Establishing Excellence in Product Management — Part 3 of Becoming a Product Leader
Great Product Leaders raise the bar for product management across an organization. They consistently strive to improve how product management is practiced, ensuring better outcomes over time. In this article, I discuss how individual contributor Product Managers can demonstrate leadership by establishing excellence in product management themselves and across their organization.
This is Part 3 of the “Becoming a Product Leader” series. In this series, I am tackling different outcomes and traits that individual contributor Product Managers can practice and cultivate to become a Product Leader.
As an IC PM working to become a Product Leader, you need to convince other leaders to trust that you can raise the bar of product management in your organization. This trust is earned through:
- Demonstrating your ability to manage product initiatives of significant scope and complexity, and
- Driving real improvements in product management processes across your organization.
Demonstrating Excellence in Product Management
Your leadership team relies on Product Leaders to bring a depth of product expertise to the organization. Demonstrating that expertise and earning their trust means:
- Experiencing the product development cycle multiple times on initiatives of significant scope and complexity, and
- Effectively communicating with senior leaders and stakeholders
Mastering the Product Development Cycle
As a Product Leader, you will be responsible for business outcomes across a wide swath of product areas. As an IC, you should aim to understand the Product Development Cycle well enough to guide and coach other PMs to success. That means running through the cycle multiple times on projects across a range of scope and complexity.
There are a lot of variations on the definition of the Product Development Cycle. But the core principles are the same. Discover and validate what you’re supposed to build and what it looks like. Deliver a high quality experience. Release and market appropriately. Measure impact and gather feedback to determine what to do next.
The details of each step vary dramatically depending on the scope of the project. For a minor feature improvement, each step can be relatively straightforward. Minimal conversation needed with customers or collaboration with stakeholders. Discovery might be as simple as deciding to build out feature parity across a platform. Definition as simple as modifying designs.
For a major launch, discovery can require in depth conversations with customers and internal experts. Definition requires plenty of concept testing and idea validation. Execution requires phased milestones and coordination with other teams. Go to market is an entire project in and of itself to get all the material together, align stakeholders, and get buy in from leadership.
For really big bets, each step can become its own miniature cycle. Discovery and validation become inherent principles behind every step. Approvals from leadership can be required to move forward between steps in order to justify the expenditure of resources or to ensure the brand isn’t damaged or revenue put at risk.
As a Product Leader, your familiarity with each step across a wide range of scopes is critical to successfully leading a team of PMs. You will be guiding them through new experiences and watching their work to ensure they don’t make irreparable mistakes.
That said, not every company expects equal depth of experience across the entire cycle, nor is the scope of products the same. The key is taking on the widest potential scope a Product Manager can own in your organization.
I built up a range of experience across my career. Working on a variety of products and business models helped to create depths of skill in areas that I otherwise might not have. Gaming required deep data analysis, down to minutes and even seconds of user behavior. Game launches meant collaborating on creative ad campaigns and hard CPI / LTV optimizations. Growth at Evernote taught me growth loops, clarifying hypotheses, and rapid experimentation. Working on zero to one products at both Evernote and Autodesk meant countless hours of user research and validation and complex release plans.
Whatever your background, seek a range of opportunities to broaden and deepen your own experience.
Avoiding the Execution Trap
Most Product Managers get their start in the execution step of the product cycle. PMs can get stuck on this step. It’s comfortable, it’s often the only explicit expectation, and there’s always more to be done.
Additionally, owning too much of the execution process can prevent the team itself from growing and improving. Having to answer every minor UI or requirements question makes you a bottleneck. Being the only person who know how the whole release process works makes you a single point of failure. Driving all improvements from the sprint retro deprives individuals from taking on leadership opportunities.
Your goal should be to enable your team to execute effectively with as little of your involvement as possible. As a Senior Product Manager, you should be able to provide guidance to the team to make them self sufficient. You should know what good and bad execution looks like. You should be familiar with multiple frameworks and methods. You should have developed an understanding of the underlying principles behind those practices.
This knowledge should make it straightforward to train a less experienced team. You won’t impose your idea of best practices; you’ll work with your team to discover what works best for the team. You know what you can expect, and so you can negotiate and delegate responsibilities. You’ll empower each team member to be responsible for the quality and effectiveness of each part of the process they touch.
As a result, your team will deliver better product outcomes. Your engineering lead and developers will have more ownership over the process and product. And you will be able to spend more time on the rest of the cycle, or increasing the scope of the initiatives you tackle.
Earning Trust Through Communication
It isn’t enough to do the work. You need to be communicating what you do and how you do it, in order to build trust that you can autonomously lead initiatives of significant scope and impact.
A key thing to consider is “autonomy.” Having autonomy means being able to choose goals and the means of achieving them. But having that freedom doesn’t mean being able to work in complete isolation. Great leadership is bringing everyone along the journey, including senior stakeholders and leadership.
A major facet of communication with leadership is understanding their needs. Your leadership team is looking for confidence. Confidence in the direction you’re heading, the approach you’re taking, the timelines you’ve committed to, and that the right people are being included throughout the process.
You should be clear in your needs as well. Asking for ongoing resources and support. Help on pushing against or even changing systems that put your projects at risk. And continuous buy-in on direction and approach.
By addressing their needs and clearly articulating and justifying your own, you will earn their confidence. And you will be demonstrating the degree of scope and complexity you can manage autonomously.
A mistake I made early in my career was trying to solve problems quietly and only communicate good news and wins whenever possible. I thought that instilling confidence was about never showing weakness. This worked for a while — I solved a lot of problems, had some good wins, and made my way up the career ladder. But as I moved into bigger initiatives, the problems became far beyond what any one team or individual could hope to contain. Trying to quietly manage everything stressed me out, which stressed my team out. And failures became surprises to leadership and stakeholders.
