Coaching Focus

Welcome back to Product Therapy. In this episode, I am joined by my good friend and product coach, Elias Liberich. Elias is one of my favorite product coaches, and he's worked across fast-scaling organizations and global enterprises. If you've ever sat in a meeting about OKRs, if you've ever sat on roadmap conversations, parathization meetings, and you felt something deeper was really misaligned, this conversation is for you. We're going to talk about one of the hardest and most overlooked product leadership skills, focus. And I just don't mean individual focus. I mean organizational clarity, organizations understanding what the most important thing to work on is right now. Elias, it is such a pleasure to have you. Welcome to Product Therapy. Thank you very much, Christian. Looking forward to this. I mean that when I say I love the work you do with teams all around the world. I know you have a passion around helping organizations really get clarity about the most important things they should be doing, coaching leaders across the group. I want to just start with the basis because it sounds like a very simple topic, focus. But why is it so hard? And particularly, why is it so hard for product organizations? Yeah, I mean, I think you're jumping right into the heart of it. and actually I think it's a very humane thing that's going on, right? They're the teams and they have good ideas. They talk to customers and they have an opportunity in front of them. The CEO goes out there and sees something amazing in the market. So everybody's pumped. Sales comes in with a customer who is just about to close the deal. So there's another thing here. So basically we all come from the right place, but then we end up with just too much choice. And then I think what is really happening, we just can't say no, right? And that is definitely something we all see in our own lives, but the bigger the organization, the more versatile the ideas and the harder they say no. I love that you started by calling it a human problem. You know, this fundamental need to, I don't know if it's to please people, like maybe you're getting to why we struggle with saying no to things. You know, in some ways, in a broader context of an organization, there is a culture that is a company culture where it's difficult to say no. Sometimes there's leadership, fear, anxiety, like there's something wrong if I say no. But, you know, when I talk to many leaders and CEOs, I always say they have fear of missing out in some ways. every CEO I have talked to around the world, they see every opportunity as an opportunity and every threat as a threat to their business. So they, you know, they jump in to respond. But fundamentally, you know, in the product world, we kind of talk about strategy as being how you say yes or how you say no. Maybe define focus for me in the product context. When you think about focus, what does it mean to you and what does it feel like when an organization is focused? So I think the first piece here, and you said it nicely, you come into an organization and you ask folks, what are we actually working on here? And then you look at maybe the company strategy. And what we oftentimes see is exactly that. It's essentially a menu, right? Let's get better at everything. higher margins, more sales, lower cost, happier customers, happier team, really AI somewhere, right? So it's a rich menu full of choices. And so I think that is where you ought to start in the product context. If we don't have a good understanding of what is the direction of the business, it is very hard to figure out what could we build to support that? What could we do to actually drive that. So I think that is really the first hint. But then what it feels like working in an organization that does have focus. I can tell you from my career, I can tell you from my clients, you know I worked a long time in ads, not the most sexy of all topics maybe, but the teams I've been working with had a laser focus. And so, and for some of you I don't know, I worked a long time in YouTube ads. And one story up, there was the team working on Google Maps, right? Like the funnest product in the world. One flurry down, people were programming self-driving cars, amazing stuff. But then the engineers, the designers on our teams, they stuck around, right? Because they knew what we're trying to accomplish. And that is my experience with strong teams. If they know what we're trying to get, they will literally try to go through walls to get there, right? So the most fun and the most fulfilling experience that I had was really in situations where we had a very strong idea of what we're trying to accomplish. Oh, I love that. You know, I always say because everything is urgent or everything seems visible, everybody has an opinion. And there is that feeling of clarity and alignment when there is focus in an organization. And, you know, it kind of takes the work out of, it takes the fun out of work when, you know, we talk about, I don't know if you've heard the term, the soup and poop, you know, where an executive just comes in and throws in a new grenade of an idea. We should work on this and leave. And everybody's kind of distracted in that way or environment. I think focus requires leaders to say no to good ideas in service of great ideas or great ones. And I don't think many organizations are wired for that. You know, many organizations confuse movement with progress or they build roadmaps from input rather than intent. And they, you know, they are rewarding output before they are rewarding kind of clarity in some ways. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely 100% right. And, you know, I think that is really the nucleus of this conversation. Once you have focus, what does it allow the teams to do? it allows the teams to consider trade-offs. I think that's the ultimate litmus test there. I'm presented with my long backlog. Tomorrow, you know, the escalation comes in. What do I do? Well, if you as the product manager, as the product leader of an organization, maybe as the CPO, right? If you are able to figure out why the things in here that we are working on, right? Now, sticking something new in, what is it going to cost? What are the trade-offs? So I think happy teams, fulfilled teams, they're able to navigate these day-to-day things. As opposed to if you don't have focus, if you don't know why it's number one on number one, and a new thing comes in, that is very hard to disambiguate. It's very hard to argue. It's very hard to decide. So really, that is the difference. You know, maybe you say things from the other lens. So you're