In the first post I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].  The second post addressed the importance of effecting leadership within the context of the two aspects of people and organizational culture [Leadership in Product Management (2) – People & Organizational Culture].  This final post in the series will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of functional organization.

Let’s consider two notional functional organizations.  While all departments play important roles within a company, arguably those most relevant to product management are Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  Aligning the objectives, much less the activities, across these disparate departments is a challenging proposition.  More often than not they have discrete objectives, agendas and measures of success that compete rather than complement each other.

In Figure 1, I have depicted an organization that is largely sequential in its information flow – the departments are discrete with hand-off points clearly delineated.  Sales controls distribution, Marketing owns positioning and marketing, and R&D retains development.  Overall coordination is provided by Products.

Given this functional organization, the leadership style most congruent would most likely be one of command and control.  Products would assume positional authority over Sales, Marketing and R&D, directing their activities towards common objectives.  While some product managers may aspire to this model, I have no personal experience with it.  I do however have experience with discrete departments, but with less-than-clear hand-off points and no productive level of overall coordination.

In Figure 2 on the other hand, I have depicted an organization towards the opposite end of the spectrum from that above and is more representational of the matrixed departments with which most of us are likely to be acquainted.

Within this functional organization, Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products are discrete departments but have areas in which there are distinct responsibilities as well as those that overlap.  While each department retains primary responsibility for their function, ideally they are complementary and supportive.  An example in this figure is positioning and marketing developed by Marketing, some of which goes directly towards targeted markets, while other is developed specifically for use by Sales in support of their efforts in distribution (direct and indirect).

R&D is more engaged with the market facing activities of the company, and while still receiving direct market input, also benefits from additional feedback from people who are market facing informed by the perspective of Sales and Marketing.

Products would provide overall coordination but in an overlay manner.  In this model Products would also have a direct market-facing role and provide input to R&D.  The most congruent leadership style for this functional organization is one of collaboration.  Collaborative leadership is a much more complex affair and is defined by Wikipedia as, “an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership).  As most PMs find themselves in organizations similar to this model, the need to effect leadership to bring about alignment extends beyond people to include separate departments as well.  Organizational collaboration has become a necessary fact of professional life.

The above are overly simplified representations but in so doing, I have attempted to depict two points on a continuum of functional organizations – each company will be unique in both its layout as well as resulting inter-organizational dynamics.

Returning to the subject topic of leadership, a successful product manager will need to assess the lay of the land – particularly with respect to people, culture and functional organization – and develop an appropriate leadership approach that will serve to attain the overall objective of organizational alignment towards common goals.  There is simply no formulaic answer or definitive methodology such as pitch, business case, executive fiat, etc. that will meet continuously evolving needs.

Nor is this a fixed proposition once a line has been determined.  Each change in the market, stakeholders and/or organizational alignment or composition will often require an adjustment.  Think of it as a finely balanced Rube Goldberg device in which the various components are always in motion and therefore the center of balance always shifting.

Leadership is not without pitfalls and failures.  The issues and challenges are far too complex.  Rather it is marked through being able to align the organization more often than not so that objectives such as successful entry into a new market and sustainable attainment of market share are achieved.

Successfully developing and launching a solution or product requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational alignment.  Only in delivering upon the internal challenge of organizational leadership can there be any expectation of product or market leadership.

Examples of people within business who embodied successful leadership have become icons of American business – names such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Thomas J. Watson, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove and Steve Jobs.  And the latter is also quite arguably the best product manager in living memory.

REFERENCES

Leadership – has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership

Collaborative leadership – describes an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership

8 years later, HP does it Fiorina’s way

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5777808.html

HP developed its strategy under the guidance of former CEO Carly Fiorina. But it wasn’t until Mark Hurd took the helm that the company’s plans were made a reality.

http://www.cbfeature.com/special_coverage/news/still_hp_after_all_these_years/hps_critical_battlefield_in_china/

HP Way

http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm

Shackleton – The true story of Shackleton’s 1914 Endurance expedition to the the South Pole and his epic struggle to lead his 28 man crew to safety after his ship was crushed in the pack ice.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/

The best depiction by Hollywood of the dynamism involved with leadership was Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Sir Earnest Henry Shackleton, the British Antarctic explorer.  Shackleton (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/) is a film testament to this unorthodox leader who was adept at continuously adjusting his leadership approach as required in the face of unimaginable challenges – environmental, organizational and crew.  His success was ultimately measured by leading his 28-man crew out of Antarctica following the crushing of the expedition’s ship without a single loss of life.

