Autonomy & Product Management— It’s Complicated
A framework to increase your autonomy as a PM
Autonomy is a touchy subject in product management. By autonomy, I mean the ability to make decisions about your work. I’ve observed new product managers waste time and energy being frustrated about how little autonomy they feel they have. Fortunately, there are steps a product manager can take to increase their autonomy. That’s what this post is about.
This post is structured in three sections:
- Why PMs fixate on autonomy — it’s complicated
- Learnings about autonomy — what to consider before trying to get more autonomy
- How to get more autonomy as a PM — a framework on how to get more autonomy for you and your team
Why product managers fixate on autonomy
Author Daniel Pink says autonomy is a critical factor in motivating people at work. It helps them feel connected and empowers them to make a positive contribution. Even though autonomy is important for everyone, it’s a hot-button for product managers in particular for a few different reasons.
We’re supposed to be decision makers
Even though product managers wear different hats depending on their company, product, and other factors, the common thread is that we’re accountable to some business result (i.e., drive revenue, decrease customer churn, etc.). This business result occurs from the sum of efforts of multiple individuals (i.e., engineers writing code, designers creating interfaces, etc.). The product manager’s key contribution is to make decisions. That’s why autonomy is always top of mind for us. If we don’t have the agency to make our own decisions, then we feel like we’re not really contributing. It’s important for us to feel like we’re making a positive contribution so we’re constantly evaluating how much autonomy we think we have.
Beyond the nature of our role, there are other reasons why autonomy is top of mind for product managers that relates to the way we work with company leadership.
We’ve had bad experiences with top-down leadership
Sometimes company leadership can be very prescriptive — such as telling teams what they should work on and why. These situations can be demoralizing because, as product managers, we feel it’s our job to figure that stuff out. If you’ve ever experienced this before, you know what I’m talking about. Think of a feature you once built that no customer ever used and was probably created for the wrong reasons (i.e., to appease the executive team or a key partner).
So, if our key contribution is decision-making, but we’re told to be order-takers by company leadership, then such experiences make us feel totally worthless. Because of these negative experiences, product managers can be sensitive about autonomy. As such, we’ll go through great lengths to prevent these awful situations from recurring by constantly evaluating whether our autonomy is being undermined and stressing about it along the way. It’s understandable why we’d behave this way. No one wants to be made to feel worthless in any aspect of their life.
In light of our heightened sensitivity on this matter, sometimes we feel like our autonomy is being threatened when it’s actually not.
We conflate “autonomy” with not being open to criticism
Even though our key contribution is decision making, ironically, product management as a discipline doesn’t have strong mechanisms to help PMs become better decision makers.
Other disciplines are far better at establishing practices that open people up to feedback and enhance decision-making skills (i.e., engineering code reviews and design critiques). Because product management doesn’t have such practices, we feel our autonomy is being threatened when we’re really just uncomfortable with others challenging our decisions.
Those who challenge us might be internal stakeholders, such as company leaders or peers in other departments who might be affected by our decisions (i.e., marketing, customer support, sales, etc.). It’s important to note that we don’t necessarily have to do as they say. These stakeholders might merely be seeking to understand how a decision was made or offering an alternative solution. Either way, even if these people aren’t actually threatening our autonomy, it sure can feel like it, which further causes us to fixate on how much (or little) autonomy we feel we have.
Now that we understand why autonomy is such a touchy issue for product managers, I’ll share some learnings about the journey to obtain more autonomy.
Learnings about autonomy
The level of autonomy you get as a PM and your ability to increase it is contextual to your company’s culture and leadership. However, there are two things about autonomy that are universal:
Increasing your level of autonomy is a long game
Some companies try to mitigate risk by having more people involved in projects and decisions (e.g., executives and other departmental leaders). Not all companies operate this way, but if you work at a place like this, know this approach is pretty ingrained. It’s definitely possible to get more autonomy in companies like this, it just takes time, so it’s important to be patient if you embark on this journey. Even if your company doesn’t operate this way, getting leadership to trust you is critical to increasing your autonomy. This also takes time. No matter what company you work for, increasing your level of autonomy is always a long game.
You’ll always want more autonomy, no matter how much you have
Autonomy is a touchy subject for product managers because it’s associated with strong feelings about the value we bring and our sense of self worth. Even if we work with a leadership team that encourages autonomy, no one in the working world is fully autonomous. We all must answer to someone, and that person may decide to strongly influence or even overturn our decisions, which can feel really shitty. In light of this, keep in mind that no matter how progressive leadership is and no matter how much autonomy you have, you’ll always want more. Obtaining more autonomy requires lots of time and energy via communication and relationship management (more on that later).
If you try to get more autonomy, know that you’ll never feel completely satisfied. You’re essentially going on a journey without a final destination.
How to get more autonomy
Getting more autonomy as a product manager comes down to three actions:
- Figure out which aspects of the project you can influence
- Show the business that you can make sound decisions
- Help your team operate autonomously (i.e., without you)
I’ll discuss this framework with personal examples that eventually led to more autonomy for me and others; but first, some context. Company leadership asked that my team and I build a specific feature. Here are the relevant details:
- What are we building? Feature X
- Who is it for? Segment Y
- Why are we building this? To make the product a better fit for segment Y
- What is the success metric? Trial-to-paid conversion
(1) Figure out which aspects of the project you can influence
When presented with this type of challenge, the typical product manager instinct is: “How dare you attempt to tell me what to build!” That’s a fair reaction as such prescriptive direction from leadership can feel demoralizing. However, I was very aware that the company was hell-bent on building X for segment Y. This aspect of the project was non-negotiable. So instead of throwing a hissy fit about the lack of autonomy, I focused on the things I could actually influence.