talking about what it feels like when a team is focused. What are the signals that a team or an organization is unfocused? That one's easy. I think that sort of for the listeners, the sure thing to know is if you are spending an enormous time planning and then you throw it all overboard the next day, that means that you're unfocused, right? So that is very easy to spot. And of course, there's a lot of more symptoms, right? A lot of more things that will happen. But I think, let me just say that. That is the surest way to see that you're not focused, right? You know, we talk about companies that talk about, if you cannot answer the question, what's the most important problem right now? When you see roadmaps that are just stakeholder requests or feel with past promises, you know, like, we had this on our roadmap since 1994, you know, and we're, you know, you never get it done, but it's always on the roadmap. Or when a team is disconnected, you know, from a larger strategy, you even cannot expect, playing it. Or, you know, one of the things I often see is when most product managers or product people are managing expectations as really a big aspect of their job, they are all indications. You know, for me, one of the biggest aspects of focus is this constant drama in companies around something called prioritization. You know, when I hear it over and over again, we have a prioritization problem. We have too many priorities, changing priorities, misaligned priorities, you know, and I often have to kind of say, you don't have a prioritization problem. You have a lack of focus problem. I want to kind of hear your take on that. In these days, in this part of the year, people call us and they will say, hey, can you fix my prioritization? Can you help me have a harmonized way to handle this? could you help us implement OKRs? And I sometimes feel like, you know, I'm not sure if you remember the movie Pulp Fiction, where they had this guy, Mr. Wolf, and, you know, you have a crime scene, and then Mr. Wolf comes in, cleans everything up. And sometimes I feel a little bit like that, you know? Elias, can you come in? Can you just implement OKRs so everybody knows how to prioritize? Or can we have rice or whatever, right? But it's exactly that, right? The root cause, the symptom. Like, how did we get to this crime scene? Maybe there's something wrong to begin with. And it is really like a focus, a lot of strategy, right? The teams don't know what is important to them. So when prioritization comes, they struggle. And then the next day, once we have done all the prioritization, a tiny thing changes and everything is thrown overboard again, right? So that is a very good point, Christian. And the people rely on all these frameworks. I mean, this is the most common pattern I see. Teams are complaining, too many priorities. We have too many things on the list. What do we have? We have 200 things on the list to do. This is way too much. And it's always changing. And we're not sure. And then the executive team says, let us have a leadership or executive off-site. Our job is to prioritize this list of 200 things so that the teams can have clarity. Maybe number one on the list was make our platform stable. Number two, make it more secure. Number three, improve its performance. Number four, make more money. You know, those kind of, it may even be like that. They go to the leadership off-site and then they come back and they say, we have cut down the list of 200 things to our 12, they always have a nice name, Big Rocks, to our 12 key pillars. Yeah, it's always a very nice name. And then you see, number one is now, number one, make the platform most secure, easier to use, user-friendly, most stable, one long sentence, you know, with all of the things that were on the list, just merging into one long, it is still doing all the things. Best in class. Yes, best in class. That's right. You know, a summary of everything. Best in class means we are safe, secure, comprehensive, user-friendly, you know, one definition of all of the things in here. Many leaders, it's often one of the hardest things. when I was a leader, I struggled with this because I wanted to please all of the stakeholders. And I wanted them to feel like whatever they thought was important was heard. But focus means you are picking one, two, I don't know, some companies argue we are so cool, three things to focus on. And here is why. I want you to break this down because if we don't define what focus really means for people, you might still get that, we are focused. I told them to be best in class. And that means all of the things. Again, how do you help a leader understand what real focus is? So everybody who's been coached by me probably has some battle scars from this exercise, going to share with you. But what I really like, so before we like focus and this strategy and all all these things. But then really a good way to figure out how well focused organizations just be like, pick an engineer, right? An individual contributing engineer is trying to do a good job and just ask them, you know, what's the strategy? What are you doing here? What is all of this for? Why do you show up for work? And the answers oftentimes are super frustrating for leaders, right and so once we sort of recognize an exercise that i really love to do is called a written narrative a written product narrative and literally it's just a set of questions like you can probably like you know look it up on google or you know find it somewhere but what i use is really like what are we building who are we building for what is the value what is the solution that we currently think is the right one? What is some data backing it up? What are some unknowns? What are some risks involved? And what I've noticed is even mature leader, they struggle, right? It's like pulling teeth. You have all of this decks, you have all of those information, but then a clear articulation to have clarity for yourself to begin with is actually not that easy. And that's where we start. And what I really encourage and coach people on is this is not about writing a perfect document. It a fact thing to figure out which parts were the easiest and which parts were hard to write And for instance if we get to the user section and maybe there is a vague understanding of user personas but we can actually really articulate it. Well, that is a thing that we can punt on. This is a thing that we can find out. So when we talk about focus, even before getting into strategy and all this stuff, we're really starting with a very fundamental thing. What are we building for who? And we start with the product leader