Navigating Your Mandate as a CPO: What to Ask for in Interviews

In our latest episode of the 10-Minute Product Podcast, we unpack essential strategies for aspiring Chief Product Officers during interviews. Discover why securing the right mandate is crucial for success—and learn the questions to ask to uncover organizational dynamics, clear mandates, and potential pitfalls. From probing team alignment to spotting red flags in company culture, this episode guides you to make informed decisions and set the stage for impactful leadership. Don’t just land the job; ensure it’s the right one for you!

The role of a product leader is to have a maximum impact through the Product organisation - and this means pushing back on the high volume of often conflicting priorities from stakeholders and customers which will tie up your roadmap and resources that will distract you without end. Saying NO constructively is a hard skill to master without upsetting stakeholders and team - all the while they loose trust in your strategy. It sounds simple but anyone who has been in this position has learnt fast how difficult this is to navigate. Keeping a steady focus and trust in the impact over time is incredibly hard in dynamic environments.  In this episode of The 10-Minute Product Podcast we tackle this dilemma and provide hands on pointers to how you can navigate it successfully. We also share cases from our own experience which you can apply in your own role as a product leader.

What career advice would you give a younger version of yourself? In this episode we will give the pointers from the experience we have gained from 20 years in Product Management.  We all know the feeling; our industry is constantly changing and we are under pressure to always adapt our skills and knowledge to stay relevant. Just in the past 2 years, the global stagnation and layoffs in the tech industry has created a super-competitive situation for the prized positions. And GenAI is now writing the PRDs! So is there an approach to follow to stay up to date, be relevant and re-invent yourself? Please follow us, as we travel 20 years back in time to younger versions of Christian and Jonas and give them the most important advice we have learned during our careers.

Roadmaps! Who hasn’t been asked for one? As a Product lead, you get asked for roadmaps with delivery dates regularly, aka the good ol’ “timeline” roadmap. And at the same time, you also need to solve problems, which isn’t exactly a predictable activity. This creates a constant tension, which can be hard to navigate. Luckily, there are solutions. One of the strong approaches being Janna Bastow’s Now-Next-Later roadmap, with dates! It helps you with the discovery part, while being able to give dates to other teams. The closer the deliveries, the more accurate the dates of course. Check out the episode “Roadmaps with Dates” on Spotify or Youtube, in which Jonas and Christian speak with Janna about her approach. Janna’s ProdPad has two useful links for everyone: a Now-Next-Later course, and for inspiration on how to sell this to your CEO - a handy Convince your boss presentation template 🙂 -- Episode summary: In a podcast discussion focusing on product management, Jenna, Jonas, and Christian delve into the evolution and challenges of product planning and roadmapping. Jenna, co-founder and CEO of ProdPad and one of the original founders of the community Mind the Product, shares insights on developing tools for OKR, roadmapping, and feedback management. Jonas brings two decades of product management experience across various industries, emphasizing the integration of marketing and engineering functions with product development. The conversation shifts to the traditional versus agile roadmapping approaches. Christian recounts his early career frustrations with rigid, year-long waterfall roadmaps that often failed, leading him to seek more adaptable product management strategies. This journey reflects a broader industry shift from inflexible planning to agile methodologies, which prioritize adaptability and responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Jenna introduces the Now, Next, Later roadmap model, which she helped pioneer. This approach segments tasks into immediate, near-term, and future activities, providing flexibility and clarity without committing to specific completion dates for longer-term projects. The model allows teams to focus on immediate priorities while maintaining a strategic view of future goals. It offers a balance between providing necessary structure for planning and retaining the flexibility to adapt as new information and opportunities arise. Jonas and Jenna discuss how this model has been received in various organizational contexts, particularly how it aligns with different teams' operational rhythms and expectations. They highlight the practical challenges of integrating agile practices in environments accustomed to more traditional, date-specific roadmaps. The conversation also touches on how the Now, Next, Later approach can complement other frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), enabling large enterprises to remain agile and responsive despite their scale. The discussion concludes with reflections on the ongoing need for product teams to balance detailed planning with the flexibility to adapt to emerging challenges and opportunities. This detailed exploration of product management strategies underscores the importance of adaptive planning in modern product development, advocating for a balanced approach that accommodates both immediate project needs and long-term strategic goals.