I realized that I could influence the success metric. I had a sinking feeling that the metric selected for this project was wrong. Some research and a few phone calls with solid product managers outside of my company confirmed my suspicion. Successful companies who built similar things to feature X used a different metric: customer lifetime value (LTV).
Armed with that information, I convinced my stakeholders and VP of Product that we should change the metric.
Ensuring that you have the right success metric in a world with limited autonomy is critical. When you don’t have the power to scrap the project before it begins (which would have been my preference in this situation), you must be able to speak about why the project was a success/failure, what you learned from it, and what should be done next (if anything).
As product managers, we can reinterpret certain aspects of a project. But we don’t always have the ability to turn everything on its head. There are always certain aspects of a project that we can influence; therefore, our challenge as product managers is to figure out what those things are.
As a new product manager, resisting the urge to take all the prescriptive information given to you by leadership at face value is an important first step at becoming a good decision maker which is critical if you want more autonomy. But you have to choose your battles wisely.
(2) Show the business that you can make sound decisions
Many new (and frustrated) product managers have said the following to me: “I wish leadership/stakeholders would just trust me.” These PMs were misaligned with leadership or other stakeholders and wanted to proceed in a different way. I’ve felt this way too in my career as a PM; I wished my stakeholders would just trust that I was always making the right call, but I soon realized that it was never going to happen. My stakeholders were not going to change. It was like being in a tug of war against a bunch of people with huge muscles. I could never “win.” There was no situation where they would “just trust me.” From there I realized that to prevent a frustrating existence as a product manager, I was the one who needed to change.
Initially, your stakeholders won’t trust you to make the right decisions, especially when you’re new. Of course this is infuriating, but instead of being pissed off about this, it’s your job to help your stakeholders actually trust you. There are different ways to go about this.
Given that I worked in an organization insisting that multiple stakeholders be involved in decisions, I brought those people deeper into the process. This approach, in turn, helped stakeholders start to trust me. A way to bring stakeholders into your decision-making process is to open yourself up to critique from them and by helping them understand how you arrived at your conclusions. By sharing early drafts of your work and posing pointed questions on how to improve, you not only build credibility with your stakeholders, but you can enhance your plans based on that feedback and possibly the project outcome.
Working this way with stakeholders was terrifying for me as a new product manager. There was a constant voice in my head saying, “These people for sure think I’m a moron.” I thought I needed to have all the answers when working with stakeholders when all I needed was to work more closely with them and we’d eventually we’d figure out the answers together. As it turned out, my stakeholders didn’t think I was a moron at all. If anything, they felt more connected to me because I made them feel needed by asking for their help. This approach not only deepened by relationship with stakeholders but also improved my plan for the feature we were building as stakeholders brought up thoughtful concerns that my team and I hadn’t considered.
Another way to show the business that you can make sound decisions is at the end of a project or the completion of a major milestone. At this time, close the loop with the same stakeholders and members of company leadership by sharing the project results. This action deepens your relationship with these stakeholders because they’ll feel like your success is their success. After all, they had a hand in helping you create the plan. Even if the project results are unsuccessful, the stakeholders are likely to still deem you a person who makes sound decisions because you took your stakeholders along with you as you worked through the planning process. Therefore, they’ll have all the context on why you made the decisions you did with the information you had at the time. If anything, sharing undesirable project results with stakeholders will increase the group’s collective understanding of the problem space and could lead to better decisions in the future.
By going through this process a few times, you’ll notice the number of factors you can influence on a project starts to dramatically increase. You’ll have more credibility with company leadership and they’ll be less prescriptive on what your team should be working on. Also, you’ll have deeper relationships with important stakeholders who will be happy to collaborate with you. When these things happen, it means you’ve shown the business that you’re someone who can make sound decisions.
(3) Help your team operate more autonomously (without you)
Throughout this post, I’ve urged product managers to stop fixating on their lack of autonomy and instead do things that eventually lead to more autonomy. That being said, there is some autonomy worth fighting for that isn’t just your own.
Focus your energy on getting your cross-functional team to make sound decisions without you. Work with your team to develop a shared understanding of how to make decisions that balance the needs of the business and the customer. For example, establish frameworks for everyday decisions (e.g., bug prioritization, making user experience trade-offs when implementing a feature). By using these frameworks and discussing them as a group, over time, ad-hoc questions from your engineering and design teammates will taper off dramatically. Your teammates will just make the call on their own. For the same reasons that you crave more autonomy, so does your team.
Getting your team to operate autonomously can take a lot of time depending on how experienced they are. Better to invest the time sooner rather than later by sharing your techniques and frameworks on how you break down problems and arrive at decisions. Eventually, you too will obtain more autonomy in your work which means more responsibility. Some of your focus will shift to things like product strategy leaving you less time to work with your team on execution. Making your team more autonomous now is just making your future self more efficient.
What have you done to increase your level of autonomy as a product manager? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Enjoyed what you read? Show some ❤️ by clapping + sharing it so that others can find it too!
📝 Read this story later in Journal.
🗞 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy Tech stories, opinions, and news waiting in your inbox: Get the noteworthy newsletter >
