Tales of Product Management - Who just joined the call??

Tales of Product Management - Who just joined the call??

Who just joined the call?

A lot of us hold conference calls on a regular basis.  

A lot of us have folks join our calls who forget to announce themselves. Or are too lazy to announce themselves.  Or maybe they don’t want to announce themselves……read on -

Sometimes we ask “Who just joined the call”. Sometimes we don’t; we are too busy, or maybe sometimes just lackadaisical.

If your conference call were in-person (in a physical meeting room) would you tolerate it if one, or more, people in your meeting didn’t tell you who they were??

Why then, would you tolerate the same behavior on a conference call?

Let me tell share a story about how this happens more than you might think.

As VP of Product Management at ChoicePoint I was leading a call to share details of a new product we were developing to get feedback from a few of our key customers on our advisory board.

There were 8 groups invited to the call, where all participants had to sign a non-disclosure prior to the meeting. There were 9 beeps.  We did a roll call. Eight people announced themselves (including myself). But there were 9 on the line.  Maybe someone just didn’t drop from a previous call.   

I ended the call and we all dialed back in. 9 beeps again.  We did a roll call. Eight people announced themselves.

I ended the call and immediately sent a new invite to the group and we all dialed back in using the new number.

8 beeps.  8 attendees.  We held the call.

Later I mentioned this to Carol DiBattiste, our Sr. VP of Privacy, Security, Compliance and Government Affairs.  Carol held some pretty distinctive roles prior to ChoicePoint including Under Secretary of the Air Force, United States Attorney, and Chief of Staff for the TSA. Carol asked me to find the call logs and send them to her.

A month later Carol informed me that it was a competitor that was the ninth beep, that this wasn’t the first time it had happened, and that ChoicePoint called out the competitor, issued a cease and desist letter, and explained to them that their phone numbers would be monitored.

It was corporate espionage.

Two years later at another company, we had our weekly product status meeting; marketing, customer acquisition, product strategy/roadmap/development/progress.

It seemed like there was always an extra beep.

I pulled the logs and turned them over to our CSO who turned them over to HR who informed me that a former worker, now working at a competitor, still had the dial-in codes and was listening to our progress……

If you think this won’t (or hasn’t) happened to you:

…. next time you ask ‘who just joined the call’ and you don’t get a reply, think twice about the importance of your call and what you are discussing and make it a habit that your attendees announce themselves the first time, every time.

TALES OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT -  A SERIES  #19.4