As a customer, I get a real joy from seeing a product company listen to my feedback, build features that make my life easier, and do it at a pace that gets me excited to read their weekly release notes.
But in reality, you probably feel the opposite situation more often. What it’s like to be on the receiving end of a crappy product experience where you feel like you’re shouting into the void and no-one is listening.
Behind the scenes, the difference between these two experiences often comes down the product org’s culture.
That’s why I’m excited to share my conversation with Genna Smyth. Genna has spent 12+ years leading product teams inside high growth startups and scale ups as Head of Product & Design at Brightwheel, a Series C edtech startup, and 6+ years as a Product and City Operations leader at Uber from series C through post-IPO.
In her own words, when she first joined Brightwheel, the product organization was “absolute chaos”. They were building bad products, doing things inefficiently, and ultimately not delivering the right impact for customers and the business. What followed was the process of building the product org from the ground up.
We go into how to build a high-performing product organization, why setting up the right culture is even more important than what you build, how to operationalize your cultural tenets through people processes and meetings, and the importance of showing, not telling, your PDE org what good looks like.
And if you’re looking to build your PDE org from the ground up (or revitalize your existing one), Genna’s talents are no-longer confined to Brightwheel. That’s what I love about fractional hiring: it gives amazing talent like Genna the flexibility to share her wisdom with multiple companies at different stages while giving startups access to top-tier talent. We’ve got some amazing advice today. — Shaina
Drop 1. Want a high-performing product org? Focus on the culture first
What we build is only part of the equation. How we build is just as important, if not more important. The three ingredients for a high-performance, high-outcome product org are people, process, and culture. Culture itself comes down to mindset, the principles, and the tenants for how we build, and all of that then manifests in people and process.
At Brightwheel, the tenants we focused on were speed for the sake of our customers, diving deep to understand their needs, iterative learning, thinking big and setting big goals and working backwards from their, taking measured risks, and taking on tech debt strategically. These were the core principles around which we wanted to operate as an organization.
Take it back to your team:
- Before you go tinkering around in people and processes, evaluate the type of culture you have. What are the driving principles of your product org and do they need an update?
- When designing new cultural tenants, make sure you’re sharing the “why” behind it. At Brightwheel, speed was a principle but was met with resistance initially. When tied back to speed for the sake of the customer, the product org was bought in.
- Don’t be afraid to throw away the old playbook. Genna came into a product org that was chaotic and struggling. Processes don’t fix a broken culture. Build a solid foundation first, set the standard, and allow people to buy in or get out.
Drop 2. Show (don’t tell) what a good product org looks like
We used one of our all-hands to reintroduce the product organization. We gave examples and said, here’s the operating norm of diving deep to understand customer needs, and here’s how a team just did this within the context of their work last week. We wanted to make sure it felt tangible.
We established a culture committee that could be the voice of the people and feedback, and develop their own roadmap to really optimize and entrench the culture.
We introduced other quick wins like a PDE praise channel and a culture award at all-hands.
Take it back to your team:
- Give big cultural changes the proper airtime. At Brightwheel, Genna used the company wide all-hands to introduce the new culture doc to highlight the importance of it.
- Writing a new culture doc manifesto isn’t enough to change behavior. Genna suggests giving your team concrete examples of what good looks like.
- Reinforce positive behavior. Consider instituting things like a PDE praise channel or shout outs during company all-hands
- Constantly collect feedback on how your product org is feeling and doing. It could be as simple as a monthly feedback. meeting with product leaders or as in-depth as a full culture committee like Brightwheel.
Drop 3. Reinforce your culture with the appropriate people processes
We would interview against this culture and really access it upfront. Then from an onboarding point of view, the first 30 days, we really emphasized this is how we work. We had a pretty rigorous 30-60-90 day check-in with feedback along the way. We weren’t afraid to be real at the 90-day mark and say this isn’t the right fit.
Take it back to your team:
- Look into your current performance management practices. Are you accessing how team members are performing against your cultural values?
- The interview process is a great time to ensure cultural alignment. At Brightwheel, Genna made sure that interviews would tease out whether new hires aligned with her product orgs’ values.
- Use onboarding as an opportunity to continue to reinforce your product org’s standards. Genna stated that her team wasn’t afraid to let people go at the 90-day mark if there wasn’t a fit.
- Use every opportunity to collect more feedback while reinforcing your values. Institute regular check-ins with employees, have a clear idea of what good looks like, and give opportunities for improvement.
Drop 4. Create a weekly operating cadence to set your PDE org for success
We introduced program reviews where each pod had a weekly or bi-weekly touch point with our CEO, CTO or myself, and the PDE org owned the agenda. The agenda items could be strategy alignment, roadmap prioritization and alignment, going deep on a project and how to approach it, going deep on metrics, or core KPIs of a pod.
If a PM needed feedback outside of that window, we also had a Slack channel called product exec feedback where they’d record a Loom and ask for the specific feedback they needed. We also had weekly roadmap reviews. And for any P1 project, we’d gant it out and get granular.
Don’t due process for process’ sake but do it to drive decisions, alignment or action. And if you have nothing to talk about, cancel the meeting.
Take it back to your team:
- Do an audit of your current meetings, syncs, and standups and see if they’re driving decisions, alignment, or action. If not, remove or consolidate.
- CEO or CTO schedules are hard to find time in. Genna suggests baking in weekly times into their schedule where PDE orgs can get the feedback they need. Async channels are another great tool to use.
- Get your executive stakeholders on board into the processes to remove any bottlenecks in production.
- For your highest priority features or product launches, Genna suggests doing the work to schedule out all the milestones. It provides visibility to question initial timeline assumptions, encourage faster iteration, and build a tighter PDE process.