#64 Prioritizing Without Strategy Won't Work
Christian Idiodi is a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group. With his experience, he helps product and leadership teams across the globe to solve their customer problems.
In this episode, he shares the biggest challenges that product teams have and how leaders can help and empower product people to solve those.
Follow Christian Idiodi:
Linkedin: @cidiodi
Twitter: @CIdiodi
Website: https://svpg.com/
Podcast Minutes
Table of Contents
00:30 - Episode Intro
02:10 - Intro Christian Idiodi
03:50 - The biggest challenges product people have
08:25 - Missing empowerment from Leadership Teams
13:35 - Prioritizing doesn't work without strategic alignment
19:25 - Supporting the Leadership Team as a Product Manager
25:45 - Keeping the strategy updated as a Leader
27:35 - The #1 tip every PM should follow
30:10 - The #1 tip every Product Lead should follow
32:15 - Micromanaging CEOs
What’s your day-to-day business at the Silicon Valley Product Group?
Christian Idiodi: That's significantly different than being a product manager. The Silicon Valley product group are people who curate what we've seen to work in the most innovative companies in the world.
We tried to share those with other companies to convince them they can walk in a similar manner or better. I think every day, I'm trying to solve the problem of helping companies. Understand how to build products customers love. I am helping companies around the world to understand how to create value for their customers in a way that works for their businesses.
So, I am an everyday product manager of an infinite amount of customers with idea startups, looking for product-market fit, working with high-growth companies looking to scale and become successful or enterprise companies that are looking for consistent innovation.
I think I spent all my chunk of my time trying to convince them that they can work in a similar manner that the most innovative companies in the world use.
What are the biggest challenges product people are facing these days?
Answer: So many things have become consistent pain points in making these disciplines of a more challenging thing ever. On one hand, it's exciting to see the amount of light being put on the discipline, the importance in many organizations today it's really technology evolving and many champions of walking in kind of this modern product practice.
However, I always say all problems are people's problems. A couple of areas have become really significant pain points for the discipline. One is a good understanding of what the role of product management is, two is actually equipping, training, and coaching people to be successful in that role. And three is leading that discipline overall product leadership and managers have put up all of this things have been becoming increasingly very poor as the role has found more relevance. And so most of my pain and challenge, with this discipline probably stems a lot from this. Now, in fairness, it's understandable.
Why? Not a lot of product people have been taught by good product leaders. Many people are self-taught in this discipline. There's not a magical curriculum out there that has equipped people to be good product managers. These are unfortunately a model of misinformation about what this role should be and what good in this role looks like and this cycle reinforces itself.
So poorly thought product people are teaching other people how to do product in a poor manner. And this cycle continues to feed itself. And most of the challenges I see have a reason from the product from the people of the product management discipline. That goes from the role of product leadership, which is being able to find high-end attract the right talent and to coach them to be successful and being able to create an environment for product people to be successful by empowering them and giving them problems to solve and providing them.
The right context as well as being able to help people manage their time well and not have off people spend all their days in meetings, all of your time meetings rather than actually put off work. It's a lot of the people aspects of this that have been really frustrating for me over the last couple of years.
How do you help companies & people change their mindest about product management and strategy?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
