LEGO to Leadership | Bruce McCarthy

Bruce McCarthy has spent his life building things – first with Lego, then with teams, products, and companies. In this episode, he takes us from childhood curiosity to becoming one of the most recognised voices in modern product leadership. His stories reveal how creativity becomes strategy, and how mindset becomes culture.

You’ll hear how early experiments in building boats, ecosystems, and entire miniature worlds shaped Bruce’s instinct for systems thinking. You’ll follow the transition from startup founder to product leader, and the shock of moving from small, outcome-driven companies to an organisation where innovation was discouraged. That contrast led Bruce to a realisation that would define his career – culture determines everything.

We explore the moments that transformed how he leads: cross-functional alignment, stakeholder management, strategic ownership, and the belief that product managers run “businesses within businesses”. Bruce shares the wins, the mistakes, and the turning points that taught him that leadership requires listening, that mandates never create change, and that real transformation comes from learning by doing.

Together, we unpack the origin of Product Culture, why his books reshaped the product world, and the truth behind roadmapping, OKRs, collaboration, and the power of finding your tribe. Whether you’re in product, leadership, or simply navigating change – this is a masterclass in building the environment where great work happens.

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Transcript

0:04

What if the key to leading great teams wasn't a framework, a roadmap or a title, but the mindset that you bring to the table in this episode, Bruce McCarthy takes us from childhood Lego Worlds to boardrooms inside some of the world's biggest organizations, revealing how creativity, curiosity, and culture shape everything we build. He talks openly about the shocks, the setbacks, and the moments that forced him to rethink what leadership really means. From running a business within a business to navigating misaligned teams to discovering why mandates never create change. Bruce shows today the human side of product leadership and the lessons that apply far beyond tech. If you lead people shape strategy, or want to build something that actually works, this conversation will shift the way you think.

Paul: 1:00

Bruce McCarthy has made a career out of turning messy teams into aligned outcome driven machines. He's a product leader. Author and founder who's helped shape how modern companies think about building and scaling great products known as the face of Boston product management. Bruce has spent decades leading teams at startups and giants alike from Oracle and ATG to NetProspex and D&B before in product culture, a consultancy that helps organizations create alignment and focus through outcome driven product teams. He's the co-author of Product Roadmaps, relaunched and Aligned Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders, books that have become staples for product managers worldwide through product, culture and his chief product officer forum. Bruce works with clients like Toast, Camundao, Securere, and Johnson Johnson, helping leaders transform uncertainty into clarity, edit into clarity and strategy into action. He's a serial entrepreneur, a speaker president emeritus of the Boston Product Management Association. But Bruce brings humor, humility, and hard earned wisdom to every conversation about leadership alignment and the craft of product management. Hats off. Bruce, I'm gonna welcome you to the show, but that has to be the hardest bio to read that I've ever created, but I hope it does you justice.

Bruce: 2:31

it's fair. I'd say fairly accurate. so why was it hard to read?

Paul: 2:37

there's a few tongue twisters in there. There's, a few tongue twisters, but I like it. I like it. and we've known each other for a while now, so I'm very honored to, i'm over the moon to bring you to the show because I think, I've been trying to go back through connections that I've made over the last 3, 4 years, and I think there's some wonderful personalities. You being one of those. that I just wanna share with our audience and share a bit of the journey that you've been on to get where you are right now. so we're gonna, we're gonna dive into a few things, but I'm gonna go back to one of the things that you've said is that, you've been making things since childhood. So what drew you to building, how did you kind of develop that creative instinct?

Bruce: 3:21

I think my origin story begins with Lego. I don't know why, but I just always gravitated to Lego as a kid, as many kids do, right? But I was the kid who annoyed the crap out of their mother by just always having them everywhere. She's stepping on them. She's trying to clean them up and it's hopeless because I'm always just going to come back behind her and

Paul: 3:43

something else. Yep.

Bruce: 3:45

used to build these giant, I called them ponds or lakes. the idea was that there was a shoreline defined by a bunch of random legos, just dropped around the entire family room. And then I would build piers and docks and factories and boats and, and have all sorts of stuff going on across, the lake. And of course that was a giant miss, but I just enjoyed sort of the building out the whole system of it.

Paul: 4:11

Yep.

