 Hey everybody, welcome to another talk at Product School. Thank you for joining. My name is Eden and today's topic is Essential Politics for Product Managers. I'm not sure if we've ever at Product School touched on this topic of politics in such an explicit way, but it is the kind of thing fearsome and nebulous as it might be that we just cannot ignore. We have to come to grips with it. So we're going to help you do that. We're going to help you figure out what it means. In fact, by the end of this session, I expect that you will know exactly what we mean by politics, why it matters, how to succeed at politics, what to watch out for, how to manage relationships, and how to gather organizational knowledge that will help you succeed and a whole lot of other additional political concepts. So definitely stay tuned. Before we kick it off, just a bit about myself. I'm originally from a small and dynamic country called Israel, but my home is the United States. I live in the greater Seattle region, working for Google in product management. My specific area at Google is consumer hardware, where I manage features related to privacy, security, and a big vision that we call ambient computing. Before this, I held product and people management roles across other big tech companies, and my formal education is in computer science and business strategy. If after this session you have any feedback or any questions, you're more than welcome to connect, get in touch with me on LinkedIn, and love to hear from you. So let's dive straight in. Here is our agenda for this session. We will first define politics and see why it matters in the workplace. Then at the risk of sounding cliche, we'll go over the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of politics. And as you might guess, because we're dealing with politics, both the good and the bad are recommended. We'll understand why. But we also have the ugly, and that includes some seductive political behaviors that are just plain harmful. And one quote that I really appreciate in this context of politics is from Peter Drucker, one of the prominent management consultants of the 20th century. If your brain for any reason is running out of memory and you can really only store one piece of information, then please do me a favor and make sure it is this statement from Drucker. And let me read it out loud for those of you who are consuming this only as audio. Quote, the most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said. Unquote. Let's lay our foundation with a definition of what organizational politics or office politics is. When we talk about organizational politics, we're referring to attempts by employees of an organization at influencing others to promote their causes, ideas, or decision. After all, the world is still governed by people. And we know that people are messy. They're emotional. They are often irrational. And so influence plays a big role, more than facts and logic put together in determining what organizations do and how they do it. It's just not a rational world. Even data-driven decisions, they're seldom made rationally. How you look at the data, which data you consider, how you decide to interpret the data. This is all decided by individuals. Same thing for big business decisions like which projects your company will invest in or which markets they'll go to or what technologies they're going to use. What their product ad spend will be, these are the type of big decisions that people shape and influence through the use of politics. Employees very widely in their levels of influence. We all know that. Some of this is simply because most organizations are hierarchies where managers formally have influence by authority or by decree. But we all know that's only one side of the coin. Even if we look at people in the same role at similar levels with similar authority being managers or individual contributors, doesn't matter. There is always going to be a difference. Some people are just more influential. Maybe because it comes more naturally to them. Maybe because they've made it a priority. But we see that everywhere. And these differences tend to be remarkable. For example, it's not uncommon at all for one software engineer to have 10 times the influence as their colleague, working in exactly the same team and having very similar skills and experience and formal authority. Researchers in this field of organizational behavior, they actually see this wide heterogeneity across different industries, different roles, and in fact, different countries. So the question is why? What explains this? What special insights or understandings do these much more influential employees have? We'll try to answer that today. Politics is, if you think about it, it's in a way an art of understanding who thinks what about which and then acting on it. So questions like what do people think about certain issues or other people? What are people's relationships with others? What are their preferences? What are their who are their adversaries if they have such? It's about developing a kind of mental map of what the big issues are, what options are being considered, and where key players stand on these issues and options or policies. Now, political employees are the ones who develop and use these insights to wield greater influence. Being political in the office just means being politically cognizant of what's going on, having that mental map, if you will. And it doesn't at all mean being a player or being insincere or being manipulative. It just means developing a perception or a sense of what's going on and using it to increase your own impact and to steer things in the way you believe is right. Of course, there are roles like PMs that are expected by