In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino and Bruce McCarthy discuss the challenges and solutions around stakeholder alignment in product management. Bruce highlights the importance of bridging communication gaps across departments to achieve unified goals and emphasizes the role of empathy, strategic prioritization, and effective stakeholder management in driving organizational success. He also touches on methods for identifying influential stakeholders, leveraging trust, and fostering cross-functional collaboration for product teams, especially in remote settings. Drawing from his book Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders, Bruce provides actionable strategies for navigating the complexities of building consensus and aligning teams with the organization’s overall mission.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding and Aligning with Key Stakeholders: Successful product leaders prioritize stakeholder alignment, actively engaging across teams to achieve cohesive objectives that serve the organization’s mission.
- The Role of Empathy in Collaboration: Effective alignment requires empathy, listening to stakeholders’ perspectives, and validating their challenges to build a foundation of trust and cooperation.
- Focusing on Value Creation: Product teams must balance user needs with market demands by identifying and prioritizing solutions that drive real value for both customers and business.
- Proactive Communication Strategies: Building trust and clarity within cross-functional teams is essential, especially in remote environments; proactively reaching out to influential figures strengthens alignment.
- Defining and Mapping Organizational Influence: Identifying informal power players within an organization can be more effective than relying on an org chart, allowing product leaders to foster essential alliances.
- Leveraging Remote Tools for Connection: In a virtual setup, choosing high-bandwidth communication (like video) and maintaining consistent, high-touch engagement with stakeholders enhances team synergy.
- Using Vulnerability to Drive Authentic Relationships: Showing vulnerability and a willingness to ask for help or clarification can build stronger relationships, ultimately promoting an aligned and transparent culture.
About Our Guest
Bruce has led product teams in companies from startups to market leaders. For the last decade, he has worked with firms like Toast, hyperexponential, Glean, Shopfully, Kaleyra, EGYM, and Microsoft. He is a prolific writer and sought-after speaker at conferences around the world. He runs the High-Growth CPO Forum. Bruce co-wrote the bestsellers Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty and Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders.
Resources & Links
- Connect with Bruce McCarthy on LinkedIn
- Bruce’s Company Product Culture
- Bruce’s Book: Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders
- Connect with Mark Baldino on LinkedIn
- Fuzzy Math
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Bruce McCarthy and His Journey
- 01:51 Identifying the Tipping Point for Product Culture
- 03:50 Understanding Alignment and Misalignment in Organizations
- 07:57 Challenges in Product and Design Teams
- 12:08 Building Cross-Functional Relationships
- 15:59 Navigating Organizational Dynamics
- 20:05 Strategies for Remote Collaboration
- 24:10 The Role of Vulnerability in Leadership
- 28:00 Aligning Product and UX Teams
- 31:59 Resources for Further Learning
Tags
#ProductManagement, #StakeholderAlignment, #StakeholderManagement, #ProductStrategy, #ProductManagementPodcasts, #UXPodcasts
Transcript
Mark Baldino (00:01.54) Bruce, welcome to the podcast. Bruce McCarthy (00:03.544) Thanks Mark, good to be here. Mark Baldino (00:05.216) It's absolutely my pleasure. As I start all the episodes, would love for you to give the audience a little bit of your background, where you've been. And obviously, we're going to talk about your recent book, which is called Aligned Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders. So take us through a little bit of your journey, Bruce McCarthy (00:24.962) Well, for many years, like a lot of your listeners, I was in product or related disciplines. I've been officially or unofficially in charge of product management, design, engineering, agile enablement, partnerships, marketing, everything. So I'm a very sort of horizontal person professionally. And I think that actually works well if you're trying to figure out how to get your team, your extended team, your virtual team. all on the same page, you have a little bit of empathy, a little bit of sympathy for what they've been through. I worked my way up through lots of different tech companies, and small, a few different acquisitions on both sides of the transaction. And 11 years ago, I went out on my own, originally to start another software company, something for product leaders. But the demand before... current spate of things like product board and aha and so on. It was really for teaching people how to run a product organization, how to do the right hiring, how to set up the team structure, how to get people working together, how to do a roadmap and a strategy and put all of those nuts and bolts into place. And so I essentially became a teacher and my job is to... coach and help companies get better at this whole practice of developing products. Today, it's not just me, it's a team of five. And we work with companies all over the world, mostly growth stage companies, just out of the startup phase, trying to figure out how to, what they usually call it is become a real company. Mark Baldino (02:14.224) What's the tipping point between, and you can use this as when people, your company is called Product Culture, when Product Culture is a good