Browsing Tag

management

Stuck in the Middle: The Committer

I haven’t done a piece around leadership personas for a while.  The main reason is things haven’t been that slow to think about leadership styles of late and I have just been getting things done, rather than thinking about things.   What a quandary, so I’m writing another piece on leadership, perhaps just to feel a little better about myself or to help a friend out.

This series is basically a pragmatic look at leadership, management and execution as it relates to dealing with specific leadership personas and how to get things done effectively inside a given management mode. Some of the other one’s I’ve addressed are The Collaborator, The Geologist, The Amoeba, The Visualist, The Fence Mender, The Vassalizer, The MBIFM, and a couple of other ones.

It is always an interesting set of problems to solve when thinking on how organizations can communicate better, develop their people, how to look at executing as an organization more effectively and how contributors can create excitement in a given role, even if they have been there a long time.  It might be important to note, that everyone needs to contribute – leadership is as much about a team and doing what needs to be done, as it is about “managing”.  It’s the last concept which got me back to thinking on this series based on a conversation I had with a friend the other day. Karen is consistently having items thrown into her queue without regard of any other items in progress and it is done via a series of ad hoc commitments which are cascaded down via email with no other interaction.

The challenge/situation is how can you keep up and be successful when someone continuously delegates new tasks without acknowledging capacity/understanding the effort to produce or providing additional context/assistance to ensure success.   I can certainly understand the troubles associated with this type of situation, which brings me to writing on this leadership persona.  Over commit and under deliver – not sure how this helps anyone – the investors, the customers or the associates.  At the end of the day, you have to manage expectations and deliverables – even if they are outside of your control.

As a product manager, I quickly came to grips with the reality that you have none of the authority, but all of the accountability, so working effectively through others is a keen skill to have no matter what role you have.   That being said you need to have an environment which allows for achievement and the opportunity for meeting the needs of the key stakeholder and constant agreement and confirmation that you will get it done while positive can lead to issues down the road.

So how do you deal with this? Communicate, communicate, communicate.  It also helps to make sure everyone understand what is being work on, who owns it and when it can be done.  Transparency is the key to success in this leadership model.  If everyone knows what needs to be done, is aware of the current prioritization and is aware of value for the folks who benefit from what is currently in the queue you have the opportunity to drive to closure the right items for the business, the customers and your employees.

November 8, 2008 by
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Complexity: The Context of Identity

The emergence of new technologies continue to change how many of us – as individuals, business folks and our online identities management of our interactions and information is becoming increasingly more complex. Ultimately, online identities can represent people, companies, products and brands. Identity online is becoming more like a house of brands, than a branded house for many of us. The complexity of managing a portfolio of identities/brands is becoming increasingly more challenging as we engage our personal networks, customers and business networks. Context and the complexity of context is making it even more difficult.

Context Defines Identity?

So I was watching The Soup the other day and I was generally amazed at how many of the personalities/identities I actually knew. The problem is I only know of these identities/celebs because of the Soup. I have no other context, except for Anderson Cooper, who wase featured on one of the more entertaining segments in the episode I just got to watch thanks to Tivo. The other thing which has got me to thinking about identity is some work I have been doing with ASC X12 and the context of where the market is, where the organization is and where it needs to go. These two things got me thinking back to how can context of a given set of interactions impact identity or the management of identity.

100_0772 by you.

The Echo Chamber

Context is one of the more interesting challenges of identity and I as a user of many platforms have way too many context sets to manage. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to streamline my online experience of late, but have been challenged to keep up with the pace of network specific interactions. My initial streamlining was related to getting yet another ID at ping.fm to help keep a consistent pulse across my networks and for that use case it works. The problem with ping.fm is that it is not conversational – you end up with orphaned replies on Facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Leveraging a tool which only speaks AT others rather than listening too is not a good thing for maintaining and developing relationships… With Ping.fm you end up with replies which echo into silence, until 3 or 4 days later when you check in at that given platform. Privacy and conversation are key drivers of the increasing identity crisis folks who are attempting to manage identity online with one way updates just doesn’t solve for.

Do I want my professional network to know the same thing my personal network know? How many networks do I need to update with my the latest picture of my kids?

The 4 P’s of Identity

When thinking about the say 8 accounts I commonly use, the ability to engage AND manage the relationships, responses and outreach can be a daunting task. Beyond the basic administrivia of each account, the challenge of trying to understand how to manage the mix of my activities and platforms continues to grow.

