What is the roadmap for product management as you scale? | Donna Lichaw
In episode 43 of Talking Roadmaps, Donna Lichaw discusses the roadmap for product management as companies scale with Phil Hornby. She emphasizes the importance of evolving leadership skills to match the rapid growth of businesses. Donna shares insights on how executives can transform their leadership to drive their companies forward effectively. She also touches on themes from her books, "The User’s Journey" and "The Leader’s Journey," providing practical advice for high-growth CEOs and teams.
Donna is an internationally sought-after executive coach, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of The Leader’s Journey, the much-awaited followup to the The User’s Journey. She helps high-growth CEOs, executives, and teams level up their leadership so that they can more effectively propel their business forward.
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In the next episode we are talking to Malte Scholz, CEO and CPO of airfocus. So watch out for Season 1 - Episode 44!
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- Welcome to Talking Roadmaps, the channel where we talk about everything roadmapping, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Today I'm joined by Donna Lichaw. Donna, introduce yourself.
- Thanks, Phil. It's great to be here. I am an executive coach. I work with high growth founder CEOs and executives who are scaling their companies and organisations, and need to level up their own leadership to match that pace. And I'm also a bestselling author, got couple books out, One User's Journey on Product Development, and my newest book, The Leader's Journey on How to be an Amazing Leader Who Levels Up Their Leadership Like a Superhero. And it's not juvenile at all. It's very serious.
- I hope there's a little bit of juvenile stuff in there 'cause that makes it fun.
- A little bit. I'm a kid at heart, so yes, a little bit. Of course.
- If you're enjoying the channel, subscribe, hit the bell and give us a like. Now, I know some people in the audience may know you from the UX space, which I know that's where the first book is and you've kind of should say moved within your segmentation, the customers you work with from the UX space into the CEOs and those Scott states, those high growth organisations. Maybe you can speak a little bit to that.
- I was in the product world actually for a long, long time. So when I was working with tech companies, it would be in some kind of head of product capacity, which involved UX as well. And my whole thing in-house and then as a consultant for years was helping companies see the stories that their customers could have with their products and services so that they can build more engaging products and services. And when I say stories, I don't mean in a marketing sense, although marketing teams loved me and my work, and loved collaborating with my teams as well. But I mean actually there's the story that you imagine in your head or that you experience as you engage with a tech product. So it's like a sword in a movie, oh, with this phone I can slay dragons or whatever it is that, that your business is building. And I did that for years. I have a filmmaking background. I was a filmmaker before working in tech. So for me, seeing stories and everything is, it just was like a natural muscle that I had in a natural stance. And over time I was working with leadership teams higher up in senior leadership at some of the most successful, biggest companies in the world. And what I started finding is that they're, well, they would literally tell me their products were fine, their customers are fine, they're not going anywhere, but how do I be a hero? And that's when I moved into around, I guess it's been almost a decade at this point, a little under. But I moved into leadership development and helping people at the top feel great about the work they're doing and being heroes of their own story so that they can move their teams and their businesses forward, and a style that feels best and most powerful and authentic to them.
- Love it. And I mean that storytelling and for me visualisation is also something that comes really close to my heart as a set of tools and techniques that are underappreciated, but really can help kinda people perform at that next level. I know, as we've kind of sort spoken before the session kind of, we're gonna take a slightly less typical angle for ourselves. We're not gonna talk about product roadmaps, we're gonna talk about really the fight between the CEO and the product leader over the roadmap, if there is one, and what that might mean. So maybe you could unpack that thought a little.