fit, like what's the tipping point in an organization that they need somebody like you folks? Bruce McCarthy (02:27.576) Well, usually at that point where they've hit product market fit and maybe they've raised a B round, sometimes A, sometimes later, they usually have over 100 employees at that point. And maybe they're even pushing 200 employees. And at that point, all of the things that worked for them in the early startup phase, being very sort of opportunistic and pursuing anything that seemed to work and having very informal communication. When you get 25 people and you're all in the same office or on the same Slack channel all day long, you don't need a formal roadmap to keep everybody on the same page. You don't need a product council. You don't need OKRs. You just need to go, go, go until you hit that inflection point that's usually around that number of employees or around maybe a few million in revenue. And you need to start to focus. You need to start to figure out how are we going to scale the one thing that we've become successful at rather than pursuing anything and everything. That requires some discipline and just enough process. You don't want to suddenly become SAP or Oracle, but you want enough of a coordination effect. Mark Baldino (03:50.736) So I like to think about acute pain that these organizations, I'll selfishly as a consultant myself, or somebody that runs a consultancy, I'm looking for acute pain in terms of this is the problem I can solve. Those organizations, you mentioned lack of focus, is it lack of traction? Your book is called Aligned. What are they going to feel within their organization to say, hey, should, and we'll get to your book, I should pick up this book. I need outside help for product management. Bruce McCarthy (04:15.256) Well, your question sets up the book very, very well because the acute pain is usually lack of alignment. It's usually engineering wants to retire tech debt and product wants to ship features. And they really want to focus on the ideal customer profile, but marketing and sales want to focus as broadly as possible on any opportunity that they can see. Mark Baldino (04:20.043) Okay, well there we go. Yeah. Bruce McCarthy (04:42.546) And the CEO wants to expand into every niche that they can possibly see. And all of those different disciplines are all pointing in different directions. Somebody has to bring it all together. And very often the senior leadership that got them to this point successfully by pursuing everything that looked at all promising wants to continue in that vein. And that's the antithesis of focus. That's the opposite. So unfortunately, it's getting everyone aligned on a focused mission to scale the one thing or exploit the most promising opportunities that is the hardest thing to achieve at that point. Mark Baldino (05:30.522) Fair enough. I want to read a quote back to you, which think is early on in the book, but really help me understand the purpose of the book, which is I've read and found fantastic. I've recommended to a number of my clients, I've said, you should read this book. And my team is doing a, we're doing a small course on how to kind of be consultants and understand what that means. Cause like, I just feel like the role of designers and I don't want to speak for product managers cause it's not my background, but I feel Bruce McCarthy (05:42.804) Thank you Mark Baldino (06:00.186) You're kind of going from tactical, the value of our work is the UI to, well, we're really consultants and we need to understand what the value can bring to our clients. But this quote early on is, someone is aligned if they see value in what you're doing, actively want you and your product to succeed, will help you to accomplish your objectives. Should we just talk a little bit about that sort of, I mean, it was a foundational quote for me and kind of what that means, like what does alignment look like? I guess the flip of misalignment. Bruce McCarthy (06:27.97) Yeah. Well, I think it comes back to maybe an example will help. It comes back to a story I told at the beginning of the book, which is, which was, which really happened to me in my first job as a product manager. I had a product that I understood the customer, understood their problems. I had designed a solution that I tested with them and that they responded well to. So I think I had something like product market fit, but the sales team and the marketing team. saw no value in it. They were completely uninterested in selling it because their comp plans, their campaigns, their budgets, their people were all dedicated to selling our core product. And maybe you'd say, that's the inner radius dilemma. But it was really that I lacked what I would call product organization fit. It's that getting of the extended team, the people outside of the actual engineers and designers and maybe data scientists working with you as a product person, their alignment is critical to success. And so you've got to get them to fall into that definition of what a stakeholder is, someone who wants your thing to succeed and is willing to help. You might think of stakeholders as just the people who are already actively wanting you to succeed and you need to manage their expectations, but we've discovered over time through painful lessons that it's broader than that. It's the people you, it's also the people you need to be supportive, whether they are today or not. Mark Baldino (08:10.064) Fair enough. One thing that I think comes through in the book around kind of initial alignment and understanding organizations, I do want to kind of go to a little bit of like how to organize stakeholders. I think what we, some of the, I'd love to talk about some of the challenges that, you know, product teams are facing. I think design teams