Brian Peterson is Head of Product, LifeMart at Care.com. He began his career in product marketing at EMI Music before transitioning to Sony Music Entertainment. After four years, Brian left to pursue his own startup, Bandbox, and then joined the product management team at Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). Leveraging his prior product and technology experience, Brian joined Campminder, a company focused on summer camp management software, as VP of Product, before starting his current role at Care.com.
We sat down with Brian to discuss how he creates empowered teams by establishing a shared vision across teams, organizations, and the company. He shares his leadership framework, which consists of four key elements: leading with empathy, speaking the truth, casting a vision, and equipping for success. Brian also talks about a time when granting more autonomy to his team led to an especially successful outcome.
LifeMart is part of Care.com, which is a two-sided marketplace that connects caregivers with families and people seeking care. This encompasses child care, elderly care, pet care, etc. That’s still our primary product and service, but there’s a big part of Care.com that people aren’t aware of: the enterprise side or the B2B side, which relates to employee benefits.
LifeMart is an add-on product and is what we call an employee discount or member discount platform. When you work for a full-time employer, you have medical and dental benefits, as well as our care benefits. That comes with pet care, backup child care, daycare, day camps, employee discounts, and more. It’s like an ecommerce affiliate platform that provides employees discounts on anything you can think of. Many Fortune 500 companies use us for their employee care benefits. It’s a great service for employees.
As a startup founder and CEO, an extreme example of an important lesson I learned early on is that every company is resource-constrained. There’s never enough time, never enough people, and never enough money to do everything — it doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or if you’re Apple or Google.
That lesson taught me the importance of focus and prioritization. Practically, it means knowing what you’re going to say no to. You can say yes to that one most important thing, but the other nine will probably have to be no’s. The sooner you get better at focus and prioritization, the more successful you’re going to be.
I’ve developed a framework for this that consists of four elements: leading with empathy, speaking the truth, casting a vision, and equipping for success.
Leading with empathy is based on the fact that as leaders, we don’t always understand. I don’t know what my employees or my team members are going through every day or what their circumstances are. There’s this element of listening, understanding their perspectives and emotions, and acknowledging their struggles or if they’re having problems. When you lead with empathy, you put yourself in their shoes. It’s important to start with that.
The complement to that is speaking the truth. This is the capacity to speak honestly and directly to your teammates, even when it’s uncomfortable or difficult. It often means pushing back or challenging their beliefs. For example, if someone says to me, “We’ll never get this done,” I counter with, “Well, tell me more about that. Why will we never get this done?” That radical candor comes in by sharing difficult and uncomfortable feedback while always doing so with kindness.
Next is casting a vision — the ability for us, as leaders, to inspire our people and motivate them. We see what they can’t see, so we often need to paint them a picture of what’s possible as a team and for a company. It’s also necessary to do this for them on the individual level in their own careers. They need to see how their actions and efforts can contribute to this vision.
Last is equipping them for success. This goes back to providing the team with the resources, training, and skills they need. It means, as a leader, I’m sharing my time and my expertise with my teams and giving them access to the tools they need.
I like to describe empowered teams as having an owner mindset. That involves taking the initiative and clearly owning outcomes. The action that I see most necessary to create empowered teams is to first establish a shared vision across the company. That is the number one obstacle for not having empowered teams.
Product managers are here to support the company, and the roadmap is here to support the company’s objectives. As a result, we need to know where we’re going and why. The other action is making sure my team is a part of the collaboration that happens around the strategy. They need to have buy-in for not only where we’re going, but also how we’re going to get there.
Finally, practically speaking, it’s crucial to have that ownership spelled out clearly. You should never have two people who own the same initiative, project, or outcome. It’s always one person. You can have supporting roles, but everyone should be clear in what they own and what their responsibilities are. The last thing I would say is to make sure that leaders are ready to equip teams with the appropriate resources. Teams need leaders’ support, and part of equipping teams is making sure they know their leaders have their back.
There are three kinds of regular milestones I like to leverage. They’re all meeting-based, but they’re essential to ensure that feedback loops are in place:
There’s a dichotomy to what I call establishing clear guidelines, which is making sure there’s a clear line in the sand, and allowing teams to have the freedom to color outside the line. Having clear guidelines goes back to that shared vision and collaborative strategy across the company. Another component is having the right process in place. As a product manager, I know what I’m supposed to be doing and what the expectations are for a process.
