This article has excerpts of a wide-ranging conversation between Don Weinstein, former Chief Product & Technology Officer of ADP and Rahul Abhyankar, host of Product Leader's Journey. Don shares lessons learnt over his career about leadership, the difference between product management and product leadership, how product managers can grow into General Managers, and the three horizons of product management.
Thanks for reading! You can listen to the full conversation here where Don shares more insights and stories from his experiences.
Let's start with your role at ADP, Chief Product and Technology Officer. Historically, product management and engineering functions have been separate. How did your role at ADP come about as a way of bringing these functions together?
Don: Yeah, and historically it had been separate at ADP as well. I've seen it both ways, separate and together. We saw an advantage of having all of the technology and product under one roof, just in order to drive strategy faster, remove some of the friction between the teams.
In large organizations, no matter how you carve up the organization, you need close collaboration between the technology team and the product team, no matter what, regardless of whether it's a direct reporting relationship or its matrix or something else. We had an expression there that:
Good people will trump org structure.
That's one way to think about it. So, whether it's direct this way and dotted that way, or vice versa, at the end of the day, it's all about getting really good people on board and getting them to work closely together. And org structures can change at any time.
You started out as an engineer. Along that journey, how did your thought processes and mental models around managing people and leadership get shaped?
Don: I was lucky. I actually started my career at GE in the early 90s. GE was a leadership development factory. I was amazed at how much GE invested into people and talent at all levels, and so it was a good, eye-opening experience for me to get that kind of leadership development at a very, very young age. I felt very fortunate.
We hear this expression all the time.
People join companies but they leave managers.
What does it mean to be a good leader then? There are a few things in it. Number one, pay attention to people. I know that sounds basic. How many times do you have one-on-ones with your direct report? Is it monthly? So that means you're talking to somebody once a month. That's not a lot of attention. So, more frequent interaction, light touch, more frequent interaction.
The other thing that is really critical is just making sure you understand people's strengths and put them in a position to help them succeed. As a leader, if you can do that, then you help your people be successful. Then they're going to get a lot of internal reward out of their work relationship.
I had an opportunity to really spend a lot of time understanding that philosophy, that strengths-based, hands-on leadership approach.
Words like management and leadership are two different terms. Somebody asked me once, what's my definition of a leader and how is that different from a manager? And I said it's really simple.
A leader has followers, full stop. If you don't have any followers, then you're not a leader, right? And so then the question is:
If you are a leader, why should anybody follow you?
A manager is different. That's an organizational construct. The manager is top down, it's imposed from above. As an individual, you don't get a choice into your manager, but you do get a choice into who you follow.
Servant leadership is all about the people and the team and they get to decide who their leader is.
And you'd have to ask yourself the question: why should anybody be led by you?
What you said about the difference between managing and being a leader, how do you apply that to product managers and product leaders as two different constructs?
Don: I'm glad you mentioned that. For a product manager who aspires to be a product leader, the key thing is you have to sit at the intersection of so many different constituent groups and needs and effectively that's what general management is. You have all kinds of functional management and then general management sits on top of all those functions and integrates them together. It’s the same thing for a product manager, which is a functional discipline.
A product leader is somebody who understands all those constituencies and can knit them together and find the right kind of optimal experience. You're not trying to satisfy everybody.
That's one of the areas where I see people go astray is just wanting to satisfy everybody, to make everybody happy. First of all, that's impossible to do and second of all, that's not leadership. Effectively that's followership.
If you really want to be the leader of the product you have to be the person who understands the most and the best about what's happening with the product in the wild, how are people using it, how are they experiencing it, what's working, what's not working, and making that the Rosetta Stone.
I always would talk about the three horizons of product management and where I see folks go wrong.
Horizon 1 is the version of your product that is in the market today. It is in the hands of your users. People are using it every single day, hopefully to get their jobs done.
Horizon 2 is your near term roadmap. It's whatever is in the sprint release. You're writing stories, you're writing epics, you're burning down your backlog. You're working with engineering to get all the work done.
Horizon 3 is what's that long term vision for the product. Where do we think the market's going, where's demand going and how are we going to get out in front of that?
As a true product leader, you need to be working across all three of those horizons. It's not that you want to spend your time equally. You don't want to just peanut butter your resources around everything. But you have to have a little bit of each and it'll spike up and down depending on where you are in the life cycle of the product.
Where folks go astray is they tend to focus on just Horizon 1 or Horizon 2. I've seen folks who consider themselves very strategic, they're spending a lot of time on Horizon 3, some time on Horizon 2, because you gotta get the product out the door, but you're really neglecting Horizon 1, which is your customer.
I've seen folks error in the opposite direction with great customer empathy. You spend a lot of time on Horizon 1, and some time in Horizon 2. You end up ferrying complaints back to engineering. At some point you almost become like a glorified super service rep, just jockeying customer support tickets back and forth between the customers and engineering. You are neglecting Horizon 3, and you don't have a vision or an eye towards the future.
To get back to your question about what distinguishes a product leader versus a product manager, it's really those two things.
You need to be able to connect all of the constituents together, technical, business, customer.
You have to work across all three of those horizons. Not equally, it depends on the lifecycle of the product, but you have to have certainly an eye towards all three.
And if you're not doing that then you're just managing a backlog, playing a support role, or something else. Or maybe you're like a strategist, but you're not really a leader of the product itself, and that becomes a very tactical role.
Is there a book that you can't recommend enough to people?
Don: Team of Teams. Are you familiar with that one? That's another one where I got really good insight about leadership. So Team of Teams, written by General Stanley McChrystal, who was the leader of special operations for the US military. I didn't realize that that was a matrix job. Each branch of the military has its own, like the Navy has the SEALs and the Army has the Delta's and whatever. But those all report up vertically to the service line. The SEALs report to the head of the Navy.
The commander of the special ops was a matrix job, so it was interesting to see the whole point about leading and influencing, about good people helping work structure. It also has a lot of great tips and techniques about being a good leader.
One of the things he talked about in there that I employed in my organization was rotations. I rotated people from engineering to product. I rotated people from development to infrastructure and as we talked about rotating people from product into general management, I think that was one of the big things I took away from that.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Don. This was a really insightful conversation and I appreciate you taking the time.
Don: Well, my pleasure and it was great to reconnect with you. How wonderful to be able to reestablish the connection. Thank you so much.
Don also shares his experience leading ADP through major technology transitions such as Agile, on-prem to cloud, mobile, ML and AI; evolving the organization's talent with new capabilities and skill sets, growing product management in remote locations such as Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and ensuring they continue to build proximity to customers and business context.
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