himself. And oftentimes that is already a great setup for everything else to follow. You are really going to, the real root cause of this is actually a lack of real product strategy. If you have a product strategy, prioritization is implicit. You have already chosen what to focus on by definition of the strategy. And I love your written narrative technique because you're doing the part of strategy that is really empowering, which is the transparency about why. You know, and here is why. And it's also, I mean, there's something magical about the written word. It's not like, I mean, we're product people, right? We can answer any question, you know, we're elaborate. But actually sitting down and writing it down for yourself, you'll find you'll be surprised yourself, right? I still do this till this day. Also, when I do investments or so, And I realized actually, I don't even know what these guys are doing. I just like them. But it's a good way just to build some interest perspective. And if you think about it, you know, the larger your organization is, the larger your scope is. If you don't have a clear answer in your mind, you have no business turning around to a big organization and telling them. Because that uncertainty is just going to multiply in terms of ambiguities for the team. So if you don't know, how can they know? And then you look at the backlog and you don't know who the user is. Who is this supposed to know? Oh, I love that. You know, I call it kind of the grandfather test. But in many cases, leaders can only give to their teams what has been given to them or what they have. So you ever get that leader where you say, why are we doing this? And they say, because I said so. In some cases, it's because they don't have a good narrative or context about why they should be doing it. Sometimes it's because their boss told them to do it. They just passed it on to you. So I really love that written narrative. It forces you to, I always say, coaching focus starts with slowing down just enough to see why are we doing things? What have we been tolerating? You know, what is important right now? But the narrative is actually, do you understand why so that you can pass that on to somebody else? Precisely, precisely. You kind of say going to an engineer, I kind of call it the grandparent test I used to do in companies. I skip levels down in my organization. And what I'm testing for is I want to see how much context has made its way down to the person that is actually doing. And that is a really powerful aspect in here. Okay, I want to role play a little bit. You're a coach. You spend time coaching a lot of leaders and teams. So, you know, I want to play some product leader that is struggling with focus and prioritization. And my rant to you is like, man, Elias, you know, too many things on the list, too many priorities. I've been trying to struggle. I don't even really sure what to focus on. You know, is your starting, you know, how do you coach me through the noise? How would you coach me in where to start? How would you know that I am doing the work? You know, what are some things in here to kind of help me move through this? Like the first, and congrats to your new role, Christian. So good for you. I think a lot of times, so we talk about focus and we talk about strategy, right? The thing I would bring in this is really a second piece here, which is critical and sort of talked about enough, which is alignment, right? So a product strategy, even if it's sharp, and now Christian, you have clarity. We've just done the written narrative. You brought some data, we discussed it. But now how do we actually get that to your boss, right? The CEO or the board or, you know, the VP. And how do we get it to your team, right? That is the real, that's the real spicy stuff. And so coaching alignment is the next thing if you coach focus. So say we have a good opinion here. This is what we're building. This is who we're building for. But we also need to align now basically with the CEO and with the board on what is the direction of the company, what are the business goals, right? And there I see a huge misunderstanding that product leaders don't question it enough, right? Like you get your spicy menu with all the options and the product strategy could be anything, right? But maybe we have an IPO around the corner. Maybe we want to grow internationally. Maybe we do want to buy a company. Like there could be a lot of context from the organization So the first thing that we start on in terms of alignment is trying to chisel down to one or two business goals as, I guess, like a seed direction. Because if we're trying to figure out now strategy, we need to know for what. So that is the next piece in the way that I approach it with our clients is to build an alignment and handshake agreement with the organization as a whole. so we have some cohesion. And that will be very important later, not only to pass that on to the teams and hear back from the teams what's possible, but also to keep the strategy actually alive. You know, we said at the beginning, the litmus test for strategy and focus is that you can navigate the day-to-day. If the CEO understands why we're doing it and has agreed to that and now has a new idea, we can actually do the best thing in the entire world. We can have an intellectual discourse about the trade-off decisions. And that is really the most valuable thing. And this has worked the magic for some of the people I've been coaching. Just starting with that, actually having the teams work on stuff that everybody cares about and coming back with results actually is the surest way to have a happier life. That magic, what does it feel like? That is what it feels like. People cheer for you and they want to invest more in what you're doing because you bring something that everybody wants. I want to get practical on that point of the alignment. And I really love this framing for you. You say, okay, focus for you starts with, we got to write down the written narrative, pull some insights, some data, what's most important? What are the user problems? These are the things we should go focus on. But that's not yet really the power of focus. You need alignment. And so you need to get alignment with stakeholders, alignment up with leadership. Tactically help me walk through the alignment piece. So let's say you're a leader. you think the most important problem is to drive, improve user engagement or something on our platform. But, you know, I'm the head of marketing. I think it's my funnel. I'm the head of sales. I want to win work. So I have other things in my head. You've got