My Organization Doesn't Work That Way - All Things Product with Teresa & Petra

Hi, folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Kortz. And we're so happy you're here. Hey, Teresa, I often hear that people want to work a certain way, but then really like with their next breath explaining me that this is just not how their company works. Should we unpack that a bit? Yeah, you mean like they want to do continuous discovery, but nobody in their organization has heard of an outcome? For example, yeah, they see too much of a gap here. Yeah. You know, I think this is an important topic, especially because there's been some narratives around you're not really a product manager if you don't work this way. And I think that's kind of dangerous. Yeah, I think we should talk through this a little bit. I think I want to start by framing it as if you are doing what your organization is asking you to do, you're doing your job. Full stop. Like if you work at a feature factory and your organization is asking you to ship features and you're shipping features, you're doing your job. So like, let's just start there as a baseline. Expectations meant. Yeah. Like, let's just stay there. Let's just start there as a baseline. So like, don't beat yourself up over it. Don't feel like you're doing something wrong. You're hired to do a job, but you're doing the job. Amazing. I think there's this bigger narrative happening, which is. We're seeing our product practices, whether it's product management, design, UX, user research, engineering. We're seeing our practices evolve really quickly. And I think this is happening for a number of reasons. We're seeing a lot more public sharing about how teams work. We're seeing a lot more discussion about engaging with customers and feedback loops with customers and a lot of trial and error and a lot of structured trial and error so we can actually learn from those iterations. And a lot of other companies sharing how they are working, which creates the desire to copy what they do if they're successful organizations or at least successful by certain monetary measures. Yeah. So then I think this leads to this yearning of like, oh, these tactics sound great. I want to try that. But how do I do that when my organization doesn't work this way at all? And I think the mistake I see most people make is they frame it as I need to get my organization to work this way. And I want to encourage people to reframe it. A grassroots movement. Exactly. Convincing all the leadership people to work that way. Handing them books by important thought leaders and stuff like that. Yeah, because your leaders are going to read a book they've never heard of. And I think we can reframe this. And this was sort of the topic of my talk last year at Product to Heart. I remember. It's less about changing your organization and it's more about changing the way you individually work. So how do you start with your team? exactly how do you start with what's in your span of control what can you start doing and that might be a teeny tiny step and yeah it might be with your team but like maybe your team's not interested right yeah okay so what can i personally do and this is where people try to boil the ocean they say like if we take continuous discovery they say well i don't have an outcome i can't do this okay well you can still talk to a customer you can still learn a little bit about their goals and their context and their needs oh well i'm not allowed to talk to a customer okay well do you have someone in your personal network who matches your ideal customer profile can you just i haven't had any formal training on product discovery so i can't even start yeah using product discovery tactics or whatever skill you want to learn you can read a blog post you can read a book you can write like so i think um The thing that's really key here is organizations don't change because some individual contributor in the organization said, hey, I read this book. It's convincing them to change. Yeah. They change because individuals change their own behavior. They have impact somewhere. People get curious about that impact. And then they get curious. How did you do that, Teresa? Exactly. Then they get curious about the new behavior. Yeah. Right. and so i think we underestimate we overestimate how much impact we can have when we take this like bowl in a china shop let me tell you the right way of doing things but we underestimate our impact when we just change our own behavior and show what this new way of working could look like yeah and let me add another aspect to that oftentimes talking to everybody first trying to convince your organization of change is creating a lot of pressure on the teams because then maybe people get excited to some extent and then you have to start working these new ways but in the beginning let's face it everybody's not good in doing these new things so you need to learn how to conduct a interview and what when to build a prototype and when to i don't know run an a b test and all these kind of things because you don't know in the beginning and you have to learn yourselves and if you first of all start to change the organization to convince everybody of continuous discovery being the thing then you have to live up to that expectations to some extent as well and i think it's it's it's easier to start small to start in your realm of influence to start with the things that you have under control you can have your first super shitty user interviews um and then improve on that before you then can tell people hey look this is all the things that we learned and this is why we want to change this and this and that feature right so so that's maybe why i like the stealth mode a bit as well yeah and we now have some examples where Like I'm, I'm thinking of, um, the CPO, uh, Francesca, is it Cortez? Cortese. Cortese at, um, Hemnet. And it's such that we shared this story on the product talk blog. She had one of her product teams come to her and say that we want to set a personal OKR of trying to put the continuous discovery habits into practice. And Frances is great. She agreed. She's like, yeah, give it a try. And the team actually had a lot of success. Like it wasn't like, oh, they just adopted the habits and magic happened. They had some trial and error as everybody does. A lot of fun went in depth. But they, as a trio, they iterated, they tried things, they focused on their own work. They showed impact. And then they went back to Francesca and said, hey, look, this is what we did. And her response was, wow, let's start sharing this with the other teams. So it was an example where an individual team had a huge impact on the organization. But they didn't start by saying, we all need to work this way. We're doing things wrong. They just said, can we try it? Yeah, can we? And that's... it's a bit of a topic that often comes up in my product leadership coachings because oftentimes leaders get approached by a team that they want to work a different way