definition to be more influential and therefore more political. You don't have to play politics, but if you're a PM and you want to lead your engineering teams rather than be led by them, then politics matters. And together, we will figure out what this means and how you can do that. But before that, let's talk for a moment about organizations that are free of politics, also known as optical illusions. Look, politics happens when people collaborate and not everyone sees things exactly the same way. In fact, the more ambiguous the work environment is, the more likely it is for politics to emerge. So if you're a one-person company, you don't need to worry about politics because there is not going to be any person-to-person collaboration, it's just you. Likewise, if you happen to work for a company where everyone wants exactly the same all the time or where the rules are so clear-cut that there is no room to make free choices, maybe on an assembly line, then you can probably skip this training too. But for everyone else, if you work around other people and you get to decide at least partially how to do your job, politics is simply a fact of life. And as a PM, you can't afford not to care about it. So I want to say to all of the very techie, task-oriented and rational people out there, first of all, I'm like you. And second, please take note, you can hate those soft-spoken, extroverted people all you want, but they're going to end up being your boss unless you recognize that value of political decision-making, which is how things are done in our imperfect world. But not to cause you too much worry, I want to say that we also have some good news. I know this word politics is justifiably loaded and it's gotten a lot of flak or a lot of bad reputation, in part because of big politics or government politics. But I can reassure you all that being politically engaged at work has nothing to do with any of that. The politics that we're talking about begin and end with the people and processes in your workplace. You can do great in this type of internal or small politics and at the same time be completely disengaged from politics at the public or national level if you choose to. So just be sure not to confound these different types of politics. Now that we know what politics are, how do we do it? Let's first take a look at the good side of politics and it's good because it's safe, it carries little risk and these are just great behaviors to adopt even if you, for any reason, aren't looking to shape and influence opinions. What I'm referring to is you caring about your colleagues, connecting with them, relating to them and developing a perception of what is going on with them. As we've noted, the most important thing is to hear what isn't being said. And the way to do this is to establish relationships, to ask questions, to observe and to listen. This is something that we should be rather strong at as PMs because we should already be doing this with our users and customers. Likewise, we should be well trained at leading without authority because the engineers that implement our product requirements, they're usually not under our direct supervision. This concept applies to politics too. The ability to lead comes from influence rather than authority. So how do we become great leaders without authority, which will also pave the way for political influence? It begins with knowing which people we need to connect to most. Of course, that includes the people whose work we want to influence. So if you're a PM for an app and you have this vision of a brand new user interface, surely you will want to prioritize the UI designer and the front-end team lead, the people that will ultimately have to do this work. But just as importantly, we should also connect with two other types of people. The connectors and the mavens, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them. The connectors are social hubs. They are the best connected people around you. They've been there for a while, they have excellent social skills and they can introduce you to people that you didn't know existed and you didn't know irrelevant to what you're trying to accomplish. These are the connectors. The other type you want to know on a personal basis and on a close basis are the mavens or the experts. They are just people that have a lot of subject matter knowledge and usually they're recognized as such. So they'll be able to give you both constructive feedback on what you need to rework in your idea and if they're on your side, you'll have a much stronger hand when it's time for the senior vice president to make a decision on your proposal. Connect within and across the organization. Make sure you reach far and wide across the company as you build your network and your relationships inside the company. To know what's going on, you will need the big picture and that means extending outside of your group or business unit. Think of these more remote connections as you planting seeds in different soils. The more soils, the more likely it is that one of these seeds will take root and sprout and to improve the odds that they will in fact flourish, make it a mission to provide value to your connections, provide information that they will find useful. Maybe you can volunteer to review and leave comments on documents that they wrote or that they care about and please do all that without expecting anything in return. Be unconditional in providing them with real value. And sometimes not always, but often enough you might get much more back. In the end, the more relationships you foster, the more topics you're gonna have for potential chit chats with the women and men in the back room and that's typically where the big decisions are struck. Do things