some data. Tactically walk me through how I gain alignment. Am I selling this? How am I pitching this? Top of mind, because we've just gone through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and these folks have done really well. actually a cpo now cpo recently promoted approached me he was new to the company actually rehire and when we started it was exactly that like everybody is working on everything those are good ideas this is a very successful company good ideas but we're not really getting any traction right there will this is an example that we're building a dashboard for the customers it's like an e-commerce space right a dashboard for the customers and it wasn't ideas sort of you know brought to them by sales they thought if the customers would see all the insights all the data they would make better choices and it would give us more money right and you know these kind of you know projects took them two years they built it everybody loved it but it didn't move the numbers right so sales loved it customers loved it no effect right so we were trying to to work through it and we did the narrative and it turned out he had a very good command of a certain part of the audiences but it was another part of the audiences and actually he struggled writing that down right he started writing it down and he was surprised himself he came back and was like i actually didn't like i have like three lame assumptions about them but i i don't really know so we he did it the smartest thing in the world right he reached out to the sales team in that region, right? And he asked like, hey, actually, I would like to know more. I'm thinking here about product strategy. Would you be able to help me? And I said, sure. Like, that's what we've been waiting for. Of course. Right. And, you know, he flew over there across the Atlantic. They have really cool events. So he went into like Miami and I don't know, but like joined these customer events. He looked at the win and loss analysis that they had done. And then they realized people were not as interested in these dashboards, these customers over there, they are very conversion oriented. And that's not, it sounds, I mean, they knew that conversion was important, but that insight that for a certain tranche of customer, that is the number one thing, right? They're less emotional about how it looks, et cetera. They're like performance driven. So when he came back, and now we're getting a bit more into the alignment piece, he already had a very happy sales team, you know, saying, man, like Lars is great. It was fun. And he really gets it. Right. But then we started to write down a perspective on strategy. And we started to work with the founders, right, that have like very insightful people, build a fantastic, very successful company. But now they started inside, they saw the sales leader show up with the product it or maybe that's a good thing, right? So now we buy ourselves some license to focus on this conversion piece. We buy ourselves some license to maybe one or two bets, but also to say no to a lot of things. So they actually redirected some of their teams towards working on conversions. They got to work. We did actually a pilot. Now it's not the focus of this episode. And I'm sure you're going to get to that at some point, but that is a super good thing. So we basically got a bunch of really good folks together looking just at conversion rates. And then they started to look at that particular problem. They started to really do experimentation. They found a lot of juicy stuff, right? For instance, changing the color of the button does a lot to conversion rates. But they also found something else. Can't say what, but a piece that they actually had never seen before that had a massive impact on compression rates. And so they changed that. It got it ready before Black Friday. They made a lot of dough. So now you can see how that feels like for that team, how it feels like for leadership, how it feels like to a friend, freshly promoted CPO, congratulations, right? So that is what it's like. And now we're asking, how could we pour more into this team? How could we get better at this? Because that's true focus now, right? That's the magic for you. I love that story a lot. And I don't want to underscore some important points around company politics and relationships, the things that actually foster alignment. You know, when I wouldn't talk to leaders about alignment, I brought this insight and I can't believe they won't accept it. I'm like, it's not that they don't trust your insight. They just don't trust you. And I'm like, it's hard to hear what I tell these to leaders, but you're describing he flew over to, you know, build a relationship. He asked for help. Like, I want to work on strategy. I need your help. He fostered a relationship that was present. People actually saw him doing the homework by spending time with sales and with customers and in the team. So they kind of trusted how the insight came to be. And what, and it felt like it was their strategy, you know, like, you know, that's the part of the magic of alignment. I mean, you're going to love this, But we, so just to get it going, right, you know how important it is to show some progress quickly, right? Like even if you get focus, even if you get alignment, it can't be a thing that's going to take us three years, right? So he really, and with the team, with his entry, they chose a pretty simple example. And I told you they changed the color of the button, right? So they made it a little bit like, because, you know, people have been talking about that in a company for years. Like how much does the shape and the color of the button, how does it matter? So they changed it and made it like a little bit more like Amazon because they're probably smart, right? That should perform better. And just ran an A-B experiment and turns out, well, it actually did worse. But actually it had a big impact. So that was an immediate feedback loop saying, we know how to tune this very important thing that has a big impact on the overall trajectory of the company, on that what we're actually trying to accomplish. So now, well, that's, it's a given, right, that the CTO, also, by the way, congratulations, freshly promoted CTO as well, that these two, the CTO and the CTO, that they're part of, you know, the big room, right, the senior leadership, because they see how critical that part of the company is to the overall success. So that is really what it can do for you. Oh I love that a lot And you know I kind of call out with strategy and focus Sometimes it feels very logical in terms of why