and that creates a bit of uncertainty even in the product leads to say like is that something that i should embrace is it bringing too much friction is it maybe bringing conflict with other teams how can we bring all of them along what do i need to do and usually so we we go through all the ifs and buts and what else could happen and what we land up what we land upon is this you need to create a bit of space for them to try these things oftentimes it's just like allowing them to do it encourage them to do it and then maybe be a bit mindful about the pressure that is on this particular team because if you try something new you might not be as fast and efficient as you were with your old working habits on paper because maybe you're still more successful with the effect that the features that you were launching down the line will be having right so success needs to be measured on the customer side I'd say so that is oftentimes the only thing that they need to do encourage them make room for them hold the space for them be a bit more patient with the team that is currently trying and learning and and that's basically it and then help them shine and help them spread the news because that's another thing that teams often forget if they're successful they're really reluctant or shy or i don't know and maybe it's a cultural thing you don't talk about your success that much as you would so yeah talking about failures is a bit of a cultural thing that is ingrained in many tech companies so they even have to up nights and these kind of things but talking about hey things really went well and that's how we did it is oftentimes something that they're a bit shy of doing. And even outside of the organization, they could go to product tanks and meetups and share what they've done. Amazing. That's how we learned about Francesca, right? She was one of our speakers at Product at Heart as well. Yeah, so share it with the world. This is raising two things for me. So one is, I think you touched on something that's really important to highlight for product leaders. If you have a team coming to you saying, we want to try this. how do we know if it's the right time and the right team? So you don't want the current quarter's biggest, most visible strategic initiative to be the team that's experimenting with a new way of working. That's going to create a lot of chaos. When all senior executive eyes are on this team, not a good idea. Yeah, don't do that, right? So create a safe space. Give them some breathing room. Give them time to... to incur the learning tax right they're going to be slower they're learning new methods they're trying new things the second thing this makes me think of is i know a lot of leaders are reluctant to let teams experiment and try new ways of working almost because of the product operations mindset and when i say product operations it could be research ops or design ops or engineering ops but there's this like tension between we want everybody working the same way because that gets us efficiencies we're reporting out in the same way we can build um tooling to support that way of working and then a team comes in and says yeah but we want to do it differently so yeah i have yeah so from my experience that's oftentimes an assumption the product leaders or the teams are having but in my experience what i've seen over the last three to four years product ops people usually embrace product people looking into new methodologies I haven't experienced a single case where product operations say no. No freaking way that we're trying this new methodology. But oftentimes they use this as an excuse to not start looking into new methodologies because we have a process. Great clarification because I'm not trying to blame this on product ops or research ops or design ops or engineering ops. I think it's more about it's easy for an organization to have the belief we all need to work the same way. And then sometimes ops teams are asked to enforce that or to enable that, right? And so what I would think about it as is it's just like running a product experiment. We're not running a product experiment and rolling it out to 100% of customers and building it in production quality code. We're running an assumption test and we're experimenting and we're playing. And if it works out, we'll do the work to turn it into production quality code. So I think in this context, it's similar. We're going to let one team deviate and experiment and try new things. And if it looks like it's promising, we might start to look at how do we roll it out? How do we scale it? How do we have more teams experiment with it? And it's almost like... That starts that gradual approach into what might become an ops process. But don't assume because a team is doing something differently, it has to turn into that. Yeah, and it oftentimes is not even breaking with the old processes, right? It's just like at some point we have to do this form of user research. but then you can do it in five different ways and usually product ops is fine if you just pick another way of answering the same particular question that you're answering currently with these other four tools or frameworks or methodologies um so i haven't seen them being the blocker so much of new no i don't either and i don't think that's the i wasn't trying to imply that they are the blocker yeah but more than the mindset that comes yeah yeah spinning up an ops team We tend to think the benefit we're going to get from it is, oh, everybody will do roadmaps. The streamlining. Everybody will use user interviews for scheduling interviews. And then a team comes along and says, hey, but there's a better tool. Can I play with it? We don't want to lose that experimentation. Exactly. And when that happens, I love to remind the leadership. folks of some of the agile values that most of us are subscribing to because we want to embrace change right and even if we have a process documentation we want to stay adaptable and look at what is the best solution for the situation that we have current that we're currently facing and sometimes you need to change your product discovery method yeah okay start with it at all and start building the muscle i want to try to make this really actionable for listeners so like let's say that i work in an organization i want to do continuous discovery um because this was the topic of my product at heart talk and my organization has never heard of it they've never heard of me they've never heard of the book they don't know what an outcome is they literally hand product teams a roadmap and they say go build these things A roadmap with features. Sadly, there are still lots of companies that work this way. So let's say we have a listener who's in that organization. I don't recommend you start by saying, oh, I'm going to go convince my leaders that they should ask me to drive an outcome instead. That's too big of a change. So if you start with, here's the change I want to see, there's usually lots of pieces to it. How