EP057 - Leading a high-performing product team online with Daniel Bodonyi at Motivating Manager
About the episode
This episode focuses on best practices for product development teams online. Daniel spent years working in Tokyo and Budapest, then leading a fully distributed product team at MemoQ. His approach to product leadership now serves as a baseline for his practice in his mentorship practice.
About the guest
Daniel Bodonyi is the founder of Motivating Manager, a cohort-based online peer learning community and mentorship program for people managers that includes leaders from countries on three different continents, from Japan through Germany to the US.
Previously, he held leadership roles at various B2B SaaS companies, leading fully remote, hybrid, and distributed teams and organizations. Having taught team management skills and organization and project management in an MBA program and obtained a certificate in organizational coaching.
He now spends his time helping other leaders build confidence, trust, and credibility.
Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Anywhere podcast. In today's episode we will talk about how to scale a product team and how to motivate distributed teams in a remote work environment. To discuss that I have the wonderful Daniel Bodonyi here, who worked for many companies, and now he's running his own gig. We know each other from from LinkedIn, but we share the same nation where we live in. So it's a pretty friendly conversation that we are about to have. Thank you Daniel for joining and please introduce yourself. How did you end up working remotely, which is not conventional in Hungary and you've worked with a really amazing company before, and you're doing your own thing right now, distributedly. How did you end up working remotely?
Thanks for the invitation. It's great to be here. I'm the founder of Motivating Manager, which is a leadership development program and peer community for people leaders. And before that I was head of product at various software companies, including MemoQ, which is a B2B software as a service company with roughly 120 employees and over 10 million in annual revenue and also Tokyo based software company called Attuned which is a somewhat smaller company, but there I was with the company from the start. So I led the team that developed and built a product. I came to remote relatively late in my life. So I'm from a previous paradigm. I worked in consulting and I worked at the UN where, working from home was unthinkable. You had to be in the office at 8 AM and often you were there until midnight. But I always felt remote was a very attractive option for me personally because I enjoy autonomy. I value it very highly and I like to, be able to work flexibly regardless of the location or the time because I'm a night owl. Early mornings are not easy, right? There's a subset of the population where time is an essential factor as well.
I don't know about you, but I battled it with so hard. I always wanted to be an early riser or at least rise a little bit earlier and go to bed a little bit earlier.
How did that work out for you?
It never works out usually. But, it's really great if you are working for companies based in the US.
Exactly. So you can play around with the time zones a little bit there.
Yeah. So my remote journey started with COVID actually so from one week to the next everything shut down and we all had to work remotely. Thankfully the company where I was working at the time MemoQ was always a very distributed team. So the company has its headquarters in Budapest, in Hungary, but it has people in Japan, in Argentina, in Canada, in Germany, in Portugal, in various places.
And it's a global company, by the way.
Yeah, it is. And the users are also in more than 100 different countries. So the customers are also global. So the company already had a culture that was very remote friendly. Many people were already working fully remotely. And for those of us here in Budapest, we had the option to work wherever and whenever we wanted. Most of us would still go to the office, a couple of days a week. But it wasn't alien to the culture to have this set up when COVID came.
They did have an office, right?
Yeah the company still does in Budapest, but it wasn't there wasn't any work from the office mandate. So it was all flexible where and when we worked.
This is a really nice journey. By the way we had discussions pre call and we know each other anyway, but I never knew that you worked for a company based in Tokyo, which is also unusual, by the way. I'm so struggled just FYI and also for the audience. I'm really struggling to get someone from Japan to the show because it's so hard. I presume it's because of the culture. So the culture working there either as a developer or any kind of, remote company, the remote working is not tied into the culture. They are very much office based in terms of work. So it's really hard to find a company from Japan that they are working remotely. So it's pretty unique that you already did that. How did that go?
I'm happy to recommend a few. So things are changing even in Japan because of the dynamics. Japan has a an aging population and the people, the working age population is declining very quickly.
I know.
So it's a big war for talent over there and companies are slowly adjusting to it. So there are companies now. Especially in the startup scene that have more flexible work from home policies and even remote ones.
So there is a startup scene in Japan.
There is a pretty exciting and growing startup scene. It's challenging for startups to recruit people there because, people are still accustomed to working for the same company their entire lifetime. There is a lot of interdependency in terms of people's personal lives and their work lives, so they might get their loans for their houses from the company, et cetera. So it's a challenging environment but there is a growing and more and more vibrant startup scene there as well.