to show your connections that you care about them as individuals as well and that you're gonna help them succeed. That means get to know them personally, make sure to have some non-work related communication, some small talk, know something about their family, their hobbies and also, more importantly, maybe, is make sure you know what they're trying to achieve and what they care about. If you can figure out what their boss cares about, that will be very useful too. And as you build that trust, you can now afford to ask more sensitive questions. You'll be able to ask what they think about so and so and what they think about the proposal for X, Y and Z or why they think the VP of marketing is no longer allocating any marketing manager to work on project, dead beef, whatever. It never stops to amaze me. Just how much sensitive information you can get by simply being honest and asking. Knowing your boss's politics, this is another critical one. Who are your boss's confidants? Who are their friends? Who do they trust and distrust? What's their relationship to their peers? Their other direct reports, their direct manager, the more you understand the kind of environment your boss operates in and how they fit into that environment, the better you're gonna be at getting on their good side and being able to influence them. For example, let's say you've noticed that your boss gives a lot of respect to what Mary from Corporate Strategy thinks. Well, maybe you have to build a relationship with Mary first and get Mary to support your idea so you can win over your boss. And this matters because your boss is usually the single most consequential backer or a detractor for anything that you're trying to achieve. If they have your back and they're willing to take risks for you, that's like that red and white power-up mushroom in Mario. You eat it, you instantly become taller and bigger. Follow internal communications and announcements. Look, you're not supposed to study it by heart but you are supposed to scan through them periodically and know what's being telegraphed. I would also add to that the corporate website for any interesting news. When you're around people in the know, typically more senior and better connected folks, I bet you they're gonna know what's in these memos and emails even before they've been broadcast. So at the very least, don't dismiss them and read between the lines. These announcements often tell additional stories. Where is the growth? If someone is moving to some new department, are they being shoved aside or assigned to the next big thing? If a certain product is becoming very successful and the CEO is bragging about it to customers, who do you know who's working on it and how can you get in on the action? And what if they mention a promotion for someone that you know even vaguely? Send them a congratulations and recognize the achievement because who knows when you might need something from them. Executive Town Halls, they're like announcements on steroids. They include a ton of information both spoken and that which isn't said. And they can give you a great idea of what the executive priorities are and what gets leadership's attention. If Town Halls are done in person, then just looking at the audience who sits where, push mooses with whom, who's in the first and second rows, there's an enormous level of high-fidelity signal in this data. So make sure to observe and not let this go to waste. Finally, unless you're an all-powerful CEO who ideally has majority control over the company, you can only be a successful influencer if you're willing to compromise and fuse other people's opinions into your own. My personal formula is that if I get 50% of my idea implemented, then I've had a real impact. And that's because most ideas, most of the time, they end up at not 50% but 0%, nothing ever comes out of them. The more people you will need to do something in order to carry out your proposal, that means the more opinions and resistance you're going to face. That's simply the second law of thermodynamics. The amount of disorder in a closed system can only increase. And the only way to break the resistance and encourage collaboration is to embrace the feedback and show people that their opinion matters and truly affects the outcome of things. People that have skin in the game because they've influenced the narrative, they're much more likely to stand behind it. And believe me, I know that sometimes it really aches to compromise on an otherwise perfectly thought-out plan or to deal with people that are resistant to change just because it's changed. But in a world of ego, competition and many emotions, compromise is necessary to overcome these human obstacles. Compromise is our friend. Next up is politicking. This is when you're working to influence a big and important outcome or decision. It's not something you'll do too often but from time to time, when there's a high stakes decision, we made it to roll up our sleeves and get into the mode of politicking. I consider it to be the bad side of politics because like Angel Eyes in the famous Western movie, it requires some sleight of hand, some shamelessness and sometimes even ruthlessness. You'll likely have to take some hidden pleasure in seeing competing ideas struggle and that's because we need you to be fired up about your cause. This is the part of politics where you have to throw your hat into the ring and stand up and campaign for what you want. Very often you'll have to justify why competing ideas are plain wrong. Politicking is about putting diplomacy and neutrality aside and I know that for some of us this doesn't come naturally so let me help you out by breaking down how to do this. The key to successful politicking is understanding