AMA: Square Product Lead, Carrie Zhang on Influencing the C-Suite

Ultimately c-suite needs to allocate resources that generate business value. So I think the best way to influence that is to make sure what you are working on produces the desired customer/ business outcome, and/ or financial value. Based on my own experience, we can do a few things that help influence the decisions our way. Good writing to clearly articulate your product vision/ strategy. When we tried to convince leadership to invest in a new 0-to-1 product, we wrote a short proposal that focu ...Read More

I think first of all, we need to have our own opinions of relative priorities. There are so many frameworks out there on prioritization. For me, it always comes down to alignment with strategy, alignment with customer problems, and relative effort level. When communicating with executives, it’s important to bring our tradeoff decisions and rationale to them. Resources are not infinite so there is only so much a team can do. It’s pretty straightforward to force a conversation like: based on team ...Read More

Can relate to this question! I definitely struggled with similar situations earlier in my career. Interestingly I got the solution from the executives I was working with at the time. He suggested “get us together, tell us the team is struggling with completely different directions, and ask us ‘where should the team go’”. I think any seasoned executive, or team leader for that matter, knows they need to provide clear guidance to their teams. Sometimes the executives are just not aware their diffe ...Read More

We can be more tactful and realize we don’t need to rely on logical reasoning alone! To this date, I am still amazed at how one of my colleagues got an executive to change their opinion. We were working on a new product launch at the time and had proposed a pricing bundle that included a feature from another product. Our executive was adamant that we should keep them separate and not bundle. Several meetings went nowhere and we were stuck. At our company the product teams provide weekly updates ...Read More

This likely depends on the size of the company and the different rituals you may have. Obviously the bigger the org, the harder it is to get direct exposure to the c-suite. If your company happens to have the following opportunities, take advantage. Product reviews. Does your company run regular product review meetings with the executives? If so, that’s a great forum. I’ve always found it helpful in these meetings to 1/ bring them up to speed on your team’s work, 2/ raise difficult questions and ...Read More

Not sure these can be called “best” habits. Just some principles I try to follow myself. Take a top management perspective. This means elevating your thinking to that level, and thinking beyond the tunnel view of your product. To do that well, you have to be curious and keep tabs of what’s going on across the company (products). You will also need to have a good understanding of the business. Practice thinking “what would I do if I were running this product/ business unit/ company?” Clear and co ...Read More

I don’t think we should try and align with certain people. Product development is about solving customer problems. So fundamentally I think we should deeply understand our customers’ struggles and figure out how we can use technology to help them. Additionally, we need to put that in the context of company level strategy and priorities. You don’t want to work on something that the company doesn’t care about. If you can clearly articulate how you are aligned with customer needs and company priori ...Read More