Bruce: 4:12

Eventually my mom threw me out and I did the same thing outside. we had a sandbox in the backyard and I would build a lake. the brilliant part about her doing that was, I could fill it with water from the hose. and then I could bring out small Lego boats, which would float because Legos, are pretty light and they hold air bubbles inside them. And so I could have. boats floating on the water and I just liked building the whole ecosystem, the whole machinery of, of a marina, of, a community around the, around the pond, that carried on for ages. there were a couple of seminal moments where I built stuff. I used to just sort of interpret every new part of the world. In terms of three dimensions and, in terms of something that I could build to internalize it. So, we went on vacation to this Lake, Sunapee Lake in New Hampshire, most summers when I was a kid and doors down from the cabin that we rented, there was what we called the dinner boat, which was a, ordinary boat, but dressed up like a steamboat with a paddle wheel on the back and everything And it was a restaurant and you would book your, meal and and they would cruise the lake for a couple of hours in the evening. And I just thought it was this giant, gorgeous machine and so I built a replica in Lego and we're there at the water, so I made it so it would float and not tip over, and to add a rudder and so on underneath, and I floated it over to the actual dinner boat, and showed it to the captain who ran the restaurant business. And he was, he was all charmed up about it and gave me and my brother, who was with me at the time, free ride on the boat. so that, so I earned earned food, through Lego.

6:12

Special shout out in today's episode for our charity partners, ADHD Liberty led by Sarah Templeton, who are part of the fight to prevent the school to prison pipeline for ADHD and Neurodiverse individuals. If you'd like to find out more, you can visit them. The show links are in the notes below, and I would encourage you to go along and have a look and educate yourself on their fight. It's an incredibly important cause and we're super proud to have them as charity partners for the MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers podcast. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your episode.

Bruce: 6:45

And and later on, when I was a freshman at college, we, I went to school at Upen in Philadelphia and they had these iconic buses, that were, sleek and missile like, just really smooth sided and painted red, white and blue for Philadelphia for patriotism. And I built one, I built a SEPTA bus, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and rolled it down the hall in the dorm. And, This one girl from a couple of doors down was really impressed at how I had managed to quickly make it completely recognisable from the kit that I had brought from home.

Paul: 7:29

Yep.

Bruce: 7:30

and that woman is my wife.

Paul: 7:32

That's amazing.

Bruce: 7:33

So I also attracted a mate, by building things with Lego.

Paul: 7:38

I That's amazing that, that is an incredible story. thank you so much for sharing that, just as an opener. I love it. I guess, you know, I look at my son now and he plays Minecraft on the computer. He loves Lego, like me, loves Lego, loves, building things with his hands, but it's kind of, it's unlimited on there as well, right? Like you don't need to have, you don't need to go out and buy more bricks. You've got an unlimited amount to build.

Bruce: 8:04

That's right

Paul: 8:04

he doesn't play the game mode. Right. He's not interested in that. He just wants to build hotels and football stadiums.

Bruce: 8:10

Love it.

Paul: 8:11

so I guess, yeah, I guess that's like what, you said at the beginning about that the lake shore, that building that world is, kind of where that all stems from. I love that and then. How did you mentioned you went to college and all the rest of it, so I guess at some point you realised that product was something that you wanted to be more heavily involved in. Right.

Bruce: 8:33

Well, I didn't really know what it was at first, I'd had various, marketing and sales jobs, and then I did a startup with my father, in we wanted to market home environmental. kits and services, so that you could detect if you had lead paint or asbestos or whatever else in your house. I learned a ton from that, being an entrepreneur is great training for being a product person. I did every last thing, I did the marketing plan, the product development, the, some software development for the inspectors to walk them through. I did, I did the pro forma books, the business plan, we raised a couple million dollars and we're not able to, to make it a success. Like many startups, we failed, but we learned a lot.

Paul: 9:24

Yep.

Bruce: 9:24

My first software product management job came after that. I had never heard of the term product manager, but it sounded kind of like a marketing job to me. And nothing during the interview process convinced me otherwise'cause they were mostly asking me questions and I was reasonably well equipped to answer from all different parts of the business because I had essentially run this small startup business. So they hired me and then I gradually found out, what product management really was learning from my boss, John Wang, who later went on to become the CMO of HTC, the phone maker.

Paul: 10:05

YepHe

Bruce: 10:05

he was a genius and taught me a lot about both software product management and The ownership mindset that comes with that and the growth mindset. And about stakeholder management. I didn't realise what, how much I was learning. I was just observing him but it was a, it was a transitional moment for me into product management. I, fell in love with the role at that little company called IMarket and have never looked back.

Paul: 10:37

It almost sounds, the way you describe it almost sounds like, being a product manager is almost like running a business within a business. is that fair?

