Barriers to Productivity and How To Overcome Them with Martin Felcman, Productboard - Productized 24 TalkInTen

We’re excited to bring you more exclusive content from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! This series continues our TalkInTen format, delivering concise, impactful conversations with industry leaders driving innovation in product and business agility. Each episode is packed with fresh insights, actionable strategies, and real-world examples to help teams and organizations thrive.

In this episode, we’re joined by Martin Felcman, Head of Product at Productboard, who explores the key barriers to productivity and how organizations can overcome them to unlock their true potential. Drawing from his extensive experience and insights from working with countless teams, Martin delves into the critical aspects of productivity, focusing on effectiveness over efficiency.

Episode Highlights:

• The Focus Factor: Discover why narrowing down to a single customer segment and objective is crucial for achieving meaningful results.
• Common Productivity Pitfalls: Learn about the typical obstacles that hold teams back, including the overemphasis on competition and efficiency.
• Overcoming Execution Barriers: Martin shares actionable tips on removing roadblocks, from organizational distractions to everyday inefficiencies.

Here is the synopsis of Martin's Fireside Chat:

Moderated by Nina Schneider, this fireside chat will gather Martta Oliveira, CPO at Cofidis Portugal, Martin Felcman, Head of Product at Productboard, and Isabel Garate, VP of Product at Landbot for an insightful discussion on increasing productivity as a nation. Together, they will explore strategies, share experiences, and provide actionable insights into enhancing national productivity.

Whether you’re a product leader or a team member, this episode offers practical strategies to help you foster a more productive, focused, and effective team.

