Leader Spotlight: The invaluable role of EQ in product, with Priyankka Mani

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Priyankka Mani most recently held the role of Chief Product & Design Officer at Lonely Planet. After completing her MBA, she started her career as a product manager at Google driving digital evangelization, revenue, and innovation with large media agencies. Priyankka then moved over to Amazon, where she worked for almost a decade on mobile shopping, Kindle user experience, global price perception, and Prime Video. Most recently, she led product and design at Lonely Planet and continues to juggle multiple pursuits, including advising startups and playing the role of a product coach.

In our conversation, Priyankka talks about how emotional intelligence ties closely to outcomes and how empathy and curiosity are key to enhancing learning. She shares her journey of learning to reframe a deep fear of failing and rejection into a learning mentality, and how that has made her a more successful product leader. Priyankka also discusses how approaches to failure may differ based on a company’s size and resources.

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Focusing on outcome instead of output

Earlier in your career, you successfully built and scaled products and businesses from 0 to $100M at Amazon and Google. How did those early experiences shape your approach to product management?

I’m very lucky to have grown in Amazon’s school of product management. While it’s a large organization, there are many pockets where innovation happens from the ground up. You get the benefit of resources with the opportunity to build zero to one, and I learned a few things from the process.

Number one is consumer-focused thinking. The biggest learning in my early days was that product management is not about, “I have a great idea, let’s go build it.” It’s about understanding where the consumer is struggling today and the opportunity for you to fill a gap. Then, you work backward to see what technology or product you can build out. You put the consumer at the absolute center of all of this.

Number two, product management is one of the toughest jobs out there. You are accountable for everything, but you don’t necessarily get credit for everything. One of my biggest learnings was the importance of relationships, especially when you’re working with multiple cross-functional teams. How do you bring these organizations together and have them march toward a vision? How do you get them to buy in? It’s okay if I’m disagreeing with somebody — it’s not just about building consensus or doing the most popular thing, it is about doing the right thing.

In the process, it is important to ensure that people feel heard. Be empathetic with their side of the story and be curious when someone doesn’t agree with you. Have an open mind, consider the data and perspectives along the way, and let that shape your view of the right thing to do.

Number three is mechanisms. This is everything from understanding your consumer better to how you communicate with your stakeholders and making sure everything stays on track. And lastly, a lot of product managers associate their success with having a product idea, and once it’s built, they’re successful. Success should not be the output, success should be the outcome. If you built something that garnered a ton of traffic and made a consumer feel that their pain point was resolved — that is the outcome we need to look at to say whether a product was successful or not.

Do you have an example of a time when you found yourself more focused on the output versus the outcome?

Early in my career, I was working in an emerging market — an extremely mobile-first marketplace. My goal was to make sure that we were growing our mobile reach and building products that were engaging consumers. I initially took a very siloed approach to say, “I need to make sure people are coming onto the platform. That’s the most important thing.” I kept running up against a lot of other organizations that would ask, “Why are we incentivizing people to be on the mobile platform? Why aren’t we allowing consumers to make that decision on their own?”

I was invested in my idea and way of doing it, but as I had more conversations, I realized that people weren’t saying, “You can’t do it.” They were just asking me, “Do you have enough customer information that you know this is the best approach?” That forced me and my team to do enough research to understand if consumers truly saw the value we thought they would from this product. In parts, I had made an assumption. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with different ways of doing this. I put checkpoints in place to make sure it wasn’t causing friction to the normal experience.

How EQ ties to outcomes

You spoke about the importance of putting the customer in the center. What about the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ)? Could you talk about that a bit?

Emotional intelligence is so important when working with your peers and across organizations. I’ve done a lot of work setting product visions, building organizations, and undergoing massive digital transformation. My biggest learning is that digital transformation can be very tough. It can feel frustrating to have to have conversations around topics that you would take for granted in more evolved tech setups. At the same time, it can also be transformative to have a group of people with diverse perspectives and different experiences of growing businesses. There is a lot of learning that you can take from that experience and humility that you can bring to it.

I read research that said that less than 30 percent of companies that try digital transformation succeed. And the reason for that is people. People are wedded to the way they do things and scared of what technology will do to their roles. There are a lot of emotions involved. If you come to the scene like, “I know what the right thing to do is, let’s just go get it done,” you’re likely to fail. That experience taught me, more than anything else, that EQ ties closely to outcomes.

EQ comes into play by having a clear understanding of the outcome. What is it that you want to drive eventually? If you keep optimizing to that, you can ask yourself in every conversation, “What will lead me to the outcome that I’m chasing?” That could mean sometimes losing a few battles or understanding that if someone is having a defensive reaction to something, the reaction might be driven by fear. In the conversation, stay open to the fact that there may be things to learn from them and that you could add to your understanding of how things can be done.

Do you take a step back and evaluate before responding when you realize you’re in a charged conversation? What’s your technique?

My approach is different now because I’m able to pause before I respond. Allowing that time to pause and trying to label what’s going on with the other person has been really helpful for me. The moment you label something, it takes the emotional charge off. I try to be curious and have control over my own emotional charge around the conversation. It’s good to ask the person to walk you through their thought process before you offer up a response.