- It's fascinating. So one of the reasons why I work so well with founder CEOs and any founders on an executive team or any any high growth tech startup or scale up organisation executives is that I come from a product background, and most of them have product backgrounds themselves. They were a product, I'm just going through the Rolodex in my mind. So I've worked with founder/CEOs who were come from product management backgrounds. Maybe they were the head of product at a big tech three year tech five company, or they were an engineer with a product mindset like they're all product people at at heart. And when you start a company and you have a product background, you know how to do it really well. 'Cause you understand customers, you understand product market fit, you understand everything, everything nuts and bolts, start to finish. And so you build successful companies that are either profitable and growing if you're bootstrapped, or you have the ability to excite investors and get them in involved in your company and the ability to raise capital as your company grows. And so when you are a CEO with product background, you are the product owner for a very long time. And it gets to the point where you hit a certain number, like a certain level of revenue or size of your company head count, where you have to start scaling yourself as the leader up on top. And what happens is you cannot do every job anymore. So at some point you hire a head of sales 'cause you can't do, if you're a sales-driven company. At some point, if you're more marketing-driven, you hire head of marketing at some point if you are also technical, a lot of product folks still code and wanna hold onto that, you have to hire the CTO to take over. And the last thing to go as I've seen is hiring a head of product, because there's this inherent tension between not only do you wanna be the head of product, but as CEO you also are actually responsible for the vision that is your job, and that's what everyone's asking you for. And so there's a huge tension, and is naturally so between CEOs who are founders wanting to hold on to product, and new hires who come in as a head of product at whatever level, wanting to also be product owner.
- Interesting. I mean when I've looked at it myself, I've kind of found one, there's a little bit of a difference between the US and Europe, for example, on that space. 'Cause in the US the first product hire tends to be quite a lot earlier in the organization's journey, like maybe number six or eight in terms of the headcount. Whereas in Europe, it's often as late as mid-30s in terms of the number of headcounts. I'm wondering if you've had any similar experiences there.
- I have not. I've seen it high happen around 30 people as well. Yeah, US and in Europe, unless the founder really does not have a sense for product, I haven't seen that it could happen, but I haven't seen it.
- Okay, interesting, yeah. And I guess maybe it depends the type of product person, 'cause that's the other angle I've seen with, those product CEOs, often they are the visionary. You said they've gotta own the vision, right?
- Yeah. They have to, it's their job,
- But then they need a certain type of product person, more of an operational product person.
- Well, therein lies the tension because any, how to put this, any great product person worth their weight in gold is also a visionary. We are, and I say we, 'cause I was this as well, and I was that often that that first product hire at high growth startups who worked right under the CEO. So I know this well, we are visionary people. A lot of us think in pictures. And we are also schooled in this idea of fully understanding the customer, what their needs are, what their desires are, what their dreams are. And that is a vision that we uncover. My last book, "The User's Journey," I call it a story, but you could just replace that and call it a vision. It's all the same thing. It's the change that we wanna see in the world. And you can hire early on a head of product who is more of an operator, but if you hire someone good, they're, they're also great at uncovering and realising visions. And so the tension and the challenge, and the opportunity lies in the CEO operating at the highest level, at the highest visionary level they could possibly operate of the change they want to see in the world 5, 10, 15 years in the future. And then work their way back as well because they need to be thinking quarterly and yearly as well. But they need to hold a high level vision. It becomes the how of how the product will help the business realise that vision that a product owner can own. And that's hard for a lot of CEOs who are also founders or even founding executive teams to let go of because they're so used to being in the how down to pixels of often.
- Yes, I mean what a pattern I've seen quite frequently is, and a very more operational product person, probably not a CPO, probably not a senior person, but a more junior product person brought in as a product person to kind of do the legwork almost. So the CEO still holds on to that almost chief product officer hat and has someone to do their dirty work for them.
- Yeah, and that can happen. So if they know enough that they need operational help, they will bring that person in and they will still ultimately be the head of product and be that that product owner, the CEO retains that role, it still ends up being, there still ends up being attention there because when you have 20 other jobs to do, you still can't be in the details of how the product gets made. And so you, you need to relinquish enough control to whoever is running product while still maintaining that high level focus of this is what our company is, this is what our company's purpose is in the world, this is how we meet customer needs, this is how our product fits into our product. And then if you're doing it right, products fit into our customer's lives and you have to negotiate with your head of products. All right, you bring that to life or I tell you what the details are and you bring that to life. Yeah, and some of the most sex successful kind of new product leaders in that environment that I've met have been the ones that were brought in because the CEO thought they wanted to hire just a product person and then they convinced them, no, you need a product leader, you need me to take this and run with it and give me more autonomy, so they can then I can bring in a team behind me to actually get into more of the weeds.
