The trouble with role clarity in product organizations

A lack of role clarity is named as one of the main challenges product leaders keep mentioning when I interview them about what they perceive to be difficult about their job. But my hypothesis is: this is just a symptom of much deeper systemic issues.

On the surface role clarity seems to be an easy thing to address. You sit down and create written down artefacts what product, design and engineering roles are, how they contribute to successful product work and share it with each other and the organization. And if you have not done this yet, then get started here.

There are plenty of great resources on this topic:

Marty Cagan e.g. clearly lays out how product managers are responsible for the viability and value risk, design leaders for usability and engineering roles for feasibility. Petra Wille has great resources on the role of product leaders and their main responsibilities and so does Ravi Mehta. That writing and sharing of role descriptions is not trivial, but simple enough.

 You can do a quick Google search, or look on Reforge and you’ll find plenty of resources on product job descriptions, and skill matrixes for all kinds of levels of product roles working in empowered teams.

But if it was as simple as that, we would not keep struggling with the topic so much.

Where things get dicey is when it comes to the work culture, philosophies and relationships that are at the core of an empowered product team vs. a team that is building features another part of the organization is asking them to execute.

At the core of this sits a power issue: Who gets to set direction? Who decides what gets built? Who defines strategy, vision and goals? Who decides on budget and resources.

In a traditional organization, this is expressed in hierarchy and the use of power over others by people in more senior leadership roles. It is by far the most common organizational structure today’s businesses have adopted.

The way empowered product teams would want to work, with ongoing discovery work, identifying problems worth solving, setting their own outcome based goals, and continuously delivering value, requires a lot of work habits that are rooted in non-traditional new ways of working that often consciously break with traditional power structures.

These styles of working are rooted in some clear assumptions about power and hierarchy, placing collaboration and co-creation, a healthy debate of perspectives, positive friction, learning, experimentation and equality of humans across disciplines, identities and seniority levels at their core. All examples of shared power and shared input into decisions. A way of working that is rooted in radical transparency and candor, that is working with experiments to create insights and data to determine next steps in short increments. It’s a style of working optimized for creating outcomes in highly uncertain and complex contexts, that require skilled collaboration across disciplines to find a path to success.

Too often I see product people know how they would want to and need to work, but not in a position to negotiate the changes needed to transform their current organizational habits structures and culture, to create a context allowing them to function like a truly empowered product team.

As a result, they have their own perspective of what the role of product is, that is often not at all aligned with how the rest of the organization and other teams around them view the role of product and their interactions with the product team. Just to point out some obvious clashes:

Empowered Team	Classic hierarchical Business Culture
Wants to identify problems worth solving and judge viability themselves. Creating their own product vision and strategy, including self-identified, outcome based goals.	Sees product as a “service team” that should do what the business asks them to do. Somebody in Finance is making RoI calculations, somebody in Legal is having the power to design compliance policies, and senior management is in charge of strategy and vision.
Sees the product team as a trio of product, design and engineering, collaborating to create product outcomes	Sees product, design and engineering as separate functions. Designers might be staffed in separate teams. Research might be staffed in a separate team. Product and Engineering might have conflicting goals and leadership.
Understands that the best outcomes are created making use of the creative tension resulting from diverse and equal perspectives in the team. Assumes that nobody alone has all the information needed for decisions in complex contexts, and that a challenge to a current decision or strategy can – and should! – come from anybody in the team who spots it regardless of role or title.	Is used to a senior role and a person “higher up” in the hierarchy as the main decision maker. Assumes that the most efficient way to make decisions is based on the experience and seniority of the leader. Does not necessarily appreciate challenges to ideas voiced by leadership and might view opposing perspectives as disloyalty or personal attacks.
Assumes that the team continuously learns and that every failure is an important reflection opportunity to learn and improve.	Often equates failure and mistakes with blaming and threats to the current incumbent of a position. Does often neither have a regular ritual of reflection (like a retrospective) nor systematically address issues like the halo effect or other power dynamics in conversations about mistakes or decisions.
Sees discovery, product strategy, product vision and outcome goal setting as part of their job.	Often views product work as limited to a scrum product owner role with a main responsibility for backlog management and without active involvement in choosing the problem to solve or the strategic focus for the team.

