We’re excited to bring you more exclusive content from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! This series continues our TalkInTen format, where we deliver concise, impactful conversations with industry leaders driving innovation in product and business agility. Each episode is packed with fresh insights, actionable strategies, and real-world examples to help teams and organizations succeed.
In this episode, we’re joined by Sergiu Lazar Angelescu, who shares his expertise on creating psychologically safe teams. Sergiu introduces the WRENCH framework, a tool designed to help product teams cultivate a culture of trust, openness, and collaboration. In this insightful conversation, we explore why psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams and how leaders can foster an environment where team members feel empowered to take risks, voice their ideas, and drive innovation without fear of judgment.
Sergiu on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiu-lazar/
Here is the synopsis of Sergiu & João Moita's Talk
One of the most challenging parts of a product person's job is influencing without authority. This workshop presents Psychological safety as a means to align stakeholders and improve efficiency in product development by ensuring everybody works towards the same goals while being fulfilled and happy with the environment they work in.
Here is the synopsis of Sergiu & Radhika Dutt's Talk:
This session delves into the critical role of psychological safety in fostering high-performing product teams. Participants will explore how creating an open, trust-based environment encourages innovation, risk-taking, and collaboration. Learn actionable strategies to cultivate psychological safety and drive your team’s success.
If you enjoy our episodes, please leave a review and stay tuned for more great episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!
Use code PROD24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev – https://www.sheev.co.uk
Host Bio
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!
Ben Maynard
🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/
Product Agility Podcast
🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/
💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/
🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility
Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes
- Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0lkwAYJzVSuk5zfJ1vIDZq?si=4c691fb12f124a56
- iTunes - https://apple.co/3YvTX8p
Want to come on the podcast?
Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80
00:00:00 --> 00:00:19 Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we can be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership.
00:00:19 --> 00:00:28 And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the Art of Product Management.
00:00:28 --> 00:00:51 Having us all find some joy in what we do, but it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and they'll be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor Sheev Limited. Sheev is a company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff.
00:00:51 --> 00:01:07 Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us.
00:01:07 --> 00:01:11 Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses.
00:01:11 --> 00:01:23 Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business and here begins a talk in 10. So Jim, welcome.
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, you saw us here last year.
00:01:26 --> 00:01:30 Yes, I was. You were saying before. But we didn't have the chance to talk last year.
00:01:30 --> 00:01:36 No, no, last year was really good. But I think our setup was a little bit more.
00:01:37 --> 00:01:57 That's what I'm looking for. Kumbassum. Was it? Yeah. Yeah, it was this year. Professional, professional George, the professional producer this year. Sure. I don't know, last year, last year, I was sitting down, I was looking up, oh, look, those guys are doing the podcast with all the cool speakers. And I was like, yeah, one day, one day, I'd like to get there. Here we are.
00:01:57 --> 00:02:01 Here we are in this professional setup. 360 something days later.
00:02:02 --> 00:02:13 You'll hear of us. It's awesome to have you here. And would you mind sharing with our listeners a little bit about what you did here yesterday and the day before?
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 You've been here for two days, haven't you? For three days, actually.
00:02:16 --> 00:02:19 Yes. I've got, well, I'm really rubbish at this whole two and three thing.
00:02:20 --> 00:02:27 So if you've been here for the whole duration, you did something on day one and day two, but today's your day. So what did you do as previous two days?
00:02:27 --> 00:02:39 Yeah. So I'm one of the founders of product weekend and actually we are organizing the leaders retreat in parallel and together with productized. So there is a group of 17 leaders that came here.
00:02:40 --> 00:03:15 So we started actually a bit earlier than productized. And in the first day, I facilitated a workshop with Radika about psychological safety and product teams. That was a collaborative session. Everybody shared challenges. Everybody shared what would be the ideal state of psychological safety and product teams. What do we need in order to go to work happy, feel fulfilled, feel like we're doing something meaningful and not be close to burnout every month, basically, which is quite common for product managers. And then we took it to the next level yesterday.
00:03:16 --> 00:03:25 We delivered a workshop on the same topic, psychological safety for product teams, where we shared the framework that we developed, that product weekend or wrench framework.
00:03:26 --> 00:03:33 And that is clear. That's a clear way to develop and maintain psychological safety in your team.