For example, hypothetically speaking, a product manager might have authority to spend $10,000 on a tool, but any expenditure exceeding $20,000 would require approval from the CFO. This is a clear guideline, whereas coloring outside the lines factors in during the execution part of a process. Say I have team members who would prefer to meet in person. We don’t have to meet in person to achieve a specific outcome, but they have the freedom to request it. Or if they want to work asynchronously because that’s their preference, they can do that. The guidelines and the outcome should be clear, but how we get there can be creative.
It’s always been about time together. The hybrid or the remote component creates more of a challenge because you have to be more intentional about spending time together. But, if you have a consistent meeting structure in place, that allows for those types of connections.
As the leader, it starts with you. And it starts with authenticity — being real, being vulnerable, and sharing the good and the bad. Show you’re a human being and lead by example. The other part of leadership is saying what you value and then living out those values. Consistency in demonstrating what you say is important.
That’s how trust is built on a more interpersonal level. From the perspective of company or team building trust, it’s about delivering results and making sure your team is successful. Nothing builds more confidence in your leadership than when the team is winning. That’s part of why radical candor is important. You have to give feedback when something isn’t working. That way, when you achieve success, the team knows everyone underwent big changes to get there together. That builds a lot of confidence and trust across the organization.
At my previous company, we were working on an initiative that was more like an integration strategy. Essentially, we were integrating marketing and communication tools, and we had this particular vision of how that would work. It was coming from the top down, and it was honestly ill-informed. We were making a lot of assumptions.
I was able to empower one of my product team members and I told her, “Don’t just take what we’re telling you. Go do your own research and question these assumptions we’re making.” She took a little extra time, but I empowered her to go do that and she came back with a better product. The initiative overall benefited because she talked to customers and understood the pros and cons of each option.
We wound up building a more internal, integrated communication feature that our customers loved, and it added a lot of value that they were willing to pay a lot more for. Our users, customers, and company overall benefited because she was empowered.
The number one barrier I’ve noticed is a lack of shared company vision. The reason why that’s so important is because everything a product manager does is based on the product’s roadmap. There’s a backlog and PMs are always trying to execute on deliverables. The biggest thing that derails that — and derails a product manager’s sense of empowerment — is an executive telling them to suddenly change direction. The first thing in my playbook is to have a shared vision because otherwise, I’ll never have empowered teams. They’ll just feel like order takers.
Oftentimes, executives say, “Of course we have a shared company vision!” If the CEO or executive team says that, I say, “Great, let me go talk to a dozen people across the organization.” If I hear people repeat that back to me using their own words, that’s validation. But most of the time, I hear 12 different things from 12 different people. That gives me a clue. Then, I go back to the executive leadership team and say, “OK, this is not clear, and here’s why. Here are the steps we need to take.”
Another practical thing that I like to do early on is to develop what I call a product portfolio. Let’s say you have this vision and direction. The product portfolio is saying that you’re going to make 10–15 percent investment in this product vertical and another 10 percent in this other vertical. The reason for doing this is to highlight the different investments that a company has to make because it’s never in just one product or one feature. You have to keep the lights on, invest in your technical debt, invest in your user experience, etc.
It’s like a stock portfolio, and you have to get a rough agreement around where you’re investing in each area. Then, you can structure your team so each person owns a vertical. They’ll have, say, 10 percent of the resources, and they’re empowered to go make the decisions for that vertical. Without that, there are always ridiculous trade-off scenarios that never work.
The number one indicator for me is how often the product manager is asking me for approval. There’s a difference between when a product manager comes to me and says, “Hey, Brian, here’s what we did. Here’s our vision and strategy — what do you think? I would love your feedback,” and “What do you think I should do?”
In other words, there’s a difference between sharing a vision and asking for permission to do something. When I regularly hear a team member asking me for permission, that’s a sure sign that they’re not feeling empowered. Something’s off. They don’t have what they need. A lot of times, that’s on me — maybe I haven’t made it clear enough what their ownership is.
If this problem arises, all it takes to fix it is a direct conversation. I let them know that they’re here to deliver value to customers and the company, not take orders from me. They should be curious, and it’s usually just a matter of a conversation to get to the root of the issue. It all comes back to communication.
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