The Product Experience

How to prioritise your work for impact - Nacho Bassino (Product Leadership Coach)

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Unlock the secrets of impactful product management in our latest episode with Nacho Bacino, a distinguished product leader and coach. Ever wondered about the true difference between staying busy and making a real business impact? Join us as Nacho shares his enlightening journey from software engineering to product management, revealing how companies are reshaping product roles to prioritize business outcomes over mere outputs. Learn how this shift is essential for aligning modern product teams with ever-evolving business expectations.

Discover the art of mapping user outcomes to business impact as we dive into the world of KPI trees and OKRs. Nacho walks us through the critical role of senior product managers in bridging customer behavior with business metrics, ensuring that teams focus on metrics that truly matter. We explore common pitfalls in structuring KPIs and the importance of fostering a shared understanding among teams to prevent miscommunication and ensure alignment with business goals.

Our conversation concludes with strategies for elevating your product impact through effective communication and collaboration. Learn how to transform your feature deliveries into compelling narratives that highlight measurable outcomes and drive stakeholder conversations. With practical tips on setting measurable business goals and involving stakeholders in strategy refinement, this episode is packed with insights to enhance your influence and secure recognition within your organization. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on making your work truly count.

Featured Links: Follow Nacho on LinkedIn | Work with Nacho at Product Direction | 'Five things we learned at the #mtpcon + Pendomonium roadshow - Berlin 2024' feature by Louron Pratt 

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Randy Silver:

Hi y'all. It's Randy here today on the Product Experience and we're chatting with a true legend in the world of Product Tank. Nacho Bacino co-founded Product Tank Cancun. He helped run the Product Tank in Buenos Aires and he's now the regional coordinator for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He's also been a CPO and a product leader for a long time and he's now making his living as a coaching consultant out of Barcelona. And he's now making his living as a coaching consultant out of Barcelona. We had a chance to sit down in Berlin earlier this year and had a great chat about the difference between keeping busy and doing the work that actually matters.

Lily Smith:

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Randy Silver:

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Randy Silver:

Nacho, it's great to see you. It's been a long time since you've been on the podcast and we're here live in Berlin. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Thank you. For people who don't remember you from your last appearance because it was a while ago, can you just give us a quick introduction again? What are you doing these days and how did you get into product labs in the first place?

Nacho Bassino:

I get into product and once I would call it the traditional way which I'm not sure if that's true I answered them yeah, exactly. So I started as a software engineer. Then Azure was a big thing and I found this product overall, I think was interesting, because people were deciding what we need to build and I didn't understand how we were making the decisions. So, hey, maybe this product owner role is what I need to do, and I found out that I knew nothing about it. But then I eventually learned how to do it and I've been in product management for almost two decades now. I've been leading product teams in different industries, even different continents, and what I'm doing now is switch to coaching product leaders within companies to improve their practices and to have more impact with their products.

Randy Silver:

Fantastic. So you have a really good vantage point for the topic we're going to talk about today, which is, you know, there was a hype cycle, or more of a business cycle, with the rise of product management over the past 10, 15 years, where every company had to have a product team and you had to be product-led, because that's the way the best companies worked. Yes, I think some of them are over it. Now we're starting to get a little challenge to actually show results, which the best companies always did. But now everyone else is catching up. What are you seeing?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the challenge that we faced was that we hired a lot of people either from this more, as I was talking before, this agile product owner role, which is not really product management, and some of the amount of teams and the amount of money we can invest in product development and the growth we saw in that led to people being seated in that chair without really knowing what they need to deliver, and now that's being challenged because we have a budget constraint, which makes a lot of sense. So I think it's a positive trend, but it has a lot of challenge for many product people out there.

Randy Silver:

So we see it in things like Brian Chesky talking about this at Airbnb, which I think it was widely misinterpreted, because he actually didn't fire anybody and he put product managers back into a business role and actually controlling, looking at outcomes rather than outputs. What do you see good companies do?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, actually, I think the way I like to frame it is more like what Matti Kagan wrote recently, more like the product management theater, this difference of hey, I'm called product manager, product owner, whatever title you have, but you are mostly project managing. You are kind of getting requests and trying to find a way through and collaborating with the teams. So I think that maybe, going back to what you're saying, the big trend is about okay, now we need to be very conscious about the impact that we are having with the team that we are managing, or the resources we are managing, the budget we are managing, and that's where I see that most senior product people and product leaders even are having a hard time making that connection from the output that we are delivering to the business impact that the business wants to see.