Yeah, I don't want to divert the conversation to Japan but I'm also a big Japan nerd. It's predictable at this stage now. But anyway I see a lot of parallel cultural issues with Japan and Dach region, the German and Austrian region where the young people, they usually favor going to a corporate, well known corporate job rather than venturing on their own and starting a company. So maybe that's why. Especially in Germany and these regions it's changing, I know it's changing but the startup scene is like less fluid or or growing than in other regions. So it's interesting to see that how it unfolds later in life. Yeah. Cool. That's a great journey. And thanks for sharing it. Tell me a little bit more about what did you do at the UN? At the, what's the Budapest head office.
It was in Tokyo as well. Pretty much accidentally ended up working there.
So you lived in Tokyo?
Yes, for three years.
Nice.
Amazing place. Amazing place. I highly recommend it. So at the UN I worked at an organization called the United Nations University which is basically a policy research institute or a collection of policy research institutes for the UN. It's a small organization, so not it's 600 people or it was around that time. Its mission is to help the decision makers leverage scientific breakthroughs and results in their decision making. It was a very interesting gig. I was there only for nine months and then I moved on to the tech scene in Japan.
Nice nice, but actually you learned a lot, the mosaics are starting to coming together that that you started there as a someone who got versed in the education leadership development. Learning and development and then startup world, and then at Budapest at the MemoQ. So let's talk about MemoQ because you built a, an entire product team or helped them build an entire product team there. And that was four, five, three years ago.
Yeah. So roughly coincided with the start of the pandemic, which was three and a half years ago, if I remember correctly. So MemoQ, you already had a product owners and product managers, and I joined the company as a product manager myself, but it didn't have a fully fledged product management team and it didn't have a product management team that was built on, current ideas of continuous discovery and outcome based customer driven product management techniques. And what we found and what we felt working there as product owners and product managers was that, we weren't really functioning as a team. There were different ways in which the team wasn't set up in an ideal way, which caused bottlenecks in our processes and in our day to day work ended up causing some conflicts between certain people in the organization. So looked like we had a very talented, extremely intelligent, very motivated group of people who weren't functioning as a team for some reason. And my mandate was basically to create a well functioning team out of these really talented and motivated people.
For the audience to know memo Q and correct me if I'm wrong. But I... hungary is a small country. Hungary and startup scene is even smaller. So you pretty much end up knowing everyone in the scene really quickly, if you are into that. And MemoQ was one of the most successful globally, most successful language localization product on the market still used today. It's growing now it's. It's all almost like Prezi where you can't really tell that it's Hungarian or LogMeIn anymore. They have like small, like head office, of course, it's still in the city here. But they are a global company now spread across everywhere. Just for the audience, because my people might not know it. And I think it's important to tell because we are talking about product management and right. And You mentioned that the lack of team wide shared knowledge and intentional product management wasn't prevalent at that time at memo Q without giving out any, or hurting any NDAs what did you see, what were the clues or the proof or science that it didn't work correctly and they need to be adjusted a little bit.
One of the signs was for example, that the team was very internally focused, which is You know, something you can often see with teams that are somehow slightly dysfunctional. They lose the focus on the customer, they lose the focus on the market. And internal issues begin to take up most of the day and collaboration bottlenecks take up most of the day rather than, focusing on what is the mission of a product management team, which is to meet customer needs and user needs in a way that will make the company more competitive in the market. So that was one sign of dysfunction there. And then there were some others as well around, speed, for example, how quickly we were able to get key developments to the customers and users how well those developments met their needs. So we needed to increase the frequency and the depth of interactions with users and customers pretty quickly to be more successful as a team.
And how did you combat these these problems? Did you do any specific stuff that you can share here?
Absolutely. So I'm a big proponent of looking at systems in a systemic way and starting out with the users in mind. And if you are a team leader or a manager, your users are the members of your team, right? So looking at what your team members need to be more effective, to be happier, to be motivated is, I think, a great way to start. And one thing that came back over and over again in one on one discussions was career development opportunities, for example. Is there a transparent path for people to get ahead in their careers, to develop their skills and to be recognized and rewarded for those developments? So the first thing I tried to fix was to create that path for the team members to make sure that if our performance improves as a team and individual performance improves, then there is a reward in place to look forward to that is. Transparent and people know what they need to do to get it. To be a little bit more specific we basically created a career ladder as a product manager, you could become a product manager first and then a senior product manager and so on depending on certain competency and other outcomes.
How did you measure performance then? What do you think? What is the guiding principle of measuring performance in a remote team, especially for product managers.
I don't know if there is a silver bullet here because of the old adage that you always get what you measure and then the side effects of that as well.
Hypothesis always defines the measurement outcomes. Yes.