where the decision will get made, by who and based on what parameters. Some decisions are formally made in dedicated meetings where you have key stakeholders but other decisions are made on the go, bit by bit. Sometimes it's simply through slow changes on the ground and likewise you may have a clear decision maker typically the most senior person in the room or you may have a very decentralized model of decision making by consensus. I'm not gonna grade these systems today but I want you to know that they do exist including many other forms and they vary by organizations and cultures. Unlike in democratic public politics, in organizations we don't enjoy the clarity of having a designated election day or one vote per one person. So it's critical that we find out how the decision will get done in our particular environment and context. Who is going to make it? Will it be made in a distinct time and place or evolve over time? And just as much what factors are gonna be key to the decision maybe it's what your top customer asks for possibly what can get done the quickest or maybe the option with the lowest risk that people fear the least. The way to find out what it is in your case is through the relationship building exercises that we just went over. The number one thing to take away is that to build a winning political strategy you have to understand how decisions are made. So acquiring this knowledge if you don't have it is the first step to politicking. Venue shopping, this is a term from political science and it refers to finding a decision setting that optimizes our chances for getting what we want. Now you won't always be able to control for this but if you know of a favorable time, place or forum where you're more likely to get what you want then by all means please go shopping and be creative. Maybe you need to travel and be there in person. Maybe you want certain people to attend or maybe to change the timing so that it happens before the quarterly results are out. Whatever it is, the decision venue is hardly ever set in stone. So don't be afraid to engage in venue shopping which is an important part of your preparation. Controlling the decision parameters this is another recommended tactic to influence the decision before it ever gets made. This is you trying to ensure that the strongest parts in your proposal receive significant attention in the process and that the weaknesses of your proposal and trust me you have some too, they don't become major detractors. So let's say that you found out that diversifying the revenue mix is a big thing for leadership and only your proposal would really tap into new revenue streams which promotes what leadership supposedly wants. In this case you'll want to make this a central consideration in the decision-making process and you'll want to incorporate it into your messaging. Now, if in this case the decision setting is the monthly review say with the corporate VP you might want to contact their admin or their chief of staff and ask them to add diversifying the revenue mix into the agenda under the relevant discussion topic. In other words, we want to shape the parameters ahead of the decision so that they emphasize the strength of our proposal and downplay its softer sides. Counting votes is about as straightforward as it sounds it's simple math, but you still have to know the answer of who is with you and who is against you. Of course business is not democratic not all votes are equal or carry the same weight life isn't fair, but make sure to focus on the votes that matter most and try to flip them using various means of persuasion. However, while you do this I want you to have a very good sense of the kind of support and the kind of opposition that you have. Put differently, you're going to be both campaigning and polling at the same time. And part of being bad is not being shy about directly polling the stakeholders to see if they are with you or not. If it takes them too long to say yes, then well, you probably haven't won over them yet. And that brings me to my next point. You will need to refine your proposal and even redefine the parameters as you campaign for it. There won't be a point in time where your proposal is frozen. It needs to respond to the feedback that you're getting along the way so that A, it addresses the key concerns and B, your stakeholders have a vested interest because now it's also their proposal and you've earned a vote of confidence if that's what you can get to. That's skin in the game that I mentioned. And finally, it's not always that easy. Sometimes you're just up against far more powerful forces or far more experienced political actors. Sometimes the parameters have shifted in a way that your advantages have become irrelevant. It's also possible that you're scouting and fact-finding neglected certain insights that are critical to the decision and by the time you find out, it's too late. If this is the situation, if you realize that the odds are against you, that's not the end of the world, but it also means that there is no point in trying to win support in a meeting with hostile views. If you know that you have a lost cause, the faster you back out, the better it is for you and for everyone. You might just realize that switching sides and joining the winning team is a superior way to exert influence and to remain relevant. That's legitimate. In fact, it's something that seasoned politicians regularly find themselves doing. In the famous Western film, Tuko, who is the ugly character in the trio, is in fact a very clever and enterprising gangster. The reason he earned the moniker ugly is because he's wanted for committing so many heinous crimes. And we, as the audience, unlike with the other two characters