do you find the first piece that's easiest for you to do? So if we look at continuous discovery habits as an example, if your organization is a feature factory, outcomes is not the place to start. It's just not, right? Maybe. But maybe, what do you think about stakeholder interviews? Yeah. As a discovery initiative, because they're there anyways. Yeah, I mean, this one's tough. It kind of depends on who the stakeholders are and what they're reviewing. I do see some teams say, okay, well, I'm just going to go interview my customer success team because they help customers all day, every day. Fair enough. Yeah. I think we talked about this in a previous episode. This is not a proxy for real customer interviews. Customer success folks, when they engage with customers, they're solving customer challenges. They're goal-driven. They're trying to accomplish something. When we interview people, they're exploratory. We're learning about context. They're just very different types of conversations. So they don't replace one or the other. But I think you could, like if you work in this feature factory and the easiest way to get access to a customer is to go make a friend on the customer success team, by all means do that and get some access and some exposure to customers. But I think the key principle here is I have a big vision. I'm an individual contributor at my company. I have a big vision. I'd like to adopt. one of these newer ways of working but my organization doesn't work this way how do i deconstruct it into its component parts or has somebody else like myself deconstructed it into its component parts here's a set of habits what's the first one that would be easiest for me to start with and it's really important you start with the easiest one because you want to build momentum right and you want to have early success yeah and i encourage people to really listen to their good if doing so because they usually know what will be easiest in their organization so they can really trust their what resonates most what what they read a book or a blog post and then sometimes they have to say oh this is something that i could try and i always encourage people to trust their gut feeling and their first impulses here because usually that that's the things that they should try and start with yeah this is a habit i individually developed i'm a big reader i read a lot of books and i got to the point where i was like okay It's great that I'm reading a lot of books, but like, what am I doing? Like, what's the benefit that I'm getting from having read these books, especially nonfiction business books, right? Yeah. So I started this practice of whenever I read something, it could be a blog post, it could be a book, it could be even a podcast that I'm listening to. If it's work related, actually, even if it's not work related, but if it's in the nonfiction category, as soon as I'm done, I force myself to write down. One to three things that I'm going to do immediately because I've now consumed that content. So I'm trying to stop from being a passive consumer to being an active consumer. I read this thing. How am I going to act on it? And almost always, like you read a book and there's a thousand things you could do, but I never hesitate. Like I always have literally one to three things that I'm like, it's funny that this is what I have a slightly different approach. Because for me, it's oftentimes quotes. So for me, I listen to a podcast or I read a book or I listen to audiobook. And then there is one sentence or two sentences that really stick with me for days. And then I send myself an email, really old school, putting this quote in my inbox. And then it hangs out in my inbox for another week or two. And if I still find it interesting, then I put a blocker in my calendar that reminds me of Petra. You need to think about it a bit more. Why did it resonate? Because it often resonated for a reason. And that's how I often find my action items. So it's not so much that the action items come so easily as they may do for you, but it's oftentimes a quote. And then I'm kind of thinking about why was this quote so meaningful in that moment? And is there an action item related to that quote? So that's how I do it with books and podcasts. Yeah, you know, I actually do something really similar. So I read everything on Kindle and I highlight as I read. And then even with blog posts, I now use Readwise and Readwise has a reader app where you can highlight blog posts. So I highlight as I read. That's just something I've always done. And it's the way that I get to my one to three items is I review my highlights. And that helps me get to like, okay, here's a minute change. And I literally do this. It's amazing. It's fun. All right. It's like the old text marker. we wandered a little bit there um yeah that's fine but i love it because that's the fun of this i think let's just wrap up a little bit with yeah let's do that i think the key message and this was one of the taglines of my product at heart talk is that it's so easy to think that other people in your organization has to change in order for you to change the way you work and the tagline i used in my talk was organizational change starts with you And we really have to just start with like, okay, I want to work this new way. What's the smallest thing I can do today, tomorrow, next week. And it really does compound over time. Yeah. Plus highlighting again, how you opened the whole conversation by. don't put too much pressure on you because you're already doing your job well. You're meeting expectations, right? So yeah, your organizational change has to start with you, but it's not that you have to do all the heavy lifting. So just your realm of influence start there. And you know, people might be surprised to hear both of us say this because we teach this stuff, but I think it's important to say if you work in a feature factory and you're meeting your organization's expectations, you are doing your job and you don't have to do any of this. at all you don't do any of this i personally believe if you start to adopt some of these habits you'll enjoy your job more fun you'll have more impact so like i think i'm gonna convince you you should you should at least like dip your toe in the water but the reality is you don't have to listen to either one of them you don't have to you're doing your job yeah exactly it just future proves your career maybe to some extent yeah for the next gig that you maybe wanted to take on. And that assumes you want another job like the one you have, or you want a different job. Like, this is such an individual thing that I kind of cringe when I hear people say, you're not really a product manager. You're doing your job wrong. Like, I don't work in your company. I can't tell you that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. I think that's a great place. 100% with that. I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. That was fun as always. Thank you, Petra. Thank you, Teresa.