My team is stuck, they don’t have good enough ideas”. “I need my team to be more creative”. What can you do when you feel that market fit is slightly elusive and that your product doesn’t have enough steam or is losing innovation speed?  In most cases it is the result of leadership. So let’s rephrase this to “We’re stuck. We’re trying many things but we can’t figure this out.” Unless you want your product to continue as is - which it could very well do, say it makes $10m a month and you’re happy - then, you need to look at this and decide whether you want to continue or discontinue the product. If you want to continue because you think there’s an opportunity you haven’t quite figured out yet, then this podcast episode is for you. We’ll look at a series of practical approaches through which you can set up a better framework for your team. Some of the topics we’ll touch on: Leadership responsibility Transparency, honesty and supporting environments Assessing external and internal conditions Reinvigorating and involving the team Discovery and source of ideas Clarity of vision & strategy -- Episode Summary: In the first episode of the 10-Minute Product Podcast in video format, the discussion focuses on strategies for reinvigorating a team that feels stuck and lacks innovative ideas. The hosts, Christian and Jonas, emphasize the importance of leadership in taking responsibility for the team's stagnation, rather than placing blame. They argue that understanding and addressing the root causes of a team's challenges is essential, starting with complete honesty about the situation. The conversation covers the need to assess both external and internal factors affecting the team's progress. Externally, this includes changes in market conditions, competition, and economic downturns that might make the product less relevant or desirable. Internally, factors such as technical quality, effective metrics and reporting, and team dynamics play a crucial role. To re-energize the team, the hosts suggest engaging in user research and investigation, fostering an environment where team members can openly discuss problems and potential solutions. This approach encourages a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the product. They advocate for involving the team in defining new strategies, rather than dictating changes through top-down presentations. The use of design sprints and short, focused projects is recommended to spark creativity and encourage the team to question existing processes. The hosts also discuss the importance of revisiting and updating the product backlog, potentially uncovering valuable ideas that were previously overlooked. Reflecting on personal experience, the hosts share insights on the benefits of maintaining notebooks of ideas and reflections, which can serve as a resource for inspiration and innovation. They highlight the significance of reviewing past work and ideas to find relevant solutions for current challenges. Leadership practices are also discussed, with an emphasis on self-reflection, clear communication, and creating a supportive environment that encourages feedback and open dialogue. The discussion concludes with considerations around team composition, ensuring that individuals are in roles that match their skills and experience, and reaffirming the need for a clear product vision and strategy that engages the entire team. Overall, the episode provides a comprehensive overview of strategies for unblocking a stuck team, focusing on leadership responsibility, honesty, assessing internal and external factors, engaging the team in strategy development, fostering creativity, and maintaining a positive and inclusive work environment.

A great episode today in which we welcome Oliver Heckmann (with 2 Ns because he is German ;) ), Head of Engineering at Coda. Jonas Vang Gregersen and Christian Miccio talk about planning with him! A recurring topic that is crucial in every company, and that is often hard to get right. Jonas has been a great fan of Coda since the start, due to their usability, innovative features, and high delivery pace, so we were really excited to have this chat. We walk through prioritisation approaches such as Oliver's 100-dollar-voting, Christian’s 1-line-prioritisation or using dot-voting to align prioritisation criteria, Jonas on the role of Product during execution, and we talk about strong tooling to reduce friction to execute at pace, we walk through focus (or lack thereof), scope reductions, and more!  We hope this gives you ideas when dealing with your own planning challenges. Do send us feedback and questions! You can read about Coda’s golden rule of planning and much more in detail in their planning handbook. Highly recommended! The results speak for themselves. If you like the content, do subscribe, don't hesitate to recommend it, and as always send us feedback and topics for future episodes! -- Episode Summary: In this podcast episode, Oliver Heckman, the head of engineering at Coda.io, delves into the critical aspects of planning and execution in the realm of product development. He articulates the "golden rule of planning," proposing that dedicating no more than 10% of the total project time to planning can significantly enhance the quality of both the plan itself and its execution. Drawing from his extensive background, including his tenure at Google, Oliver shares practical insights on optimizing planning processes. He suggests that minimizing planning duration can paradoxically improve the quality of plans and outcomes by forcing a focus on essential elements. Heckman further advises on effective prioritization techniques, highlighting the significance of clear ownership of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) within teams. He underscores the integration of planning and execution tools as a means to streamline processes, ensuring that teams remain aligned and focused throughout the project lifecycle. The discussion also ventures into strategies for fostering productive collaboration between product management and engineering teams. Oliver emphasizes the importance of prioritizing tasks based on their impact and alignment with the project's goals, advocating for a disciplined approach to maintaining focus during the execution phase to avoid common pitfalls such as scope creep and resource misallocation. By sharing anecdotes and lessons learned from his experiences, Oliver provides listeners with valuable strategies for improving planning efficiency, enhancing teamwork, and ultimately achieving better project outcomes. The episode is rich with actionable advice for professionals looking to refine their approach to project planning and execution, making it a valuable resource for anyone involved in product development.

