Leading Through the Unknown

Pioneering leadership in product management

Imagine the most ambiguous product initiative possible:

• Raise the profitability of your product

Let's raise the stakes…if you can't increase the profitability, then resources will be re-assigned.

The product team is looking to you, the product manager, for an innovative solution.  There are many ideas and challenges in the solution.

How do you lead the team to explore a solution that may or may not work in this uncertain environment?  This is a case where pioneering leadership instead of great leadership can help.

Pioneering Leadership

Great leadership with top-down hierarchies won't work in this situation.  It would help if you had a pioneering leadership style to lead your team through uncharted territories. 

Think of how a scouting party works.  The leader of a scouting party knows the terrain, and survival skills, and can make quick decisions.  Likewise, the scouting party has key skills and responsibilities.  The scouting party communicates well with each other. The scouting party observes the landscape as they go.  They adapted to what they found as they went.  They recorded what they found to help the future expeditions.

Let's apply a scouting party analogy to the ambiguous product initiative.

Pioneering leadership approach:

1. The leader and the team have clear objectives

2. The team is organized in small informal groups with sub-tasks

3. Team communication is critical - verbal, shared documents, and written channels (email, instant messaging)

4. Each team member is self-reliant and able find what they need

5. As the team learns, they adapt their plans and explore alternatives

6. They record their findings and return to the main group

The pioneering leadership approach works well on product initiatives where a team collaborates to go through uncharted territory. 

How does pioneering leadership solve real problems?

Hypothesis Development in Shared Documents

The team has a few hypotheses to explore together.  Small groups test the assumptions and get diverse perspectives.

The steps to developing hypotheses are:

1. Chose a shared space and version control tool to work out in the open - edit and comment in real-time

2. Create a template for each team:

   1. Statement to explore - for example, costs can be reduced by …

   2. Assumptions to validate - such as headcount on non-essential projects

   3. Measurements and observations

   4. Experiments to test the hypothesis

   5. Results of the experiment

3. Record the exploration in the shared document

4. Edit the shared document as you go so the other sub-teams know what is learned

5. Adapt to findings: a new hypothesis or new experiment might come from this

The benefits of hypothesis development are the team collaborates and iterates quickly.  The shared document is a great way to keep stakeholders and the extended team updated on progress.

To take full advantage of the hypothesis development, the team needs some structure to reflect on learnings and adjust together.

Learning Checkpoints to Absorb

As the sub-teams progress, a regular cadence of structured discussion is needed.  These learning checkpoints keep the teams focused on the objective while adjusting from the experiments.

The steps to learning checkpoints are:

1. Schedule regular checkpoints for a structured discussion - cadence depends on the pace of the initiative

2. Prepare an agenda ahead that outlines discussion topics such as experiment results, new insights, challenges, and next steps

3. Review the results together

   1. encourage the team to share what they learned

   2. Look for patterns and other insights

   3. Reflect on your hypothesis and if your assumptions have changed

4. Adjust and plan the next steps

   1. Change direction or stay with the current approach

   2. Define clear action items and deadlines

5. Document and share findings to keep the whole team involved

The benefit of learning checkpoints is continuous progress with quick decision-making.  Additionally, the team has a shared understanding of progress and status.  This drives the initiative forward with adaptions as you go.

Conclusion - Leading Through the Unknown

Many product management tasks are ambiguous.  Read the situation to use pioneering leadership if the team is receptive and the objective is suitable.  Put on the pioneer mindset to form a hypothesis, take learning checkpoints, and conclude the initiative when the ambiguity is settled.

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