Exactly. So it's, I know. dangerous territory. But for us at that point, the priority was to have more frequent and deeper interactions with customers. So the metric was very simple looking at the number of customer interviews and also the number of usability tests that we conducted with customers because hypothesis was that if we engage with customers more often in better ways then they'll be happier with our work and the company will be more successful as a result because they like the product more.
And by the way, when we are talking about customers in your case, it's businesses. Usually growing or medium, so small or medium sized businesses that want to have a localization approach.
Absolutely. B2B and fair share with these enterprises pretty large ones as well. And then there are small and medium sized businesses in the translation and localization industry as well.
Totally. Totally. And let's focus on the results at the end. So I obviously assume that you track the results of the rebuilding of the team can you share some some wins that were visible and also trackable because the reason why I'm asking this whole journey is that our listeners, I think they have to resonate to the problems that you already had. And they probably encountered with the same or some, but the same problems as well. That can be addressed in many different ways. Yours is just one, of course. But that address that you did probably show some results as well. And that should be a great deal to share
I'm really glad you asked about how to make trackable and visible, because part of the reason I think why you want to measure something is because you hope it will improve performance, obviously, but also because you want to have some quick wins that you can celebrate to increase confidence and to increase credibility and to increase trust within and towards the team. So we had to pay a lot of attention to creating our processes around this. How do we engage with customers? What type of interviews Do at which stage of the product development process. How do we involve other teams like design and development teams in this process? How do we track the outcomes? How do we make them transparent and visible to other teams who might need to rely on this data? So there was a lot of work into removing kind of the systemic obstacles and aligning on, okay, what is our process for doing this? And then the results were basically we went from doing very few only sporadic customer interviews to over 100 customer interviews in the first six months and usability tests and beta testing became part and parcel of our process. So basically every product manager would be conducting these before we laced releases of new features. I think very clear that to everyone that this was working and we had some successes to celebrate and people were getting promoted at the end of the first six months. And that gave people the confidence to see that this is a direction that was worth going into, worth exploring further. And from what I hear I'm no longer at MemoQ, but this culture has still survived to this day I know.
Totally. And have you shared these learnings and wins and results with the other types of the teams within the company, because these are, I think partially the reason why you do any kind of user research. And not just as a product manager, but like anyone else, there are some intrinsic findings that you can see in those interviews that can be, simply used for marketing messaging, simply use for feature development So many insights that the teams can use not just in the product management. Personally, I see product managers as somewhat like the marketers as a bridge between different teams and they are sharing all the learnings that they have from the customer, on the product and about the product with anyone else involved in the product development, it's not just product managers who are developing product or developers and others, and there are also others who are selling the product and so on and so on, right?
Exactly. And I think if you work remotely, basically whatever kind of team you run one thing you want to pay attention to is the interfaces of your team with other teams. Because there is some good research out there by Michael Arena and others that shows that in a remote setting, the bonding ties within the team can get even stronger. But the bridging ties to other teams and departments yeah they might deteriorate. So you need to be very intentional about managing these interfaces of your team. And especially if you're a product management team, right? When you are in a kind of bridging position, like you said, anyway. This is one area where I don't feel I've done everything I could have done. I think I, and also the team could have done more to share these results in a more effective way. We had some difficulties that were objectively making this even more difficult than It usually is for example, our marketing team was undergoing a reorg, sales teams are always super busy. They live in calls, they live in their email. It's very hard to get through to them with information because they're focused on doing their jobs and interacting with customers minute by minute in some cases. So I think we could have done more to share these results in a more effective way with people. And what I think I got wrong is, something that we all get wrong as managers from time to time is assuming that once you've communicated something, people have noted it and understood it and absorbed it. And usually, you need to over communicate things by a factor of 10 for them to really get through those barriers. And I don't think I've done that effectively at that time.
I think it's the same applies to internal communication and internal sales as well as for external. I just had A lovely talk with a, with another guest from a like it sourcing whatever company 200 they scale 200 to 600 people within two years. And that's like a massive scale. And one of the learnings that they shared and. I think that applies to everyone that when you onboard, for example, people to your teams, a, obviously our job is to shorten the span of the onboarding, right? Because, you want people to work pretty much from day one. But also you want to make sure that clarity is always there. So they know where they are working, what to do. Obviously this is a distributed team. And the learning was that they have, as for sales and marketing, have multiple touch points, right? It's for leads and and prospects. We have to newsletter website, landing pages, and yada, yada, yada. We all know the drill, but they do the same internally as well. So they have an internal hub, internal newsletter. Everyone should read your internal newsletter because there are information in it. They have the internal chat and so on. So many different touch points where they get almost the same information all the time in a slightly different manner. But they because of the multiple touch points, they somehow later on it's somehow sticks in the memory, right?
