 Hello, my name is Nares Salem, and I want to talk to you today about how company culture affects product success and direction. A bit about me, I've been in B2B Enterprise software for 17 years, and those are some of my customers, partners, and companies I worked for. I've been in product roles for 12 years. I have owned different types of products, mostly technically complex and a lot of which are heavy on machine learning. I have also built both product and engineering teams, set product strategy and metrics, all things that are very related to culture, hence today's topic, and I'm also an amateur bird photographer. The agenda for today is I will start as a good product manager by talking about the why, the who, and the what of this talk, and the culture. I want to talk about different aspects of the good debate and the ugly, and then I will give some tips around building culture and assessing culture and some closing words. Let's jump right in with the why. Why culture? Well, product is so ingrained in the decision-making of a company that it ends up being highly dependent on company culture, and that is not the same for different organizations. Sales, for example, and sometimes have a culture that is sort of separate and removed from the rest of the culture of the company, but that does not happen with products. So product direction is highly correlated with company culture, and it is also a topic that is not often addressed, not directly at least, but I do think that it's important, and I think it might also benefit if you're not just looking internally, but trying to understand your competitors, their direction, their actions. And why now? Some of us might have seen recently in the news that there has been a push for productivity from companies such as Google, Meta, Shopify, and that is essentially trying to change the culture. So if that's something that you are thinking about, you have to be thinking about the culture because productivity cannot be separated out from that. So who is this talk for? A lot of people, number one would be product leaders. I think that culture is sort of the missing link that goes into a lot of what product leaders need to do, such as prioritization, the ability to have information flow up to you easily so that you're able to make good decisions and culture affects all of these things. If you're an IC, product manager, you will need to understand the culture in order to be able to work with it. And if you want to take on leadership roles, then you can also help shape it. And for everyone else in tech also to understand the decision-making, I have had conversations with people that have had maybe certain issues, and then I point out that the department they're working with has that type of culture which leads to that type of decision-making, which then results in the interactions that they are having. And people have found that helpful. So hopefully tips today will go along the same lines. So let's define the what. So what is culture? Well, this is the definition of Harvard Business Review. It's defined as the ways people in the organization behave and the attitudes and beliefs that inform those behaviors, i.e. the way we do things here, including formal, stated norms as well as implicit ways people work and interact. And that's a good decision, but Netflix has a simpler, more direct one, which is the actual company values as opposed to the nice sounding values. And these values are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go. So in essence, the important decisions. And I would also add that hard decisions can manifest in other places, such as incident response. So you cannot say that you are a people first company, and then if someone is mistreated in your company, things get shoved under the rug. And this does not necessarily have to come from male intentions, but I do think that this is something that culture affects a lot. Things like financial decisions. I want to quote Jonathan Nightingale of the Raw Signal Group, and I took their people management course and he mentioned a story in which a company talked about how they value diversity, and he pointed out to the fact that their office, their building was not accessible. They said that they cared a lot about accessibility. He still pointed out that their office was not accessible. So the financial decisions are also showed, show your values and your culture, and high pressure situations. And these can have very profound financial repercussions. So we probably remember the Volkswagen scandal in which the company essentially cheated on car emission metrics. And when this was investigated, it turned out that it happened because people felt that they were under a lot of pressure and that they needed to find a way to make these numbers work. Here is also another example of culture in action versus the nice sounding things again from Netflix. We know the House of Cards was a very successful Netflix show. And then when Kevin Spacey had sexual harassment complaints, Netflix decided to stop, took the decision to stop season six of House of Cards in 20 minutes. And that's a record time. And it didn't have to be sort of escalated to senior management. And that's something that deserves that we stop and think of how it came to happen because for them to be able to do that, that needed things to happen before the actual event, which was actually true because Netflix really cared about the culture. You were, if you're in tech, you're probably seen or heard of the Netflix culture deck. And they had rehearsed situations like those and that's why they were able to make the decisions quickly. So you have to be deliberate before you actually need to make a decision and actual events are the test and they tell you how well your culture is versus