- Yeah, and when you do it right, and you're growing enough, your job as the head of product at that level is to provide your, I'm gonna say your boss is, this is how work works. Your boss with as much value as possible, and make their lives as as easy as possible. And so they're your customer in a sense. So when you're clear on what your, not just your external customers, but your internal customers need, and fulfilling what their needs excites you, and is what you wanna be doing, that's the secret sauce, that's the perfect balance. You're not just pleasing them to please them, but you're helping them make their jobs easier. It has to be something you love to do as well.
- Now, I wouldn't be doing the channel a good service. I didn't say couldn't we roadmap all of this.
- Roadmap in what way? Tell me.
- I'm thinking, so for example, you early on in the conversation you kind of, you sketched out some typical stages in terms of relinquishing control that the CEOs go, all the founders go through like, well, okay, we need to bring in a sales person. So they, you could start to think about, well actually we need to roadmap how I'm gonna transition from being this be-all and end-all to actually the organisation is running itself, and I can focus on certain key activities that are the CEO's role, for example.
- Yes, so it is all the same thing. And this is why I love working with my clients on helping them develop as leaders. Because when most of them have product backgrounds, tech backgrounds, engineering backgrounds, and they're kind of familiar with this way of thinking, whether you call it product thinking or design thinking or just good business sense, which is all of it is, developing yourself works much the same way as you develop products. And so when I work with clients, we do, it's like I've been doing the same job for 25 years, which is, we start at the end. So you start with a vision of the future. You wanna see the change you want to see in the world. Now when we're working with products and building products, we're thinking of the change we wanna see in our customer's behaviour and working our way back. When you're thinking of your own leadership, you're thinking of the change you not only wanna see in the world, but the change you need to be in the world. And so you might think back when I start out with clients, we're we think three years or 12 months out into the future, we often do a little bit of both. 'Cause three years is more aspirational. 12 years starts getting more practical. But let's say we're thinking 12, sorry, 12 months, three years is more aspirational. 12 months gets to be more practical and helps you create a change that you will see if you follow through with this in 12 months, if not much, much sooner. And so give you an example. Let's say we think 12 months out, I want to be the best CEO.
- The day I realised that in terms of my own leadership practise was the day I made so many breakthroughs. I went from right, we need to have this meeting to no, this is, this meeting is an experiment. We are trying this out. Does it add value? Does it help us get more aligned in this space? If it doesn't in three months time, it's gone, and we're gonna try and we're gonna iterate our way to a practise that works for us as a team and as an organisation, because not two organisations are the same. So why should the same rules and tell tools and techniques work that?
- And that's a huge one. And I think it's a huge misconception and I see it all the time, which is, it's a misconception that people have, of the product world. So I remember this when I was doing product full time, people would think there's one right way to do everything. And you come to an organisation and everyone's looking at you to build the product team in the right way, the way it's supposed to be done. And no, there's the same thing. There's vision and there are ways to do things. There's capacity, there are resources and there are challenges and blockers, and you need to figure it out for your organisation. Leadership is exactly the same thing. These days, I get people coming to me all the time, especially newish CEOs. So it's your first time being CEO, this happens when you found a company, eventually have to be the CEO unless you're gonna step down and hire someone, which happens. And that's a great thing to do sometimes. But if you're choosing to be CEO, it's new to you. I mean, it lands with that classic phrase that you hear from every product manager's lips. It depends. Now there are definitely gonna be some ways that are work gonna work better for you, some different ways it can work better for me. One of the words you used earlier, which is one of my favourite is authentic. The right way for me to be the CEO of an organisation is not the same as the right way for someone else, even the same organisation.
- Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's something that's so important because what you find is when CEOs are the worst at being a boss or the most cranky or the most frustrated, it's often because they're not able to be the boss in the way that they naturally should be or want to be. And that is something that is really, really important. 'Cause we're not, in the book, I use the example, I mean it's so silly, but it's very, it's very serious and there's so much psychology behind this, but I use the example of Bob, the dad in the "Incredibles," the Pixar movie. So in the first movie when we meet him, he's a pencil pusher in an office and he's so cranky, and he hates his job, and the more frustrated he gets, the more chaos he creates. And then he ends up blowing up an office by accident and doing all this stuff, and it's a caricature. But that's what happens when we're not using our superpowers, and CEOs are not immune to this. I think it's just more challenging for them to figure it out because CEO is a job similar to head of product, which is, it can mean anything to anyone, it's just a blob. It's a big mound of clay and you have to create it. There is no one way to be CEO, there's no one way to be head of products. You have to create it. And the best way to create that, when you're head of product, you have to really meet the needs of the organisation. When you're CEO you have to more so meet your needs 'cause it's your company and meet the needs of the organisation. So you have to find that balance.
- One of my favourite phrases, he's from a guy called Meredith Belden, I'm not sure if you've come across him, but back in the '70s, he worked out a lot of stuff around how to create high performing teams, and I'm a practitioner of his techniques, and all of his lines is, all of his kind of bits of wisdoms is be the greatest of your strengths, not the least of your weaknesses. Which to me is playing to that authenticity. It's like I can, I can work to reduce my weaknesses and then I'll just be average, or I can take those superpowers and double down on them, be the absolute best of them. I accept that I've got some weaknesses and then find the right people to put around me. And that's the way I'm gonna put a dent in the universe.
- Exactly. I mean there's so much psychology and neuroscience behind that, because your strengths have imprinted themselves on your neural pathways. Your brain is just full of all, that's another map. But, so I think in terms of maps, which is why I love peeking out with you, but talk about roadmap. Your brain is a giant roadmap. It has the blueprint for how you have operated your entire life that's imprinted. And the more you utilise your strengths, the more they imprint themselves on your neural pathways, that's how they become strengths. They are actually physically part of you. They're a physical strength in a sense. And the more you use them, the stronger they get. Now when you deny the ability to use your strengths, they're still there, but you fight your nature. So that takes a lot of energy, and when you try to build up new strengths that you don't have and you focus a lot of time and energy on that, it's just a waste of time. It's a lot it harder. It's like being an adult and trying to learn a bike to, trying to learn to ride a bike as your primary mode of getting somewhere when you're actually an Olympic marathon athlete and you're a great runner, and you could learn to ride a bike for fun, but should that be the new way you do things? I mean, you can, it actually sounds like fun if you wanna, try doing something completely new. But if you're looking at being the best version of you and performing at your absolute best, you're better off applying your ability to run towards doing something new. So it's not that you can't do new things, but if you're trying to start over from complete scratch, you could do it. It's just a lot harder. And when you're the boss, you probably shouldn't be spending all your time trying to learn something new because you have a company run.
- Yeah. It's maybe that after you've exited, after you've sold the business, made a lot of money, now you've got the time on your hands. You can go and use that time, that financial freedom to reinvent yourself maybe.
- Yeah, and that's a great opportunity to then go learn to ride that bike or do whatever you wanna do and if you spend years at it, maybe you'll become a new, Olympic biker or something like that. And it's not to say, you know, as I'm saying this out loud, I feel like I'm telling people not to grow. I'm all about growth. I mean it's, if it didn't sound so awful, I would call myself a growth coach, which sounds terrible as I say that, even when I say performance coaching, that even sounds awful.
- But that sounds like they must be doing something wrong. They must be failing if think performance coaching.
- It feels like it, right? It's, there's something, I know this is why I don't like labels and this is just about what you, what you do, but you do wanna grow. You just wanna grow in a way that feels most powerful to you. That's what levelling up is. That's what becoming the best CEO that move propels your company forward is, that's what being the best head of product is. That's also what developing everyone on your team who works for you is all about, you want everyone to be the best version of themselves so that they not only perform at their best and feel good, but then they move your company forward. This is how, this is how progress happens and that we can all measure whether it's, I feel better or our team has 10X, x, y and z. It's all stuff, all stuff that you can measure. When we were exchanging beforehand, you talked about, I'm gonna go take us back a little bit. You talked about, well, even though we are growing, we're growing ourselves when we bring, when we bring a team together in an organisation, there might be some conflict in there, some fights over things like the control over the road, what goes wrong there? Give us some thoughts.