Bruce: 10:47

That's exactly it. John looked at it not as what features should we build, but at how shall we improve our business and when. When as the second product manager in the company, I was building second and third products for the company, we were essentially setting up different lines of business complimentary ones. So there's synergy, but that was the idea. first product I created, the, core product we had was a CD rom. This was that long ago, that, Had marketing data on it, you could, buy mailing lists essentially. the biggest problem our customers had was, the production of, sales letters or postcards or what brochures or whatever they were going to print and mail from the mailing lists that they got off of the, disc. So I created this internet based virtual letter shop with a partnership with Pitney Bowes. And, was that they could just take the data directly and upload it and get it printed into a mailer. I ran headlong into the dotcom bubble bursting and the company pulled back from the internet and we did not pursue that. I think I had enough time with that product to launch to have one customer. But, again, I, learned a whole lot and I learned, without knowing the, classic, classic, triad of product management, that something must be feasible, technically viable as a business and desirable by the customer. I learned that without knowing the framework from John.

Paul: 12:36

It's, a coming at it from a different perspective, an outside world almost applying principles from outside of the industry to, to disrupt the industry as it stands. Right.

Bruce: 12:48

That's right.

Paul: 12:49

I wonder then, so you've, led teams at some, I mean, it's, astonishing some of the teams that you've, led people at, so like Oracle, ATG, NetProspex. What would you say are the moments that stand out as real turning points in shaping your leadership style or how you led those teams?

Bruce: 13:45

There were a, there was a series of moments at Dun and Bradstreet that crystallised for me what it was that I had really learned and absorbed and valued at, in my experience at I Market, that was not universal. I didn't, I was just absorbing it and it just seemed natural and I give credit to John for that and I give credit to it being a natural fit for my personality, also to be Analytical and thorough and cross-functional and entrepreneurial all at the same time, empathetic to the customer problem. All of those things coming together when I, so that I market was eventually bought by Dun and Bradstreet. That's how I came to work

Paul: 14:31

Okay.

Bruce: 14:31

And I gotta say it was a huge cultural shock going from 75 people in a software company in Massachusetts to 10,000 people in a 180 year old financial services company based in New Jersey. the, the atmosphere was completely different. there was many more layers of hierarchy, when we had our first meeting with people at Dun and Bradstreet to kind of introduce us and figure out how we were gonna rationalise the product line. The people in the room from D and B who outnumbered us 2 to 1, were just meeting each other for the first time, many of them and that was bizarre to me because of course I knew everybody at IMarket. and we had to really work out that everything was pretty reasonable for a while. We were left alone for a while, but there were a few sort of aha moments that clued me in on what the difference was in the culture. The most important one was I had, a couple of times at I market made product proposals for a new product that we would develop. And not everyone but a couple of them had really turned into multimillion dollar things. And the process for approving them was pretty simple. I got together with my boss and his boss and we just talked it over, and if we agreed, then we went forward and I I didn't need to make a giant 70 page business case, but I, needed to put together the three things, feasibility, viability, desirability, and some basic idea of what would be necessary and then we would do it. did the same thing, just repeated, that at Dun and Bradstreet and I sent it up the chain and tried to get a meeting and couldn't and a couple of weeks went by and I heard nothing. And finally I was in a meeting with my boss's, boss's, boss and, at the end of the meeting I just asked him, so what happened with this proposal? And he said, oh, that, no, you have to understand, Bruce. We're just, we're not trying to be entrepreneurial here. And I was like,

Paul: 16:42

Wow.

Bruce: 16:42

okay thank you for clarifying that because it was shocking to me that, that the business model did not involve innovation or creating anything new. The, business model at the time was, make more money on the things we already have, figure out how to sell more of it. So they didn't really want me to do product management. They didn't really want me to try to create more value. They wanted me to try to extract more value by clever marketing, I guess and that was an important moment. I was gone within three months. I went and worked, that was three years, three years in, after the acquisition. I, I knew that things were different. It just felt different from the start. it wasn't until that moment that I was convinced that this is never going to work. There was another moment too and I mentioned cross-functional leadership, there was not much of a notion of cross-functional collaboration or cooperation at D and B| every department was different when I, when I needed to get some pricing thing approved. I had to go to the pricing czar and and he just wasn't having any of it and I fought with him for two days and he just was not interested in my approach to pricing whatsoever. Eventually, I escalated it to my boss. in my business line who just told me to ignore him, just wrote a note and said to the pricing guy, we're doing it Bruce's way. Forget about it. and I was like, so, okay. So th this is a top down decision making kind of organisation That's not how I think about things. there was another time where, the sales team, the, person in charge of the organization of our division was essentially the chief salesperson. And, we were meeting with, with her and, she was talking about all of the, planning they were doing in her team for the next year. And she, we, when I say we were meeting with her, it was a half a dozen of us in product management. And we were well, product planning is kind of in our job description. Shouldn't we be part of that? And she was completely uninterested as far as she was concerned, it planning was sales planning and product was like, well, you guys are gonna help us execute on the sales plan, right? so there was no notion of cooperation between sales, marketing, product engineering. Also, they, they laid off 99% of our engineering staff and outsourced it to offshore,

Paul: 19:34

Wow.

