Product managers are considered as mini-CEOs of their products. It’s one of the most misunderstood statements for product management, mostly due to incorrectly basing it on the lack of authority in product management and thus refuting it. The essence in this comparison is not authority, but ownership, result oriented approach, and the will to align different functions to the common goal. More precisely the essence is about leadership.
A one word definition for product management would be “leadership”. Leadership lies at the heart of various roles a product manager plays. How well a product manager leads a product release, without having any authority over various functions involved in it, has direct co-relation with the success of the product. Let’s explore some of the leadership traits one must resonate with, in order to be an effective product manager.
Know Your Team
Empathizing with your users forms the crux of product management. While the focus lies primarily on the end users of your product, the empathy and understanding starts from internal users and stakeholders involved in product development. People are the real strength for every organization. This holds true for the mini org present in your product development team too, which has key members and stakeholders from across functions of tech, design and business. Its very important to know your team members’ strengths and the environment in which they give their best, and then making sure that all roadblocks and challenges in making that environment for them are removed. Know what motivates each one of them and align their tasks accordingly.
Know Your Goal
As obvious as it may sound, always keeping the end goal in mind can’t be stressed enough. Every product development starts with a vision and a path towards it. But as one progresses, chaos is bound to set in and increase day by day. After all, every worthwhile problem demands huge effort to solve. In this reality, the onus to keep the vision always in sight and course correct the entire team on the product development journey lies most heavily on the product manager. Where other team members can get too deep in their own functions, be it tech, design or business, the responsibility to never lose focus from the end goal is primarily product manager’s. A clear focus on what to chase is the foundation on which product scope is shaped. Once the scope is defined, prioritizing the intermediate milestones becomes that much simpler, giving the entire team concrete mini goals to chase and accomplish. This brings us to the next trait of leadership required in product management – aligning the team to these mini goals.
Align Your Team
Be it a mini goal or a complex task, a well functioning cohesive work unit can take care of anything. For the team to be well functioning, its imperative that each member knows and plays her function to the best of her capability. Where capability of one member falls short, other members give the guidance and provide the complimentary skills to sail the entire team through. The responsibility of keeping the communication flowing in this cohesive unit and in fact, the responsibility of keeping the unit cohesive is what the product manager shoulders. Other functions, especially tech and design, can very easily fall in their silos while solving an intricate problem. This can easily derail them from the overall goal, which might want them to prioritize some other details they might be overlooking instead. It is for such situations when a product manager’s crystal clear documentation and agile methodology to drive the project comes handy. The role of the product manager is to identify owners in the team for various parts of the product, and nurture them as solution experts and definitely not as blame destinations. It’s very important for the product manager to inculcate such collaborative culture in the team.
Keep The Morale High
Product development projects require a lot of navigation around ambiguity, especially so in consumer Internet products. Often projects need to be started much before supporting business functions’ role can be accurately defined and documented, which becomes clear only when the product feature starts taking good shape. Even during feature development, some tech and design decisions taken at the start of the project need to be re-evaluated due to roadblocks which arise only after coming so far in the development journey. Such inevitable scenarios can easily take a toll on the morale of the team and their motivation can drop. Such times require the product manager to keep the overall morale high, and course correct the project promptly. Course correction can either be in the form of re-scoping the feature list for the launch, or aligning the executive leadership to allow more time and resources for the project. Most important is to never abandon your team and never put the onus for the hiccup on the function experts. What is needed in such times is to regroup, reassess and re-scope your release.
Celebrate Success & Highlight Contributions
Finally at the end of every release, what paves the way for successful future releases is to let your team know that it was their individual contributions which made this project a success. Celebrating each and every meaningful contribution imparts a sense of confidence in your team and that results in work satisfaction at a much deeper level. Highlighting the effect of function experts in your team on the project success gradually matures them into their roles, and prepares them to be ready for more elaborate and more complex releases down the line in the product roadmap. However, at times product releases result in some shortcomings too. At such times lead your team from the front and embrace the negative comments with an open mind, and enable everyone to learn from the negative feedback and shortcomings. With right receptive attitude, cohesive teams always bounce back much higher and stronger.
The essence of leadership is to bring out the leaders in others. That’s what a good product manager must do too. Gradually as the project progresses, she should enable others to have so much context that they can work independently from her, thereby leading the project on their own. This not only helps in high quality output, as the product manager merely orchestrates whereas the music is created by other functions, but also results in giving more bandwidth to the product manager so she can again holistically keep managing the product and not simply hustle.