- Yeah, that it's something I see a lot as well. So I work with teams as well, and when I work with the teams, it's often at the system level. So the team is the system, and it's a similar thing, which is when teams are not as a team able to utilise their superpowers, it the thing, the thing breaks, it's just that team superpowers are not like me as an individual, right? One of my superpowers is connecting ideas together and then sharing them with the world. It's two, I guess two different superpowers. That's me as an individual. A team might have someone on the team who has that as their superpower, but when it all comes together, what is the team's superpower? I've seen things like, this team is really amazing at tearing ideas apart. That's a superpower. It's actually, it is a strength. So when you team is able to do that, I've worked with, one team for example, they had this uncanny ability to tear ideas apart, dissect anything quickly and rapidly. So they would as a team do this, someone would bring up an idea, and they would all like jackals and pit bulls all jump in, tear it apart, it would look like they were fighting. But then once they came to agreement, and it only took a few minutes, they would come out the other side smiling and having an insight and knowing exactly what they were gonna do next. And so that was one of their strengths, was tearing ideas apart. The trick with teams and all superpowers are like this, even on the individual level, any of our superpowers have the ability to turn into our kryptonite as well. So this same team as an example, when they would argue and continue to argue, and not have an insight, and then half hour later they're still arguing and then they're still going at it, they would, in this example, the team I talked to folks across the company, I heard things like, oh my god, can you please get the parents to stop arguing? So as a coach, that's why people were excited that we were there to help this executive team perform better. They're like, oh my god, the parents are arguing, please. It's very uncomfortable, and it's confusing to everybody. So teams or an organism as well. And same thing, they need to be able to utilise their strength. If this team just never argued, they wouldn't be as effective as they were, but they had to do it in a way where they time-boxed it and made sure that they gleaned insights and had next steps, and were in alignment and continued to communicate and continued to stay in alignment and continued to track progress towards their goals. So teams are essential. I always, I find it extremely important and philosophically this is what I found to work best is, I start with an individual leader. If a team is, is having a problem. The lead, it's, first and foremost, the leader's responsibility to really coach that team. So I work with them first, but if, then there's a next level of team performance that we can extend towards the team. If we can get the team performing as a high-functioning organism, then it's just, that's when the magic sauce happens. So yes, team teams are just like individuals, but they're like their own squishy organisms.
- I mean they're, it's a favourite part of the product work for me is working with product teams. I often kind of say something along the lines that, the product team is the smallest atomic unit of value delivery. It's like a product manager can't deliver anything on their own. A designer pretty much can't deliver anything on their own. Maybe a developer can, but it'll probably be the wrong thing if they're not teaming with those other functions. And so kind of coming together as a sync, as a cohesive unit to me is the only way that we deliver that disproportionate value that a high performing product scene can.
- It's huge. And that's so, so important. And I know for me, I mean that's one of the reasons why, for years, I did coach individual contributors and what I found is, and I don't do that anymore, I don't coach individual contributors as the single entity person or as the system anymore. Because what I found is that when you want to impact a system that is not the system of you, the system that you fully own, you can only have so much impact on that system, and when the system is a team. So when you think about that trifecta, the product engineering design trifecta. If your problem is engineering is not listening to us, we need a coach, then no, you all have to get, that's a family at that point then you're looking at family systems coaching and that's why, like you said, the best product coaches, best product consultants I know have all developed an expertise in that level of systems and team coaching, because it's never about the tech. I mean sometimes it's a little bit about the technical issues, but usually it's something else going on, and interpersonal challenges and the team not coalescing, and team not teaming very well. And so teams are essential, essential for getting certain types of work done. And even on the executive level it's essential. It's just that if, you call me in to work on your team and your CEO's a nightmare, we'll only get so far. So it is important to start with the highest locus of power on any given team. But actually I'm even gonna negate myself there. I've worked with, yeah, I've worked with teams where maybe the CEO wasn't quite ready for coaching, but we work on the team and then it, it trickles up by default. It can happen. But yeah, we could geek out about teams forever. I'm sure with you, let, you spoke just coming out, maybe you could give us the cliff notes, the two-minute version of what, what's the key takeaways there to inspire people to go and take a read?