Randy Silver:

So let's get into that. But let's start with the beginning. We recruit people. We take people from inside the business, we throw them on a certified scrum, product owner course or something else. They come to us, we teach them Lean, we teach them Agile, we teach them scrum and we say go do it. And we say do discovery, create a backlog, create a roadmap. Are we missing a key point in this? Are people doing good practice or are they actually doing a good job?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing that we need to be mostly cautious about is that we are delivering. So the role is about prioritizing that. We are doing the most important show at any point in time, but the thing is that we need to make sure that that is delivering the right business impact, and that's the connection that we are mostly forgetting or even not being pressed to do in the past and now this is becoming more relevant and more thoughtful.

Randy Silver:

So why are we not? Why isn't the default that we are actually trying to deliver business impact or actually succeeding in delivering it?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, to be honest, I'm not sure about the situation. It may be different in different companies, but I think that, first of all, was an expectation of the role. If you come from, say, safe, just to mention one, you're basically project managing, so you're not expected to know and maybe it's extreme, but know anything about the business impact because you someone decided what to do and you're just responsible of delivering that, and that's quite different from an empowered product team in which you actually need to make sure that you are delivering to the constraints of the business and you are delivering value for the user but also impact for business.

Randy Silver:

So if you are, lots of product, teams are organized around features. Can you really prioritize business impact if your perspective is always trying to maximize a feature?

Nacho Bassino:

That's a good question because the way I'm seeing a lot of this in the coaching I do and many product developers really want to go away from a model.

Nacho Bassino:

They kind of understand that the model is wrong, but they are facing the challenge of kind of going with their opinions, saying this feature doesn't make any sense, let's purchase something different. And the way they need to actually do it to make sense for the business and to really be able to influence the stakeholders making these decisions is to be able to build a storytelling around. Okay, this feature connects in this way to the value of the user and in this way to the impact we want to create in the business and then compare it with other things that they may want to propose. So the way to be empowered and get out of the bill trap or the feature factory, or however you want to call it, is to actually create the storytelling around the business impact and the opportunities that we are solving and present that in a way that stakeholders at different levels can understand. So it's not just throwing a product framework or outcome-reactive roadmap, it's making them understand how we are thinking about this business impact of the connection.

Randy Silver:

Whose job is that? Because there's a different viewpoints on this of being able to do it at the individual contributor, at the product manager or even a senior product manager level, versus being in a leadership role. Is it the role of the individual contributor or is it more the job of the leader to do that? It depends.

Nacho Bassino:

Good question. Yeah, I think that we can say it depends.

Randy Silver:

We should always say it depends. I'm going to keep pushing you if you do.

Nacho Bassino:

No, no, but actually I do have a definition.

Nacho Bassino:

But I think that if you think about, let's say, okrs, just to put an example, think about company OKRs company probably are aligning on this business impact. They want to generate, wanting to grow 20% revenues in this direction, this market or whatever. But then if you see, at the team level, they probably are focused on a user outcome. So what behavior we want to see changing the user, and that's what we are pushing for. So the connection there between the outcome the user behavior we're changing and the impact is probably the responsibility of the product leaders and if we achieve this level of outcome, we are going to hit or not that target we are having as business impact. Of course, the independence comes here, because I think that senior product managers should be able to do this and should be able to bake it into the prioritization framework they're using. So I think that there is a great line. So for leaders, for sure, and I think that senior PMs must do it, and also it's something that will help them grow in their career.

Randy Silver:

But usually at the level of the individual product team. You're doing a piece of that, so you're contributing to one or more KPIs that, when combined with a bunch of other things, really influence the user journey and the user experience and then maximize and get you that to really realize that objective. If you're doing a couple of them but you miss on a couple, are you able to do?

Nacho Bassino:

this Is this yeah, I think that I will frame it in a different way, please, and we are getting into how to solve it. But actually, if you think about what you are doing, you're solving problems or, let's say, a customer problem, in a way that you enable them to do something new or to do something better or reduce their pain and they will change their behavior. But if you have no idea how that connects to some business metric, then why you are even doing it. Maybe it's not the right pain to focus on. And that's where, for example, kpi trees can be very helpful. Because again I'm going back to what a senior PM must understand If you do the business modeling and you understand how the business behaves and the metrics that or the lower level metrics that influence this revenue or this charge, this monthly recurring revenue, whatever, this is the way in which you can understand that the outcome you are, or the customer behavior you are willing to change, will impact.