face it. Engineering, I don't mean to exclude, again, I don't come from an engineering background, so I try not to speak for other people, but that sort of misalignment is like, Bruce McCarthy (08:22.925) Yeah. Mark Baldino (08:39.632) people see themselves as very good at what they do and they build some, actually in recent podcasts called it kind of these silos of excellence, which are like these areas where they hold key information and they understand their needs. And I think people are comfortable staying in those silos. And I assume, but correct me, that an aligned organization is gonna have some really good horizontals within that to connect some of those dots, but good, as you've referenced, kind of cross-functional model. Bruce McCarthy (08:47.896) Yeah. Bruce McCarthy (08:56.365) Yeah. Mark Baldino (09:09.668) What are some of the challenges you're seeing people facing in organizations? What are some of the, as I always like talking about warning signs and then like, what are kind of some of the cultural or organizational shifts we need to make? Bruce McCarthy (09:17.294) Yeah. Bruce McCarthy (09:21.602) Well, I think for product leaders and design leaders too, to a large extent, the role can be when it's done well and when you're really looking for a result for the company, it's a very horizontal sort of role. It's not just I do my job, as you say, in my silo, I produce designs or I produce requirements or a backlog or something like that. It's owning the success. for the user, for the customer, if the buyer is different, and for the company. And your job is to bring all of that together and make sure that the product that you're shipping is feasible, viable, and desirable, right? And that ownership of the result rather than of my work is the critical difference that I think a lot of leaders aspire to. And what that means in practice is putting together a very horizontal sort of coalition, if you will, to make this thing successful. So where you run into trouble is where nobody but you thinks like that. And so when you, as a horizontal leader, go to another department and say, I'd like to talk about this thing, you kind of can get a little bit of like, why are you asking? or a little bit of like, well, that's my job. And that defensiveness or suspicion. And it can be hard to allay that, to make friends across the aisle, if you will. We talk about a few techniques to try to break down those silos. One is when you get defensiveness or seemingly illogical arguments from people. to be genuinely curious, to just ask a whole lot of questions and be empathetic and keep asking questions, open-ended questions until you feel that you understand and can repeat back to the other person their point of view. okay, so what you're saying is the most important thing right now is that we hit the conversion rate numbers because that's really leveraged not only for the company's top line but Bruce McCarthy (11:47.864) for your metrics, for your department as well. And that's gonna look good to your boss. I totally get it. I wanna help you with that. In fact, my thing that I'm working on right now, these improvements to the landing page may actually help you with that, with your conversion rate goal in marketing. Mark Baldino (12:08.4) Building empathy, think, or being empathetic, empathic towards other people and understanding what kind of their needs are. Is it, all right, so let's say I am a product leader, I'm noticing these silos, shared responsibility to break them down, shared responsibility to create this cross-functional group. Do I need to go up a level in the organization and say this is what we need? Like, do you see these more as like bottom-up, top-down, a blend? Like, I feel like people can get, Bruce McCarthy (12:11.758) That's right. Mark Baldino (12:38.138) totally exhausted by trying to drive change with an organization on top of doing like what other people see as their job. Bruce McCarthy (12:40.248) Yeah Bruce McCarthy (12:45.582) Yeah. Well, I think it's great if you can sort of take the lead yourself. It's great if you can not wait for permission, but ask for forgiveness. People say, why is he in that meeting? Why are you stepping on those toes? Those are fine if you can actually accomplish the mission. You'll be forgiven for being a little pushy or a little impertinent or asking too many questions if The end result is that the team comes together and is moving forward. That said, it's also really smart to kind of map out the territory around you to understand where the power players lie within your organization. And unfortunately, I have found that the official org chart is not a whole lot of help. In fact, it can be kind of misleading. You get this... false sense of comfort that you, if you look at the diagram with the CEO at the top and all the lines and boxes, and it's also neat and tidy, and you think, okay, all I need to do is make sure that I trace a line straight from me all the way up to the CEO and take care of that, right? Well, not so much. Finance may have something to say about whether your initiative or project or product or whatever gets funded. because you need to make a business case to the right person there. And sales may force some things into the roadmap if there's a big deal on the line. And marketing may really need to make a big splash at the next user conference and be pushing for you to develop a new feature or at least something sexy to demo. So all of these things come into play. customer support may be saying, we're screaming about these particular bugs or usability issues because they're causing a whole bunch of calls for us. So rather than try to beat those things back, you want to try to pull those people into your process, make them officially part of your team. The easiest way to do