- Yeah, "The Leader's Journey," it came out, God, I've lost track now. It's pretty new. It came out this year, and it sums up and puts together everything you and I have talked about today. So it starts with the individual leader. A future book I will write will be about teams, but this one starts with the individual system, your system. And it extends a little bit out towards how you not just lead yourself, also lead your organisation and lead your team. And it's everything we talked about. So how to find your own superpowers as a leader, how to get clear on what your mission is and how to realise that mission, how to remove any, any pitfalls or blockers along the way. And then starts digging into how to not just be your own superhero, but how to create a team of superheroes and how to help those you work with feel great about the work that they're doing and feel great about the interactions they have with you, and how you're gonna get work done together. So in the book, I use superheroes as an analogy just 'cause I'm a metaphor, I'm a super geek. My clients, 'cause I work in tech are all geeks as well. So, it's funny when you're, you're being annoying to your team and I make a Hulk reference about, anger being a superpower and we laugh and so, I love using metaphors as a way to teach things, but it, the other metaphor is, you could call it product thinking, design thinking. It's really how to take charge of your own leadership, the leadership that, that you have control of, which is you and your relationships with those around you and how to make it the, as most effective as possible. So I do, it feels funny saying this about my books, but I highly recommend it. I people enjoy it. I wrote it so that I could help and serve more people than I have the ability to work with individually and in teams. Because right now I am mostly working with CEOs and C-level folks, or even at giant tech companies, they're pretty senior and I can't work with everyone. So the book is my gift to everyone to glean some of that goodness that that happens behind closed doors.
- I love the use of the hero metaphor. I have my own model that has villains and heroes and so on in there that I kind of developed a few years ago and kind of for different working styles or types of work that people do and where we have preferences as well. And my co-host his businesses happens to be called Roadmap Heroes. So it's a great metaphor to use. And yeah, I think you're right, the audience in the product space, we do tend to like to geek out a little bit, which is not a bad thing.
- Yeah, it's fun. It makes me appreciate who we work with and our industry. I think tech can be a wild place to work and there have been times where I also get sick of it, or there are times when it can be a little, I wanna say, I don't wanna say scary, but I'll just say scary, with like what's happening with AI right now. And there are times when we have to retrospect and retrospect and really look at what are we creating and what impact are we having on the world. And I'm excited to do my part there, because I want the change that you want to see and be in the world to be as net-positive as possible. And that's why most of us got started in tech. We're kind of geeky. We love, you know, gadgety things and creating things and we need to be doing good in the world.
- So Donna, I always like to end with an opportunity for our guests to just to pitch themselves those services, how people can get in touch. I'm guessing that CEOs that we want to get in touch here, just fire away or where they could find resources and read for themselves.
- Yeah, so I've got all of my tools, everything, my entire toolkit for free on my website. You just go to donnalichaw.com, and you can find the spelling of my name in the show notes, and my newsletter people love. So newsletter toolkit is a great way for you to enjoy some of the stuff that I put out there in the world in addition to my new book, "The Leader's Journey." And if you are a founder, CEO of a high growth organisation and looking to level up your leadership, definitely reach out to me. If you are on an executive team and want me to work with your CEO and we can gently prod them, reach out to me as well. Or if you wanna work on your own leadership, I am available. So the website is the best way to reach me. And even if you just wanna say hi, reach out to me, I respond to each and every email.
- Thanks Donna. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here today. Thanks for your time.
- Thank you, Phil. This was so much fun.
