3 Skills Setting Apart Product Leaders From Product Managers
3 Skills Setting Apart Product Leaders From Product Managers
Don’t wait for leadership to happen. Self-lead instead.
Newer product managers are often given a specific set of scope to navigate with a focus on product delivery and execution. Tasks usually centre around empathising with customers to understand pain points, specifying product requirements, and hustling and doing whatever necessary to implement to plan.
There comes, however, a point in every product manager’s career path where a broader set of responsibilities are needed. Whether it be more products or features, more relationship management with strategic customers, partners or management teams, a wider remit becomes inevitable. PMs don’t get formal training on how to adapt when this shift in responsibilities is asked of them, so how should they prepare for the step-up in leadership? Simple: lead by example.
“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” — Michael Jordan
Nobody knows more about self-leadership than Michael Jordan.
A Case Of Self-Leadership: Michael Jordan leading the Bulls
In 1990, the Chicago Bulls were on track to win their first national finals ever. For the final fame (game 7) of the Eastern Conference Finals, a win would have signalled to the world that the Bulls were a team to be reckoned with for the remainder of the decade. Instead, the Pistons showed their dominance and brute strength and won with almost 20 points between them. The Pistons went on to win their 2nd straight NBA title against the Blazers. The Bulls were out mastered.
The Bulls needed to change drastically. Straight after their loss, Michael and the team went straight into training. Michael gained pounds of muscle through strength training and spent the entire summer on team development. He demanded perfection and mistake-less practice.
Michael knew that if he didn’t lead by example to show how to evolve himself physically and mentally, the team could not excel and become the top team that it had destined to be. By the time they reached the Conference Finals the following year, they had beaten the Pistons convincingly in 4 games straight. It was the beginning of a new era.
Just like Michael, instead of waiting for Leadership opportunities to come to you, the best you can do to lead is to lead-by-example, every day. By building in self-leadership traits at an early stage of your career, you will bolster your ability to deal with difficult situations and product decisions that need to be made.
Provided below are the three undervalued skills that immediately make you a leader in your own right. Flex these three skills to practice your leadership today.
1. Questioning Purpose Based On Insight
Instead of accepting the status-quo, a Product Leader revisits their purpose early on instead of blindly following the paths taken by those before them.
Let’s break this down into the two components:
Questioning Purpose
One can easily focus on launching features according to a pre-established set of priorities. Still, a bigger strength is to revisit the purpose (the “why”) early on to avoid disaster.
A customer’s initial response to an interview is usually just scratching the surface of more latent or hidden tasks or pain points that you better could solve for. By constantly placing the question “why” at the forefront of all problem-solving related discussions, PMs will be able to identify any opportunities where scope needs to change, or a dramatic pivot is required.
Of course, an organisation needs the appropriate culture and psychological safety to allow PMs and their peers to question strategy and direction. If the first time this is raised is by the PM looking to enact change, then even better — it is far more important to question the status quo before the product inevitably fails.
Product Insight
Begin getting into the habit of gathering data to justify decisions to gain more confidence in your communication and gain crucial trust from your team members too. Decisions without data are simply guesses.
“I never guess, it is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty. — Sherlock Holmes
Matt LeMay describes this as “taking a clear-eyed look at all the real-world information available to us and making the best decisions we can, even when those decisions are neither clear nor obvious”. For a more detailed write-up on how to be a data-based Product Manager, see his post on Mind The Product.
Over time, as you mature your product capability, you’ll ascertain a Peter Parker-like spidey-sense (c/o Adrienne Tan) for making product decisions without necessarily waiting for data every time. As Adrienne suggests, continuous learning is a non-negotiable activity. PMs should own the fact that they are on a perpetual journey of gaining new knowledge and skills. PMs must also aside time to learn about their customer ecosystems, the market interactions and tech trends every week.
2. Continually Ensuring A Shared Understanding
Strong Product Leaders continually communicate vision, purpose and strategy so that it is heavily engrained across the company. It’s not enough to send out a set of PowerPoint slides every 6 months with a vision statement. Communicate your “why”, your purpose, your north star, frequently and often.
With shared understanding, a team is more efficient, resilient, and creative. In times when a manager or leader is not present, they always find a way to jointly solve complex problems autonomously. Such teams do the following, best summarised by John Cutler:
[Aligned teams] row relentlessly in the right direction, even when that point on the horizon shifts. — John Cutler
Some practical tools to frequently ensure shared understanding are:
Have open, honest, constructive conversations: communicate purpose, strategy, vision and problem statements often. It is also ok to sometimes ask your teams to restate what they think the problem statement and objectives are, to ensure they understand.
Establish cascading performance measures: set product objectives that roll-up and support organisational objectives at a strategic/company level. The most common method is using Objectives, Key Results (OKRs) pioneered by Google. Review this at least monthly.
Communicate simplified status tracking and reporting: ensure people are up-to-date with developments and how each deliverable drives value and the OKRs established above.
3. Distinguishing Alignment from Consensus
Strong Product Leaders know the difference between Alignment and Consensus, both related but very different concepts.
Gaining consensus is when a group of people reach a decision together. Typically this is done through many meetings to ensure everyone agrees to a certain direction, but where no single person can be held accountable.
Ensuring alignment is the activity of helping people understand the context, issues, roles, and solution. It means asking questions and listening to feedback. It means people with differing opinions can still align on their intentions and would commit to the decision made.
No organisation distinguishes better between consensus and alignment better than Amazon, for which one of their leadership principles is to “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.”
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting... Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.— Amazon
To manage product priorities and product roadmap, one only ever needs alignment and open, collaborative culture. Not everyone has to agree with everything, but they all need to have the ability to provide input and feedback. Gaining consensus is great to achieve, but ultimately isn’t needed.
Take, for example, the responsibility of establishing a product roadmap for your product. Trade-offs are needed all the time, and many features need a swift “no” so that your team and delivery schedule stays focussed on the wider strategic goals. PMs can never satisfy every stakeholder — the sooner the PM realises this, the better.
Final Thoughts
Provided above are three critical skills needed by any Product Manager to flex their leadership muscles early on in their career. These included:
Questioning Purpose Based On Insight
Continually Ensuring A Shared Understanding
Distinguishing Alignment from Consensus
There are obviously many other skills that I’ve skipped over that you would also need to hone in on later as you progress the Product Management career ladder, typically worked upon once you have more resources and PMs to manage yourself. These skills include, but are not limited to:
Corporate and business strategy acumen
Organisational design and operational model development
Thought leadership, inspiration and motivational leadership
Acquiring and retaining top talent, building product teams
Coaching and delegation, and when to change leadership styles based on competence and commitment
Many more!
However, these are much more advanced and occur later in your career trajectory. These require in-depth analyses and write-ups in their own right — I’ll post them right here in Medium once I get the time to do so!
So, the next time you see the opportunity to take on more responsibility, simply point your superiors to examples where you have demonstrated the 3 skills above. At the very least, your candidacy would have been legitimately considered over external (hiring) options. And if your leaders don’t believe in your ability based on these merits alone, don’t give up — be like Mike! Just keep flexing.