In the first post on leadership in Product Management I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].   This post will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of two of those aspects: people and organizational culture.

In most organizations, alignment of people around a common initiative in the context of product management immediately involves multiple stakeholders in terms of decision makers and influencers.  With respect to people and personalities, the immediate task is to identify the stakeholders relevant to product management.

As with prospective customers, these will include both decision makers and influencers.  Also material with respect to people is the need to approach people differently.  Some stakeholders will require no more than being asked for support, while others will need more formal persuasion in terms of market assessments, pitches and business cases.  It should be recognized on occasion there will be those stakeholders you will not be able to inspire or persuade and for them you should identify a means to mitigate their impact.

Similar to development of a good go-to-market plan, development of a stakeholder engagement plan (whether formal or informal) will increase the chances of obtaining your objective of advancing the product / solution plan Products proposes.  In short, the engagement plan should identify the decision makers and influencers within the organization whose agreement (or at least neutrality) is critical to advance your objectives.

Engage your stakeholders one-on-one.  Doing so provides you with the opportunity to engage each stakeholder using an approach most appropriate to them.  It allows you to demonstrate your knowledge of the market and why they should buy into what Products proposes, and therefore align themselves in terms of objectives and metrics organic to their departments.

Engaging stakeholders individually also allows them to privately air disagreements or concerns which you must address as part of your product, solution and/or go-to-market plan.  Note the “must” in the previous sentence.  Failure to address the concerns shared with you one-on-one will most likely prevent their support of Products in the current initiative.  It could also result in limited to no access to these stakeholders for future projects.

This also provides a firebreak in the event a particular engagement does not go well.  Company-wide presentations are best utilized as forums for publicly demonstrating broad consensus across the organization – not for persuasion of undecided stakeholders.  If you have done your job properly, the true benefit of public presentations are to demonstrate that all (or the majority) are agreed with the go-to-market plan and aligned accordingly.

Organizational culture is important as your approach in leadership should be informed by the predominate culture.  The primary dimensions in which this comes into play are “what” and “how”.  Let’s explore some examples to illustrate the point.

Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1999 largely on the basis of her strong performance in rising through the ranks at AT&T and Lucent.  Prior to her departure from Lucent Fiorina led Marketing and Sales for the largest customer segment.  She brought with her to HP this focus upon sales and marketing which was initially lauded as a much needed shake up of the staid engineering oriented company.  However, Fiorina’s personality and approach ran counter to the well established “HP Way” (http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm) and proved to be a catalyst to her eventual dismissal.

Fiorina’s successor, Mark Hurd, was appointed CEO in 2005.  Though Hurd continued the head count and cost reductions, his approach was much lower profile than that of his high-flying predecessor.  His focus upon productivity and efficiency seems to be more in line with the inherent engineering culture of HP.  Assuming leadership of HP, Hurd took on expectations that he would return HP to “boring profitability” – a challenge that he has delivered upon in spades. 

Interestingly however, a closer examination of the strategies upon which Hurd has successfully executed trace many of their lineages to Fiorina.  No where is this more apparent than in the acquisition of EDS which delivers upon a strategic proposal made early in Fiorina’s tenure – and which precipitated the now infamous proxy fight with Walter Hewlett (son of co-founder William Hewlett).

There is a growing level of recognition that strategy developed by and under Fiorina has proven to be both sound and profitable for HP.  What is equally apparent was that the “how” of her approach was out of synch with the much vaunted HP culture and as a result it is Hurd that has received recognition and reward for the successes of HP.

From 1986 to 1997 Apple, Inc was then known as Apple Computer and struggling to define its path in the highly dynamic personal computer business.  This period in the company’s history is best known for the notable failure of Newton and plummeting share prices.  Yet Newton was only one of many endeavors undertaken by the executive team, all of which contributed to the declining market capitalization.