I think it's a great approach because the challenge nowadays is not that we don't have access to information is that we have access to too much and it's hard to find the time and the bandwidth and the attention spent to absorb it and to know what to focus on. Yeah, we have curated in a way that, you're intentional about the touch points and what information needs to reach what people at what stage that can be a great help.
Also let's discuss a little bit more about the remote aspect because You worked in offices in Tokyo and also in Budapest, but then you switched remote as a manager during the pandemic. FYI in Hungary, we had a I'm not sure how strict, but we had strict lockdowns for at least half a year or so. So yeah, most people switched or forced to work remotely. How did you handle that? What's, what was what has changed in your approach on working?
Interestingly, I didn't have to change a whole lot when I became a remote leader. I think that's because I was always very intentional about building connections and relationships and helping people to do that. I had a very kind of fixed and I think well functioning meeting cadence and pretty good meeting hygiene that I could carry from the office days to the pandemic. And I think it helps because one thing that can happen in full remote environments is that you have more and more meetings. And then if those are run poorly then, it's just more and more suffering as opposed to more and more leverage for you as a leader. Yes. The team members as well.
Totally. And you are one of the few, by the way that, that had a healthy meeting schedule and meeting habit. Yeah. Pre remote as well.
I Found it really important because when you have a number of people in the same room, even for an hour, it's a big cost to the organization. So you want to get something out of it. You want to have a clear purpose. You want to have a clear agenda. You want to walk away with next steps and you want to walk away with people feeling better and more confident at the end of the meeting than before. From the basics okay, having a clear agenda, having clear roles, like who is facilitating, who is taking notes having actionable, tangible next steps, following up on those, if you can get these basics done, that's already a good start. And then I think there are some more subtle things like, especially in a remote environment, building time into your meetings to connect personally. So in this remote setting at MemoQ, for example, we made our weekly team meeting a half hour longer just for us to have Comfortable time, yeah to chat, to do a check in round, to see how everyone was doing. And it's really crucial because otherwise you might not learn things like, a team member is going through a divorce or someone's close relative has died. It was a really tough time for everyone personally as well. So we needed that time to connect as humans. And also other things like, if you have a discussion, are those time boxed, for example, is there a clear needs articulated at the beginning of the discussion? Again, do we walk away with next steps? And things like separating tactical and governance for more strategic issues because you don't want to end up in a one hour strategic discussion in the middle of a small tactical issue that you're trying to solve and vice versa.
That's an often neglected issue, by the way you just mentioned it now casually but I actually saw this happen many times. Then people have a really wide angle look on a really small problem and they walk away with pretty much nothing to do at the end of the meeting. But they understand everything and then, in a bigger picture, but okay but how can I apply to this small specific problem now?
Yeah, exactly. So are you above the line or below the line, right? On a specific issue, as Ray Dalio says. And for me, like at MemoQ, we had weekly tacticals that were focused very much on the tactical things. What are our priorities? What are our metrics? What are the bottlenecks we need to remove? Short focus time box discussions. And then we had originally, I thought we would have monthly sort of governance or strategic meetings to talk about our processes and our OKRs and stuff, but it was a team very much in the forming and norming stage. So we ended up for the first three months having weekly governance and strategic meetings as well, because people were looking for clarity on, how are we approaching this decision or how. Are we approaching that process? So we ended up with having more meetings, but hopefully those contributed to an increase rather than a decrease in efficiency.
And what are you doing now? How you help others because you're pretty much leading your own consultancy now. But it's focused on the same things that you did before for others as well.
I have a mission to help leaders learn in one year, what took me over 15 years as a leader, as they say wise people learn from other people's mistakes. The fools learn from their own and for me, it's too late, but it's not too late for many other people. So I basically, what I try to do is I try to open source my MBA team management skills class, which I used to teach in the data driven MBA program here at the international business school in Budapest and created a one year program on the back of it, which is a more in depth improved version. It also has a sort of support group, a mastermind group in it and one on one coaching and mentoring options. So the idea is that if you go through this program as a leader in one year, you can learn pretty much everything you need to manage teams effectively, but also hopefully get support as you do it on the way from other leaders who are in the same shoes as you are and for me if you opt for the one on one mentoring. So there is this motivating manager program that I do and also I do corporate leadership development training programs at various companies for leadership teams.