Randy Silver:

this is simple okay, kpi trees are one of those things that always seem really obvious, but I'm amazed at how many people don't know them or haven't really used them. Can you give us a couple of minutes on on a good usage, a good way of getting started and and some of the mistakes around kpi trees?

Nacho Bassino:

yeah, absolutely. I think I'm the the the first one. For example, if you go to, this is not complaining about the tool, I love the example. If you go to, this is not a complaint about the tool, I love the tool. But if you go to Miro and you search for a template for KPI tree, it will give you something like strategic and tactical and what other level. That's completely wrong.

Nacho Bassino:

So KPI tree is simply, as the name indicates, it's a tree and you start with the root of the tree. You start with the highest level metric that the business wants to move. So it can be revenue, it can be driving cost, it can be monthly record revenue for SaaS companies. So, depending on the company, it can be different. But then what you want to build is a structure in which you say exactly which metrics are contributing to that higher level metric. So in this example, it's, for example, e-commerce, in which you have revenue, and then revenue is composed by visitors, conversion rate and average transaction costs or value, and then you expand further by saying what other metrics contributes to this second level. So that's the way you build it and that's where you understand how the business model in a way that what the little thing that you are, the little KPI that you're actually changing here, will actually influence the revenue, and what mistakes do you see people making when they try and implement KPI trees?

Nacho Bassino:

All right, exactly this one saying not following a tree logic. So saying, hey, I'm just kind of bunching KPIs, we list all the KPIs we can think of and try to see maybe this group together more like a affinity grouping.

Randy Silver:

And that's not the tree logic that we want to see so just a dashboard of numbers of interest, rather than anything actually relating to each other.

Nacho Bassino:

And the other one that's interesting is that trying to bake in what I call dimensions into the KPI tree. So if you want to, for example, let's say, platform iOS, Android Web, If you want to put that into a tree, what will happen is just kind of massive ramification. It will be mess. So these dimensions is something that, if you keep the structure right because the structure reflects the business modeling these dimensions can go into a dashboard and that's where you can actually see those numbers okay.

Randy Silver:

So now you've got the reason I love this is it's it's a visual reference and it's a. It's essentially a map. Yeah, and I love maps because people look at them and it's hard to argue with a map, or you can argue with it, but at least you're arguing about something where the two people are arguing about the same thing, rather than when we just talk and talk past each other and we think we both walk away from a conversation with different understandings, absolutely.

Nacho Bassino:

At the end of the day, all artifacts that we use are about understanding and not about the artifact itself.

Randy Silver:

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Randy Silver:

Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast. Okay, so what else do you have to do to be good at this? To make sure that you are keeping business impact at the heart of everything?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say the KPA-3 is kind of my second step. I usually start with making sure that you understand the outcome that you are trying to achieve and the way you do that is. You probably give them a feature, as we were discussing before, and then for that feature you need to understand the user problem. That's something that we are easily good at, so it's not super difficult. And then we're using the reverse order in which Teresa Torres described her opportunity solution tree. You can actually climb up that ladder and say, if I have this solution that hits this opportunity will eventually hit this outcome or custom behavior. So you can understand actually what you are trying to achieve in the first place and once you have that, you can connect that outcomes we were discussing before with the KPI tree.

Nacho Bassino:

So let's say, in an e-commerce, I want to build a new filter. Why I want to build a new filter? Because I want to solve the problem of users not finding particular items that they want to find and this is what will drive this conversion. And if we map that to conversion, probably from results to detail, that would be the lower level metric that we're paying for. You will be able to see how that scales up to revenue. So maybe to complete that, that's the first two steps. You build this reverse order of the opportunity tree, you build the KPI tree, but then what you need to do is to really come up with a real number you're expecting to see moving.

Nacho Bassino:

So that's also something I see a lot of people failing to decide.

Nacho Bassino:

It is to improve conversion Okay, but how much. If a lot of people failing to decide it is to improve conversion Okay, but how much. If you are going to make an investment, you need to have a hypothesis at least on how much you expect to move that needle. So that's why I say that the KPI tree turns into a table, that hopefully, if you're a data-driven company, you have some sort of dashboard already out there, but if not, you can actually pull the numbers and what you say is if I change this lower level metric and everything else remains the same, this is the impact I will have in revenue. And in that way you can derive from your very little feature idea all the way up to the revenue you will generate. And that's how you can make a good decision if this thing that you're planning to do makes sense or not. In a language that the business will understand. So you're not talking about precision tree, you're talking about revenue, and that's something that the CEO or any stakeholder will understand.