we are focused on something in the grand scheme of a picture You know like I always say if you building a house and you were walking on the foundation of the house and I came to you and I said let walk on the roof right now You'd be like, yeah, I get the roof is important for a house, but it's not important right now because we don't even have walls. So we don't even have, you know, the scaffolding in place. You know, what's your take on saying no versus saying not yet? and you know how how do you mentally use that tool or coach people in using that in in their prioritization let's start with the good news right once you've got that all going it's easy right because people trust you if you do what you're saying and you're generally heading in the right direction folks will just trust you on this right so as you are developing this once you actually have some alignment most of the time the answer is never no the answer is not yet right And that is the interesting part. Now that everybody, like sales leadership, marketing, the teams, once we're all aligned, it buys us really the license of the trade of conversation. So a new thing comes in, we can now understand across all the different perspectives in the company, what is it going to take away, right? because we really wanted those conversion rates. And we have one thing here in the pipeline that we actually think is going to move that. So yes, that customer request, that's an important partner and we really would want that deal. But wouldn't they also want better conversion rates? Wouldn't they also be excited? Wouldn't we want to talk to them about that? And maybe they would actually be happy with more conversions for Black Friday and then we could do the other thing later, right? So the not yet conversation, that is really your go-to. It's the, you know, for every product manager starting out, that is probably the best career advice I could possibly give you. If you're able to articulate what the impact is that your team is bringing, and if you can have those conversations, your team is going to love you. Your stakeholders are going to, I'm not sure, love you, but you know, they're going to like you a little bit more. but it's going to definitely also, I guess, put you in the situations where you're being now asked in terms of what do you think? What could we do? What is the right order of things here? As a product leader, one of the things that already falls apart is at the team level, people complain a lot about stakeholders dropping grenades of ideas, shifting priorities, changing requirements. And I do get two schools of dynamics in big enterprise companies. We had things like, you know, there's a mandate, a regulatory requirement that is not shifting priority or shifting focus. You know, we got an audit or we got to, you know, there's business as usual things. How does a leader protect their team's focus from stakeholders changing priorities, shifting strategy? Should they, or I mean, what is the right dynamic as a leader with the team? Where should we manage or filter out noise versus what's important? I think this is also good news that gets better over time. Like as you grow in your career, you're going to get a little bit more relaxed, right? Like somebody calls you and is like, you know, everything's on fire. We have like legal, like legal tells us to do this, right? and you get a little bit more, I guess, relaxed. And the first thing that you really want to find out, and that will be my advice, you want to find out, is this a serious request, right? Even if somebody's talking about legal, right, it could be completely out of context. So the first thing you really want to do is you want to, you know, take the request seriously, but you want to really understand what is behind. And if done right, the second piece here, and that is maybe a bit more advanced technique. We talked about trade-offs, right? With putting something in and something else has gone out. In big organization, now there are trade-offs that are not obvious to the person who's requesting. So over here, Bob really thinks we should have X. And over there, finance really requires this change. So it's fine from an accounting perspective. So that is a bit more advanced now because we will have to really understand the different requests. We have to build some trust with the stakeholders that we understand them, but we also in a way have to make transparent the trade-offs that are going into the decision-making. So that is a bit more tricky, but that is also something over time where you can build very, very powerful organizational support. If finance understands that there's a critical rollout and marketing really needs something, maybe the accounting piece, maybe we could just, you know, maybe we could just row a little bit longer with the like crappy accounting process that takes all the manpower at the last day of the month because they can help marketing. So if you can bridge that and if you take everybody in the process seriously, you're already in a good place and that gets a lot easier over time. In my last operation role, I used to write a strategy narrative every quarter. It was probably the most sought after internal document in the company because, you know, it really talked about all of the learnings and insights I have gathered and seen throughout the quarter. And it typically always ended with a very clear statement. You know, after thorough analysis of all this learning over this last year, we are choosing to focus on these things or not change our focus from last quarter or change our focus. And the powerful part of that narrative was every stakeholder could see their problem, their request, their issue in that document. It's almost like, I heard you, I see you, I have spent, you know. And so it was very exciting because you kind of want to see what are the trade-offs? What were all the issues from everybody else that has allowed us to choose to do this? And I never used to understand the importance of it. but it grew over time when, you know, people will probe me. Where's the document? You know, every time they had a request, they'll want to see, go back to the narrative to kind of see what are the other issues in the business. Many people fail to understand what context is, the powerful nature of context. I was just explaining this to a team. Like there's nobody that sees, there's a, you know, I have an idea to help the company make 1 million. And then they see the team working on something to make the company 1 billion. that will say, no, you must do my idea first. Or, you know, many leaders just don't know what the