Conditions for Change
What's the most important important product skill to master?
Creating the necessary conditions for change.
This is critical for product leaders, or aspiring ones. I would argue that if a product person can't mold the environment to accept and embrace the changes necessary for a product to be wildly successful, they shouldn't be in a leadership role.
I'm not talking about features, or me-too products, but rather the ambitious ones - the products new startups are founded on, and the new products that put an established business on a new trajectory, perhaps even transforming it.
These ambitious products, almost by definition, disrupt the status quo. We talk about disruption all the time in this context, but then lazily assume that people will embrace the new thing, despite the disruption, simply because the new thing is that brilliant. It's the "if you build it, they will come" fallacy.
People are highly resistant the change, and most disruptive new products fail spectacularly, because the appropriate conditions for change were not created. By people, I'm speaking in the broadest possible sense - customers, peers, direct reports, partners, regulators, etc. History is littered with grand examples of great products that were bludgeoned by the status quo - the digital camera at Kodak, the iPhone-esque prototype Nokia killed off - as well as plenty of less publicized ones.
Despite this, odds are that if you're a product leader, no one has ever provided any coaching or training on creating change. CEOs rarely ask about it in interviews.
So how do you mold an entire ecosystem of humans to embrace your big new thing? That's an entire novel, but there are two key things we should be practicing for every product launch:
Intervention design
Storytelling
Intervention design comes from IDEO, and I absolutely love it. I'll let them explain it (here’s a more in depth HBR article):
"Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance of the “designed artifact” into the status quo. In fact, the more innovative a new design is, the more resistance it’s likely to meet.
This process, intervention design, grew organically out of the iterative prototyping that designers did to help understand customers’ reactions to new products. Not only did iterative prototyping create better offerings, but it was a great way to get organizational funding and commitment, because it improved the chances of success and reduced fear of the unknown. Intervention design uses iterative prototyping to get buy-in too, but extends it to interactions with all the principal stakeholders—not just customers."
Intervention design provides an excellent framework for understanding and being intentional about the ecosystem of stakeholders we need to influence and mold. But stakeholders is simply a fancy word for a human being who has the power to kill or accelerate our product.
And humans are suckers for a great story. Individual behavior within that ecosystem is changed most effectively when we're intentional and excellent storytellers.
Cool fact - we're biologically hardwired to crave and respond to stories. I highly recommend "The Storytelling Animal" by Jonathan Gottschall if you want to dive deeper.
If you're looking for something a bit more practical, it's hard to beat Chip and Dan Heath's "Made to Stick." One really important note - most good stories are collected and discovered, rather than invented. We don't have to be a creator of stories (a really hard skill to master), we simply need to be aware of the type of stories that would resonate with the people we want to influence. Then capture them, and retell them (over and over).
Creating the conditions for change isn't someone else's job, it isn't just part of our job - it is THE product leadership job.