Randy Silver:

And this is just a tool to help you understand, so you can communicate it better, exactly.

Nacho Bassino:

The thing I always talk with people I coach is that what you are trying to do is not to impose your decision. It's like explain your logic and get input in a more structured way Because, again, going back to what you were saying, we are all talking opinions and we are kind of fighting through each other. We will not be able to fix the fundamental logics because, at the end of the day, when you expose it in that way and you get negative feedback or contrarian feedback, what will happen is that the hypothesis you made has some, basically, ideas that are different from the mental model that your stakeholder has and if you expose it in that way, they can pinpoint where they think you are wrong and you will get much more valuable feedback than if you're just kind of doing this in an unstructured way.

Randy Silver:

One of the mistakes I see people make and I'm not blaming them, because I've definitely made this mistake and it's a really easy one to make is you start to work on, you prioritize the things that you know you can do rather than things that need to be done, and you get defensive when people challenge you about it. How do you deal with that?

Nacho Bassino:

Actually, I always tell people that, no matter how empowered you are, you're actually facilitating decisions and at the end of the day, there are some decisions. For example, let's say that we are following this thread and you have one opportunity that is reducing costs and the other one is improving revenue. At the end of the day, as product manager, you probably don't have all the understanding of the business situation to make the decision. Maybe the CFO knows that, hey, we're running out of money, so we need to save costs, and that's something that, even if you think that the other is bigger or better, you need to have that input and this reality check, and so you need to let other people decide and be part of the decision you're making.

Randy Silver:

So what I think I hear you saying is that we're not the CEO of the product. Oh yes, Tell me a little bit about doing that, about facilitating these decisions. What is the best way of doing? What's the advice you give to people who are Having trouble getting that? That across to other people? Yeah, perfect.

Nacho Bassino:

So the first thing is maybe to complete what I was saying We'll get to an estimation of the impact you are trying to achieve.

Nacho Bassino:

You also need to combine it with, for example, if you're using something like ice scoring. I don't want to promote that framework, but basically the confidence part of iScoring is when you expose what you're guessing or what you're betting on and you are saying the level of risk you have in this impact you are expecting to achieve. So in that way, you start by opening the conversation and you are opening yourself for feedback. And then, in terms of facilitating the discussion, we are in the best way to, or in the best position to, present different scenarios or different options. So it's more about saying, hey, these are the scenarios, this is what I would suggest, but these are the other options, and you let people inform your decision-making and also see the different options and make some decisions at the end of the day. So I think that way is what I call strategic storytelling, is let's build a pitch for how these options can evolve and with these scenarios, you actually invite people to decide and to align on and to get the buy-in that you need.

Randy Silver:

So a lot of times, we're doing our planning in advance, we're doing a lot of forecasting, we do annual budgets, we do things like that, and then things change. How do we handle that change? Because it's easy enough for me to say, right, something has changed in the world, a competitor has released something, an investment team come through. This is what I have to do at my level, but there are degrees of impact on other people. How do we deal with it? Collaborate, communicate and really make sure that we're still aimed in the right direction.

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, I think first of all, boils down to the level of change we are seeing.

Nacho Bassino:

So, for example, everyone wanted to do AI at the beginning of last year, maybe this year still. So if that level of change is required and everyone needs to come up, probably you need to come up as an organization, as a product organization, and probably drop your roadmaps and start over again. So that level of change I think is more dramatic and it goes back into the whole strategy building. Again, if you are having smaller changes across organization for example, let's say, going back to what we were discussing before, if you see you have a very interesting learning from the users and the users love your filter and you want to build more filters in our e-commerce example, and for that you need to collaborate with other teams, probably you need not only to change your plans but also to change other people's plans.

Nacho Bassino:

So I think that, first of all, if there is a regular cadence, like, for example, a quarterly strategy review or quarterly OKR review, that's a great place to start. But again, what you need to build is this storytelling about why this is important and go back to kind of building what user problem you are solving, how it connects to the KPIs, what's the real number you're trying to achieve and the confidence you have about this or the user feedback you have about it, or the evidence you have about it, and then building the so what. So what's the scenario? What if we do it, or what if we don't do it? And again you facilitate the discussion.

