 Hi, everyone. My name is Chi-Dem. I'm a product manager at Spotify. Today, I'll be talking about how to navigate different personalities as a product manager. I wanted to cover this topic today because needless to say, communication is at the heart of every product manager's day-to-day life. Sometimes you will have conflicts, difficult conversations, or at any occasion it will be important to understand the differences between people to communicate effectively. Another reason is that I'm a complete nerd about psychology and personalities, and this is an interesting topic for me to talk about. As part of this presentation, I will also give some examples to some personas that you might encounter in your PM life and talk about some strategies to communicate with them. So let's start. Product managers work with a wide variety of people every day, engineers, stakeholders, engineering managers, designers, other PMs, and so on. And these people are not only diverse in terms of demographics or their experiences, but they're also diverse cognitively. Cognitive diversity is the assortment of certain characteristics, including personality traits and communication styles. Cognitive diversity is the reason that some people seem to just get you. You click with them, but with some people, you feel a disconnect or misunderstandings happen a lot. The people you connect easier probably share some of your characteristics or your communication style. Let's dive a bit deeper into personality. Definition of personality is roughly characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. People show differences in how they respond to same situations based on their personality traits. The way we go about our life, the way we dress, how we talk to someone, how we react to situations, these would follow the same kind of patterns if we were to examine our lives. We sometimes find ourselves saying things like, oh, this is so typical of Jane, or if you know a person enough, you predict the way they'll react to things. All these are because you observed them and you got an idea of their personality. There are different frameworks to measure and classify different personality types, and there are several assessments and inventories for each. These are the top three frameworks that are widely used. While there are many different personality frameworks, they largely focus on similar attributes. I'm not gonna go into detail about these frameworks. I encourage you to check them all. You might already be familiar with Myers-Briggs type indicator. It has kind of made a place for itself in culture nowadays. You can find the online assessment for it in the internet and find your own type, but take it with a grain of salt as Myers-Briggs theory is not backed up with empirical data. Out of these three models, only the five factor is empirically supported. If we want to communicate effectively with everybody, we might need to employ different communication strategies for different personalities. What I did here is I created some example personas that I have myself encountered in my PM life. These will seem a bit stereotypical and they are for the sake of this presentation, but I'm pretty sure you're going to encounter a blend of these characters during your PM life. And I'm gonna suggest some strategies to follow for each persona. So our first persona is Annie. Annie is very reserved and generally quiet. She does not contribute to discussions and likes to work alone. It seems like Annie has an introverted personality. Introversion is a scale. Some people are more introverted than others and it does not necessarily mean they are shy or unfriendly. Unlike extroverts who gain energy from social interactions, introverts consume energy in social situations. The worst thing you could do here is to expect her to behave like an extrovert. Don't make her feel like she have to pretend to fit in. It will be very counterproductive. Introverts tend to prefer small groups and quiet settings or crowds. They might feel more comfortable doing things alone or with one or two people. And they tend to open up after getting to know you better. So try to establish a one-to-one relationship with Annie. Have some coffee breaks together, go to lunch together. If you're at the office, get to know each other. She would feel more comfortable around you after getting to know you outside of work context, outside of meetings as well. Don't put her in the spotlight in the meetings. Give her time to prepare for her answers. If you're calling for a meeting, inform her about the goal of the meeting in advance so she can prepare. Well, in fact, you should be doing this with every meeting in my opinion, but it's especially important when it comes to introverts. Maybe she is more comfortable with writing instead of talking. So when you need to ask her something, instead of calling her, maybe you can just message each other over Slack or something. And make sure her opinion is heard. She might have brilliant ideas that are not being incorporated because she felt intimidated to voice them. You can get her ideas in one-to-one settings as well if she doesn't feel comfortable in groups. And definitely don't forget the credit her work. Well, credit everybody's work, but usually it's the louder people in the room who get the most recognition and introverts tend to not get enough credit for their work. So make sure to show them that their contribution is seen and valued. Let's go to our second persona, Andy. Andy is the opposite of any. He is super extroverted. He's the one who dominates the discussions. He has the desire to take charge and tends to impose his point of view. So this could be someone in your engineering team or it could be a fellow PM or a stakeholder. A very confident and loud personality may come across as the most persuasive, but there are other opinions in the room too. They could make less assertive people feel uncomfortable sharing their opinions, which would result in the loss of potentially good ideas. So if you're in a meeting together and you feel like this one person is dominating the discussion, you can create space for others by asking directly to give their thoughts too. Something like, Jenny, what do you think about what Andy says? This would help the less dominant people in the room feel included and also suddenly remind Andy that other people's opinions should be heard too. And when communicating with Andy, be assertive and firm, have a neutral stance. If you try to suggest something in a meek manner, he might walk all over you and dismiss your idea. So stand your ground and focus on tangible facts and data. You can look for win-win opportunities, common grounds, where they feel less compelled to brush you aside. And dominant people are usually willing to take on new challenges. They're action-oriented and hands-on. So if this person is in your engineering team, for example, you can incorporate his strengths for the team's success. Like he might be great at presentations or you can have him in your pitch meetings to back you up. He probably would enjoy being part of these and you get to use his strengths in your product's favor. Our third persona is Mark. Mark is sensitive and impulsive. He struggles with taking criticism, deflects blame onto others. This is a guy that you probably wouldn't want in your social circle, but here you are working in the same product team or