which are shrouded in mystery, we get to know all about ugly. So I wanna make sure that as you become politically savvy and engaged, you don't leave behind a growing trail of political misdeeds, enemies, and other career damaging artifacts. And sometimes that's easier said than done because politics and especially political success can become very seductive and can lower our guard when it comes to acting professionally and responsibly. So what are the tempting behaviors to avoid? Let's start with this. Don't withhold or restrict information, especially to try to maintain some advantage over others. And that applies to every kind of information. Whenever you know something that someone else doesn't and it would improve their effectiveness, then unless this knowledge is confidential, share it with them. This will help you build a great network of supporters who will be at your disposal when you need them. Look, reality is if you refuse to share information or you pretend not to know sooner rather than later, your colleagues will find out and your presence won't be very welcome. Next, don't speak negatively of other people or situations. There will be delicate moments when you're asked to talk about some difficult person or team or situation. It could be during a review with management. It could be in a one-on-one with your boss. And look, it feels good. You might feel like you're sharing, you're providing information that maybe only you have. It's very emotionally rewarding, but it's not going to help your career when some of the people you talk negatively about or people involved with situations that you talk about will hear or infer in one way or another that you spoke ill about them. If what you're going to say is actually useful to the people you share it with, then you should expect for that to echo around the organization and might just reach the people you're talking about. So what's the right approach? Don't say much if anything. Keep it to yourself. Avoid negativity. Say something like, I'll need to think about it or I have nothing to point out or I can't think of anything bad to say. Do not ban opposing opinions or prevent topics from being discussed. Sometimes we can get away with muscling other people or blocking topics that we don't like from the agenda, but these tiny tactical wins never pay off because they harbor deep resentment and create bitter political rivals. To influence people, we need to make friends, not enemies. If you try to silence someone, they will despise it and they're not gonna be on your side. Credit, don't claim it when you don't deserve it. When you immerse in politicking, you will need to take on some shameless self-promotions. But you have to be wary about overstating your contribution when it really isn't yours. Don't take credit for something where your contribution was just marginal. Instead, use it as an opportunity to praise the people who are responsible for this by name. And believe it or not, they're more likely to become your future supporters even if they're not there when you give them that credit. We talked about avoiding a fight when it's a losing battle. Let's also talk about avoiding a win when it's not important. And usually it's not that important. You don't always have to be better than others and show it to them because on the other side, it's very annoying. Instead, make others feel good by letting them convince you that they are right because, well, sometimes they are. So be sure to acknowledge their accomplishments and give them your respect. As a rule of thumb, winning is only important when it carries strategic significance for us. I think of winning as the result of a struggle where you ultimately get to a desired outcome. But unlike in competitive sports, in real life, winning is not the end in itself. The best workplace politicians, they know that if reality is pretty much what they wanted it to be, that's the win right there. There's no brouhaha. They put on a solid face and they refrain from going on a victory lap. Next up, don't gossip about people. And I mean talking about people when they're not around in a context that's not strictly professional. Sharing information about people's work, that's fine. Talking about how people are doing their work, if it's done professionally, that is fine too. But details about people's personal lives or the type of sensitive information that you wouldn't want others to discuss about you, that's truly to avoid. And if you're pressed to respond, simply say no offense, but I'm not interested in that kind of stuff. Finally, please don't forget what the ultimate goal really is. Politics and influence, they're crucial in allowing us to contribute more and to have a lasting positive impact on what the organization does and how it does it. That is the objective. In contrast, influence that leads to undesirable outcomes such as uncontrolled spending, infighting, or excessive arguments is bad for the organization and ultimately it's bad for our brand and our careers. So let's definitely engage politically and do this responsibly and always with positive intent. We are getting closer to the end, but for those with access to the video, this table is a cheat sheet for PMs that juxtaposes product management and politics. You can print it out and it can serve as a good reminder for what organizational politics involves from you and how it's in many ways similar to the traditional product management that you're familiar with. Just a nice quick way to capture the many ideas that we've been reviewing. With that, thank you so much for attending. And if you found this to be useful, then please be sure to share it with your friends and with your professional network. And I hope to see you again next time.