Randy Silver:

One of the things that I can look back on earlier parts of my career that I know I didn't do as well at was you know, I was always looking ahead and seeing what did I need for the team to succeed in this, and lots of things have to break right, but I could also see a thousand things that could break wrong and I was always warning about all those things. So then you can get a reputation as Chicken Little warning on saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling and you've lost trust of other people at that point. What's the right time to communicate? Do you communicate as soon as you see something? Do you communicate early in an OKR cycle? Do you only communicate at the end? Is there a good in this?

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So the way I like to think about it is let's think about the scenario we were discussing before. You are in charge of the timing how the investment of one team or more teams if you're a block leader will develop over time. So let's say that's costly. It can be half a million maybe for a company over the year. So when you say my roadmap looks like this for the next three months, you are saying, hey, this is how I will invest company money in building these features. The way you actually do it is hopefully start by doing discovery. So instead of investing all the money in building the feature, you will start by investing a little in doing some experiments. So that's what you need to communicate as soon as you have results. Well, let me wrap that If there are changes coming from that discovery that you need to inform, that's where probably you need to be very proactive If things are evolving as you expected. Probably that's easier to do the check-ins from the OPRs or other type of ceremonies that are existing.

Randy Silver:

And lots of people I work with, they still, no matter how empowered we try and make them, they're still working with people who expect that they're part of IT and they're a delivery function within the company. How do you build that relationship to communicate with people better and say yes, I totally agree with you, this was the right strategy. However, this is what we've learned.

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, I think the challenge we have seen there goes back to this discussion we had at the beginning that product people were doing this product management and they were not showing the value Because, at the end of the day and I actually, marta Karan says this in different words there is no business stakeholder that if you propose something better that will drive more value for the company and maybe more bonus for them, will say no, so it's.

Nacho Bassino:

I think it's more about the or this scenario is more about the inability we have as product people to communicate again the impact for the business in a way that they can understand, they can see your logic behind. So, once you have made it more practical, if you have this expectation, probably it's this salesperson saying, hey, I need this feature to close the deal. And if you are able to say, hey, we are doing this feature, we are delaying this other thing, and this is how the business impact of those two options compare. That's where you can build them on board and make them part of the decision instead of just fighting and saying no.

Randy Silver:

Except where the challenge is that salesperson A wants to close a deal and salesperson B or B, C, D and E will all benefit from what you're doing, but you're screwing over A, and A is still not going to be happy, even if the deal is much better.

Nacho Bassino:

I mean your role is not to make everyone happy, but actually I think that problem is not a problem for them I mean, the product management needs to be able to explain the situation but that's a problem for the sales manager Exactly, you need to escalate it up and have the support of people to do it.

Nacho Bassino:

Because, at the end of the day, I mean, if you think about, we're abusing this scenario, but what happens is that we have a strategy and the strategy is obviously, for example, this customer segment. So everything we're willing to do is to make this customer segment successful, and what may happen is that these salespeople are going to leave from another segment, so they're trying to push in and deviate from the strategy, and that's something that the sales managers should handle.

Randy Silver:

So, nacho, this has been fantastic. What's something that you would advise people listening to this or actually watching this? No, what can they start doing tomorrow? What's the first thing, the first step for most people to get better at this, to prove that they are responsible owners of business impact.

Nacho Bassino:

Yeah, yeah. So I think that the logic I described is the logic I try to, because what people are afraid of is that this first seems like a lot of work and I will get into that in a second and the second one is that they have no idea how to start. So that's why I describe it in a very pragmatic and then sequential way, because it's easier to kind of remove the fear and know exactly what we're trying to do. So, following this step of doing the reverse OSD so a production tree, doing the KPI tree, connecting both, and then building a new table in which you can actually get to a real number, that's all the elements. You need to do it. And, finally, what you need to start doing is start making that into your presentation.

Nacho Bassino:

So if you are just, let's say, you have a monthly report in which you are just reporting feature outputs, start by changing that and you can do it. You can say, hey, given the progress we have and the feature we deliver, this is the impact we generated and this is the impact we expect to generate from the other features. If you start making this language into representations, into the discussions you have with stakeholders, showing them how you are coming up with the logic. I think that's something that you can start doing tomorrow. There's nothing preventing you from doing it and you will start, little by little, elevating the conversation you have, winning more empowerment and delivering more, more input from the company, which is what eventually will lead you to grow in your position and say secure your shop. That's the point of it. The point of it into the fear where the branches give one up, but I guess that when we deliver value, of course your shop is not at risk. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Nacho Love it. Thank you.

Lily Smith:

The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

Randy Silver:

And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

Lily Smith:

Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor and our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow.

Randy Silver:

Thanks to them for letting us use their track.