Pricing is hard. You can have the most unique product and amazing marketing plan but at the end of the day customers will judge you by the price they pay. So how do you get it right? Famously, when the iPhone launched, many would say “This is crazy! I would never pay $500 for a phone!”, and yet here we are. Join Jonas and Christian in the discussion, and hopefully we can provide useful pointers for you! As ever, send us feedback as well as topics you’d like to hear about in the future. #productleadership #productmanagement #pricing -- Partial trasnscript" (...) If you have an IT product, technical product, you know, places like Gartner Research, other areas, there's plenty of knowledge hubs that kind of gives you a good understanding of your competitive space. Awesome. And that's an interesting point to segue into the price points and how people perceive them is also one of the issues you'll face when you select yours. And so one thing to mention from my side would be that you can't make everyone happy and some people would like it super cheap, some people are happy to pay more. The reality is once you do set a price point, whether, you know, and thanks for mentioning B2C and B2B, once you do set price points, you do automatically aim for certain audiences and so you will focus your efforts and you will focus your product towards certain audiences that are willing to pay a certain price. So you can go premium, you can go cheap, you know, high volume, but low margins. Whatever the price points are that you choose, you will automatically do, you know, certain focuses. And so in order not to stay theoretical only about this, the biggest thing I would recommend with pricing is in addition to the research, as you mentioned, as in, you know, see what's out there on the market and what people think about it. The biggest other thing would be to experiment with your own price points and you could do things from research, as in surveys, try to ask people. As a startup, I even interviewed people in coffee shops in order to find out price points or, you know, go more professional with B2B companies and talk to them. What you could also do, a good trick that I found over time is instead of asking people a range of prices or, you know, would you be happy to, but in order to really find out and to emulate the moment that somebody has to give you their credit cards or really find out if they give you the money, what you can do is segment your audience into several groups of people and tell one group, you know, it will cost you 20, please give me your credit card number so you can sign up for the first of the next month. The next group, you say it will cost you 40. The next group you say it would cost you 60 and see where people stop paying you, where they stop wanting to give you money. And you'll see the inflection point of where your prices are, for example. That's a very, you know, basic and cheap method, but it still works. It's true. And it carries an important point, but it's to, you know, you can go full academic on researching what's the most appropriate price point you should pursue. But at the end of the day, the most valuable feedback you get, like with anything in product discovery is talking to customers, talk to the end user, sign up end users to your dilemma, you know, give them a discount with the first five customers, but have very transparent conversations with them around what's the most appropriate price point. Most customers B2C or B2B like that. They first of all, like the discount, but they also like being part of an innovation process and bringing new products to market, right? You know, the best research you can do is to talk to customers and get that feedback. The last thing is around how you present your price point and a tangible and very efficient way of also experimenting with different price points is to do a price tiering. (...)