Bruce: 19:34

at the time. So we had very little capacity to do any of the things that I was used to doing in terms of building new things. So all of these things, accumulated. But the crystallising moment was when they said, we're not trying to be entrepreneurial here. And I'm like, oh, well that actually kind of sums it up.

Paul: 19:55

Yep.

Bruce: 19:57

so I left and I went to ATG and where we were, I called a real software company. Oh, there's one more story I gotta tell you about Dun and Bradstreet. I think there was some understanding that when they had bought the company, they had bought both the product and the team that created the product, at least at some levels within the organisation. Because as the product manager for the product, they invited me to join a team that was building a product internally that was similar. our product was at that point an online service where you could define a list of prospects and then download that list and you could pay for

Paul: 20:37

it Yep.

Bruce: 20:37

a credit card. And they had an initiative internally to build a web-based tool that would allow their own salespeople to define a list, get a price, download it, send it to the customer. And in phase two or three, they eventually were thinking it could be self-serve on the

Paul: 20:54

internet. Yep.

Bruce: 20:55

And in the first meeting, they were sort of, they were describing this and I'm like, that really sounds like something we already built. so I asked for the requirements and I read them over and I was like, our system already does 90% of this. There's a couple of details we could just add in a month or two of effort. so I told them this, and they said, yeah, but you know, we do not leverage homegrown software. we don't develop software here. We outsource all of that and I'm like, well, yes, but A, we already built it so you don't have to build it. And B, you know, you bought a software company, right? and the, as the, attitude was, now by standby my statement, we're gonna, you know, get, we're gonna use off the shelf tools and we're gonna get somebody to build it. And I'm like, look, I respect building with off the shelf things where you can. But we solved some hard, unique problems with custom technology because there was no off the shelf solution that was adequate to the task. Like you can get a, a regular sort of simple database and you can query it, but might, it might take you minutes or hours to get a count if it's a very complex and very large query. We had created a custom search engine that would get you a count in less than a second no matter what.

Paul: 22:25

Yep.

Bruce: 22:26

And they were just like, Nope, nope, I don't want to touch anything custom.

Paul: 22:31

That's,

Bruce: 22:32

so

Paul: 22:32

that's just how we do things around here is a dangerous phrase, isn't it, Bruce?

Bruce: 22:36

Right, right, right. So I left in frustration, went to ATG, where nobody was afraid to build something to spec, to what was necessary. it operated much more like I expected, like I had learned at IMarket, but on a larger scale. that was, that would I was there for six years, very happily. learned a ton. Did all sorts of, partnerships, acquisitions, business cases built, on-prem products and SaaS products. Really was a fantastic learning experience.

Paul: 23:14

I guess the difference between the two organisations that you've described there boils down to culture, right?

Bruce: 23:20

Well, It does, and that was the origin of my company name product culture was recognising that there was a cultural difference that was underlying all of these decision differences. All of these process differences and structural differences was, the underlying thing was a mindset. A mindset of, not just here to do a job, tick a box, close a ticket, I am here to make a difference. and that requires me to take a cross-functional approach. the, my boss's boss at D and B was big on leadership. He used that word a lot, but what he meant by leadership, it seems to me in retrospect, was just relentless optimism was just, we're going to hit this number no matter what. and when I or others who thought like me would be like, okay, well let's make a plan that for things we're gonna do that will get us there by adding value to the customer. He was just not listening.

Paul: 24:25

It is

Bruce: 24:26

I think leadership involves as much listening as talking, maybe

Paul: 24:32

maybe more,

Bruce: 24:33

as

Paul: 24:33

yeah.

Bruce: 24:34

empathy as, assertiveness. I think it's gotta be much more well-rounded and balanced in that

Paul: 24:42

Yeah, I think that there's, often a disconnect between senior leadership and the mid-level leadership where there's thinking meets doing and it's hard for those two levels of leadership to interlink properly. In a way that's meaningful for the business. And I think that's where a lot of larger businesses and even some startups to be fair, get lost in their journey that they're going. And we end up either too busy doing things or too busy thinking about things instead of connecting the two together so that we've got a plan that's actionable.