trade-offs are. You know, and so you're calling out something very powerful around, you know, once you end the trust and once people start to understand you can deliver, but we need to know if we're doing, working on the most important thing right now, it changes the dynamic. I mean, just to riff a bit on this because it connects so deeply, right? so and just the two tricks for people listening this right so so the one thing here i mean you write a narrative but then to build alignment right another really critical piece here is that you start to talk to some of the stakeholders as you know as you have some gaps maybe marketing has some ideas on the user segments maybe they have some data but the the thing that christian's calling out here and i love that a lot they will have questions they will have concerns they will challenge. And the best thing in the world is to acknowledge, to refine. And then there's two things I would want people to do if you go down that route. One is, please put everybody who has been working on this with you onto the document. So Christian said, like, we would say we choose. So it's very hard to mess with the strategy that has been created by everybody, right? the main leaders in the organization. Maybe there's one person who's a bit on the fence, but if everybody else is already there, maybe it is a bit easier. And the other thing I would recommend that really wonders for me and like for some people I've coached, it's something called a product FAQ. So because you will stumble over these elephants in the room, right? There will be almost impossible to reconcile decisions. And so what do you do, right? Like you cannot, it's not an easy intellectual discourse to get to a clear answer. So what you can do is just take out the question. You move the question in the product FAQ and you say, as of, you know, Q4, 2025, as of Q1, 2026, this is the best answer we have. And it could be we don't know. But it acknowledges the concern. So when we go and talk about it, we're seeking a review for it, we're seeking resources for it. People will see themselves being part of that. They will see the concerns being there, being transparent. And they will value us basically doing the hard legwork, coming back to them and saying, hey, this is what we've got or this is what we've included. Would you mind take a look? So in terms of cohesion and alignment, that's really the better anyway. I love that. No, you're spot on. You're calling out. I love you calling out those, what makes it magical is the co-creation, the co-accountability in it too as well. So, I mean, we've talked about the leaders protecting the teams. What if I'm a team or a product person on a product team and I feel like my leaders won't prioritize? Or like, oh my goodness, we don't have any focus. You know, is it an excuse to not do anything? Or what do I do? The thing I would generally recommend if you're a product manager or a product team, the conditions are never perfect. Not at Google, not at YouTube, not at SVPG, I guess. You know, there's always some imperfections. So get used to it is like sort of my realistic expectations to you and pivot your mindset into what's the opportunity, right? and oftentimes the ambiguity that is happening is a lack of strategy or it's a recent reorganization or refocusing so the first like that is the biggest one you could do in any situation is try to figure out what is in it for us right what could we do with this as opposed to sort of going two steps back and saying whoa another change like i don't like that you know so that is a mindset that thing. And then concretely, so now you have your backlog, right? Very, very specifically if your backlog and the team is struggling with prioritization, do an exercise, try to sit down and take just every single item that is high on the list and just try to write down who is it for? What is the impact that we think it's going to bring? Just try to answer that. And if you cannot answer that, Mel, maybe it shouldn't be there. The other question is, and that is a sort of very practical issue I see, teams feel like they have to come up with all the answers, right? If you don't know, it is absolutely okay to ask maybe your manager or other parts of the organization and saying, there is some context that I don't know, right? And oftentimes there is an answer, but somehow that gets lost, right? We feel like we're the product managers, like the mini CEOs we have to have, like, so be humble. If you don't know, just ask. And if people around you don't know, then maybe that's a bigger conversation. So you can add a lot of value also in that sense to, you know, first of all, see the opportunity, try to be clear on what are we building for who. And then if you don't know, try to figure it out, right? And maybe somebody has an answer, maybe they don't. I love, you know, I get a little more pointed when I coach teams, I say, if you cannot answer the question, what's in it for the business? Meaning, I always say, why are they paying you a salary to do this? I mean, you might call it out in our world, what is the business objective? That is the nice way of saying it. But I say, if you cannot answer the question, what is the business objective? Kind of, why are they paying me to do this? If you cannot answer the question, how will they measure success with this? Like, How will we know we're doing a good job? If you cannot answer the question, what problem am I trying to solve? And who the customer is we are solving this problem for? Don't do it. And I say, you know, the reason I say that, I'm like, to be very clear, it is not strategic if you cannot answer those questions. Because if I'm an executive and I say, hey, Elias, what are you working on? I'm building the new API for this dashboard. And I don't have a clue what that is. And we're thinking to ourselves, we need to manage our budget and cut some things. The very first thing I'm going to cut is that. You know? So I tell people, if you cannot pointedly say, I am working on driving revenue, driving conversion, you know what's in it for the business and the measure of success. You may not be working on something that is strategic. And by the way, Christian, just like as we were talking, I mean, this is so, this is gold, especially for teams that are not as obvious, right? So maybe you're working on this internal tool, right? You know, I worked on internal tools for code review, for instance. And if you just saying like you know we just cranking along like no one cares we an internal team Well maybe we could think about a co tool as the productivity for the entire company right So I