Today on Product Team Success we're going to be embarking on a storytelling adventure for your career where each topic is a captivating chapter and together we craft the narrative of career success in the world of product leadership. Your career growth starts now. I'm Ross Webb and this episode is brought to you in partnership with Amplitude.
In my opinion, who's been the driving force behind the transformation of a number of companies in various industries. And in this episode we're going to dive deep into finding out how harnessing the power of narrative and storytelling can help turn you into a product management superstar.
Coming up in this episode, the arts of creating an engaged team, career transformation through change and being a product leader in a founder led business. Now Matt, you have quite the passion for making change and I'd love to get your thoughts on how you work with product teams and also wider business teams in the context of this.
I mean, the first thing you'll say is change is hard. Never underestimate how difficult that that that can be. And if I think back to most of my mistakes and failures and learnings in my career, they've generally come around this. And I think that I genuinely think that pretty much every PM no matter what level.
If you're doing it right is a leadership role and leadership is really about amongst a few things helping people through change understanding what needs to change and then successfully making making that move.
And problem is even icy relatively junior PMs you could be the leader for a particular type of change that might be some internal tooling, which is going to mean that we're moving from where you were to slow of lake or data bricks or whatever, which is creating a whole different way of thinking about and accessing data across the organization.
That is that is change and that requires some of those leadership capabilities for change. So one thing I would say is any time you get the opportunity to do valid leadership course to think about leadership change management, these sorts of things. Grab that with both hands, it may be sort of like feel generalist feel, you know, it's not a direct problem management hard skill. I really think it is, you know, it's a critical thing that we that we all need to.
That's a fascinating outlook. Could you expand a little bit more on this specifically? I'd love to know a little bit more on the quality needed to fulfill that role in an organization. Whoever you look at for this, I think it comes down to a couple of things. Probably one of them is, you know, to lead and to drive change organization, you've got to be able to lead and change yourself.
Yeah, these things aren't factual, but not purely, but not purely about, you know, what would you change this system for that system? So deal with it. It's humans. It's all about humans. And it's about how those humans react. And what other humans reacting to, they reacting to you. Not just your message, not just the facts about what you are saying, but you as a person, how you are bringing it, you know, what reason and understanding and, you know, how you're doing that.
So you've got to understand yourself so that you can then understand how you interact with others and how you, how you come across and how you might react to different types of people. And from that point, then it gets into a whole one, you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of leadership to around that which I won't, I won't, I won't do it too deeply on, but there's a lot of some standard leadership stuff, which I'd highly recommend. Any and every PM is thinking about it.
Nothing, the next thing is what's been narrative, you know, what, what, what, what is the, what is the why around it and the why isn't it's going to save X amount of money or it's going to enable this or it's going to whatever it is not all about metrics metrics are very important. It's about the narrative and I think a lot of product management in general, I would sum up as a bit of a bouncing out between quantum call in whatever sort of rain that makes sense in that.
The narrative is that quorum aspect and the better a storyteller you can be the better a, some of these sort of brings different pieces of, you know, the company's culture, you know, the folklore, the founding myth, whatever those pieces are, the more you sort of bring them together into your narrative, that's what we've hidden the better you are going to, you're going to be consistently achieve that impact that you're looking to from, you know, C suite all the way down to interns.
It's that same thing because it taps into that common knowledge it taps into that into that common, um, and sort of common, um, set of shared belief set of shared sort of experiences. So, you know, the more you can bring all that together, I think the, um, you know, the, the better the better you can be.
Yeah, there's, uh, something that the, the, the, I've sort of been using with with the pro team here, here at, here at ClareScore, um, through riffing with, with a couple of, couple of the pms, just trying to sort of classify what type of, what type of pm we are. And, um, you know, we, we sort of think about ourselves as, um, also two dimensions, classics of consultant for folks, they, um, are we wartime or peacetime types of types of people, um, and are we librarians or poets.
And I think that you get pms all over that spectrum and there is no right or answer. It's just situational. It's about, um, you know, what, what are the right set skills, what's that right sort of default mindset to bring to a particular team or a particular phase of a company's growth or a particular, yeah, whatever it is.
I think thinking about who you are and what that is, well, will also help you in terms of how you position yourself, are you positioned to change what you're looking to drive and understanding how other people might react to it. Okay, man. So this last question I really want to know, is whether there are any experiences or any other examples throughout your many, many story career that spring to mind that you'd be willing to share with us.
I touched a little earlier, but let me, let me talk a bit about working at founder led businesses and with, with founders, um, playscores my third founder led business in a row and we have all founders like all humans are different and unique and have their own strengths and weaknesses. But I think the founders are a unique breed and they have superpowers beyond your wildest dreams.
You've still got founder involved in that business that could be incredibly positive and powerful, you know, they have the ability to just cut through and get stuff done. They have all the experience and knowledge. They have a sort of passion and a, a, often a reality distortion field, the likes of which very few other people will never be able to replicate your, your, your most charismatic or standard in both commas CEO,
has to work damn hard to, to, to, to, to match that, that, that strength of founder. Um, and you're with that, with that comes, you know, all strengths have a dark side all strengths, I've like a double edged sword sort of aspect to it. And it can be that they could be harder to commit. It can be that, you know, it's, you know, it is this way or the highway or whatever it is.
And my guidance to every, I mean, not just Pierre, but everybody watching the family business is really understand and respect that the more you can understand the founder, what makes them tick, why they do what they do. The better you're going to understand the business, because the founder, let business has to work for the founder, you know, they are such a pivotal role or such a pivotal set up that, you know, you can influence, you can try and help them understand.
And you can, you can, you can do all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, it's got a word to founder. And, um, yeah, particularly as a senior product leader always ask yourself that that question is, is, is this set up working because often you will find that the founder was the product person for quite a while before they, before they brought in any peels.
And then they did bring somebody else in there were probably relatively junior. So as a product leader, you're probably one or the few people outside the founder who sort of had the ant on the controls, so to speak. And that's, that's a great responsibility, but it comes with sort of like a need to sort of match the house style, the house by you, or whatever that is.
And that will be said by the end. So, yeah, put that put that time in, put that time in in need, if you process, put that time in, you know, as you're entering the business and always recognize that as you're, as you're going through that it's, it's a great soup out. The more you can harness it, the more you can work with it, the better. Yeah, it can feel hard, but it's incredible. I love working for candlelight businesses. But yeah, it's, it's different.
As our narrative journey comes to a close, remember that every story in your career is a key to unlocking new steps forward in your career, advancements. You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn for more insights. I think he's absolutely awesome. And don't miss our recent episode with John Kennedy, where we explore the importance of being positive when it comes to motivating and driving your team.
And keep listening to product team success, where we'll explore more captivating stories and strategies in the world of product leadership. Thanks as always to our friends at amplitude for helping produce this episode. And until next time from me, Ross Webb, bye for now.