that if you don't have the Bruce McCarthy (15:03.074) gravitas or the pull yourself in the organization is to map out where in the organization those hidden power players that other people find influential are. And there's a couple of hints we provide in the book of how to identify them. One is to think about is your organization sales driven or engineering driven or marketing driven or finance driven or what? And it can be Mark Baldino (15:10.544) Right. Bruce McCarthy (15:31.778) difficult to tell right away. I worked for a company where half the company was engineers and I worked with the engineers every day and we were a very technical product we sold to other engineers. And so I figured, well, it's an engineering driven company. It must be. But I noticed that the sales team had an annual awards dinner every year where they gave awards to people in other departments for helping them out. And When the CEO got up in front of the company to give kind of the State of the Union every month, he always led with last month's revenue numbers. And I noticed also that he had coffee almost every day with the same person. And that was the head of sales ops who knew the exact state of play of every deal in the pipeline at all times. And the final thing, when I started to sort of twig to what was really going on, I started helping out with sales deals getting in front of customers to help business close, that's when I got a promotion. And I realized, this is a sales driven company, despite everything that I thought in the first year or so that I was there. So those kinds of clues let you know that the function that is dominant is a function you need to be close to and be able to influence and make your case for whatever it is that you're advocating for in their language. Mark Baldino (16:28.24) and we'll right back. Mark Baldino (16:34.416) Interesting. extra compensation. Bruce McCarthy (16:56.87) If it's marketing, it's all about customer acquisition or retention, probably. it's engineering, maybe it's technical excellence. Or if it's product, it's probably not product. Mark Baldino (17:09.776) Right, right, right, right. So it is really around, you mentioned this sort of like, it's around influence. Who are the influencers within an organization and how you can reach out to them, reach across the aisle, build relationships, understand their needs and their drivers, but also kind of organizational alignment of what's important to this organization. And then... Bruce McCarthy (17:26.369) Right. Right. Bruce McCarthy (17:35.342) That's right. Mark Baldino (17:36.56) What is that? What's like if you're able to do that and that does take kind of a specific type of person. And I think as you mentioned, in some cases you might not, I think you use the word gravitas, like some people in their role might not have it. So they actually kind of need to figure out who are the people that do have the gravitas to come back. What's sort of the, what's the next step? Is it aligning your team around, let's say it's sales driven organizations. So we're gonna, we need to connect the dots between what we're doing on a daily basis or weekly basis or quarterly. Bruce McCarthy (17:51.103) can they borrow. Mark Baldino (18:05.964) up to what's going to drive greater revenue, what's top line or bottom line or something. Bruce McCarthy (18:11.298) you won't necessarily know right away exactly what the right way to engage is until you start trying to engage with those people. So the first thing to do is get to know them. I would seek the most informal venue you can to get to know people who you think may be power players. What I used to do often was to take my laptop and hang out by the coffee machine and just wait until they turn up and say, hey, have you got a second? I have a couple questions or I'd love to get your input on this thing I'm working on. And just make some, I mean, you can make some coffee chat, but then you can also try to talk just a little bit for five minutes about what you're working on or even better, what they're working on. The other thing I would recommend if you have just a little bit more time is to do what we call a stakeholder interview, which... If you read the book and the questions that we suggest that people ask is exactly like a user interview. It's tell me about your job. Tell me what you're trying to accomplish. What does success look like? How are you measured? Tell me what are you doing to try to achieve that and what's working and what's not working? Where, where are the obstacles, the challenges try to do a jobs to be done or a problem discovery interview with your stakeholder. Understand where they're struggling. And then try to problem solve with them, you know, try to be a little bit of a helpful consultant and maybe something that you're working on can actually help them. You can personally help them. Like when I went on sales calls and I used it as an excuse to do customer research at the same time. So was serving my own needs as well as theirs. but I did that. I did that knowing that it was helping out a significant, a significant function. within the organization. Mark Baldino (20:07.984) It sounds like you have to be, if you want to drive alignment, right? There's a group of people who might not, but if your goal, if you're sitting in an organization and listening to this right now and you feel a little bit of misalignment, there is outreach, there is helping out people around you. As you said, like doing a stakeholder interview that is just about understanding their jobs and the pain points they have, their stakeholder journey, right? Not that... Bruce McCarthy (20:30.478) Yeah. Mark Baldino (20:34.16) not the client end user journey, but their stakeholder journey. That's a time and effort that you have to be willing to