While ping.fm is interesting, it mainly is a broadcast tool, unless there is some well hidden feature I can’t find.   As a tool, it only represents the ability to consolidate presence, not the ability to manage platform capabilities, promotion and placement. Identity as a brand or product is essentially what develops in each of the channels you participate in. If each instance of identity becomes a product, that means as platforms change, people migrate and new capabilities are available on a single platform identity/brand equity is diluted and management gets more complex.

So what are the 4 P’s of identity?

  • Platform – The holder of the ID account from a technology perspective is commonly the definition of a given platform. Typically platforms have unique account management and network capabilities which are not open, for the most part, for third party management.
  • Presence – The capability set typically associated with where you are and what you are doing. Twitter or the Plurk are good examples of platforms which support presence.
  • Placement – Group membership on a platform is one way to look at placement, but as are the ways which you allow to be contacted or how you can be engaged in context of group or platform.  On some platforms you may expose email, others you might constrain to the core messaging option, such as inbox messages or the wall on Facebook.
  • Privacy– Each platform, identity and group has privacy management attributes and rules which need to be managed. The management of privacy is uniquely related to the relationship you have in context of a platform and group.

100_0756 by you.

Why is identity such a challenge online?

If you share content online, it doesn’t go away.   However, if you share something at a dinner table it might be moved from memory, but it definitely isn’t a broadcast or a sustaining reality.  Just imagine if that incredibly stupid thing you said after your 3rd bottle of Silver Oak lived on forever?   It is the broadcast and permanency of content/interactions which make managing context and identity a far more complex thing. As an example, my offline identity is pretty much Jon and maybe a couple of nicknames, each with their own context, but mainly that context isn’t necessarily shared, even if the moniker is used more widely. I recently got a new nickname, Echo, while a seemingly fun name and definitely has an affinity to who I am that identity has no context outside of 3 people, the adoption is getting wider than expected.  While Echo usage is growing, the context isn’t being shared.  On some level the visibility of context is greater and can be shared, not so much in the real world.

The key challenges of managing the 4 P’s of identity are unique to being online and the fragmentation, management and interaction requirements require some type of solution.  Technologies to update, integrate and provide security/authorization are out there, but a great deal of work is needed to actually manage, protect and OWN your data.  Perhaps interoperability isn’t enough, we need to also support portability to better manage identity.


DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

September 20, 2008 by
(6)

Enable persona based sales

So I’ve been thinking a little more on those topics I shared and since I keep reading interesting stuff over at Adele’s site, buyerpersona.com and am always looking for ways to improve sales enablement. I thought I might should eat a little of my own dog food and address one of the questions myself — How can positioning and targeting of buyer personas improve sales execution?

Having launched products into the market a couple of times, sales enablement and readiness is one of the biggest obstacle to success in the marketplace. Messaging and tools are often the critical success items when you sends sales out into the field to represent your product. Adele’s approach is fairly straight forward – know who you are selling to and what interests your targeted buyer. A recent post that really made me think about it was Messaging to No One In particular. The gobblygook syndrome is a problem in marketing, particularly technology marketing where we all are looking for a way to differentiate.

Broad messaging is just about the same as having no messaging. Messaging for the masses is typically not the best way to go out into the marketplace and often driven by lack of product definition and understanding why your product wins in the marketplace and who it is for. To help figure this out, I ask myself three questions which help me understand the typical buyer persona or at least to prioritize them:

  • Who buys my product at a company?
  • Who influences decision cycles for my product?
  • What do these people they really care about?

Seems a little too simple, but more complex and broad based questions can skew how you go to market – at least for me – I over analyze everything. Sure you can refine with follow on questions, but typically each of these questions return less than 3 or 4 things which is a great baseline to build from.

The core messaging opportunity for marketers and product managers is know the right people to focus on and identify a simple way to speak to them. When you build a product you often leverage use cases/user personas, so why not apply a succinct set of value drivers, key differentiators and messages for the product the buyer.