what you want it to be. So let's talk about more examples of the good, the bad and the ugly. Let's start with the ugly because it's the short one. Maybe a lot of us have seen toxic cultures. They're very difficult to deal with and I have a magical solution and it is you can just leave. And of course, everyone has different constraints and this is not easy. However, I have seen from a lot of people that I have mentored that they were in toxic situations and they felt the need to persevere and to sort of keep at it and that that would be the good reflection on themselves. So I want to give people permission to leave toxic cultures because I've seen it affect people's both mental and physical health actually. What about the good? What like, think for a second. What comes to your mind when you think about good culture of a product company? You will probably think about being product led, innovative, metrics driven, agile and experimentation. That's all good and nice but you have to keep in mind that every decision is a trade off and as easy as it is to fall in love with these ideas, they might not be suitable for everyone and they might not be suitable for everyone in all of their company's stages. So if you are a small startup that is just starting out and trying to figure out the product that they will build, it's, you cannot state that one of your values is being metrics driven. If you are in healthcare, you're doing a complex product then maybe moving fast and being agile and breaking things does not work very well for you. So the trade offs need to be taken and I think this is the tricky part that leads to the bad side of the culture. So let's talk about some of the examples of where these trade offs on a spectrum can go wrong. So for example, on the speed and alignment will probably be a different ends of a spectrum and you need to decide where you want to be. So if you end up in a situation that looks like this, everyone is running in a different direction then you're probably ended up on the extreme end towards the speed side. If you find that you are in a situation where everyone is super busy, everyone has meetings all day, everyone has a lot of work but results are not being achieved then you might be in a situation in which you have prioritized alignment and are spending so much time on internal alignment that it is really putting and damping up your speed. Keep in mind that we talked about this list of good things but too much of a good thing is a bad thing and it can end up being a spoiler to your culture. So here are some examples. Collaboration is a nice sounding great value but if you prioritize that too much you will end up in the situation that we were describing which I actually borrowed this just from Marty Kagan when he was talking about prioritizing stakeholder alignment versus following a product strategy. But here is something else that a lot of people are a fan of which is the agile software development process. However, if you take any process agile included to the letter you will end up prioritizing the process over the results and I'll also mention this code which is from Boss Tweed and if the name sounds familiar that's because this is actually a real life character that was portrayed in the Gangs of New York movie. I heard that quote in the movie and it stuck with me because I thought it was very profound and subtle and at the same time the appearance of the law must be upheld especially when it's being broken and I've seen that happen with the agile process. If you forget that the goal of the agile process is to make you responsive to customers and needs and the market changes and you get so hung up on the actual rituals then you're probably doing more harm than good. Being metrics driven is a great thing but we have seen that this can actually lead if you overdo it and you're hyper focused on the metrics that you have achieved in the past and how you can increase them in the future then you can end up losing touch with your customers and I personally think that this was one of the factors that have led to some of the recent tech layoffs that we have seen. There was an expectation by multiple product companies that the demand and growth for digital that they have seen during the pandemic would not just continue but would actually grow post pandemic and this doesn't turn out to be the case because there was not what customers wanted or needed. Experimentation is also a great thing but I have actually seen it as sort of an excuse in low focus and again to make hard decisions for what to choose and as Steve Jobs said innovation is saying no to a thousand things to a thousand good things because you need to choose what to focus on and you can just say well just keep experimenting in different directions because then you might end up losing focus. So we have said that culture is difficult to build and to change and to define even how do we even go about building culture? Well, the first step that you would need to do is to decide and you need to decide on your values. You need to decide on the trade-offs because they are trade-offs. You need to decide where you want to fall on the different spectrum of values and in order to do that, I have personally found that it is very, very helpful to choose people that are different and that what brings to light where your shortages are and extenuates these differences that might not otherwise show. So a lot of companies have culture fit interviews. I think culture fit interviews should be flipped on their heads and used as a tool to include people that have different backgrounds, different skills, different experiences and just diverse on so many different personal and professional criteria and that helps you see what your culture is and how you can change it. If