00:03:33 --> 00:04:21 So that's kind of the solution, the how to. And it's been a great experience also getting input from people, getting people to share that, yeah, I've tried this and I've tried that and does a great discussion and great learning. Brilliant. Well, first of all, did I speak to you last year? I don't think so. I did. I said to a few people, we were probably weekend. It's a great thing. So if you listen to this, if you haven't seen product weekend, look it up. You're running events across the globe now. Yeah, across all Europe in seven countries this year. Excuse me, I have a frog in my throat. So yes, I'm just going to walk off. And they're probably we can do a great thing. And it's nice to have you here representing that. And was it the wrench framework? Yes. Do you like the name? Like Mung? Is it catchy? Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, let's just kind of create a baseline.
00:04:21 --> 00:04:28 Why is it important to have psychological safety specifically in a product team?
00:04:30 --> 00:04:40 I think I'm going to share a bit about my background just to bring a bit more context. So my career started actually with startups. I've been working in a few startups. I co-founded one.
00:04:42 --> 00:04:58 I felt good and I felt happy in a startup, especially as a founder. I mean, I felt comfortable. I worked with people that I knew before that I enjoyed working with. It was amazing. Unfortunately, the startup didn't go so well. So then I got a job in Amazon. It's a big corporation.
00:04:58 --> 00:06:01 Customer obsessed. Actually, the first year was a great one. I felt good. I was a project manager there. I didn't have a team, but I had many stakeholders, right? I had to influence without authority. And it went well. You know, goals were achieved. I got a promotion, became a program manager. But in the last two years, I've I've had some challenges, changes in leadership, rounds of layoffs, and yeah, the psychological safety kind of went away. I have some examples of situations where psychological safety was not there. And it impacted people by leading to burnout. That was visible in numbers of sick days taken throughout the year. Many people quit, left the company. Amazon didn't hire other people in their place. So it was more work for everyone that was left. And in general, the vibe was negative. The one on ones, the meetings were starting with a bit of complaining. So I've experienced that in parallel for two years.
00:06:01 --> 00:06:46 Actually, during the pandemic, I started organizing retreats for professionals, where I wanted to help people to discover what makes them happy and how to build their career around that. So I organized around 10 retreats for professionals from all around Europe, did it in sunny, sunny Italy, actually in Portugal as well. And there I discovered that if you build the basis of psychological safety, that sometimes you don't even have it in your daily life, right? You don't feel comfortable in me to share everything with your friends, relatives, because of the fear of being judged. But if you build it properly and we did it with the retreats, then people open up people have realizations. And that was powerful. We also did B2B retreats, corporate retreats.
00:06:47 --> 00:07:11 And then we noticed that we are able to build that psychological safety also there, and we supported companies. Yeah, then a year ago, I joined forces with my friend, Joao Moita, and we continued scaling and building product weekend. And we realized that psychological safety is something that we are passionate about. And we want to bring it for PMs and YPMs.
00:07:12 --> 00:07:25 Actually, just going to share briefly two numbers, but according to Mind The Product survey, it's from 2021 or 2022. 80% of product managers suffer from burnout, burnout symptoms.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:30 That's a big number. And I've seen variations that were actually even higher.
00:07:32 --> 00:07:42 And also in 2015, Google identified that psychological safety is the main indicator for highly performing teams. So that's why we're focusing on it.
00:07:43 --> 00:07:46 So in the wrench framework, is wrench and acronym?
00:07:47 --> 00:07:50 Yes, it is. Let's play a game.
00:07:52 --> 00:07:55 First letter, what do you think it stands for?
00:07:55 --> 00:07:56 So it begins with an R.
00:07:56 --> 00:08:06 Yes. So not a WU. That was going to confuse me then. Like I said, R. There's the R stand for these English words.
00:08:06 --> 00:08:08 Yes. Yes, they are.
00:08:08 --> 00:08:10 Joao, what do you think? What could the R stand for?
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 It's a very powerful tool for product managers.
00:08:15 --> 00:08:16 Reflection?
00:08:17 --> 00:08:18 Close. Reframe.
00:08:18 --> 00:08:19 Reframe.
00:08:19 --> 00:08:20 Reframe, okay.