And if you can name like, I know everyone hates lists, but still, if you can name five most important leadership practices that people should learn or relearn or de learn sometimes what would are what would those?
Great question. I would start with active listening. So honing your listening skills in a very tactical, actionable way. So when you are in a conversation or in a negotiation or in a team meeting, you're able to validate and summarize what other people are saying, what they're feeling in a way that resonates with them. So They already think that you get it you feel it and even if you disagree, they'll be much more amenable to your point of view when they feel that you've heard them, so they'll be much more likely to hear you as well. So that would be number one. Number two would be probably around emotion regulation. So with all the stress and all the conflicts that can happen at work our ability to Sit with difficult emotions like anger, like frustration, like disappointment and to help others do the same and to acknowledge these feelings and to identify the need behind them. So what is it that I need? What is this emotion telling me that I need? I think is a key skill. And this, if you can do this well, it enables you to do a third thing very well, which is assertive communication. So being able to communicate your own needs without blaming or criticizing other people and being able to hear other people's needs without hearing blame or criticism.
That's a big thing for Hungarian managers, by the way.
Oh, for sure. There are other cultures like ours where healthy norms of confrontation are not something you're taught in schools.
Yes, totally. Okay, you still have two to go.
Brilliant. Number four would be learn about what motivates individuals. So what are the motivational needs and values and preferences that people have? You can even use a tool like Attuned, which I helped create which actually gives you an idea. Okay what do your team members need? What do they value? What will make them motivated and have them perform at their best. So awareness of this can also be super helpful and number five maybe building trust and alignment on the back of all these things, but also some slightly separate skills that are needed for this. To me, a leader's role is about aligning needs, understanding and aligning people's needs. You're. Customers needs your businesses needs your teams needs the stakeholders needs and if you have a skill set that is good at getting get those needs and then trying to find the common denominator, so you can align them. That can also be a great skill set to have.
Great list. Thanks. Thanks for sharing it. If someone wants to enroll to the program or just have any questions from you where people can find you?
Just go to motivating manager. com. And you can sign up to the wait list for the program if you'd like to, or you can schedule a call with me if you have questions about it. I'm very happy to jump on a call, talk about your challenges and needs as a leader, and you're welcome to subscribe to my sub stack if you'd like. It's called the Motivating Manager monthly. I haven't been able to post every month this year because I've had too much work to do to, to write a, we always have. It's difficult to find the time, especially because I'm into long form. So I write really long pieces.
Me too.
You too. We are a dying breed, but I hope a helpful breed as well.
Yeah. It's a personal thing, it's hard because I do like short form, of course, on LinkedIn and this podcast too but most of my peers tell me like, without hesitation that long form is a little bit dying because people have short attention span. I'm probably one of the few ones who, and I think you are also to wants to work with people who have that attention. And I use this as a, almost like a filter to those who want to engage with any kind of professional manner with me. So it's pretty much it's not for those who are just interested. It's for those who are really interested. And it's a great filter, so never give up on long form, please. It's an amazing filter.
I'm with you on that, and especially if you want to develop as a leader, it takes commitment and it takes time. Basically, it's about changing patterns of relating to other people, which doesn't happen in a day. Frameworks are helpful if you can learn a few, but those are not really going to change how you lead. It's it's a longer term journey. You need to mean it and maybe, like you say, long form can be a filter to find those people who really do mean it.
Totally. And it's so interesting that leadership practices, and then it's funny that you mentioned the frameworks because everyone loves frameworks. Everyone loves lists. Everyone loves I dunno, top 10 things that you need to do, but these are they are not killing it. They are they are just like a short and small pain relief to certain problems, but they might cure some symptoms, but they won't cure the actual disease in you, which is the bad leadership skill. And I think you can learn a lot from pretty surprising areas of the world from literature, from from, I don't know, culture from engaging with others. So something that is not like a really quickly consumable framework or role or something. So I'm with you on that too. Yeah. You need to be a little more holistic patient and a little bit more attention.
If you think about it, leadership is an interpersonal process, right? Yes. Through interactions with others. And the way you interact with others develops, through interactions with others, in your childhood, in your formative years. So if you want to unlearn the patterns that no longer serve you well, it's not gonna happen after you read a list of top five things, it's going to happen because you're engaging in a meaningful way with other people who can support you in this process, a coach, a mentor, maybe a therapist maybe a support group. Those are the things that will remove the needle.
Oh, I loved our talk. Thank you for your time. Thank you for coming here. And I hope everyone else who listened to this learned a really great deal from your practice. Thank you for coming.
I really enjoyed it as well. And thank you for doing this.