put into these activities. Bruce McCarthy (20:43.34) It is. is. if you're, if you're in a tiny company, if you're in a 40 person company, it's a sort of easier, happens naturally. You're, you're, you're probably running into each other at the coffee machine anyway. People naturally develop lunch groups and things like that. If they, if they're there in person or they seek opportunities to all get the whole team together, if they're remote. But the bigger the organization gets, the harder it is for those things to just happen naturally. And so you have to, like you said, you have to deliberately spend the extra time. When you've got a new group of stakeholders, I think it's super important to try to meet everyone in person at least once, face to face. There's this weird phenomenon that I've observed that other people are not quite real to us, as long as they are just a voice on. a call or even pixels on Zoom that they don't become real until we can shake hands or until we can share a cup of coffee. Then they're your friend and you don't want to disappoint them. Mark Baldino (21:54.544) I humanizes and not that they're not human, but you're right, it does make that sort of, it helps make the gap much, much smaller. Yeah, I mean these days, honestly, right? Well, I've seen you speak and do enough panels that I know you're not a bot. I'm sure I could be. Any tips for folks that are working in like 100 % remote cultures, they don't have the opportunity to do the, like the office dynamic and the office power structure. Bruce McCarthy (22:02.158) I don't know. How do you know I'm not a bot? Right. Bruce McCarthy (22:09.922) Yeah. Bruce McCarthy (22:17.496) Yeah. Mark Baldino (22:24.24) is easier, frankly, to figure out because literally the logistics or where people go or you you said these two people have coffee every morning. They must be talking about probably talking about something important. Like any tips for folks who sit in these, they join an organization, product leader. It's all remote and their interaction is slack or something. Bruce McCarthy (22:41.356) Yeah. I mean, first of all, if you were in a job like we're talking about that requires the buy-in, the cooperation of a whole lot of people who don't necessarily work for you, don't report to you on the org chart, being remote 100 % of the time sucks. It is hard. I once, I mentioned that I got acquired a few times. I got acquired from a 75 person software startup into a 10,000 person financial services firm in another state. And that was horrible because it was, I was not at headquarters. I was, in a much larger organization that I'd never worked for any company that big before. I didn't know anybody and, it wasn't even, culturally at all similar. it was a much older company, much more mature and they weren't the kind of tech startup that I had grown up in. And, I had this experience where I. needed something from someone in finance. So I emailed them and I didn't hear anything. And I called them and left a voicemail and I didn't hear anything. And I emailed them again and I still didn't hear anything. And I'm like, you know, am I talking to the right person? You know, I would ask clarifying questions and so on. And I still heard absolutely nothing. The only thing that fixed it was that I went to headquarters and I just showed up at that person's desk and said, hey, Can we have lunch? I'm Bruce, you know, and the guy had the grace to look sheepish when I introduced myself because he knew he'd been ignoring my messages. But when I said, let's have lunch, when I was A, friendly and B, suggested an easy out that was not, we're gonna have a confrontation about this issue right now, I suggested a social thing, eating. that worked out well. spent 90 % of lunch just getting to know each other, him and two or three other people from finance that he often had lunch with. And then at the end of that conversation, we were easily able to resolve the thing that I needed. And he was happy to do it because again, at that point I was a real person. Now, so that's the number one thing is if you can get in person with people even just once, find an excuse, we're gonna have an offsite. Bruce McCarthy (25:08.6) We're all going to go to headquarters, or we're all going to get together at a conference, or something. If you can't do that, then some other, or until you can do that, because maybe you can do it, but not for months. There are some other tips. One is use the highest bandwidth method of communication that you can, and the highest intimacy method that you can. So bandwidth is... The best bandwidth is in person. You 360 degrees, five senses, all of that. And you get the body language, the tone of voice, the context that they're in. You get absolutely everything. Second best is video, like we're doing now. I can at least see you nodding right now. So I know you're following along with what I'm saying. There's a feedback loop there because of that immediacy that say if we were on a phone call, which would be the next step back. I would be missing. I would be missing that entirely. And you just had a small smile too, and I got that. But I wouldn't know that, and I can't hear you laughing, but I can see you, right? Okay, and now I can hear you. So if you step back from a phone call, the next step back is an email or no, the next step back would be a text because it's much more synchronous, Slack or WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever you use because each message is short. Mark Baldino (26:20.304) Thank you. Bruce McCarthy (26:36.492) And so there's, and if you're synchronous with the person, then there's back and forth and back and forth. So you quickly correct any misunderstandings in what or any incomplete information because you can ask clarifying questions. Did you