Bruce: 25:18

So I was just giving a talk on the role of the chief product officer and think there, I think the, unique role of someone leading product is to connect the dots between vision that we want to achieve and the tactics that we are doing, usually with some kind of coherent strategy, but not just for themselves or for the dev team, but for the entire company, for all the functions. If. If we're going to achieve that vision, it's going to take a coordinated effort across the company, across sales, marketing, product engineering, customer support, partnerships, finance, everybody. and often in the early days of a startup, that's the CEO's job. I mean, that's, usually the case, but there, the point at which a CPO really becomes critical is when the company's gotten to a certain level of success and has gotten a little bit too big for the CEO to be in every meeting and every decision, providing that context and connecting those

Paul: 26:22

Yep.

Bruce: 26:22

people. CEOs will find themselves spending time with large customers, with the board, with investors, with analysts and and managing the business. But who is, every day there everybody about the context and herding cats. it could be, it could in theory be any executive, but engineers don't wanna do that. Finance doesn't want to do that. Marketing has got their MQLs to get, sales is busy making the numbers. It's down to product.

Paul: 26:57

It, the conversation that you are aligning here sounds very similar to one that I often have with, customer experience, senior leaders. Where they're, in a very similar position where, except that instead of product, it's the customer experience that everybody needs to align on. But again, there's no ownership, there's no customer experience department. it's, not one team's workload and it falls across the shoulders of everyone, but nobody wants the responsibility for it or has the budget to spare to make it happen. Right.

Bruce: 27:27

there might be a CX department, there might be, there might be people in user experience who are thinking that way. There

Paul: 27:35

Okay.

Bruce: 27:35

people in sort of modern innovative versions of customer support that worry about the complete customer experience throughout their journey. But even that is an incomplete

Paul: 27:50

Yeah.

Bruce: 27:50

we not only need to think about what's the ideal customer experience, but we need to think about where we focus our efforts in improving that customer experience that will make us money.

Paul: 28:03

Yeah.

Bruce: 28:04

I don't mean to be crass about it, but we need to make money if we want to be, to stay in

Paul: 28:10

business Yeah.

Bruce: 28:11

and keep doing that. and that customer experience also needs to be, made as good as possible within the bounds of what is technically feasible and can be accomplished technically in a reasonable period of time. So again, it's that checklist of, yes. It's gotta, the customer's need and be the ideal experience for them within the bounds of we can make money and we can do it technically.

Paul: 28:39

Yep.

Bruce: 28:40

the product manager's job is kind of pulling all of those things together, creating what I would call the flywheel of the business and constantly refining it with, I had a boss at ATG, who said, Bruce, you're not just the product manager of the code that we ship.

Paul: 28:57

Yeah.

Bruce: 28:58

You are the product manager of what he called the whole product, which is all of that,

Paul: 29:02

Yeah.

Bruce: 29:03

which is the machine that delivers value to the customer and makes money in the process.

Paul: 29:09

So what, at what point then, so you've gone to this business, which, sounds like you had a fairly positive experience compared to the, previous role that you'd held and much more aligned with where you wanted to go with things. At what point did you decide, did you needed to go off and, create product, culture and go off on your own?

Bruce: 29:26

Well, that was a bit of an accident too. I had various product management roles. I had, my way up to leadership, been a VP of product and what I was seeing was that product managers, the job was becoming more and more common, and yet there was not a lot of help for product managers in doing the job. A lot of them felt like it was a lonely job and there wasn't much to help, guide or support them. One of the big challenges that I saw was that there was no good software for product managers. They wanted a method for intake of ideas, for prioritisation, for road mapping, and for, communicating the roadmap. And there were a few solutions that had been created like around the turn of the century, and they were old and creaky and. expensive and hard to configure and hard to use, and I got a bunch of demos of these products for my own team to see if we might adopt one. And I just hated them all and so did my team. And so I left my, regular job to start a software company to create some software to do this. To help out product managers, but this was way back in 2013, I think and I was too early, everybody I talked to in product was excited to try the product. We got a beta together and nobody kept using it, not because it was difficult or clunky or didn't have the right features. But because the very candid feedback I got from people was, we don't really have a practice or a process that, to automate We need one, but the tool isn't doing it for us, which is the usual case with software. People kind of expect it will fix everything, when in fact it's just support for doing the right things and they didn't know what the right things were.

Paul: 31:30

Yep.

Bruce: 31:31

So. What they did ask me for was, training or coaching, or consulting. And so I started doing that because I'm just following the customer's need. agAgainI'm providing something that's feasible, desirable, and viable. They're paying for

Paul: 31:48

it. Yep.

Bruce: 31:49

so I started, Started doing a bunch of training and coaching, and I started and in, in the meantime, I had already been to promote my software, been writing a blog and speaking at meetups. And, I got there because that's what the market was asking for. that's how it happened. It's grown from there. I ended up writing a couple of books, as you mentioned, based on that practice. See Todd Lombardo, my co-author on product roadmaps, talked me into writing that first book with him and Evan, because, he'd seen what I'd written and spoken about, with regard to roadmaps. And actually I'm really, quite proud of that book because it changed the practice of

Paul: 32:36

roadmapping Yeah.