Many product teams aspire to work in a modern, outcome-driven way—prioritizing discovery, continuous learning, and experimentation. But what happens when your organization doesn’t support these practices? In this episode, we unpack the tension between ideal product practices and the reality of organizational constraints.

Join us as we discuss:
✅ Why it’s okay to work the way your organization expects—without feeling like a failure
✅ How to navigate the disconnect between best practices and company culture
✅ Strategies for influencing change when you’re in a feature factory
✅ Specific tactics leaders can use to support product team’s who want to experiment with new methodologies
✅ How to identify action items from everything you read and listen to

Whether you're struggling with leadership buy-in, feeling stuck in a rigid process, or wondering if you’re “doing it wrong,” this conversation will provide clarity and actionable insights.

Show Notes 
Working within your company’s framework doesn’t mean you’re a bad product manager
Change happens incrementally—start with small wins to shift toward better practices
Be mindful of elitist narratives in product communities that may discourage rather than inspire

Resources & Links:
Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

Mentioned in the episode:
Everybody Can Do Continuous Discovery—Even You - Teresa’s talk at Product at Heart: 
https://www.producttalk.org/2023/08/getting-started-with-discovery/
Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio To Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story: https://www.producttalk.org/2023/09/one-product-trio-to-inspire-change/
Product Tank: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/producttank/
Continuous Discovery Habits: https://amzn.to/3hGkNYT
Readwise: https://readwise.io

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