mean this? Did you mean that? And then stepping all the way back to the least synchronous is something written long form like an email where somebody might go on for paragraphs and you had a question about the first sentence and you still don't know the answer by the end and you're completely distracted and mystified and you have to ask for clarification and it might be a day or two before you get that clarification if you're just communicating by email. So try to keep the synchrony and the intimacy is the other thing. Maybe you've noticed this, it's really hard to have a real conversation in a group of 20 people. You know, it's a formal meeting with an agenda probably, even if it's meant to be a brainstorm, still you only have a couple of minutes to say what you need to say. And people are reluctant to get into any real substantive issues in a group that big because they don't want to be embarrassed. They don't know what the politics are, maybe between other people in the room or how they will come off. The best conversations happen one-on-one. like we're doing now, where you can have an immediate answer to your clarifying questions that you might have to wait for three other people to raise their hand and go first in a larger group. And people are more willing, especially if you make it informal, to tell you what they're really thinking if they can have an open conversation. love teams that use Slack. I think benefit from the ability to have asynchronous and synchronous chat, and then to just get into a video huddle right within the app without having to set up a Zoom meeting. And I think that increases that immediacy. The last bit of advice on remote I would give is to push the envelope on actually pinging people directly who may be highly placed in your organization that maybe you're a little reluctant Mark Baldino (28:35.354) Thank Bruce McCarthy (29:00.248) to bother them or interrupt them because maybe you think they don't know who you are, that there are cultural norms within different organizations and you don't want to completely go against them. But push the envelope just a little out of your comfort zone and text the CTO and say, I like what you said in the departmental meeting the other day and I just have a quick follow up question. It can't hurt. Melissa, my co-author, did that with this ETO at Wayfair where she worked at the time, 5,000 person company. And he said, glad you enjoyed the presentation. Thank you for your question. Let me refer you to so-and-so who can give you the proper answer. So it wasn't a long interaction, but she got an answer in five minutes. And now he knows who she is. Mark Baldino (29:52.036) Yes. Mark Baldino (29:56.224) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's impressive. It does take a little bit of effort and energy, but there's something you talk about in the book, which is vulnerability. And that's a vulnerable spot to put in, specifically if you don't know the CTO or CEO or somebody in the C-suite or senior leadership, there's a lot of different leadership styles. And I think you have a- a quote from Brene Brown, which is, vulnerability, not by oversharing, but by talking about what's really going on, being willing to take on risk and accepting responsibility of failure. And another quote I like from Brene Brown is that, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. And it's, I'm not here to, you know, go be vulnerable, like, right? Like that's really hard. People have to make that decision on their own, but it's good to know that there's examples out there that when you do that, you do in order to build trust with people, you Bruce McCarthy (30:43.692) Yeah. Mark Baldino (30:50.608) probably do need a level of vulnerability and that's going to kind of build a stronger bridge and that's a way that you as a person can push forward and hopefully help your organization push forward. Bruce McCarthy (31:02.614) When you show vulnerability, you're showing trust in the other person to not abuse whatever confidence that you've given them. Even if that confidence is simply saying, actually, I don't know the answer to that question. I will try to find out for you. It doesn't have to be something deeply personal. It can even be, you know what? I actually really hate coffee, which would be an unusual thing to say. Most people like coffee. But. That's peculiarity and makes you a little bit vulnerable, makes you human. And so other people are likely to reciprocate and you find out more about them. And if you and this other person are successively giving just a little bit more humanity to each other through this, that's how you become confidants. That's how you get to trust each other. And so when you say, really need your help on this project, they're more likely. to say yes in that situation. We took a lot of inspiration from Benet Brown in the trust part of the book in particular. Her stuff is amazing. Another author that I would highly recommend is Erin Meyer wrote a book called The Culture Map. And it's about how different cultures typically differ along predictable lines. in different aspects of social interaction. One of those is willingness to be direct and honest. She has a spectrum she calls high context versus low context cultures. In a low context culture, people don't expect you to read between the lines. They are direct. They say, I'm having a bad day today, bear with me. Whereas in a high context culture, you're expected to deduce what's going on. You're expected to figure out the context and read between the lines. very, people often say that the Japanese and many other Asian cultures are high context or they're very indirect in what they say and they expect you to figure it out for yourself. I would say on average, the English are more, they're known for being