Bryanne Pashley is Director of Product Management at Ziff Davis, overseeing a portfolio of publications covering consumer technologies, services, and trends. The publications — CNET, PCMag, Mashable, and ZDNET — are collectively referred to as the CNET Group. Bryanne began her career in business intelligence at Everyday Health Group before transitioning to The Weather Company. She later served as Senior Director of Global Data Products at Condé Nast.
In our conversation, Bryanne talks about how she enhances and develops soft skills, such as empathy, within her team. She emphasizes the importance of both approach and delivery when communicating, and also shares three main points for improving communication: diagnosing worlds, organizing thoughts clearly, and assuming good intentions.
From a technical integration perspective, my team owns the frontend product strategy and content workflow. That means that I’m very focused on the vision for our user experience. I’m usually asking myself a lot of questions, such as:
We work closely with many different stakeholder groups. A lot of our time is spent with design and engineering, as well as with our editorial teams across the different sites that we touch. It’s all about how we enhance the content we’re putting out and collaborate on new ways of bringing expertise to our readers.
Absolutely. When I say “unblocking,” I mean making sure that the core group of product engineering, project management, and design works together effectively and productively. I also want to ensure that everything is balanced — I want to bring everyone along while also not wanting to waste anyone’s time.
Not every PM or designer’s vision ends up on the site. We sometimes find — through user testing or other means — that even if an idea is great, sometimes it’s not viable or can’t happen right now. Part of that unblocking means coming to an agreement and thinking through how we balance where we’re spending people’s time among technical and functional groups.
For example, we’re practicing bringing design in early in the process. Essentially, we’re including them in the brainstorm early, but doing so in an effective way to pressure test internally. We’re striving toward having communication in place so everyone has the information they need at the most optimal time. It’s a two-way street.
Consistent communication will bring you halfway, but your approach during that communicative process is just as important. Demonstrate open-mindedness and stay ready to learn. Ask questions and try to listen during these conversations. That way, if something difficult arises, you’ve already established a baseline and understanding of the potential impact. You’ll be able to consider what the problem looks like for the person you’re speaking with, which can enable you to have more empathy and find solutions faster. It’s all connected.
This advice feels very simple, but it’s often easier said than done — when stakes are high, these foundational elements can slip.
The main two soft skills are communication and following through. Communication means knowing how to talk to people with different motivations and follow through means doing what you said you were going to do when you said you’d do it. Both are essential to building trust and having productive working relationships with stakeholders.
Communication is a bit nuanced as a skill to develop, enhance, and grow within yourself and other people on your team. There’s a quote I like that is something like, “How well we communicate is not how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”
To lead effective communication, you should be thinking about questions like:
One soft skill that is both very important that can be challenging to coach is empathy. To grow it, it’s good to ask things like what are the components that make up empathy, and what are the pieces that can be barriers to empathy? I focus on removing otherness and exploiting motivation. When we think about empathy, we all have some baseline — empathy for whom? Typically, it’s with those we relate to in some way. In organizational settings, a demonstrated lack of empathy typically comes from the mentality of us versus them.
If there’s friction, that can mean there’s something that is removing the two parties from being the same or equal. It’s hard to relate to someone who you see as your competitor. That leads to difficult relationships, even in instances where both parties agree. I try to highlight similarities and show that even if two people aren’t very alike, they share a common goal. They might have common pressures from the organization, team, or leadership, which can nudge people closer to empathy as well.
Motivation draws people to the currencies they value. Then, you can demonstrate how displaying empathy, even if it’s just for optics, is aligned with their motivations. If they’re motivated by, say, reputation or importance, their status within the organization or team can be improved with changes to how they take in or consider stakeholder feedback. Over time, you build a habit within team members where openness to feedback gets baked into the process. Even if it originally starts as self-serving, the habit builds good relationships.
Growing and enhancing communication involves three big ideas. One of them is diagnosing worlds. Broadly speaking, this could be examining yourself and considering your biases, your motivations, as well as other external and internal factors that impact how you see situations. On a more micro level, it could be about a situation and what your specific take on it was. Next, do the same thing to “diagnose” the worlds of the audience you’re talking to. What are their motivations? What are their pressures? What are their external factors?
