The Product Manager Needs To Be Like Rocky Balboa - Conversation With David Pereira
If you ask ten people who the Product Owner is, you'll get ten different answers. Who are the CPO, PO, and PM?
Today I converse with David Pereira — a popular Product Leader, prolific product writer, and a CPO, Chief Product Officer, in omoqo.
We talk about the roles and accountabilities of Product Owners, Product Managers and, of course, the CPOs, Chief Product Officers, as I can’t let this opportunity pass…
How did your work scope change when you moved from being a Product Owner, Head of Product, and now Chief Product Officer?
“The perspective changes. You need to focus more on strategy. You talk to investors, shareholders, executives and the truth is that everyone pushes you into some kind of command and control and predictable way of working. If you let this happen, everyone on the team will be unhappy.”
So, as a CPO, David needs to do a lot of stakeholder management to agree on the direction. And also to protect the team from doing something that in his consideration would be against creating value, namely the timelines, detailed plans, etc.
“I don’t want the teams to stop creating value to start creating and discussing the timelines”
David Pereira
So the main difference in getting to a C-level is focusing on strategy. However, it is very easy to fall into execution and start telling others what they should do, as opposed to what they should achieve.
David explains the reason behind falling into the command and control management style:
“In Brazil, we don’t like processes. It’s annoying.” David comes from Brazil and has been working in Germany for many years now. “In Brazil, our life is about adapting. It is not as simple as in Germany where everything is super well-organized. In Brazil, we need to adapt all the time.”
Germany is very process oriented:
“If you want to get a German person annoyed, you don’t tell them the next ten steps. Apart from that, you need to have a backup plan for each of the steps. So this makes things a little more complicated.”
David takes it lightly and tries to explain his line of thought. To an inquiry about finding the right process and getting all the next ten steps envisioned, he replies:
“When we work together, there is no process like that — we set the goal and we define the first step and from there we go.”
“There is no such thing as the right process. There is the goal, and the right experiments that will create the right learning.”
David Pereira
On the executive level, David spots something he calls “the fear of losing something”. Because as an executive, you want to ensure that the company is successful. And a mindset that they need to ensure they are safe from failure — that creates the command and control management style. The need for predictability. It is a combination of accountability and the culture that makes it harder.
“The definition of a great leader is not the one that comes up with the great ideas but the one that creates an environment where the great ideas can happen.”
David Pereira
From ten next steps to just one
So how do we move away from the ten-step process and towards accepting the unknown?
“It’s about accountability. Generally, companies hold people accountable for the output. If you deliver the feature by the deadline, that is enough. What I say is that’s never enough because the feature is just the means to an end. What if we define what we want to achieve exactly? What matters most right now? Growth, retention, a new market? Let’s understand this and define the results the team should achieve and then hold them accountable for the results.”
David Pereira
Results speak louder than plans
We need to keep the executives seeing the progress. Because once the results become the reality then that will talk louder than a plan.
So we need to move from an abstract discussion to something a team can work with and bring concrete results. Then it becomes easier.
Changing company culture
It is never easy. Start with one initiative. Take a small one and work in a different way while keeping the others in the traditional way. Showing the results will help the executives gain confidence with that.
CPO’s accountability
There is no one-size-fits-all and it depends a lot on the organization. The first part is to understand where the CPO sits. Is the CPO an executive member of the board? Or is the CPO someone lower in the hierarchy?
“In general, the Chief Product Officer has the responsibility of pointing the team in the right direction. So the accountability is the product success, making sure the product is marketable.”
David Pereira
The CPO needs to own both parts, the discovery and the delivery. Otherwise, if the discovery is outside of the product, we have a feature factory.
PO - PM battle
There are companies that have both roles separated. Usually it means that the Product Manager defines what needs to be delivered and the Product Owner ensures it is delivered correctly.
The Product Manager is responsible for strategy and Product Owner is responsible for the tactics.
What brought a mindset change for David was his failed application for a Product Manager role at booking.com. He learned that he couldn’t answer basic Product Manager questions. And it dawned on him that for all this time, his Product Owner role was misunderstood.
“We have Scrum Product Owner, SAFe Product Owner, etc. If you ask 10 people who the Product Owner is you get 10 different answers. If you ask 10 people inside the same company who the Product Owner is, you’ll still get 10 different answers.”
David Pereira
David defines a Product Owner as an accountability inside Scrum. And that is best filled by an experienced Product Manager. An end-to-end role.
Why not have two separate roles?
Having two separate roles for Product Owner and Product Manager leads to a broken phone game. The Product Manager talks to the customers and tells the Product Owner what to build. Then the last one creates stories for the team and then the team builds that. The problem with this setup is that the team is too far from the customer.
David explains really well how that can create confusion, discussions and lead to frustration from both parties. He also mentions that some companies decide to rename the role to a Product Leader, and this way creating an end-to-end role.
Hierarchy in the product world
David doesn’t support Product Owners reporting to Product Managers because it leads to a lot of problems. If you have both roles, one should be able to challenge the other. And that won’t happen if one reports to the other.
Generally, a Product Manager reports to a Group Product Manager or a Head of Product. Depending on the size of the company, they could also report to the VP or directly to the CPO. Group Product Manager would still be hands-on, playing a Product Manager role for one of the teams and having 2–3 direct reports. The same should apply to the Product Owner.
David says people ask him why he talks and writes so much about the Product Owner role, if that’s only an accountability in Scrum and not really a job.
“The reason I talk more about the PO role is because it is full of anti-patterns all over the place. And I want to help the Product Owners escape from the trap that I have fallen into.”
David Pereira
The interview goes on and we talk about how the Product Owner is not a story writer. How to work with the team to change their mindset from just following the instructions on a user story to collaboratively finding solutions for the problems.
All in all, we come to the conclusion that A Product Leadership role is a very tricky one. One gets hit from every corner, David quotes Rocky Balboa here:
“It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
Being a Product Leader is not an easy task. One has to grow thick skin and just carry on. It gets satisfying when you see a change happening and how you contribute to the companies becoming more successful and the people more satisfied with the job their doing. One just has to be resilient.
I invite you to watch the full interview, Listening to David is not only interesting and insightful but it’s also entertaining!
You can listen to it as a podcast here:
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/maria-chec/episodes/S2E6-e209f37