AI has a lot of potential, but successfully implementing it in large organisations is a tricky business. Everyone is apprehensive and expecting a magic bullet at the same time. A few dimensions that are crucial to approach AI: Where do you start, and which projects do you pick? How do you set up a framework to run AI projects successfully? Can you navigate all the stakeholders and set the right expectations? Jonas and Christian dive into these topics in our latest episode of the 10-minute podcast, and walk through practical approaches to embed AI into your company. #AI #productleadership #productmanagement -- Partial transcript: (...) And generally, it's because we're overcomplicating the use of AI and ML. Through our conversations, we've discussed what is it, really. AI, ML is another tool in your toolbox. It doesn't change your initial range of use cases that you're looking into as a product leader, but it gives you an extra means to resolve those use cases. So looking to introduce AI and ML in large organizations, it makes sense to split your use cases into two segments. We coin them as working bees use cases and helpers use cases. So working bees use cases are use cases that are where AI can support by taking over and repetitive user actions, so automating workflows. This with an aim to reduce the time it takes for a user to complete a task, so automation. Helpers are AI solutions where AI is supporting you by providing relevant guidance when you need to make a decision, so decision support. And looking across and splitting up your set of use cases like that, the working bee use cases, so automation, taking over and repetitive tasks are usually more straightforward to implement and a more clear cut, which in turn will enable you to unlock value faster than helper use cases. So we do recommend looking across your use cases that you start with the bee use cases, so repetitive tasks. Also start simple. Don't overcomplicate things. Try to start with a simple use case. Try to define a simple solution and get going. Test and ensure that it works, and then you can work on scaling it across a user base or an application space. Try to de-scope what you want to achieve with AI and ML initially, learn how to use it, see it work, unlock value from it, and then move on from there. Awesome. I really like your split into two different types of activities, and I have to agree. It's better to start simple, and it's better to start with the easier tasks to be repeated. And so this brings me to another topic, which is in big organizations, one of the effects AI and ML has on people is that there's a certain amount of magic thinking, because you read a lot of stuff in the press. You read about the, you know, you see amazing pictures being generated, and so there's a lot of magic thinking. So as a product lead, one of the most important things to do in a big organization is to set expectations or you set yourself up to fail. Setting the expectations means you have to dispel some of the magic bullet thinking. You have to assess the risk of your activities. And by that, I mean, if you do blue sky model training, for example, on certain outcomes on this one, so can you do just blue model thinking, blue model training, blue sky model training? Probably not, because if you do just that, you can fail in every single one of them. You could, mathematically speaking. If you have advanced analytics, for example, as a avenue for some of the projects you're doing, it's much better, because you can predict the results of some of these projects. So you can have a balanced portfolio. And this is something I've done in the past to explain to the board and to the executive to say, look, I have 50% of projects that are very risky, 50% of products that are more predictable. (...)

High Performance Teams - what is it in practical terms and how do you achieve it with a team? Both working in and leading a high performing team is rewarding and brings out the best in everyone and gets the most impactful results. As a leader you can promote a high performance mindset by removing distractors around but also inside the team, and set up metrics which reinforce the behaviours and culture you want to achieve. In this episode Christian and Jonas share their experience and provide you with tangible pointers to how to get started as a leader. Do subscribe if you like the content, don’t hesitate to recommend it 🙂 and send us feedback and topics for future episodes. -- Partial transcript: (...) But the point is to not become a point of friction every week, twice a week, three times a week, but to help the product move forward. So those will be the two first outside actors I look at. What about you? So Christian, to build on what you said regarding roles who are there to serve the product and the core team, I made it a habit to encourage people in those roles to regularly meet with the team members and the team as a whole. Ask them the question, how do I best add value to the work you do and to where we want to bring the product? And then quietly sit on their hands and listen to the feedback they receive. As a leader, obviously you sit outside the team. And what you're looking to is to promote a culture, a line to set up behavioral traits that enables a team to become high performing. This requires you as a leader to be able to put up some guardrails around the team that gives you the confidence that you're constantly on tap with what's going on inside the team. And then you can step in in a supporting role, supporting, unlocking through mentoring any issues on the path to high performance. Trying to formalize a little bit what you just talked about. It's not exactly for every team. Some teams are very early stage and they prefer a little bit of we move fast and we don't have time to measure. So they just prefer that and it can work. But one of the things to explore is could you formalize these metrics into a sort of like a health dashboard for a team? So if you can, whether it's cadence, whether it's time to decision, whether it's how impactful was our launch, whatever your KPIs are, whatever the metrics are that you choose, if you put them together on a health scorecard, then that allows you to fill that in regularly, put in the values and review them with the team. And when you review them with the team, you get to the point where you say, we're improving, we're status quo, we're becoming worse, who knows. But the point is that the measure allows you to then take action in case some things go adrift. So as usual, having data makes things transparent. What you probably as a product lead need to do is, your product team will probably have to take a little bit of this. Not everybody likes to measure things or to write down how long it took for things. But your product team is well placed to capture some of these metrics. And so I would say that's a really high, really performant tool. The other thing I would say as well is, once you actually set up these things, you set up a team scorecard, you're working, you reduced meetings, how do you keep it up? I think that's the last tail end of this discussion would be, how do you monitor your team continuously in a way to keep the performance high? And so you have a team scorecard that you continue doing. But I would actually suggest as well, sending out surveys, ask the team to assess themselves and maturity on the different aspects. And use that to then review what you're doing and do retros, include this in your regular retros and feedback the data you collect into the process. So that you can keep the team at a high cadence and high performing. (...)