Bruce: 32:36

in the world. If you ask people back in 2017 what is a roadmap, they would say, well, it's the dates you're gonna ship features on and now if you ask a product manager, what is a roadmap, they will say it is, it is a thematic roadmap. It is a way of, talking about the big steps that are gonna. Be required to reach your product vision, and that's the thesis of our book, is that it should be a strategic communications document, not a project plan.

Paul: 33:12

to bring this to life, for those out there who aren't involved in the product world, right? Bruce's books are used as textbooks, right? for coursework, for learning for juniors across. I'm,

Bruce: 33:24

amazed the, the book came out in 2017 and our publisher is shifting to print on demand and doesn't, isn't going to do another full print run of, thousands of copies of the book, but It's their most successful product management book, it keeps selling year after year. So they are reformatting it for the print on demand because they don't, they can't afford to have it go out of print.

Paul: 33:52

It's amazing and I love that it's helped you achieve a legacy, which I think is something that a lot of us aim for, but don't necessarily see before it's within our peak, within our prime. Right. Like it's almost something that happens for a lot of people. Their legacy happens after they've gone or once they've retired or whatever. And you are there to see it, the, results of your legacy in, person. So I can only imagine how satisfying that is.

Bruce: 34:19

feel

Paul: 34:19

Yeah. So if we, go back to the early days when you, first started product culture, then I, know how hard it is firsthand to shift people's thinking. What was, the hardest part of, or how did you solve the problem of convincing senior leaders that there was a challenge that, that you were there to solve in the first place?'cause obviously you've connected with the junior and mid-level teams, but you've still gotta convince the stakeholders right?

Bruce: 34:45

Yeah. and increasingly that's where my business is focused, is on the leadership, and fortunately, the leadership has absorbed some of this too through osmosis. Maybe they're hearing it from their teams, or maybe it's been long enough that they were on the teams and now they're in leadership and they have a sense that I don't think we're doing this right. Can we, Can we, talk to somebody who might have the experience that we need and can help us learn? And, but even then, so I've, I frequently get people reaching out because I've written books and I've, I appear at conferences and so on, and asking for help. They like what I'm saying, but they're not sure how to make the change they need to make inside of their organisation. So they are reaching out for help. I find it's not an overnight process. It isn't just like, okay, here's the formula. this is what you're gonna do, just do it, because it's a mindset shift, it often requires learning by doing. when I first started doing training, when I first started doing talks, I was kind of a, I kind of provided people a blizzard of information. was like, here's all the frameworks, here's all the techniques. Here's what you do step by step. now go off and do it. And then I would find that people would come back with very basic questions or they would say, ah, we tried that, it didn't work. And then I would ask them a few questions about how they did it. And I'm like, no, you didn't do it right. so so instead have found is that, what making one change at a time and learning from that, some guidance is much more effective. I'll give you an example. I worked with this company where there were about 20 different engineering teams and they were all operating, as, basic, scrum type teams, manager, tech lead engineers, et cetera. And there was this one particular team that was down on themselves, in their, retrospective at the end of a sprint because they had once again, failed to complete all the work that they had taken on for the sprint. And they, were at about 50% of completion and that was kind of their average for the past few sprints, and they were, they were discouraged about it and I said to them, well, you know, how are you doing your estimates? And they were estimating in hours. And I said, well, have you thought about doing relative estimation? Just like, using Fibonacci or t-shirt sizing or something to to, and then calculating your velocity and then figuring out what your actual capacity is in each sprint. And they were curious. So I just spent like 5 or 10 minutes with a few slides that I already had explaining the method, and then we did it. We just sat down and did it right there. Took us like an hour and a half, two hours to relative size their backlog, and they lo And behold, they, within three sprints, they were within 80, 85% of, accuracy on what they could get done. And they were euphoric. They were like, we have taken control of our destiny. they were so happy that they bragged about it to all the other teams and a month, everybody was doing it. And the kind of creating change that I think actually works is you find one team whose problem, real problem, that they are motivated to try to solve you can help solve and then that spreads it, totally different method than, okay guys, I'm gonna do a training and you're all gonna have to do this. Now this is a mandate from management and that never

Paul: 38:43

No.

Bruce: 38:44

That's the sort of the, I'll give you another example. I worked with this executive team on OKRs and in their first go, they had eight members of the executive team and seven OKRs for the company as a whole for the quarter. And I told them seven is too many.