Realistically, the power to change an entire organization’s culture is not typically within the mandate of even the most senior product person in the organization alone.

That kind of a change depends on the collaboration with many other functions in the organization, who very often have work styles and habits that are far removed from the way an empowered product team would want to collaborate and function.

If you find yourself there, what can you actually do, to shape the way you work towards a more empowered style of working?

• Understand the systemic context and dynamics of this: in a hierarchical system it is important to include the most senior decision maker in this process. You can e.g. gift them a copy of Marty Cagan’s book “Transformed” and seek a conversation with them what they like about these concepts. True culture change for the entire organization will only work if they are on board and willing to co-shape and role-model it themselves.
• You can influence the direct context you work in. That means your team, your peers and your stakeholders. You can design work relationships and processes with them that center discovery work and close collaboration as a product trio (UX, engineering, product).
• You can experiment with ideas and concepts of empowered product work, and step by step influence your team and those around you with creating outcome based roadmaps and the related business and customer results.
• You can show up curious and with a learning mindset when experiments go wrong or when assumptions get proven wrong. This builds the foundation of a healthy failure culture in your team
• You can learn about strategy and vision making and ask great questions that showcase your understanding or seeking to understand the strategic context of your organization. If you are seen as contributing to overall business strategy you will get more trust executing ideas based on your discovery insights. You might even get an invitation into that next strategy session at your organization.
• You can keep investing and trusting in ways of working that center inclusivity, psychological safety, trust, collaboration, diverse perspective in ideation, experimentation, safe to fail culture and joy at work. They are all building blocks of high performing teams. And could serve as inspiration for other teams around you. Share success stories of this and you might just invite more teams to get curious to work more like you.

And I think it’s also important to know what you as an individual contributor can probably not shape without the support and some deep cultural transformation work of your entire organization:

• The way your job titles are phrased (e.g. whether there are POs or PMs in the teams)
• The way your performance system in the organization is designed
• The way your teams are staffed
• The way your senior leadership team decides about your involvement in strategy
• The value people outside the product team are placing on equality, healthy debate, learning from failure, data driven decision making, insight into user needs,
• The understanding of people outside the product team, on what it takes to build products in an empowered team.

On most of these points you can give feedback, you can forward articles, books or maybe even this blog post to spark a conversation about systemic and structural changes that would support a true transformation to more empowered product teams in your organization. But you don’t typically have full control shaping these exactly like you want. Accepting that reality may make it a little easier to be with the frustrations around “role clarity” in your organization.

The more senior your leadership role, ideally as the CPO in collaboration with the CEO, the more likely it becomes that you can address the systemic shifts that would help the whole organization to transform and work in a more empowered way.

As a CPO or Head of Product you can typically choose job titles, influence the way performance is rewarded, work on team topologies and composition, bring product people into the strategy process and role model the values and ways of working the entire organization needs to embrace to create a cultural context that lets empowered teams thrive. Ideally you get yourself help with this.

This is not a trivial small change to introduce, and you’ll likely need help from an experienced mentor or coach to help drive this transformation of your organization. But it is so worth it. The outcomes and engagement of truly empowered teams are an amazing creative force. Making it much more likely that you’ll reach your strategic goals. Truly empowered teams make your company’s vision a reality much sooner.

Book recommendations for further reading:
– “Transformed” by Marty Cagan on how to shift your product organization into an empowered product operating model
– “Strong Product People” by Petra Wille to get a lot of input into developing great product managers and setting up strong product teams

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If you would like to explore this more: reach out for a free coaching session with me.
I coach, speak, do workshops and blog about #leadership, #product leadership, #AIEthics #innovation, the #importance of creating a culture of belonging and how to succeed with your #hybrid or #remote teams.

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