Managing Product Managers

At the time of writing this post, I am training/mentoring few tech industry product mangers who have not just the responsibility of crafting the steller success for their product but also to be able to grow individuals to repeat that success. While there are much material on how to manage product portfolio, very few learnings are shared on how to lead a team of product managers.

I am fortunate to have worked on software products and underlying technologies, bringing the enterprise angle or innovation angle depending on where the market, competition and trends are swinging, bringing the value to the paid customers and meaningful efficient tools to new customers via the products that I built ( with the top of the class teams)!

I want to stand by the good decisions (there are nothing like that…) in the heinsight and learn from bad ones. However the worst impact comes to the team not from the worst product development or prioritization choices but from doing the incremental mistakes of thinking of tech and problem in hand higher than people in team. In particular this is so true in the subjective topics like people management that then leaves the holes in disharmonized team that hardly gets onboard with no support to amplify their goals and learning needs met and expanded as a part of job itself.

Not having provision for the growth & quantification of impact of individual PM’s work leaves small cracks that then transfer to a spagetti of disjointed product decisions totally made out of intuition and good faith from various smart people but are not justified to implement a harmonized solution.

Broader Communication: Enable team to be a glue !

Some things I advocate in my mentoring and training is “communication” — there are various forms — over, redundant, effective, upwards, downwards etc. From time to time, one that matters the most is communication to be a glue across all directions and initiatives. The glue that keeps the people, charter, sales, marketting and entire brand to be a solid one ! It can be Gorilla glue in case of hard to stick agendas and iterations or regular school glue in case of creative, exploratory ideas. But as a leader, your job is not to glue it yourself ; give your team the power to use various laid out communication tools. I believe only very senior PMs will even go this route to articulate the communication methods to satisfy company, customer and brand culture. Regardless, communication is a powerful tool that make or break the destiny and outcomes — people should be made experts to realize when to tame it down or overdo it depending on the charter by following a decent framework that is set by you as a leader.

Strengthen the team : Multiply of skills and responsibilities

If you are in a train, the novelty most of us had as a kid was to be a Caboose, who wants to be a Caboose as we grow up? Most of us would prefer to be an engine that the train runs on — right? Or be the Bogie where important assets are, or be in charge of luxurious compartments or so on? This is natural — going for opportunities that may have limelight and perceived importance is natural. That does not mean the person in charge of something cannot take on other responsibilities — from a train ride to another, changing that responsibility is not only rewarding to the team but also makes n*m growth in the team skills. To stress the point, be grateful to the finisher i.e. the person incharge of giving the last bit to the customers, however, to set the path for them to circle back & particpate in the product discovery as well will make them better finishers next time — You really want to rotate opportunities for the healty teams and mutliply your team’s expertise and efficiency, this is healthy for your organization!

Product Outcome : Measurable outcomes and demonstration

Many people think and believe that the product management is a craft, so I tell my friends — it might be a craft for the ones who cant measure the success of the role. On the other hand, there are super PMs who are KPI nerds who live by numbers — estimation, measure and be critical about impact in numbers. As a product lead, its your responsibily and the most important part of your role to set those benchmarks for your team and have team run with them. You ought to be inquisitve about the numbers your team is tracking. Provide healthy brainstorming and guidance! Much of that metrics in fact does not come from one brain alone, team should feel confident in inviting peers to crafting those together -cross verify and adjust.

If there are no numbers and thresholds, what will you rate your product execution against? Caution — Mental bechmarks are hard to communicate across the orgs (everyone has different interpretation of non standard terms, varying degree of patience for ad-hoc measurement and tracking asks), so sit down with your team and demonstrate them how to align cross functional, give them the framework to proactively track, communicate and be ready to refine.

Summary:

First : Provide communication guidelines and examples ! Show trust in team to communicate as per their needs ( not according to their personality ;-) )

Second : Rotation of tasks to build stronger teams !

Third : Demonstrate benchmarking for the team! Measure, communicate, question and measure again.

To be able to manage above three things like a well oiled machine, is your success as a manager. Your focus should be to enable everyone to deliver the best in class products and tools to get customer’s job done, giving the mechanism for your team to improve upon the brand promise, help sales get more leads, work with engineers to bring new technology and solutions to the market . Go at it… All the best !