Paul: 39:05

It's a lot.

Bruce: 39:06

A really successful, advanced, experienced team with OKRs could do maybe three. if I were you, I would start with one and they said, no, we're seasoned executives. It's no problem. We can do this. And instead of arguing with them, I decided to let them learn by experience. Sure enough, they had something like 28% achievement of their OKRs by the end of the quarter. And in their, our reflection at the end of it, It was pretty clear that it was because of lack of focus, because they had just too many. also, they were all very siloed. They were like, except for one, they were, each department basically had an OKR. There was a marketing OKR and a sales OKR, et cetera, and they weren't cross-functional where, which would drive collaboration across the executive team. So gradually, quarter by quarter, we corrected these things and gradually they. Learned how to do this. And, they got down to one OKR shared across the entire executive team that drove a great deal, more focus, success, the achievement, numbers was much higher. And, critically collaboration across the executive team instead of infighting, which is why they had, in retrospect, why they really wanted to have so many OKRs was they didn't want to have to cooperate.

Paul: 40:34

It was all their own unique layer of interest, right?

Bruce: 40:37

Yeah, Each, the marketing person could say, well, I made my OKR, fact that sales didn't make theirs is not my problem.

Paul: 40:45

Yeah,

Bruce: 40:45

And that's the thing you want on an executive team. You want cohesion there more than anywhere else.

Paul: 40:53

we used to, call them, SEPs, somebody else's problem. And, it's definitely, again, it's, up there with one of the most dangerous phrases in any business is if we've got somebody else's problems, we don't care.

Bruce: 41:05

the fascinating thing for me was that there was this focus on, I've done my job, there was this lack of ownership of the real results that the company needed to have. There was a lack of cross-functional collaboration and leadership, and I had kind of thought based on my, the contrast between I market a tiny tech startup and d and b, an old world comp, a huge old world company. I had kind of thought, well, this is just a difference in the ethos of modern tech companies, right? It's just that's the cultural difference. Tech non-tech. But this executive team with the siloed mentality, were a tech company. Every one of them had worked in tech companies before they joined this company. they should have had the tech company culture but it isn't guaranteed just because of the industry you're in or been in, it needs to be created on purpose.

Paul: 42:06

And I think a lot of what you are seeing is incredibly easy to extrapolate out to, non-tech companies as well, right? Like you can see the parallels between where a lot of businesses struggle and, where others who's come out of nowhere and do incredibly well because they look at the world from a different perspective. And I guess that's kind of where I want to go next. So you are the head judge at the prestigious, new venture competition at Harvard. What stories or confounders stories have steered with you from that experience that you've, been able to learn something else from? I.

Bruce: 42:38

the competition, is basically a pitch competition. You, you pitch your idea for a product and it's students and non-students, any, anybody in the community can apply. and there's a panel of judges and there's just a such an enormous range today in who is doing this pitching? Some of it's Harvard students, but lots of it is not and the, it's people from all over the world and, of, some of them, it's just an idea and they're just saying, it's just slides basically. I've got this

Paul: 43:14

Yes.

Bruce: 43:15

here's what I'm thinking. Are you interested? Some of them though, have really taken that ownership mindset pretty far, and it's one or three or a few people who have built a product and gotten the doubt there and have some traction, and are this close to being ready to raise money. maybe they've even raised some friends and family money already and the, I think, I don't know if there's a fundamental insight here other than I've just been impressed with the incredible diversity. These are people, they might all be local to to Cambridge, Massachusetts for this moment, but they're from all over the world and they're from every different, Background, background, ethnically, national nationality, economically and industry wise. there's, it isn't just a bunch of people doing like, social media apps. there were, there every year there's two or three people who are trying to figure out how to help, farmers or herders in disadvantaged countries. people who are, who, you wouldn't even think of as, people who could be reached by technology. But there was this one where they had a series of automated texts that they would, that you could interact with on a feature phone because you can get a text on That was targeted at helping, Farm, small single owner farmers, in Africa get more crop yields from what they were doing and I was just super, incredibly impressed with that.

Paul: 45:01

I think when you bring together such a diverse background, such a. Unusually connected background without a necessarily a strong theme through the middle of it. It's amazing that the learns, I'd imagine that a lot of those people who attend that who pitch also take a lot of insight from the others that are there as well, right? Like it's, kind of everyone's growing together. And to see that variation is it gives you inspiration and hope, right?