00:08:20 --> 00:08:20 Reframe.
00:08:20 --> 00:08:23 It's about accounting for uncertainty.
00:08:23 --> 00:08:28 It's reframing insights as assumptions and decisions as bets.
00:08:29 --> 00:08:40 Because quite often, quite often, when it comes to decision making, right, there are people coming in the room, saying things as if there are facts, hard facts, and they're influencing the discussion and the decision.
00:08:40 --> 00:08:44 When there are actually assumptions, we are not 100% sure, right?
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 Once you have multiple assumptions, then you can map them out, right?
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 What's the level of confidence? What's their impact and so on?
00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 So that's an important tool, reframing.
00:08:53 --> 00:08:55 Also decisions as bets.
00:08:56 --> 00:08:58 And I had a fun experience here.
00:08:59 --> 00:09:04 We were asked in Amazon to commit to actually quite a steep goal.
00:09:04 --> 00:09:10 We had to commit to a number and we said, okay, we are going to deliver X million in cost reduction this year.
00:09:10 --> 00:09:13 Cool. Everybody was motivated. Everybody was excited.
00:09:14 --> 00:09:16 At the end of the year, we didn't reach that number.
00:09:16 --> 00:09:22 It was still an impressive number, but it was kind of seen as a failure, because we didn't reach that specific one.
00:09:23 --> 00:09:27 And that's where we realized that decisions are more like bets, right?
00:09:27 --> 00:09:30 You again have a level of confidence there.
00:09:30 --> 00:09:31 You know, you are going in that direction.
00:09:31 --> 00:09:34 You have kind of like a vision. You have the North Star.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 Then you're doing your best to get there.
00:09:37 --> 00:09:41 But it's a bet. It's about 100% certain that you'll get it.
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 I feel like this episode is going to go longer than 10 minutes, I think.
00:09:45 --> 00:09:48 Why are we always wondered about bets?
00:09:48 --> 00:09:52 Is in some cultures, does that language full flat because gambling is against their religion?
00:09:53 --> 00:09:53 Yes, it does.
00:09:54 --> 00:10:08 Yes, it does. Actually, we are reframing this depending on the culture, but people understand the concept of betting, which is basically counting on something.
00:10:08 --> 00:10:13 Biting doesn't involve necessarily money or winning or losing something when you're doing it.
00:10:13 --> 00:10:14 It's more about taking a risk.
00:10:14 --> 00:10:15 Yeah.
00:10:15 --> 00:10:16 Okay.
00:10:16 --> 00:10:18 So then the E of wrench.
00:10:18 --> 00:10:19 It's A.
00:10:19 --> 00:10:20 A.
00:10:20 --> 00:10:21 Yeah.
00:10:21 --> 00:10:22 Why can't I spill?
00:10:22 --> 00:10:22 Go on.
00:10:22 --> 00:10:22 Okay.
00:10:22 --> 00:10:23 A. What is it?
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 All right. That's accept.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:25 Accept.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:27 So we frame and accept.
00:10:27 --> 00:10:32 This is around accepting failure as part of the journey, as part of the learning process, right?
00:10:33 --> 00:10:36 It's not bad to fail.
00:10:36 --> 00:10:40 It's actually good, especially as a product person to fail fast and learn fast.
00:10:42 --> 00:10:43 Try things, experiment, small.
00:10:44 --> 00:10:49 Iterate and that's the only way you can build great products.
00:10:49 --> 00:10:49 What's the next letter?
00:10:50 --> 00:10:53 It's N from notice.
00:10:53 --> 00:10:53 Notice.
00:10:54 --> 00:11:02 Noticing is about self-knowledge, understanding your strengths, your improvement areas, and your emotional triggers.
00:11:02 --> 00:11:04 That's an interesting one, right?
00:11:05 --> 00:11:07 It's quite an emotional job.
00:11:07 --> 00:11:19 I think we are feeling many things as product people and the first thing is important to understand what we are feeling, have the emotional language, then accept the feeling and then use it.
00:11:20 --> 00:11:27 I will share an example here, but in general, when somebody feels angry, usually means that something needs to stop.
00:11:28 --> 00:11:31 So once you identify the feeling, you can actually use it in your advantage.
00:11:32 --> 00:11:33 So we're running out of time.