Crispy Messaging For Me Please

So if big fluffy messaging platforms are the way – what should you do? Crisp it up a little, look at your core messages today, talked to sales and a few customers and see if common themes develop that would allow you to reduce the options for sales to speak to and customers to embrace. The differentiation challenge will continue to be one of those key deliverables marketers and product managers deliver to the field and the marketplace. The challenge to provide sales with a crisp understanding of who benefits from a given product or service is sorta like a twistaplot story, but once you find the ending you like you can crisp it up and make it repeatable. With a focused messaging and buyer centric packaging of the product you can help sales know when is the right time to walk from a sales engagement?

To take a little bit from the Customer Centric Selling folks – The second best salesperson isn’t the one who’s product is runner up in a bake off, but the person who exits the sales cycle first when he/she understands that it isn’t the right target. The DNA of salespeople typically doesn’t allow them to just give up, but if you can provide them with a clear set of buyer personas and product definitions, as a Product Manager, you just might make it more likely sales will focus on the right folks.

Short Attention Span Theatre

Buyers are busy and sales folks are just trying to eek out an existance and neither of these afford the marketer the opportunity to spend a good deal of time explaining why thier product is the right product. From my perspective, albeit limited, effective product management isn’t delivering the coolest product, the most feature rich product or the most enterprise scaleable solution to the marketplace – it centers on delivering the right product, with the right features for the appropriately buyer.

The goal for me at this point is to right size a solution or product for the buyer. How about you?

August 17, 2008 by
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Principles: Shading strategy, execution and interactions

prin·ci·ple [prin-suh-puhl] –noun

1. an accepted or professed rule of action or conduct: a person of good moral principles.
2. a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived: the principles of modern physics.
3. a fundamental doctrine or tenet; a distinctive ruling opinion: the principles of the Stoics.
4. principles, a personal or specific basis of conduct or management: to adhere to one’s principles; a kindergarten run on modern principles.
5. guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct: a person of principle.
6. an adopted rule or method for application in action: a working principle for general use.
7. a rule or law exemplified in natural phenomena, the construction or operation of a machine, the working of a system, or the like: the principle of capillary attraction.
8. the method of formation, operation, or procedure exhibited in a given case: a community organized on the patriarchal principle.
9. a determining characteristic of something; essential quality.
10. an originating or actuating agency or force: growth is the principle of life.
11. an actuating agency in the mind or character, as an instinct, faculty, or natural tendency: the principles of human behavior.
12. Chemistry. a constituent of a substance, esp. one giving to it some distinctive quality or effect.
13. Obsolete. beginning or commencement.

—Idioms
14. in principle, in essence or substance; fundamentally: to accept a plan in principle.
15. on principle,
a. according to personal rules for right conduct; as a matter of moral principle: He refused on principle to agree to the terms of the treaty.
b. according to a fixed rule, method, or practice: He drank hot milk every night on principle.

The funny thing about principles is that not only is the construct so nuanced that it supports 15 different dictionary use cases, but we often forget iT shades most daily actions. I was reminded of this throughout the week based on three different interactions within multiple settings – professional, social and familial. The trifecta of situational proof points that principles could be seen as an individual’ personal acceptable use policy.

Each situation for each participant is shaded by not only personal experience/biases, but constrained to the context of one’s principles. A friend has told me time and time again, your “world view” impacts your reactions and others reactions to YOU. For example, my view of productivity and follow up is not the same as others or vice versa. which while circular logic is the recursive spiral many interactions get into because of core DNA differences with folks. At times you just can’t connect your idea, emotions or actions toward what may or may not be common goals. Ultimately, how does an individual internalize a strategy, a brand or an action plan in the marketplace or in a cohort group is often the common thread of miscommunication between folks, as least that’s my lesson of the week around principles.

To effectively lead, manage or interact this is a baseline reality is often forgotten and overlooked, MYSELF included. I find myself not asking enough questions, but instead interpreting reactions and actions within how I would see/feel on a given topic which is more of an anchor than way to move forward and drive change. So my personal and career challenge to myself of week is to use my ears more than my mouth and to ask questions as to why something isn’t as effective as I thought it would be, rather than to make assumptions based on my own understanding/filter.

I think with this approach then perhaps I can avoid the pitfall of the best laid plans going awry. So now I think I have 101 things to be thankful for.

I really get excited when life hits you in the head with a blunt object and make you realize the best thing is that we are all different and bring different view, strategies and tactics.

For me it’s those situational reminders which provides clarity on things. I think I’ll read the 4 agreements again.

July 20, 2008 by
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