Part 3: How to Engage and Motivate Product Managers Stuck in a Rut
A series of lessons from the front lines of managing teams
Helen here with my 3rd post on Employee Lifecycle focusing on Engaging and Motivating Product Managers. I am deviating slightly from the wheel and focusing specifically on the scenarios where as a leader you are seeing that your team needs to get re-engaged and rediscover their motivation. If you want to read my previous two installments, check out Getting Started and Recognition.
There is a variety of reasons why teams lose motivation - both macro and micro reasons are often times at play. When that happens, I have seen product managers gripped with fear and disengagement, which creates a vicious psychological cycle of negativity. As managers, it’s our job to figure out what to do to get our folks back on track. While any unhappy team member will have ripple effects on the team, an unhappy PM’s influence is particularly extensive due to the glue that the PM often times provides across the organization.
In this post, I will discuss what I’ve done as a manager to get teams out of a rut - specifically when PMs feel demoralized. This post lists resources and tools that have helped me navigate as a leader in the context of a late-stage growth start-up.
△ Name it - Victim, Villain, Hero triangle
No one gets disengaged and unmotivated overnight. What I have learned to watch for in 1:1s and other team engagements is how my team and I are showing up on “the drama triangle.”
I first learned about the Drama Triangle in the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership from Kaley Klemp. And one of the tools it offers helped me identify if I am inside the drama triangle (which is common for all of us, myself included) and then shift my mindset to be more intentional and aware.
Especially when my team struggles, I first and foremost reflect on where and how I am contributing to the drama going on and how do I model an owner’s mindset.
During coaching conversations, I ask in 1:1s to name where a team member is on the drama triangle and acknowledge it—usually, the demoralized and unmotivated folks are hanging out in the victim corner, villainizing the circumstances around them. To break the ice, I ask my team to name where someone else appears to be and then move to self-reflection.
I know I need to engage in this exercise when I hear statements like this (or similar):
“I have no control over this situation,”
“Leadership just doesn’t get it”
“This decision has been made and now I’m stuck with it”
“I’m excluded from x”
Here are questions I use to get folks to name where they are and reframe it:
“Where on the triangle are you right now?” - I have seen that just stopping to name it goes a long way.
“What is in your control?”
“What can I do to help you get unstuck from your anchor”
This technique is a starting point of the conversation, and where I go next from here is reminding my team of what success looks like.
🏆 Clarify success
Many times success criteria gets lost in the shuffle of the day to day and I see my team getting stuck in activities over outcomes. To be clear, activities are necessary to achieve the outcome but when the big picture gets lost, morale and impactful productivity suffer.
As a leader, my job is to be my team’s compass so I try to step in and remind them on where we are going so they can reflect and make a plan on how to get there.
Here are some specifics to support this:
First, I work with each PM to make sure they know how their success aligns to business goals and remind them why this is so. Sometimes the big picture gets lost and as a manager, it’s easy to take for granted that my team knows why their work matters. If through a conversation, together we uncover that there is a lot of time being spent outside of business-aligned goals, then we talk through why that is and how to minimize these efforts.
“Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.” ~ Measure What Matters, by John Doerr
I ask PMs to reframe investments in value that they are driving - so they can tell a story like “By delivering x and y investment, [this thing] will increase/decrease x% and therefore the business will make [x% more next quarter] or [see y% less customer churn].
When possible, I assign a PM to a specific and focused business metric and ask them to throw everything they can at moving it. I’ve seen that PMs sometimes struggle with attribution of their work to a business metric, so breaking things into key results or KPIs to clarify how investments latter up is helpful.
👥 Increase customer connection
When I am in a rut at work, I go back to the basics - get more sleep, work out more and talk to customers to remind me why I love my job.
As a manager, when I observe that my team is also in a rut, the best way to help them get back to customer connection is to model it. Here are two specific tactics I do:
Ensure that every week I have time with a customer - it can be a customer conversation, watching FullStory of users going through the product, listening to a support call, or reading a competitive analysis.
I use customer learnings and insights in day to day language around my team. Sometimes I drop an observation in a conversation or a stand up, or send out a recap of what I learned and what it means to me.
⛹️♀️ Product play
Additionally, I’ve seen product play help PMs get re-centered and re-energized. So whether it’s doing a product tear down or playing with an adjacent product is both inspiring and invigorating. Others get a boost in energy by switching context and hacking away at something as a team - encouraging your team members to participate in a Hackathon is also envigorating.
Adam has written about the way he thinks about Product Play in the past and here are 3 of my favorite tactics that he recommends to make this be a habit:
Have a project or goal. This isn’t tire-kicking - relate Product Play to a real need to use the product, for instance using a website creation tool to create a place to share information about a learning program for my team.
Asking “What if?” and “5 Whys?”. This is about generating energy. Ask yourself “What if?” and also ask yourself “Why?” and then “Why?” again at you answer at least 5 times.
Go far afield. I love the quote about how it is better to be pretty good in 3 areas and put them together in new ways rather than be an expert at 1 thing. It’s the essence of being multi-disciplinary. To that end, some of my Product Play will be with things far afield of anything I work on. Connecting gaming to enterprise software, for instance.
💪🏻 Boost morale - onsites, team building and recognition
Lastly, I turn to boosting morale- especially in a hybrid remote world. My key go to tools in my toolbox include quarterly onsites, team building activities and focused and intentional recognition. As a leader, this stuff takes time and intentionality and while ideally this is always on, when times are tough, I’ve found extra attention here especially important.
Here is an excerpt from Adam’s “How to Rock Your Onsite” on structuring a simple agenda focusing on Why, What, How:
Why: Focused on our mission, customers, and how we as humans are motivated to do great work.
Example agenda topics: Motivating customer stories, leadership AMAs, geeking out on the latest workplace research on what motivates humans
What: Focused on celebrating successes, learning what the rest of the team is doing, and what our next objectives should be.
Example agenda topics: Celebrating past successes, stories around big learning moments, a look ahead to upcoming events and milestones
How: Focused on our culture, process, and diversity & inclusion.
Example agenda topics: Brainstorming on how to improve product craft, retro on why we aren’t moving fast enough, D&I programming
Additional resources:
Transformed by Marty Cagan - I have mixed feelings about Inspired and Empowered, but this book has helped me with practical tactics of empowering PMs, especially in a non-product-led environment
15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Kaley Klemp - This is the book where I was first introduced to the Drama Triangle
Daniel Pink’s Autonomy, Mastery Purpose - What really motivates employees
Measure What Matters by John Doerr