long-term vision for a product/portfolio. Some are uncomfortable putting too much effort in looking to the future because things change. The core of this discomfort is not so much that things might change, as it is that they will be perceived as being wrong.

Don’t let the possibility that you’ll be wrong stop you from looking towards the future. Regardless of whether you end up right or wrong (or anywhere in between), the efforts you put into planning for the future will pay off. You will learn things you would have missed had you not tried. Be the leader—the CEO—of your product and create a long-term vision of how it will create value for your customers.


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Why companies win by building relationships

For too many companies, business-to-business (B2B) customer engagement is dismally low. In most cases the people running the business don’t recognize the disengagement and don’t see it as a problem.

In his article B2B’s Win by Building Relationships, Not Selling on Price, author Marco Nink gives the following insight on the importance of building customer relationships:

Competing on price is a losing strategy, and Gallup research shows it’s an unnecessary one. B2B companies are more likely to be successful and secure in their customer relationships if they help their customers succeed. The more a B2B company helps its customers perform, the more essential it becomes. That kind of customer impact transforms B2B companies from vendors into vital partners.

To make a difference for your customers you need to help them improve performance and achieve their goals. Building solid relationships will not only help customers improve their performance, but will also increase their commitment to you. Listen to their feedback and build connections with the factors that drive their business.

Here are three simple tools that great leaders use to improve their working relationships:

  1. Listen: Leaders let other people talk and they pay attention to what they’re saying. They remove anything that would distract from their conversations and focus on what people are trying to convey.
  2. Understand: They appreciate what other people do and value their feedback. They know that taking the time to understand where people are coming from will pay dividends in the long run.
  3. Acknowledge: Leaders acknowledge the contributions of others. They are quick to give credit to others for their successes. They know that customers will be more motivated to use their products and provide value if they acknowledge their contributions.

Are you building effective relationships with your customers?

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The Product Management Perspective: To effectively lead the product development efforts, product managers must build meaningful relationships with their customers. Listen to them, learn from them, put their feedback into the appropriate context, then move forward and make decisions that will improve the value of your products.


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Three ways to be more influential at negotiating

Guest post by Kurt Smith

Your palms start to sweat. You’re thinking about this quarter’s benchmark. You can’t remember what your purchasing agent said about your most recent vendor, but you know that you need this sale. Actually, you need the next couple of sales. Negotiation – that’s how you’re going to succeed. Your prospects want to pay less than your sticker price. You want them to pay at least that much. How can you make a deal that results in both parties walking away winners?

Understand Your Value

If you don’t come to the negotiation table with some type of value, you’re already dead in the water. You have to know why your product or service is valuable to your prospect. For example, maybe you sell computer software that automates a company’s accounting processes. The company you’re meeting with is hesitant to buy anything from anyone because they believe accounting needs that “human touch” and discretion to be effective – that accounting isn’t just numbers on a screen.

Why would your software be valuable? Perhaps it doesn’t completely eliminate human beings from the equation. By automating the actual accounting processes, it frees up the accounting team to focus on qualitative problems instead of quantitative ones.

Computers are fully capable of doing math. But they can’t think – this is the value in your product. Your software allows your prospect to be more creative with its finances. That, in turn, will allow it to become more productive – which results in a better bottom line.

To this end, you could design a presentation to show how your product fosters creativity, productivity, and profit.

Listen To Your Prospect

Becoming a better negotiator isn’t about talking him into a sale. Often, listening is what will give you the edge. Knowing which questions to ask is often far more powerful than knowing what magical phrase will make him buy. In most circumstances the prospect already knows what he needs to do.

He just wants to see if you’re paying attention – he wants to know if you have the solution. There’s this delicate dance that goes on during negotiations. The prospect wants to know that you understand his problems; that you are listening.

Listening also provides you with clues as to how to present your offer. For example, if the prospect happens to mention that his company just spent a lot of money building out a new department, then it might not be the right time to ask for a lump-sum of cash. Maybe your prospect can finance the purchase of your product instead.

Learn To Become A Problem-Solver

Inevitably, prospects will throw up walls to block a sale when they just don’t feel like they can buy from you right now. How do you overcome this? You learn to be a problem-solver. Let’s assume that your prospect can’t make a move for 30 days because they’re waiting on financing for some other project. You don’t want to just leave the room with a “maybe” or “come back in 30 days.”

You might lose the sale. Instead, you could confirm that the prospect does indeed need your product or service, and have them sign a contingency form – they agree to buy from you now for a discounted price. You get commitment now. All you have to do is invoice them in 30 days. Problem solved.

Kurt Smith has extensive experience in sales and marketing. Originally from Austin Texas, Kurt recently he has taken on a role as a sales team leader for a telesales firm in Manchester in the UK where his wife is from. In his new role he finds he often needs to keep the team’s morale high and he is always researching ways to improve their day. On weekends he enjoys mountain bike riding and going for walks with his wife, Linda and their basset hound Dusty. His articles mainly appear on business blogs. Visit the NextDayLenses.com website to see how they use it to offer solutions to potential customer service issues.

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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers negotiate all the time. Learning how to sell your ideas effectively will increase the value of your products, as well as your value to the company. You won’t win every time, and that’s not a bad thing, but initiating more dialog will improve your products overall appeal.


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Does loving your job make you a better leader?

I recently attended a keynote address by Dr. Craig Manning, sports performance coach and author of The Fearless Mind. He talked about how 10% of our brain is the conscious, and 90% is the subconscious. As we practice and perform, the things we learn in our conscious mind flow into our subconscious and result in our naturally doing what we train our mind to do.

What struck me the most was his emphasis on the importance of loving what you do, and focusing on what you love. That is the key to becoming great at your chosen vocation.

This experience made me think of a blog series I called The LOVE of Leadership. Here the word ‘love’ is used as an acronym that describes the behaviors that, if practiced, bring out the best in the people you lead:

As you strengthen these competencies—so they come out naturally from your subconscious—you will see a noticeable improvement in the success of your people and your organization.

To learn more about the science behind these powerful principles I highly recommend Dr. Manning’s book The Fearless Mind.

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The Product Management Perspective: Most product managers I know love their job. This helps them work more effectively with people from other teams. Your love for your job and products will communicate a positive message to the teams you work with and the customers who use your products.