people know Alain de Baton, he is a writer, philosopher and talks about self-discovery and self-knowledge which is a tricky thing. And he says that this knowledge is probably out there in the world outside you about yourself more than it is within you, which is very interesting. So he mentions that probably your friends know more about you than you do about yourself but they're not going to be bothered to tell you. They're just there to have a good time. So if we apply that to business for companies, for leaders, self-knowledge is not easy and you have to be, I think, listening to the ICs, listen to the leaves of your organization because they know but they might not be telling you. So listen to what they have to say and find the trends. You'll probably find differing opinions but you will probably also find trends within the feedback that you get and you might need to read between the lines especially if you're in the management position. So how do we go about then changing a culture? Well, if you have done the homework that we just talked about, you'll probably be able to gauge the delta between where you want to go and how things are on the ground. Everyone needs to be involved and you need to take a very close look at your reward system because that's, as per Netflix's definition, where culture really comes into play. You need to educate people, especially if there is going to be a big change, especially if this is, say, a startup that is scaling and hiring a lot of people quickly. Education needs to be a big part of it and keep in mind that change is a process. It takes time and get help if needed. This is an area where either an advisor or a consultant can contribute a lot if that's an area of focus of theirs and here is a litmus test or a thermometer that I will throw out there. Find out how minorities feel in your company and that's going to be a very good indicator to the culture and to the success of change. If you are out there to include different opinions or you want to collaborative culture or you want to prioritize certain things such as success in getting things done, minorities would be able to tell you a lot of how well that you're doing. Here are also some tips for you if you want to assess the culture in an interview. A lot of people tell me that they find it very hard to assess the cultures of companies they're interviewing with because when they ask questions, they only get ideal answers, which is tricky. That's true. But here is my advice to interviewees. I would recommend that you optimize learning. Look for companies that are not just similar to places you've been to in the past and things that you've worked on in the past but also carry some learning for you. That's very, very useful if you're starting out your career. It's very, very useful if you, for example, are in the middle of your career and you want to get into management. Seeing different things gives you way more experience than staying in the same company or staying in very similar companies. Doing your research, here is a real-life example. I was interviewing with the company and I checked their class door and there was a trend in the employee feedback. I asked about it in the interview and from the response I got I decided this is not really a company that I would like to work for. And ask hard questions and ask about the leadership. I asked if this is a product-led company or a sales-led company or a founder's-led company. And you would be able to assess a lot from the decision-making process of companies. So for example, if this is at 20 people start up and they just hired their first product hire and they're saying that this is a product-led company then probably something here needs to be dug into to be discovered more. So read between the lines and also ask the same question to different people because then you would be able to gauge how aligned people are. We've spoken about how alignment and speed are on the spectrum so it doesn't necessarily have to be a good thing. That's the tricky part. But if you ask for example, what's the primary goal of this product area and different people say different things then that's something that you might want to consider. And again, hereby I give you permission to ask to talk to more people other than the people that you have interviewed. It's okay for example, if you're interviewing with say a hundred person company and you're a product manager to ask to talk to the CEO because we have been talking about how decision-making is so related to product and it will affect the CEO will probably in a direct or indirect way affect your ability to succeed in your role. So here are the closing words for us to wrap up. Culture affects decision-making and product success. So you have to pay a lot of attention to it and educate yourself. You have to decide on your trade-offs. Nice sounding values will just not get you there. You have to decide what to prioritize and what to trade off with. And if you don't actively define your culture it will probably end up getting defined for you. And depending on your stage that might be a good or a bad thing but you just have to be aware. I highly recommend people who haven't checked out the Netflix culture deck to do so. Gibson Biddle actually tackled the issue of culture heads on. So I would also highly recommend his talk how Netflix built an innovative culture by Gibson Biddle. When Marcy Kagan talks about product strategy a lot of the things he talks about are related to culture like the stakeholder idea that I talked about. So that's also a great reference that I found. Thank you so much for listening. Hope this was useful. You can find me on my website, nahelasalem.com if you have further questions or you have a situation that you would like to discuss. Thanks again.