Under the respective leadership of John Sculley, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio Apple moved away from its predominate culture in two ways.  Under the auspices of Sculley, and continued by both Spindler and Amelio, the organization of Apple was changed from that of being product focused to various forms of nominal corporate functional alignment.  Secondly, the company embarked on a spectrum of technology initiatives that were far removed from the core competence recognized today. These initiatives ranged from central processors (Aquarius) to high-end workstations (Tesseract) to high volume / low margin go-to-market strategy (wading into the prevailing PC price wars of the time) to licensed manufacturing (Mac clones built by Radius, Motorola and Power Computing).

It was not until the return of Steve Jobs and his assumption of the CEO role that Apple again found its footing.  Jobs appears to be the very embodiment of the Apple culture and he reasserted the focus upon products and the user experience.  The results have been stunning.  The CEOs before Jobs had each in turn attempted to lead Apple into various forms of “what” that was not congruent with the predominate culture – none of which were successful.

The point is to be aware of the company culture and align your leadership efforts accordingly.  The degree to which your approach with respect to either “how” or “what” is divergent from the culture will increase the level of difficulty in attaining your objective of aligning critical stakeholders and therefore the company behind your initiative.

Leadership as a topic has a great deal of breadth and depth.  With respect to product management the term “leadership” usually evokes the context of product or market leadership.  While these are worthy goals to which many of us product managers aspire, there is much work to be done in laying the groundwork for the desired level of success.  This is particularly true if the objective is to achieve product or market leadership on a sustained basis – think Exchange over Lotus Notes.

Attainment of product or market leadership requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational leadership.

Over the course of three posts we will explore the topic of organizational leadership in the context of product management.  Many of you will reflexively think that this is ground more suited to CEOs and the like, and that Product Managers should stay primarily focused upon identification of market opportunities, development of products / solutions and their successful launch into the market.  However, product management best practices make implicit, or in many cases explicit, the need to run a product or solution as a business unto itself.  Therefore, unless you have direct control of all the means of production, marketing and distribution, you will need to effect leadership to ensure the organization and its disparate departments do what is necessary to win in the market.  I liken product management to being the CEO for the given product or solution.

Leadership is one of those concepts ready to grasp but difficult to define, so let’s take a moment to reflect upon definitions to ensure we are all working within the same context.  Referencing Wikipedia, one definition of leadership is the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership).  Note the focus upon persons.  The formative years of my professional career were spent as a naval officer, therefore to me there is a clear distinction between leadership and management.  Leadership involves alignment of people around a common initiative or objective.  Management is the control of assets and/or processes.

Having assumed a role as Product Manager you have learned or will learn quickly that there are many beyond you with opinions as to what the Products department should be doing.  As Joshua wrote in his recent post, A GPS for Product Roadmaps, a successful product strategy requires more than simply the PM’s imprint.  To be successful, a company needs to align itself around one or more clearly defined product or solution strategies so that all departmental teams can pull in the same direction.  Critical to the achievement of organizational alignment is ensuring the core objectives and effort across Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  This is best accomplished through the exercise of organizational leadership.

In approaching the challenge of alignment through leadership, the purview of product management expands beyond identifying a market opportunity, defining a product or offering and its successful launch.  In addition to the above, the foremost task of product management becomes the alignment of stakeholders and organizations such that there is consensus with respect to the go-to-market plan, and all know their role in its execution.  To accomplish the requisite level of alignment requires a multi-disciplinary approach spanning all the elements readily recognized as “good product management practices” to also encompass inspiration and persuasion.  In a positive sense, these are at the core of leadership.

The objective of this post was to posit and outline the need for product managers to effect organizational leadership.  It is axiomatic to state that every company is unique.  Yet relative to product management, there are three aspects of organizational composition that are consistently material:

• people (and personalities) that comprise the relevant stakeholders
• organizational culture
• functional organization

In the next two posts we will explore these three material aspects as they relate to organizational leadership by product management – what they mean and how they can be leveraged to achieve the outcome you desire.