We catch up with product leader Jonny Schneider to find out his thoughts on why businesses find it hard to become product-led and why cross-functional collaboration is so important.

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If you’ve been following Mind the Product for a while you will have come across Jonny Schneider. His 2017 article, Understanding how Design Thinking Lean and Agile work together is one of our all-time most read posts. His book, Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile was published a few years ago and he regularly writes and speaks about how to bring these disciplines together for customer development and product innovation.

An Australian, Jonny started working on software products about 20 years ago. He found his way to agile software development early on in his career. “I just was lucky to land in a very progressive team building web applications for mobile phones in a time before the iPhone,” he says. The engineering team and UX teams collaborated closely and worked in an agile way because they had to – nothing could be taken for granted about the constraints of the technology they were designing for. Lightweight agile methods were helpful, but there was no playbook for integrating UX design and software engineering. “I learned how to do it through trial and error and by working with good people,” he adds.

He spent 10 years as a staffer on software product development teams in a variety of organisations, ranging from large enterprises to small companies and scale-ups.  Throughout this time his role was always one of collaboration working with designers, engineers, analysts and marketers. He says he was lucky to land in forward-thinking organisations, surrounded by people from whom he could learn.

Lean startup fundamentals

Jonny then spent about 10 years as a consultant, first at ThoughtWorks and then at Amazon Web Services. He joined ThoughtWorks, which has long been closely associated with the agile movement, at a time when it was starting to expand its offerings beyond technology.

ThoughtWorks takes a cross-functional approach, he says. “I spent most of my time integrating strategy and design into product engineering and delivery – identifying the right customer problems to solve and solving them in ways that align to business outcomes. Lean startup was building momentum, and we were bringing some of those principles and ways of working into large enterprises.” During his two years at Amazon he worked on an innovation advisory team, showing customers around the world how to innovate like Amazon.

All this foundational experience meant Jonny was well placed to set up his own consultancy, Humble Ventures, 12 months ago. His website proclaims that he offers “pain relief for your digital product organisation”, and outlines the ways in which he can do that. “I help organisations to design and implement better product operating models, ones that will work for them,” he says. “I look at the culture of leadership, how teams are structured and led, how people work together and collaborate.” These are the building blocks of a product-led business where empowered teams invent the right solution for their customers.

A current client provides a good example of the kind of work he does. It’s an Australian SaaS B2B scale-up that has been going for 12 years. It employs around 100 people and manages a portfolio of digital products for real estate agents. His engagement began some months ago with some work with the executive team to reshape their product operating model, clarify their vision and turn it into a plan of action. He says: “That’s end-to-end: from how they go about describing outcomes that matter and developing strategies that teams can align around, through to team structure. I looked at how the work happens, and how that can be improved across design and engineering.” He’s now working there as an interim product director, leading a global cross-functional team to grow existing products and launch new ones into adjacent markets.

Businesses underestimate what it takes

In Jonny’s experience, a lot of organisations aspire to be product led but fail to invest in the people and cultural change needed for this aspiration to work. He explains: “They’ve read Marty Cagan’s books, been to the workshops, and believe in the ideas of aligned autonomy, empowered teams, setting a strong strategy and then enabling teams to execute it. All are terrific ideas, but really hard to get right.”

He finds leaders can expect too much, too fast. He says that in organisations that use frameworks like SAFe, for example, product owners are trained to optimise software delivery and commonly conflate product ownership with product management.

“Product management is a broad craft that’s hard to master,” he says. “Too often organisations want people to transform overnight. They want them to be customer focused, define the opportunity, drive strategy and market outcomes, and lead the delivery team building the solution. Executives then often revert to command and control leadership style and the first signs of trouble. Teams can learn fast and become brilliant really quickly, but it takes the right conditions, investment and guidance.”

Collaborate early

Jonny is a firm believer that the best way to develop products is through early collaboration at all stages of product development.

Decision-making, even in the most progressive businesses, is often too linear: someone on the executive team sets some goals and direction, then there’s some research and analysis to understand customer needs, someone writes a product spec, produces a prototype, and then engineering looks at it. Assumptions become embedded, teams miss opportunities to collaborate on innovative solutions and they end up with average outcomes that are slow and expensive to deliver.

He has a simple approach to facilitating collaboration in a continuous way (see the diagram). His approach is to kick off with a collaborative product narrative that describes the outcome the business is trying to deliver, how it solves the customer problem and why this is important. It describes how this outcome aligns with company goals so that the purpose of the work can be easily understood. “I like this to be a collaborative artefact,” says Jonny. “As a product manager, I curate the narrative, but it’s not mine to own. It always works better if we have the voice of designers, engineers, marketers and more in a rich narrative that describes where we’re going.” Often the highest quality thinking comes from engineers, not strategists and designers, he finds. “Doing this work together helps to capture those ideas.”

Take small incremental steps

It’s then easier to break down the work into a set of steps to achieve the goals – where a roadmap comes in – mapping initiatives and dependencies so that the work can be broken down into small steps. This takes you out of strategy and into execution fairly quickly, Jonny says, delivering working software that addresses the outcomes you’re trying to achieve and creating a natural feedback loop. “It’s also the best learning opportunity. You start to deliver and observe, and that informs your roadmap and product narrative. You’re always inspecting the outcome, checking your beliefs and deciding on the next best action as a team.”

Sounds simple, but getting people to collaborate early doors is not easy – it takes a long time for the mindset of people and organisations to change. Jonny advises that product people need to be careful not to lose both people and influence through adopting a dogmatic approach. You have to recognise change can’t happen in a few big steps but in hundreds of smaller ones.  “If you turn up and say you’re doing it wrong, we have to do it this way, your way doesn’t work, chances are people won’t listen. They won’t listen to your advice and they won’t take your leadership. It’s better to meet where they are and walk to the next destination together, one step at a time.”