For years, an idea kept niggling away at the back of my brain: if I know so much about how to do the Product management job, why is it still so hard? And why do all of my peers seem to have the same challenges?

When I made the transition from full-time operational roles to fractional, coaching and advisory roles, I was able to see things from a different headspace. I was able to synthesise my own experiences with the conversations I have with amazing people from across our field as part of The Product Experience podcast, communities like Product in the {A}ether, CPO Circles, and more. And it led to something profound.

We all know what it takes to be a good product person - the ability to accurately predict the future, and arrange circumstances so that all of your firm’s efforts align perfectly to take advantage of that knowledge. At least, that’s what  is expected of us.

To accomplish that, we need to master three things:

1. Prioritisation - We must ensure that we know what the team(s) should be working on, and - just as importantly - what they shouldn’t be working on at the moment. We need to be able to limit work in progress, focus on the things that will advance the company’s strategy, and be able to both understand and communicate this at tactical and strategic levels.

2. People - We need to make sure we have the right people, with the right capabilities, working together on those priorities. They need to have a culture of permission and empowerment that lets them to move at pace, but with the responsibility of communicating and collaborating with other teams.

3. Process - If you have the right people working on the right problems, they need to be enabled to concentrate on delivering value at pace. That means that meetings, reporting, ceremonies, etc, need to be revisited to remove blockers. There’s such a thing as Minimum Viable Bureaucracy - just enough to ensure that people and teams can work together, but not so much that they’re spending the bulk of their time on organisational politics and red tape.

For a long time, I thought this was it. That if I mastered these three things - and hey, I got pretty good at them! - that everything would magically work. 

I was wrong. Something was missing. Something else was needed. This is the hardest thing for Product people - for most people - to learn.

It’s the thing that separates the good product people from the great ones. The one thing, that if you learn it early, will help accelerate your career. And if you learn it later on, that’s OK - it becomes a super power that fundamentally changes the dynamics of how you work with the rest of the leadership team.

It’s the thing that I’d heard over and over from the most consistently successful people I’ve met - but for many of them, it came so naturally that they didn’t always articulate it explicitly. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready to hear it, until I finally was.

It’s Perception. It’s how others look at the Priorities, People and Processes that you’re working on and judge them based on their own goals, needs and expectations.

This is Stakeholder Management, but at a different level. When we talk about managing our partners in other areas, it’s usually assumed that this is an adversarial situation; we create dynamics of Product vs ‘the Business’, or Sales, Compliance, and so on. We need to change this approach.

And no, it’s not easy to do so. Nor is it quick. But the first step in changing something is to recognise it.

That’s why I created the Product Environment Canvas - as a way of changing the conversation, and dealing with the issues holding you, your team, and your partners back in a constructive way. 

It’s something you can use by yourself, with your teams, and with stakeholders. You can download the canvas and instructions for using it here:

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Mind the Product 2023: Keynote talk on The Product Environment Canvas