00:11:33 --> 00:11:34 Yes.
00:11:34 --> 00:11:36 How many letters do we have left to?
00:11:36 --> 00:11:37 Two left, yeah.
00:11:37 --> 00:11:38 So C.
00:11:38 --> 00:11:38 Commit.
00:11:38 --> 00:11:39 Commit.
00:11:40 --> 00:11:41 Commit, yeah.
00:11:41 --> 00:11:43 It's the mutual trust, right?
00:11:43 --> 00:11:46 When you commit to something, you deliver it.
00:11:46 --> 00:11:50 It's having trust that the rest of the people, team members, stakeholders do the same.
00:11:50 --> 00:12:00 And if you cannot keep your commitment, we also have a way to to change, to adapt and to communicate again the commitments.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:02 Because sometimes we need to adapt.
00:12:02 --> 00:12:02 Yeah.
00:12:02 --> 00:12:03 And H.
00:12:04 --> 00:12:04 Humanize.
00:12:05 --> 00:12:08 It's humans as leaders.
00:12:08 --> 00:12:11 It's being vulnerable and accessible as a leader.
00:12:12 --> 00:12:20 That's a really powerful way to keep your team close, make people feel comfortable to also be vulnerable and accessible.
00:12:21 --> 00:12:25 By role modeling, at the end of the day, you're able to build psychological safety.
00:12:25 --> 00:12:37 So if people are listening, and this is what they're with, so they're interested in learning more, where can they find out more about yourself and the framework, ranch?
00:12:38 --> 00:12:38 Yes.
00:12:38 --> 00:12:41 So look out for me on LinkedIn.
00:12:42 --> 00:12:43 I'm posting quite a lot.
00:12:43 --> 00:12:45 And also follow product weekend.
00:12:45 --> 00:12:47 We're talking a lot about psychological safety there.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:49 So on our LinkedIn, Instagram or website.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:50 Excellent.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:52 Well, thank you so much for coming on.
00:12:52 --> 00:12:52 It's brilliant.
00:12:52 --> 00:12:53 Have you here?
00:12:53 --> 00:12:55 Hopefully we hope to see you here again next year.
00:12:55 --> 00:12:56 Maybe don't be nice.
00:12:56 --> 00:12:58 Maybe it's a product weekend at some point.
00:12:59 --> 00:12:59 Yes.
00:12:59 --> 00:13:00 I love to.
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 It's a way of my invite, to be fair.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:02 OK.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:04 Check your LinkedIn messages.
00:13:05 --> 00:13:06 I bet there is one in there.
00:13:06 --> 00:13:09 I just don't be mistaken a year ago or something.
00:13:10 --> 00:13:11 Thank you for coming on.
00:13:11 --> 00:13:12 And everyone, thank you very much for listening.
00:13:14 --> 00:13:15 We will end it there.
00:13:18 --> 00:13:23 So don't forget to keep an eye out on LinkedIn to make sure that you are aware of this and other episodes that are coming out.
00:13:23 --> 00:13:25 And do let us know what you think.
00:13:25 --> 00:13:28 Your feedback and your likes and your comments are always warmly welcome.
00:13:28 --> 00:13:30 So again, thanks you very much for listening.
00:13:30 --> 00:13:52 And this has been the
Related Episodes
The 7 Key Traits of High-Performing Teams (with Lucy Widdowson & Paul Barbour)
Send us a text In this week’s Product Agility Podcast, we explore the true foundations of high-performing teams with Lucy Widdowson and Paul Barbour, executive team coaches, authors, and lead tutors at Henley Business School. With decades of experience coaching leadership teams, Lucy and Paul share ...
OKRs vs. Strategy: Are You Focusing on the Wrong Thing? (with Sebastien Prioris)
Send us a text In this week’s Product Agility Podcast, we explore the critical link between strategy and OKRs with Sebastien Prioris, a seasoned product leader and founder of Stratify. Seb shares why so many organisations struggle to make OKRs work—and how a clear, actionable strategy can change eve...
Productized = Leaders with João Moita - Productized 24 TalkInTen
Send us a text We’re excited to bring you more exclusive content from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! This series continues our TalkInTen format, where we deliver concise, impactful conversations with industry leaders driving innovation in product and business agility. Each episo...