I started communicating risks early. I walked through the situation, what the team and I were doing to address it, and whether we needed any assistance. Most of the time, nothing changed in what we would do — I was just being transparent about it. And by doing so, it took a lot of the pressure off in the case of failure, and it actually increased confidence that the team and I were doing well.
I learned that while winning is important, bringing people along the way defines success. By walking with your stakeholders and leaders through each step, they become collaborators in the process. Decisions and outcomes are made together, win or lose.
Ideas Into Action
When communicating to your senior leaders stakeholders, there are several key areas to cover: conflicts between people, the plans for complex projects, risks to plans, insights on direction, and high impact emergencies. You should seek to provide transparency into challenges and risks, but emphasize that you and your team are taking appropriate actions.
Examples of the kinds of topics worth communicating:
- Unique insights from customer conversations
- Last minute emergencies that you managed and resolved
- Overcoming logistical hurdles, such as legal blockers or creating an operational plan with customer success
- Disagreements with partner teams on priorities, approaches, or resources and how you plan to resolve them
- Presenting a research plan — goals, hypotheses, methods
- Managing an angry client or frustrated sales rep, or requesting assistance in those conversations
Look for opportunities to communicate what you and the team have managed. Take advantage of presentations on major launches or research findings. Leverage periodic check-ins with the leadership team. 1:1s with your manager can be an effective time to demonstrate excellence. A good manager can be your strongest advocate. Providing them specific evidence of your good work can be critical to your future opportunities.
With my reports, I ask them to keep me updated on the many initiatives they’re working on. I ask them to emphasize the challenges they’re facing and how they’re approaching them. For complex projects that are a bit beyond their experience, this ensures I can evaluate their approach and provide feedback. For problems that they are resolving on their own, I have awareness of what they’ve accomplished, and I can then broadcast their successes to other leaders in the organization.
Leveling Up the Product Team
Beyond establishing excellence in one’s own abilities, Product Leaders level up the craft of product management across the entire organization. Part of this is in coaching and mentoring other PMs. But an important aspect is driving improvements in product practices in your organization.
As an individual contributor, you have opportunities to make meaningful improvements to how your product team operates. Taking the initiative to collaborate with other Product Managers and drive improvements is an important part of leadership.
There are many ways to level up your product organization. It comes down to a few key ideas. Improve tools or processes to make it easier for PMs to do their jobs well. Identify and share out best practices across the product development cycle. Knock down barriers in communication with other functions, partner teams, or leadership.
Some examples of what this looks like:
- Product Development Cycle improvements. Every aspect of the cycle is rife with opportunities to drive improvements. Running kickoffs, product spec reviews, analysis templates, release checklists, customer research methods, etc.
- Unblocking barriers with partners. Getting approvals with legal, setting up a new beta process, or getting access to analytics tools can be opaque if clear processes haven’t been defined. Working with partners and documenting processes can go a long way to making other PMs’ lives easier and more effective.
- Product planning. The org-wide planning process is extremely high impact and often quite a mess. I’ve never seen a company with a bullet proof planning process. But I’ve worked places that put in a lot of effort to continuously improve the process. Being part of the solution and helping to make the org-wide planning process more effective is a great way to invest your time.
- Communication with stakeholders and leadership. Do you have recurring meetings with key partners? Do you have channels for passing direction and insights down from senior leaders from other functions? Any best practices when presenting updates to the leadership team? Communication out of the team is critical to success for the team, PMs, and the organization as a whole.
- Team culture. Does your team foster an attitude of positivity and proactiveness? Do you share ideas and collaborate, or are you mostly siloed into your teams? Do your product team meetings include time to get to know each other, how you think, and what you value? Do you have recurring product team meetings? Fostering a healthy product team culture can spur improvements across every aspect of product management.
Finding areas that need improvement is usually quite easy. Prioritizing your time and energy effectively is important. Talk to your manager, skip level manager, or even your head of product to hear about high priority areas that need attention and improvement. Volunteer your time to assist other leaders in ongoing initiatives.
You can also take any improvements you’ve made for your own team or paths you’ve trail-blazed and share those with the rest of the product team. This can be as simple as documenting steps in a confluence page and talking about it during your biweekly PM meeting. Or as robust as frequent presentations and helping your team to become evangelists.
When I joined the Growth team at Evernote, we had the opportunity to redefine what Growth meant at Evernote. We revamped our experimentation process: clearer hypotheses, automated dashboards, new testing frameworks. And we began to see some real impact. We shared our results and learnings throughout the organization. Biweekly emails with upcoming tests and previous results and learnings went out to the entire organization. We presented to leadership on major wins, explaining the data and psychology we used to define hypotheses. And on demo days, our developers presented their experiments. They walked through the full process of hypothesis generation, implementation, results, and findings.
We consistently messaged what we were doing, how we did it, what we learned, and what the impact was. And we shifted attitudes and perspective on what growth could mean for our business and organization. By sharing knowledge and democratizing the process, we brought more product and marketing teams into adopting experimentation and growth concepts, pushing the entire org to more data driven decision making.
Summary
Product Management is a function without obvious answers and no guarantees. But the frameworks, practices, and processes we apply to our craft can determine the long term success or failure of an organization. Becoming a Product Leader means establishing excellence in Product Management in oneself and throughout the organization. Moving up from an IC position means taking steps to demonstrate that excellence to senior leaders and to take real action to drive improvements beyond your individual team.
And this process is never ending. A great Product Leader is always striving to improve themselves and the organization.
Next in the series, Hiring as an Individual Contributor — Part 4 of the Becoming a Product Leader series.
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