Martin on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinfelcman/

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Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and we're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is a company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. So product size 24 has had a really broad range of different events, let's say, activities, workshops and fireside chats. And we're a John by Martin Folkman who is your job title. Is it something head of product? He had a big end head of Prager Pro board head of product at product board. Excellent. So it's really nice to have you here. Thank you for making this time to share. Thank you for having me. Yeah, share stuff with me and the listeners. Now you were involved in this fireside chat and we've been talking about it. We had another member of that conversation of that group earlier on the podcast. Remember talking a second ago, you're saying about productivity and how to be competitive. And also you mentioned something called founder mode, which I, is a term which I think is new to some people. So first of all, what puts you in such a strong position to be talking about productivity and being competitive? So we at product board, we are a productivity tool right. So like we are helping people to build the right products and building faster, which are kind of like the two elements of being productive. And so we've been working with thousands of customers and hopefully seen what good product management, what bad product management actually looks like. So those are some deep the insights that we collected over time when it comes to productivity and what makes organizations more productive or less productive. So that's one. A lot is also about competitions. Many of our customers are on highly competitive markets. I have my own experience as a product leader working in a highly competitive market with data science notebooks, which is a very hot market recently. And I've also seen firsthand how maybe some people overdo that kind of like competitive battle and how they maybe don't think very well about what they should actually take from competition. So see many of those things present. Sometimes the competition is it just people get blinded by the desire to win. I think very often people forget why they actually founded the company. They didn't find it to win over the competition, but very often to change something for their users, for their customers. However, sometimes because of they're motivated by raising a capital, they're motivated by different other factors. Obviously you need revenue to grow the business. You tend to go with very short hand wins and focus on the competition maybe way too much. And I've seen it in the past where it like shapes badly the culture in the organization doesn't really put great incentives in place. And sometimes I see the organization and she like put them themselves in that full over mode. We at Prakowar, we also have capability that kind of allows you to collect feature ideas or Prakow ideas from your customers. And you can also publish your own ideas and let people to share insights. And we have seen many times that people are hesitating to put their ideas there. It's like, what if competition will actually see it? That's what we actually want. They will be in a full over mode. You will have all the insights. They will only know that you are working on it and it might be available, but they will not have the insights. And so you're making a first step. And they are always going to follow. And that's actually where you want to be. And many people don't get it. They wait too much focus on it. Like, yeah, we need to win over this competitor. But it's also because in sales very often, if you are losing a customer over competitor, like you mark a note there, it's like, hey, we lose to this and so on. But in many industries, actually, competition is good. It cultivates the whole space. It actually helps to explain value in many different ways. And so we at Prakowar, our biggest competition is a statistical tool. It's Excel, it's presentations. It's not a fault that are building similar products or are trying to cultivate the product management space in general. So I like to take them as a friends, have an inspiring conversation with them, listen to different angles and why they're actually coming from there. Because each of us are solving eventually for slightly different users, slightly different layers of a product management. So it's about it. So when you consider productivity, you've got an organization which has got a health bit of competition, but really understands why they're in the game. What have you observed as the biggest barriers to productivity? I think people tend to focus on efficiency a lot. That's where you see a lot of engineering teams actually being focused and how many tickets we can ship, etc, etc. But I don't think that it is the productivity. I've seen many teams delivering a crap but being very efficient at it. To me, productivity is primarily about effectiveness. And so whether you are actually able to deliver the result that you said that you are going to deliver in a timeframe that you set out, but also you can do it repeatedly. Because you can't game if you are actually trying to do it repeatedly. And so what I found is a kind of key ingredient to it. It's very hard to find. It's all about focus. And it has three components in my eyes. One is focus on a specific customer segment. Ideally, build for one specific customer segment, but also have a specific customer that you could create a product with. Other thing is ideally have one objective. There have been many talks today about OKRs and how they are good or bad. But it's all about ideally having one objective. Otherwise, wise, you are diluting your focus. And one thing is, and one thing would be actually try it in pre-work recently, is you will actually go around and ask people, was it objective that they are working on? And if they are not consistent, and every word matters, if they are not consistent, they are not pushing in the same direction. And so we ended up even like, it might sound very silly, but putting a poster on the wall to actually remind people. And it completely changed the way they perceived it. It wasn't a religion. We are way too focused on certain metrics, where we are going. And it was absolutely clear for everybody. And it was a unique moment of absolute clarity. And it would be very hard to repeat it, because there are many different goals that we might have next year. But it was just an annual goal. It was like a half year objective or specific milestone that we had to achieve. And lastly, it's like remove all the obstacles in execution. I think very often the team is don't really adapt themselves. And I think that's what the agility is about, actually adapt themselves to the environment and to the goals that they actually have. We very often hear about peace time and wartime, but in organizations. And I think it's heavily in it right now in that wartime mode. However, they didn't really change internally how they operate. Very often they follow the same rituals, etc. Because it's how they are grounded. This is how they read about all the processes and how things should be done in the books. But very often in the books, there isn't said like, yeah, but this is only applicable in this context. And if you have a different context, maybe you should try something different. So thinking about what are those obstacles and what are really stupid things and unnecessary things to do. And also what are the things that actually are holding you back. And it might be completely unrelated to proactively. It might be like, your people are distracted because they have to take the kids to kindergarten in the morning. It's like, yeah, can we do something about it? Or they are staying late? So can we provide a meal for them? So they don't have to worry about it and spend minutes finding a right place or and so on. So these are sometimes like small things that can actually lead to a lot of clarity and also focus on execution. I like that when you're talking about removing the barriers of execution is to make it more holistically and actually kind of appreciating what is going on for people and how can you make it easier for them, I suppose, to live their lives, live their lives, but at the same time be a productive member of the organization. So if I think back to what you said there, it was focused on a customer segment and kind of co-create with your customers. Have a singular objective and remove the obstacles and execution. Some good advice there. Our time is kind of rapidly coming to a close. Time always, I'll say, simply by so quickly, if people want to find out more about what it is that you're doing and what you do at product board, I guess your website and LinkedIn is the right place to go. Definitely. Proboarded Quam and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I am very passionate about talking about Prakic Silent. So this is a framework that we are putting out in the world. So I would definitely recommend to check it out and you will definitely find it on the Prakic website. Great. Everyone heads to product board website. Look at the product excellence framework. Martin, thank you very much for coming on to the podcast. It's been great for everyone here. Thank you very much for listening. Do you remember to go on to LinkedIn, let us know what you'd like to what you disliked about these episodes and talks in 10. We are here to serve you, our community and our audience. So please do give us your feedback. Again, Martin, thank you very much. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. Thank you again.