We have all started from scratch in a new role and the first 100 days are critical to set yourself on a successful path, in particular in product leadership roles. You have to both understand and meet very different expectations from colleagues and stakeholders.You have to formulate your own approach, and deliver plans for the products you’ve taken on. And you have to  adapt the existing roadmap and projects to your direction. In this episode we share our pointers to dos and donts in the first 100 days and which will line you up for impact in your new role.  Do subscribe if you like the content, don’t hesitate to recommend it 🙂 and send us feedback and topics for future episodes! Podcast brought to you by Christian Miccio and Jonas Vang Gregersen! -- Partial transcript: (...) So first thing we do is interview leadership, interview stakeholders, interview your team, literally set up one-on-ones with people, find out what they're aiming for, find out what their goals are, you need to learn who they are, what they want to achieve, and in that way you can, you know, in the future align with them and figure out how to have a coexistence, let's say, in the company. Secondly, it's good to read up on vision, on the strategy and understand where the company's currently headed. Without that you don't know what to do, you don't know where it's going, you don't know what to, you know, what to fine-tune. So this is really important to understand the current situation. And one of the first things you should be doing as well to understand the company and the situation you're in, is take your own medicine. This means using your products you're in charge of, down to the details, understand what problems they solve for users, what problems they don't solve, and basically, you know, where are the friction points, where are the value points, what do you, what you have handed over to you. So that's the first, the first big area. Second big area, Jonas. Yes, and just to leave it where you left it, Christian, in terms of knowing your own product, we discussed this in the lead-in to this episode, that in fact, you need to be the most knowledgeable of the products, even though there may be a product between you, a product team between you and the product, understand it in detail. Because the same goes for getting to know and understand your customers and the vertical you're in. You need to be the most knowledgeable. You have to have an in-depth understanding of their pains that you're looking to resolve, but also if and where your product and offering provides a value for your customers. It starts with the data, look at available dashboards, metrics dashboards that are available to you within the company, study the KPIs, figure out what's really going on into the low detail. You also need to look at the market and the competitive space to understand where your company and your product are placed at the moment. And here, don't rely on what you get told by your new colleagues. Make up your own opinion and make sure that what is perceived as to be the position in the market is in effect, from your point of view, also the case. And then finally, but most importantly, in my opinion, which is to start meeting your customers. Spend as much quality time with your customers, learn about their pains to sit with them, understand what's going on in their way of doing things. (...) And so what you, the next thing you should be doing, most likely, is that based on your assessments, develop a clear vision, develop a product vision, and develop a product strategy that are similar or divergent from what you had before. But you know, in reality, it's always going to be somewhere in the middle. But you do need to articulate a way forward because that will be expected of you, first of all, but that also will allow you to discuss with the whole company, where things should be going, align people, align the teams. (...)