The second point is to organize your thoughts clearly. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying or who you’re talking to; if it’s circuitous or convoluted, whatever you’re saying is not going to be well understood. There are many different ideas on how to do this, but a simplified Minto Pyramid works well as a starting point. You don’t need to do that full exercise for every conversation you have but you should have some concept of what you’re trying to say. Consider which supporting pieces exist and which need to be explained further.
Lastly, always assume good intentions. You can resolve a lot of miscommunication by assuming that what someone has brought to you comes from a good place. Also, always be more willing to listen. If someone makes a statement that conflicts with your thoughts, assume that it’s because they have a good reason for their conviction. Remember, ideas are not a battlefield and communication is not a competition. These opposing thoughts are probably coming from a good place.
Yes, and it’s something that I have to think about for myself, too. Overpromising can mean promising something that’s too big, and it can also mean promising something that you can’t accomplish at the time, even if it’s reasonable.
A big thing I like to do and encourage my team to do as well is to ask when is this needed and who needs to get updates on this task? We need to be able to step back and ask, “Is it realistic that I can accomplish this with everything else that’s on my plate?”
Whenever I ask my team for timelines, I want to make it clear that if I’m asking when something will be available, it’s not necessarily because I needed it yesterday — it’s because understanding that timeline may create follow-on work for someone else. This clarity is key for planning. Furthermore, if you promise the wrong thing or promise to over-deliver on something that you can’t get to, let the person know. As long as it’s not your MO every single time, it will buy you a lot of goodwill.
I’ve taken different paths to do this. I’ve used assessments like DiSC that break down how people work best with others. This helps you understand motivations and how they like to be recognized. This all comes back to this notion of diagnosing a person’s world. What are their external factors? What pressures do they face?
Keep these things in the back of your mind when you’re talking to that person — both in times when you’re trying to build up something within them and when you want to provide them with recognition. We all internalize recognition in different ways. Often, coaching is not just about leveling up a deficiency, it’s also about letting the person know when they’re doing something awesome.
I find that when interviewing, people know what you want to hear. So, in the absence of a red flag, the hiring process can be challenging. I use two avenues to deal with this. One part is including other stakeholders or cross-functional groups within the interview process. Having multiple perspectives is good in general, but beyond that, other people will hear or ask things differently than you do. They could notice something that raises positive signals for how someone works with others, and they could also note potential warning signs for how someone talks about or works with specific groups.
The second piece of this is thinking through stakeholder management and asking questions that touch on that. Working with stakeholders is so much more than teamwork — it’s about listening, and frankly, it’s having humility in the face of mistakes. When you’re talking with interviewees about some of the more technical or experiential work they’ve done, listen for these two aspects. Pay attention to how they talk about cross-functional teams when they’re describing their past work. Of course, in an interview setting, everyone talks about themselves as the main character, but how do they mention or bring in other team members to the story?
Yes. Asking questions about how a candidate has pivoted after negative results on a project tells you a lot about how they take in failure. Asking them to describe the last time that they asked for help can be quite illuminating as well. I’ve had candidates share interesting stories — both small and large — but also some will reference an example from many years ago.
With these answers, you can get a hint of their willingness to be wrong or ask a peer for input. You’ll also get a hint at their willingness to let leadership know that they need a hand. Once they come on board, it’s more than likely that not every conversation or relationship with a stakeholder is going to go swimmingly. You have to trust that, if there are causes for concern, they will raise them early and that you could help them through that.
Earlier this quarter, we launched 100 Days of Holiday, an initiative for the holiday season as part of the CNET Group. That came with a lot of editorial work — it took a lot of media teams, advertisers, sponsorship development, partnership, and product and engineering initiatives that set up new ways for our readers to engage with the gifting experience.
There were several groups involved in making this successful, and a lot of different nuances to what each team needed for their portion of that pie to work well. There were challenges along the way, but I feel it was a real coming together moment for the involved teams. It was a true cross-functional effort and an amazing opportunity for people to showcase that collaboration and bring something wonderful to our user base.
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