Oftentimes, I also force myself to not react in the meeting. I say, “I’d love to think about this a little bit more. Can we set up a follow-up conversation to chat? While we have the time between this meeting and the next meeting, I’d like you to think about X, Y, and Z things.” That diffuses the situation a little and it gives both people the time to consider the other person’s perspective.

Is there an example you could share when, instead of trying to bring the person over to your side, you were able to see their point of view and it changed the trajectory of your project?

When I came into one of my past roles, there was a set roadmap in place and some projects that were already invested in. I was trying to build the new roadmap and figure out what stays, what goes, etc. I remember thinking that we needed to take on a project because the team I inherited was invested in it. In the past, I’ve been guilty of wanting to protect my team at all costs without taking in external inputs that could threaten that.

An important stakeholder asked if we could hold off on deciding about that project until we draw out our five-year vision. I said, “Sure, but I don’t see how this is not part of that vision.” We went back and forth and then agreed to let the team build out the features that they had planned for this quarter. After that, we’d decide whether to continue investing in this product or not. Ultimately, as we drew up our vision and strategy for the next two years, I realized that it made sense to stop investing in the project beyond that quarter. I appreciated having colleagues who pushed me to do that work as opposed to going with my gut or going with what the team felt invested in without doing the analysis.

Reframing failure into learning

Sometimes, after a product or feature has already been released, there’s critical feedback from customers or stakeholders. Do you think that working on boosting your EQ has helped you handle that?

There was a time in my life when my fear of failing and my fear of rejection stopped me from trying new things. I worried about trying something bold and being told that I’m not good at it. I learned to reframe my approach when I understood that feedback as learning, like, “If I don’t get this feedback from you, how am I going to do better next time?” Successful people have practiced and learned. It’s an adaptive loop. That’s when you go build a phenomenal product. Reframing that has been really helpful.

The second thing I would say is it’s not always in our control. There’s so much I can control internally, but there is an external factor of working in spaces that encourages failure. You need a space where failing feels safe. If you’re in an organization that doesn’t like failing and will make a big deal of every failure, it’s very hard to be a successful product manager. Be ready to fail, but fail intelligently, fail quickly, and above all, learn.

It’s hard for most people to be OK with failure, let alone celebrate it. Are there techniques or approaches that you use with teams to really celebrate those failures?

When we set a goal and don’t meet it, we experience all of the feelings related to failure. But if I just set the goal differently — to not build a successful product, but to learn everything I need to learn to eventually build a successful product — then everything changes. This can be applied to anything in life. Is my goal to find a new amazing job? Or is my goal to look for a job in a balanced way? In every aspect, you could change the goal or your orientation toward the goal a little bit, and that changes everything else.

Willingness to navigate uncertainty

Do you feel that being able to establish a culture like that varies by stage of the company?

It’s a combination of who you are and the environment you’re in. One is not removed from the other. In early-stage organizations, you have to bring a different approach because a lot of money is at stake. Time is of the essence, but you still have to fail quite a bit. It’s just that you have to fail in a way that is cheap and fast.

In a large company, you can fail in such a way that it’s okay to take your time. At Amazon, I’ve been part of projects where we spent three months on research/usability analysis to establish whether the user sees value in something before we even started building a product. And if a product I launch will impact 300 million people and billions of dollars, I better take that time.

What I’ve come to learn over time is that the way you do product discovery is different depending on the company’s size. At a small company, maybe I don’t build out the highest fidelity prototypes but still put them out in the market and get some signal from the consumer to continue. You have to have the willingness to keep moving forward without having all of the information you need and to navigate that uncertainty.

In other words, don’t try to get it perfect, just get it good enough. What’s your approach to helping your team embrace this way of thinking?

It’s harder to change individuals who already come in with a very formed way of doing things. When I’m hiring my team and putting a team in place, I try to find people with a level of flexibility in how they think about things. I think deeply about, “Are they going to be a good fit in the kind of culture that I’m looking to build?” There will always be times we inherit teams and bump into cultural challenges. The second piece is making sure that I create a safe space for them to fail. That’s really on me as well as the leadership that goes beyond me.

The third piece is not announcing everything that we’re trying. That’s where some of the fear comes from — “We told them we’re going to try this, so now I have to tell them that I failed.” Have an internal threshold on when something has to become reportable in a roadmap or label them as experiments to set expectations.

Becoming an ‘enabler of doing’

Lastly, what advice would you have for people who are working in product and are either hoping to move into leadership or advance in their current position?

One thing to understand is that what’s gotten you to a certain point is not going to get you to the next point. You may really feel this when you’re trying to go from mid-management to senior management. You’re more of a doer then, and product managers take pride in being doers. When you transition from middle management to senior management, you are no longer a doer, but an enabler of doing. You are holding the fort together and offering space for people who are having frustrations around how things work. You are trying to think about the big picture, draw the vision, and get people to go with you.

When you are a doer, you have a lot more control. When you transition into a leadership role, you start to lose control. It’s almost counterintuitive because a certain amount of control comes with a sense of authority but that doesn’t mean you can just do things yourself. You’re not going to scale if you are going to be the doer of everything. You’re going to have to get things done through people. If you are not conscious of the fact that senior leadership needs a different set of skills, it’s easy to get lost.

Know that it’s going to be different. Getting an executive coach is super useful and valuable in this sort of transition. Secondly, read. There’s so much material out there that we can read and learn from. Those are my top two pieces of advice.