really do a lot of coaching on what I call the currency. And the deeper you go down into the stack, and it's the good news, right? Like I'm in a platform team or so, kind of machine roomy stuff. Oftentimes, the more heavy weight the impact is on the rest. so if you're able to articulate that right it's it's just going to help you and i also found that super good for longer technical migrations right it's like a mountain of work nobody know like everybody forgot why did we start this so if you're a product manager you're working on this and you can refocus and you can say like oh we did it because the other thing is very expensive to run and takes forever to build stuff well we're getting a bit closer so you need to really be able to articulate exactly that. And that's just going to make everything better. It's going to have a more motivated team. You can slice it a bit better. Anyways, just a lot of good stuff. And I love the internal tools example. I often have to state to people strategically, like what strategy really means. Even when I talk to executive teams, because we talk about things like risk or legal compliance or keep the lights on work, you know, I'm like, well, we have something we have to do and we have to prioritize this. And I'm often like, I'm going to be talking with them like a big bank. and they're like, we had a compliance request. We need to repartise. Why is that a surprise that you work in a regulated industry and you have a regulatory request? This is also the absence of strategy because in your household, you don't compete between, should we pay our power bill this month or should we watch Netflix? There's a cost of running a business, cost of running a home. You're not questioning your utilization. You're baking it in your budget and your growth. And I say, you know, when I see companies struggle with like, we have to trade off whether we should do a legal request versus whether we should innovate. I'm like, you've missed the whole point of it. In terms of improving your efficiency, improving your productivity, those are real problems to solve. What your teams are doing is disconnected from it a whole lot. You know, and, you know, pointally, kind of what I think about this whole focus discussion, I tell teams, you know, you don't have a prioritization problem. You have a lack of focus problem. You don't even have a lack of focus problem. You have a lack of strategy, an absence of strategy problem. It's always my roots because strategy, you know, in the product world, we have things that help focus. If you have a product vision, you're kind of already choosing what world you want to create. You're already focusing a little bit. Strategy is saying, I want to get to that wall while taking into account all of the business needs, company objectives, stuff. So I'm choosing what to focus on right now. So when I'm coaching focus, I love how you've called out all the pieces around alignment and insights. Those are the things that really help a company to kind of do this well. Okay. I want to get through some breakthrough moments in your coaching because focus is not a one-time decision. It's a habit. You know, it's something that you cultivate and build over time. It is the most common conversation I have with CEOs all around the world. How do you build the muscle? How do you help people kind of shift this focus mindset and harden it? Like throughout the conversation, I think we already like put together a couple of puzzle pieces. So let's bring it all in. Right. I think it's really like it typically starts with a single person in the organization actually takes it on them to try to really answer some of these fundamental questions. And as you start to, I guess, like sort of in concentric circles, right, if you bring in the rest, maybe your CTO that you trust, maybe the CEO next, maybe your team. as you're exploring that, I think that is really the first step. The second step is once you have something like that, and that is really by strategy so critical, it's the connective tissue from, I guess, what the company wants as a whole, what we can contribute as the product to what the teams are working on. The second thing I coach people on is almost immediate feedback loop, immediate success. I've been recently working with a very large company. they had a very strategic project they've been working on for years it's been like we looked it up it was on the strategy for six years right and then we we asked this question like who is it for and we realized the group that was for nobody had ever spoken to right so so as we've been exploring it in the leadership team just 1 p.m with this team wrote up a bunch of questions called up a couple of those customers and came back with results, right? That took a week. So this is how you start the muscle is you have to show small positive increments. The second thing I would say is how do you do this? How do you manage that? Alignment is a very fragile thing. We bring all of that in. We have the evidence. We have talked about it. We start on a very, you know, crisp point. And then as time moves on, a new person joins the team, OpenAI launches, chat GPT, right? Like the alignment just kind of dissipates in different directions. So we have to bring it back in. And we have also, we have to bake in new information also, right? We don't want to be ignorant about the world around us. And what I typically recommend is the first piece is the short term, the very short term. So maybe we plan in the quarter. Maybe we're very verbal. Like what are we going to contribute to conversion rates this quarter? What is that thing? And how far do we want to take it? And so now another concept I want to introduce here is accountability, right? So say we have that focus. Say we have that alignment. Say the team's goal and they're on the loose, right? They're trying to figure out how to do this. Well, we should check in. We should check in regularly, maybe every six weeks, maybe at the end of the quarter. what we should really take a serious look at that we make a dent. And then that is a piece of alignment. Maybe at the end of the year, and that's typically what I recommend for strategy, that's another check-in point. And you mentioned that, right? Like you did that document once a year. And that should be really a thing that people are highly anticipating because it consolidates a whole year of learning plus some of our gut and product sense. And, but that is a good moment to basically completely realign everybody back, all the new joiners, all the new information. So that is, I guess, a good way to incorporate the learnings by being