This year, World Product Day calls out the importance of resilience in the everchanging landscape of digital transformation, with both the opportunities and rising concerns among practices about the role of AI and how automation might affect job descriptions.
With those concerns in mind and our team expanding, it’s more important than ever to scale the support network too. At Transform, we’re grateful to be busy and involved in knotty problems, but that requires resilience to persevere, deliver and thrive in these situations.
As clients see greater opportunities and expectations are high, it takes a strong Product Manager to ensure teams stay value centric, aligned to achieve objectives and deliver in a structured pace to achieve. These pressures can affect morale, a sense of autonomy and may lead to work stress taking time and presence away from your personal life and family.
Facilitating our monthly Product Community of Practice, Andrew West-Moore - Principal Product Manager here at Transform - devoted time to tackling the subject of Resilience; sharing the reality, what helps and the actions we’ll take away to bolster our approaches. We hope that sharing this reality and takeaways not only supports our team, but our clients and invigorates Product Managers in the wider community.
What’s making resilience hard
No-one is an island, but being resilient day-to-day can often feel isolating as we try to push through daily stresses.
Team structure & alignment
Meeting and connecting with client teams and other suppliers is hard. Working across existing ways of working, gaining trust and dealing with different “characters” is our role, but it takes its toll. Gaining alignment and clarity can be fraught with politics, personal challenges to overcome (such as risk aversion or responsibility overload), and in rainbow teams you might even be dealing with conflicting supplier agendas.
Strategic & leadership gaps
Not understanding the problem, opportunities and direction is a common reason that we’re brought into a project. As we work through a brief; undocumented perceptions, lack of knowledge, politics or simply their headspace means that we’re unable to push forward at pace or towards a valuable outcome. We do our best to bridge this gap, but it’s important to call it out.
Client engagement & autonomy
Lack of visibility or decision making reduces pace, dilutes solutions and presents a risk to delivering within a timescale. On the opposite, overbearing engagement fails to gain trust, and a lack of autonomy reduces a team members ability to evaluate and shape all viable opportunities.
Technical & operational inefficiencies
Sometimes it’s an access, process or cultural blocker that simply won’t budge, reins in the potential impact or restricts our visibility to truly connect and deliver. Strain on the allocated resources on client side is relatable but also restrictive.
What actually helps
Exploring our experiences, the attendees (Product Managers and those interested in Product Management) identified many factors that have helped them stay strong when life gets stressful.
Often basic things, these are important reminders that no-one builds alone and to look after yourself.
Personal habits and self-care
Making time for self-care and building these into habits; going for a walk, taking a breath and catching some sun. Having self-check-ins to accept that some things are out of your control.
Simply blocking out time in your diary to think, recuperate between heavy meetings/workshops and decompress allows people the headspace and resolve to release pressure and make better decisions.
Building strong relationships and leveraging support systems
Connections in both your project team and client team give opportunities to unite, share the load and find new routes to move forward. “Don't be a hero - trust the others in your team” and “You don’t need to know everything” came through in the discussion.
Transformers have dual support networks. By exploring openly with other colleagues, you may find catharsis but also gain valuable workarounds to consider. Bouncing ideas off others to collaborate, validate and build confidence collectively also helped.
Effective communication and boundaries
Taking time to clarify, explore collectively and document decisions can help teams articulate, collaborate and move forward aligned. Even learning to say no, making tough calls when gut instinct dictates, and not being afraid to escalate were highlighted.
Growth mindset and problem-solving approaches
Sometimes it’s about chalking it up as a chance to grow and evolve. Considering we’re always on a learning path, facing new situations and people time-after-time give us the chance to reflect, identify, research and implement ways of working to mitigate, resolve or circumvent challenges.
Considering new problems, solving approaches or trying something in your toolkit but applied in a different way, may enable you to zoom out, recalibrate or reposition the problems faced.
"So much of the Product Management role is about managing expectations - including my own. Every meeting and interaction I go into I pause and ask myself, "What do I need out of this?". Then "What can I expect out of this?". If the two are wildly out of whack or the best I can come up with is "To survive" or "To look good", that's not a psychologically safe space. I can then make it safe by resetting my own or someone else's expectations off the bat or cancel it if it isn't moving things forward."
Chris Bolam, Principal Product Manager
The power of community
We know that Community sessions around Product craft and client experiences are important, but stopping and focusing purely on the mental health of our team is far more valuable. Individuals can hone their elasticity to absorb and rebound when they know their team can relate and support each other through knotty problems if they arise.
Bringing us together to centre on this subject was so powerful. Many attendees highlighted how cathartic it is to discuss and relate to each other’s struggles, however it was the outcomes that really gave us the opportunity to take away shared learnings to put into action tomorrow.
One that resonated with me: “Be better at practising what I preach - take some meaningful time away and go for a walk”. There are so many simple things that we drop for ourselves, but promote to others to help them stay resilient, so it’s important to start prioritising and practicing self-care.