polite. Bruce McCarthy (33:25.678) What we mean by polite is softening the message, being a little bit indirect. Whereas Americans are known for being more direct than that, a little bit more transparent, a little bit more honest, but not as direct and honest as say the Danish or the Dutch or the Israelis. So the reason I bring this up is you have to recognize that you're operating within a set of cultural expectations in terms of how vulnerable and how direct and how honest you can be, how much you can point out or how aggressively and directly you can point out the elephant in the room. And I would encourage you because of all the benefits that you described that Benet Brown describes to push the envelope a little bit, to be a little bit unexpectedly more direct than average without being rude. within that cultural context that you find yourself. Mark Baldino (34:27.556) Fair enough. And understanding who. mean, being vulnerability with a peer versus a stakeholder, C-suite or a client. Like there's different levels and kind of, I mean, it would fit into the landscape. There's organizational culture, but then there's kind of maybe the role you're serving and who you're speaking with that is important as well. So thank you for sharing that. I wanted to do, and I hope this doesn't put you on the spot, but I'm thinking we've talked about some of the challenges and some tips. And I just want to say the Bruce McCarthy (34:34.104) Right. Mark Baldino (34:57.69) book is full of advice and stories and frameworks to go from a misaligned maybe organization that lacks focus to an organization that's aligned. it's not esoteric. can be a playbook if you want it, but I think it's really, really good. It's practical and strategic as well. I work a lot in the UX field, almost primarily, but I work with a lot of product. groups and I often say that the best projects I have are when I have alignment with product and the worst projects I have when I have misalignment with product and I'm bringing on a design team. As a way to kind of wrap this up and again I hope not putting you on the spot too much but like maybe a before and after and like what might a misaligned product in UX team or two groups look like and then in the flip side of that is like what would an aligned product in UX. Bruce McCarthy (35:47.0) Right. Bruce McCarthy (35:52.546) Yeah. The most common situation that I run across where there is misalignment between those two is, to oversimplify it, is where the UX team is focused not incorrectly, but perhaps too exclusively on the user. And they are focused on, they want to do the user discovery. They want to map out the journeys and the jobs to be done. They want to make sure that they are constantly advocating for and pushing toward a better and more successful experience for the user. And that's fantastic. And it is necessary, but it is not sufficient for many products to be successful. There also needs to be success in going to market. And that means in many B2B products that you have to satisfy the buyer who may be a different person than or a different committee, or a different organization from the user. And it's easy for product teams to get caught up in that too, and just thinking about the user, because we're taught, do your user interviews, make sure that you're satisfying the user's needs, make sure the jobs to be in on are all taken care of. And that's all correct. But if you can't sell the product because the buyer doesn't see things the same way as the user. then it's still not going to be successful. So where there's fighting between the UX team and the product team, or sometimes even the UX team plus the product team and the sales and marketing teams, it's usually at that juncture where, well, yes, but we need to also take care of this other stuff, and we cannot always and exclusively prioritize the user. That seems to be the... the rubbing point very often. And so you get people on the UX side saying the product people don't understand the user or they don't appreciate the user's needs. They're only about adding in another stupid feature, which is making the product more complicated. But maybe those features are necessary to win the RFP or to compete with the competition on the feature checklist. Bruce McCarthy (38:20.078) And on the other hand, the product people are sometimes looking at the UX people and saying, we don't have time to do all this research. We need to actually get on with building some stuff. the compromise, what good looks like, I think, is when they're collaborating, is when the backlog or the roadmap actually explicitly acknowledges the needs of the user in maybe one swim lane and the needs of the buyer or maybe the admin persona in one or another swim lanes. And maybe also taking good care of the platform for the engineering team on another so that we're moving strongly and in some balanced fashion on all of these things. And we're collaborating together on finding the wins where we can do something that will serve all of those masters at the same time. Mark Baldino (39:27.905) That's great because I think it's not, you're not advocating that like UX just focuses on the user and sales focuses on the buyer and engineer. It's not just that maybe product has to connect all those dots. It's actually shared ownership and shared responsibility, actually a collaboration in those efforts. Bruce McCarthy (39:42.51) It really is. Let me give you an example. I worked for an enterprise software company. And we sold to big companies. we were thinking about a particular capability that we wanted that we knew that this one large customer wanted. And they wanted it sooner than we were likely to be able to ship it. So the professional services team was involved trying to spec out some custom work that they were going