same company. You may subconsciously try to keep away from him, try to avoid confrontation unless it's absolutely necessary, but this is definitely how I felt when I was dealing with such people. Of course, this does not help anyone. You need his contribution to deliver products and avoiding him is not the way to go. And not addressing such behaviors will enable him continue and affect the entire team. Doesn't matter if he's a super genius engineer or a very tenured stakeholder, he shouldn't get a pass for such behaviors. So these behaviors should be addressed privately in a one-on-one conversation. I would suggest to set up a friendly coffee session or bring this up when you're grabbing lunch together. And the important thing is to describe the behaviors and how it affects you or the team and not describing him as a person. Communicate friendly, but assertively and set clear expectations and boundaries. If you're addressing the deflecting blame part, remind him that everybody works for the success of same product, we're in the same boat and nobody gets punished for mistakes. So rather than finger-pointing, let's focus on how to fix the things and go forward. And after the feedback, it can be that he will be more self-aware and he'll actually make an effort to change. Our last persona is Jenny. Jenny is pessimistic and complains a lot. She is unanticipistic about new projects and focuses on the negatives. Negativity can be contagious. This could affect the mood of the entire team. And it's hard to get negative people's buy-in. Seems like they always find a reason to disagree and they tend to prefer status quo over trying new things. But in this case, it makes sense to first try to understand why she's feeling this way because sometimes due to past experiences with failed projects or things not going as expected, people might have this emotional baggage, so to say, at disbelief. And usually this is caused by the lack of inclusion and visibility of long-term strategy. And if this is the case, you can help changing it by being more transparent with her and with the entire team. And usually listen to our concerns and make her feel heard. Only listening alone and acknowledging her concerns can reduce the negativity overall. Ask her about her alternatives and her suggestions. And while talking about these, you can ask her what's going well. You know, there must be something that she appreciates, she celebrates and emphasizing that could remind her that there are good things around as well and maybe encourage her thinking a bit more positively. And as a PM at all times, you should cultivate a positive mindset around you. This does not mean you don't talk about risks, failures or uncomfortable topics, not at all. Cultivating positivity can be as simple as sending birthday cakes, making fun team events, sending memes, making jokes. These little things have an enormous effect to team health that will win over even the most pessimistic personalities. You can't change people's personalities, but you can shift the way engaged with them. Understanding personality traits will help you understand people around you better, allow you not to take things personally and manage your own emotions in difficult situations. So far we mostly talked about other people. Now let's take a look at our own selves. Let's talk about emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others. In order to understand other people, to empathize with them and build strong relationships, you need to leverage your own emotional intelligence. There are four pillars to each you. Self-awareness is about recognizing your own emotions and how they affect your own thoughts and behavior. Self-management is controlling impulsive feelings and behaviors, managing your emotions in healthy ways. Social awareness is understanding the emotions, needs and concerns of other people around you. And relationship management is developing and maintaining good relationships, communicate clearly, influence others and manage conflict. You can work on some strategies to master these four aspects and increase your emotional intelligence. To increase your self-awareness, you can get a feedback from people. In the work context, this could be your engineers, PM colleagues, stakeholders. And if you don't wanna do this face-to-face, you can do it via the help of some apps where people can give you anonymous feedback. And this way you can understand how people are perceiving you and your behaviors. And rather than focusing on changing or avoiding your emotions, just accept and acknowledge them and try to pinpoint what is it that you're feeling exactly and what triggered it. You may benefit from journaling. Journaling will help you understand how you react to events and how you feel in various situations. After feeling more self-aware, you will have better chances to manage yourself in certain situations. When you feel like you're emotionally charged in a situation, learn how to calm yourself with breathing techniques. Take your time before reacting, do your breathing exercise and revisit the situation after you calm down. And identify the activities that recharge you and use them within your week to get your mental energy back. And learn to learn from mistakes. Think about the situation that you handle poorly and think about what could have been done better. Next time in a similar situation, try to apply those learnings. As to improve your social awareness, careful observation is the key. Give attention to how other people react to situations. Observe their bad language, facial expressions, give them their posture. And this is how you'll have an idea of people's personality traits. Practice active listening at all times. Sometimes we're too excited to say what we wanna say and in such moments, we're not actually listening but waiting for our turn to talk. And when that's the case, we might actually miss what the other person is saying. Always give your attention to the person you're talking to and try to understand. And empathize. Empathy can actually be improved by practicing it. Acknowledge your biases and talk to people without judgment. Expose yourself to people who are different than you. And actually reading fiction books will help you increase your empathy because it requires you to enter characters' lives and minds and by doing so, you will increase your capacity to understand other people's thoughts and feelings. And performing effective relationships. Strive to build trust. To build trust, focus on being consistent with your words and actions and keep your commitments. Share extensively and provide context. Adapt to different situations. This does not mean you'll give up your authenticity. You can still adapt to different people, different situations by still being authentic. The exercise we did with our personas is a good example of adapting yourself to different situations. And finally, express appreciation and feedback. People feel good about themselves when they get positive feedback. It helps them feel capable, motivated and valued. And expressing respect and appreciation to others will lead people to develop a meaningful bond with you and help you maintain positive relationships. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. It was a pleasure to talk to you and I hope you found something valuable in this. I wish you success in your PM lives and thank you for listening.