also a bit technical, right? Like, what are we going to do this month, this quarter? So you have to integrate those two things as well, yeah. I love that a lot, and I love that you called out on the accountability of it, to it. I mean, when I coach leaders, sometimes, you know, I get those future requests, and, you know, the two things I always do when someone says, I want this future, I want to build this, fix this. And I always say, okay, if we fix this, what becomes possible? What are we, you know, I want you to reframe your mind, but I will often ask leaders, what are you pretending not to know that's in your way? And, you know, and I want to get what's really in the way of this to really get you thinking around those things. And there are habits in these things that take a while. we've covered a lot of elements in here that I think are important to rehash. You know, the idea of focus coming from those insights and data, a deep understanding of the customers, the problems, the markets, your industry, your business, those things help build trust. It's not enough without alignment. You know, you don't get focused if you cannot align with your stakeholders, with your leaders. We talked about the politics of building trust relationships, earning the right with a pilot and a test to kind of show people like, you know, if you trust us with information, we have a way of experimenting, improving point, we can translate what is important into action in some meaningful way. I think that's a fantastic top track. We kind of went down. I beat up that point a whole lot. Everyone's like, we don't have a prioritization problem. You have a lack of focus, a lack of strategy problem. I would also joke because I do get capacity questions. I don't know if you get that a lot. We need to hire 10 more engineers, 20 more engineers. And I was with a very big enterprise company. And they were like, we need $50 million more in our budget. I'm like, what's in the world to hire, to start this whole initiative? And I said, how many employees do you have? They're like 300,000 employees. I say, you don't have a resource problem. You have a lack of focus problem. Because if you, We talk about work in progress in combine, right? There's only so much you can load into a washing machine or a dishwasher. It doesn't matter. It's still going to run the cycle and the time it does. What are you using? And over capacity. We want to be laser focused on the most important things, but the empowerment comes with understanding why, what those trade-offs are in it. Okay, this is fantastic. I want to go through some rapid questions in here just to kind of get some thoughts on some things in here. What is kind of one thing if you're talking to a product leader, you say, I want you to stop doing if you want to be better focused, like stop doing this? Back to back meetings all day. That's a whole other topic. You just scratched open something on that one. Because, you know, it's funny. we talk about insights and data and thinking as a leader. You know, if you are in meetings all day, when did you have time to even think about those things? Oh, what a great one. That's a good one. Okay. Give me a magic coaching question that you use to kind of cut through the noise. You know, if you're talking to a leader and you're all over the place, what will kind of help you discern what the root cause of things may be? Who is this for? Now say a little more about that one. the biggest products I've been working on, the biggest successes I had were literally because we realized that the needs that we had cut out for ourselves from our customers actually weren't cutting it. There was an adjacent or a specific user group, customer segment, where there was a lot of value to be had. Organizations, and I've been victim of that, right? Like we thought about our customers as the large customers and the small customers. Enterprise, SMB. You know, as you had me thinking about that that I'm reflecting on my career, like many leaders are nice. They say yes by default. You kind of started there. You know, I often tell leaders you are trading clarity for comfort. And that's a bad deal every time, you know, because you're going to be very uncomfortable later on, you know. So it's one of those kind of big things in here. All right. So we talked about kind of go-to question. On the other flip side, if you could talk to every CEO on the planet, and your organization struggle with focus, what is one go-to message or key point you want to get across that will help create clarity or focus in an organization? I think my question would be like, when was the last time you had a hit that was intentional? It's the point I always make to companies all the time. In many cases, it feels like things are, how much of your work is something that is happening to you that's something you are making happen? that intentional aspect of it. You know, I tell all CEOs all the time, you know, I love that quote, the company cares about what the leaders care about or what the CEO cares about. And absolute power in the whole aspect of focus and the work being done there. All right, Elias, we could talk about this and riff on this for days. I love this topic of focus. I love the conversation. Your wealth of knowledge and experience working with teams. I absolutely impressed. I really enjoyed this conversation. This was fantastic. Is there any kind of last word message for anybody out there, points you want to make before we wrap up this episode? I love the conversation. It got me, you know, it got me going. I wouldn't want to hang out here longer. And there's so many, you know, parts here that we could have camped out. But no, I think that's a good rep. I really love the show. So thanks for having me on. This is made for my day today. Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for being on and thanks for being on Product Therapy. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Christian. Want to learn more until next time? Please check out svpg.com. Sign up for our newsletter that Maddie Kagan puts out. Join us for one of our workshops near you and get access to all of the articles and content we put out. And thank you to everyone for joining us. Until next time, have a good day. A quick disclaimer, while this podcast is named Product Therapy, it is not hosted by licensed therapists or mental health professionals, and it is in no way a substitute for professional mental health services. We recognize the importance of mental well-being and encourage anyone facing personal difficulties to seek support from qualified professionals. See www.findahelpline.com