to do to help this customer. But we knew that it was also going to be a feature at some point. So I led a team to go visit the customer for three days. We brought people from professional services, people from design, people from product, and people from engineering all together to this customer. And we workshopped exactly what it was that they wanted. the product to do for them. And the professional services team went off and took that as a blueprint for building the custom solution that they needed this year. And the rest of us all went back and said, this is great. We now sort of have a cooperative plan for at least one take on the next version of our product. Mark Baldino (40:59.6) Well, think you've demonstrated the final component there is pulling the customer into that process. They can be collaborative as well. You sort of have a cross-functional team that just isn't internal, includes the client and that. about 100%. Bruce McCarthy (41:14.232) That's right. So when we started prototyping, we were bringing our mockups back to the client saying, is this what we were talking about? Mark Baldino (41:22.372) Yeah, and to put a little spin on what we talked about before, you are building trust with them. And I think a lot of executives, and I don't want to have too much of a tangent, feel there's too much vulnerability in going and asking and talking to clients. Not saying what do you want, but trying to understand their needs and putting up a prototype together that might not be fully functional and getting some feedback. I think they feel like that's very vulnerable. But actually, when you do that and you admit that, hey, this is going to take us a few iterations, You're engaging your clients in a way that's very different from how a lot of software companies operate. And you're going to build sort of better trust with those customers. They're going to become hopefully, know, lifelong, multi-year clients. Bruce McCarthy (42:02.112) Absolutely right. You know, it's such a common place that people say that customers and prospects, and by extension, the sales team, they want to inject things onto the roadmap, and then they want to hold you to a date. They want a commitment for a date, let's put it in the contract. And we all resist that. But the antidote to that is not just saying no and have the client go off and grumble and maybe go somewhere else. The antidote to that is just what you said. It's bringing them into your process and saying yeah, we are working on this actually Starting next month. We're gonna do some research and we want you to be part of that And would you agree to give us some feedback on early? Like you said not completely done yet but early access versions of the product to help us make sure that we're on the right track and then they're much less concerned about the date because The date was the only leverage they used to have. Now they're inside the process and they're just as likely to say, yeah, obviously it's not fully baked yet. It looks like you're on the right track, but we still need this and this and this. And that's gonna take you another three months? Fine, we'll wait. Mark Baldino (43:12.698) Fair enough. Well, that's great. Bruce, I could talk to you for hours on this. This has been a fantastic conversation. The book is amazing. I'll say it again. Anyone that is in an organization that is unfocused and misaligned, where they're struggling with some components of getting people all just say generalization on the same page, or maybe they're in the middle of the journey, the book is a fantastic resource. So I want to encourage everybody to go out and purchase it, read it, absorb it. But Bruce, Where can people find you? If you wanna make a pitch for your kind of organization, ways you help your clients, give the audience a sense of where they can find you and reach out. Bruce McCarthy (43:53.334) Yeah, so I'll give you three thoughts. One is, if you want to learn more about the book, go to AlignedTheBook.com. And it shows you the book and the table of contents and various parts and gives you a sense of what you'd be looking for. We have an affiliate link to Amazon. But we also have some free bonus material that, in return for your email address, you can download right away, including something we call the Stakeholder Canvas. which is, I think, a better map of your organization and where the power players sit and what you each need from each other than the org chart. And that's completely free. Second thing is, if you go to productculture.com, you can learn about what product culture does. We work with growth stage companies all over the world, providing coaching and advising and training for product teams. Our job is to help. companies get better at the product discipline. We also help with hiring in those companies where they need to add to the team. And then the last thing I wanted to suggest is that I'm on LinkedIn. I've sort of abandoned Twitter, like many people. And so if you follow me there, you'll see everything that we're working on. Mark Baldino (45:17.488) Well, we will include links to all of those, obviously, at you on LinkedIn and Product Culture when we publish the episode. I just want to say thank you very, very much for your time and energy. Thanks for putting this book into the world and following up and explaining it to kind of the audience, how they can find their way to a more aligned organization. So thanks very much for your time, Bruce. Bruce McCarthy (45:42.39) Yeah, my pleasure. I like talking about this topic everywhere I go. People thank Melissa and I for writing it because it's the hardest part of their jobs and there's not a lot of guidance out there for Mark Baldino (45:57.232) That's awesome, well, much appreciated. Thanks again. Bruce McCarthy (45:59.096) Thank you.