Bruce: 45:30

Actually, this was in part, inspiration for the CPO studio that I run. Now, the c the studio is basically a get together for chief product officers or whoever's in charge of product. I don't think titles really matter at a company. And it is that peer interaction, that peer coaching, that comparing. We get together once a month, there'll be a session on Friday and for an hour we will deep dive on one member's challenge. They will present with slides and all. Here is my situation. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish. Here are the challenges I'm running into the things that I've tried that haven't to worked. People, what experience do you have that applies to my situation? What should I do? we workshop it in depth for an hour as the core part of the agenda. In addition to holding people accountable on stuff they've presented at previous and just giving everybody a chance to provide an update. Everybody universally says that the two things that are valuable there is one, they get practical suggestions from other people's experience because nobody has all the experience they could possibly bring to bear on a problem. And two, get validation that they're not crazy, they're not alone in dealing with some of these challenges. Right?

Paul: 46:56

Or maybe that they are, but everybody else is just as crazy, right?

Bruce: 47:00

Just as Right. Everybody's crazy in their own way, but just as Right. we deal with challenges, everything from, Hey, I'm working on a strategy for launching a new product, could you walk, I'm gonna walk you through it and I need everyone's critique, poke holes in it, to, Interpersonal challenges. my CEO is driving me crazy and, I'm gonna give it to him with both barrels, talk me off the ledge or I have a lot of difficulty dealing with my CTO. Is it me or do, or is it him? Do I need to, do I need to escalate this, to the CEO.

Paul: 47:37

I think that's incredible. I can see why it's incredibly helpful for, for lots of different people. And it reminds me very much, there's only one kind of, I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a networking group, but very similar sort of group. We're a different focus. We're not product people, but we come together with the same ideas. We do it every Monday morning. There's five or six of us. We're experts in our own fields. None of us are experts in each other's fields, and we all just kind of bounce ideas off each other. Sometimes we're just ranting about life, but other times we're talking about, you know, our, sales and marketing problems, our offerings, our services.

Bruce: 48:13

Right.

Paul: 48:14

what, and it's, I, think you're right. I think it's about finding your own tribe, right? And I think. That's something that, that runs through your book as well. Your, second book, right? Like it's about helping align all the different tribes within the business.

Bruce: 48:29

Yeah. Yeah. on a common mission, Which can be really hard as we've discussed. and so. A lot of the lessons I learned, both Dun and Bradstreet, to herd the cats and working with, teams, from Scrum teams up to executive teams all over the world. A lot of techniques that I've learned for getting people together on the mission and on the particular, the plan for executing on the mission made it into that book because it's the part of doing the job. I would say specifically of product management, except it's really quite universal in business. It's the part of doing the job that nobody really talks about. Everybody talks about the hard skills.

Paul: 49:20

Yeah.

Bruce: 49:20

gotta learn how to do this kind of analysis, or you gotta adopt these frameworks. and that's all useful, but the stuff that makes that work is the interpersonal stuff is, can you get somebody who doesn't agree with you to come to some understanding and go along anyway? And that's not easy.

Paul: 49:44

Taking'em out for dinner and getting under their skin, right, understanding them a bit more.

Bruce: 49:48

that is in the book is, is in-person, one-on-one informal kind of, Informal in the sense of

Paul: 49:57

Yeah.

Bruce: 49:58

in the office, maybe it's dinner, maybe it's coffee, whatever. maybe you go to the gym but get out of a meeting with an agenda and into we are two human beings. and we probably have some things in common that we haven't thought

Paul: 50:13

Yep. Yep.

Bruce: 50:15

and if we can make that kind of personal connection, it just makes the, times when we have to cope with disagreeing, professionally easier.

Paul: 50:25

Bruce. I could talk to you about this for all, afternoon. Like there is, there are loads of more questions that I have that, that I think are relevant and I think it's incredibly easy to take the learnings from the product world and apply them to almost any business. So I wanna thank you very much for, being a fantastic guest this afternoon and sharing your insights and knowledge with us. I'll make sure that you know, the, links for the books and, your website are in the, show notes. Is there anything that you'd like to leave our audience with as a last thought?

Bruce: 50:53

If you are with me that this is about mindset more than anything else. It's about culture more than anything else. what you said, Paul, about finding your tribe, I think is really important. maybe there are some folks like that in your current organisation. Maybe there aren't. but I want you to, I want you to make it your personal mission to connect with your tribe. There's probably a meetup like Paul's or mine in your area or online that aligns with your culture. Find that, place if you're a product person. You can subscribe to my newsletter@productculture.com and you're in leadership, you can join the CPO studio, but we're whoever your tribe is, don't go it alone.

Paul: 51:43

I love that. Thank you very much, Bruce. It's been a pleasure.

Bruce: 51:46

Same. Thanks Paul.

Paul: 51:47

Thank you at home for watching or listening along, and we'll see you next week on MarketPulse Pros, pioneers.