Managing your team as a Product Manager
Product Managers manage products, not people, right?
The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.
While the word “manager” in your title often means that you’re a people manager, this is not a job requirement for a PM until you reach Group, Director or VP level. However, a Product Manager is nothing without their team so it’s critical we’re successfully managing our relationships with these coworkers. I’m going to break down what serves me well when managing the people on my team.
While working with your engineers, designers, data analysts, UX researchers, etc. I recommend the following four tips for stronger, more trusting and collaborative teams:
- Admit your mistakes
- Have strong opinions, weakly held
- Provide strong validated research
- Create opportunities for input
Admit your mistakes.
While I know this isn’t intuitive, being quick to admit where you may have misstepped will encourage your team to do the same. In the past, this has worked to create a strong culture of trust on my teams. This can also disarm anyone who might be on the attack. If you’re not defensive, it will deescalate the situation. Acknowledge the issues, accept the blame and be ready with a plan of action to correct the wrongdoings.
Have strong opinions, weakly held.
Go ahead, speak with confidence about your well founded opinions. However, as soon as you are presented with new and compelling information from an informed source, accept it, don’t reject it. This also isn’t intuitive. Humans suffer from confirmation bias and therefore tend to ignore information that doesn’t further support the hypotheses we’ve already formed. This is an incredibly dangerous trap, especially for a PM. Fight that confirmation bias and your team will trust that you’re open to accepting new ideas and concepts from them.
Provide strong validated research.
While we often think about having strong validated research to help determine our roadmaps, this is also critical information to provide your team. It’ll help to justify that their time is being well spent. If you don’t have support and buy-in from your team about the upcoming work they’ll be doing, you’re going to have a problem. Because you’ll be synthesizing quantitative and qualitative data for your roadmap anyway, I’d strongly suggest setting up a session to communicate your research and findings with your team prior to roadmap finalization. Take the time to answer questions and be sure to get their input! Great ideas come from everywhere and they’ll be more confident knowing you did your homework.
Create opportunities for input.
The session I suggested above is just one time that you can get input from your team throughout a road mapping cycle. There should also be more frequent opportunities for your team to provide feedback. For my teams, this has been done best through regularly scheduled retrospective meetings (otherwise known as retros). You can find the right cadence for your team but mine met every other week to great success. In the early days of my team’s formation, we had lots to hash out in retros. However, because we actually prioritized resolving our action items, these meetings became quicker and more efficient. Retros create opportunities for everyone to admit and address mistakes, building trust within your unit. If you fear that you’re not getting honest feedback in retros, you can also create surveys and allow your team to fill them out anonymously.
These four tips above should help you to successfully manage the people on your team. I’d also suggest that you get to know your team members’ personally and create good relationships with their managers. With all this, you should have established a strong base level of trust with your teammates which is critical to you and your product’s success.
Establishing trust ensures that when larger issues arise, individuals can safely sound the alarm, allowing the team as a whole to triage quickly. The alternative scenario, where someone tries to hide and independently solve a problem of their doing, leads to a much more costly cleanup. Team trust also ensures a culture of “positive intent assumption”, which is a necessary component of any healthy relationship. Now go forth and manage!
“Trust leads to approachability and open communications.” — Scott Weiss
Let me know what else has worked for you when managing your teams.
