Product Management 101: Managing Your Team

Over the years I have saved hundreds of links in my Bookmarks and books to my Amazon wishlist, on various topics as a PM. It’s getting rather unwieldy now, so I thought I would do a bit of digital decluttering and help fellow PMs in the process.

Whether you are officially managing a team of people or not, the hardest part of being a Product Manager is arguably working with so many different types of personalities and roles. And you might need some of the skills of a manager, even if you haven’t been trained to be one.

As always, please feel free to suggest more resources in the comments below!

How to be a Good Manager/Leader:

• ‘10 Things You Need To Do When You Become a Manager’ Article: I’ve highlighted so much of this article, it’s ridiculous.
• ‘Assessment: What’s Your Leadership Style?’ HBR Quiz: Find out what kind of leader you are instinctively, in order to know where you might need to improve.
• ‘The Making of a Manager’ Book: A truly practical guide to being a Manager, even if you aren’t officially managing a team. Filled with examples of what to do in almost every scenario, as written by a Manager at Facebook who grew with the company.
• ‘Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe’ Video: A Ted Talk by Simon Sinek, the best-selling author of the ‘Start with Why’ book. Here he describes why it’s important for a leader to make those in their organisation feel safe, and what a good leader looks like.
• ‘Product Leadership’ Book: Written by Product Managers you often see giving inspiring talks at conferences.
• ‘Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things’ Article: “Google reported a statistically significant improvement in 75 percent of its underperforming managers after implementing the program.”
• ‘How to run world class One to Ones — Part 1: The Basics’, and ‘Part 2: Deeply understand your team’ Articles: A very practical guide.
• ‘Starter wisdom for new managers — how to not suck and have people like you.’ Article: Fairly self-explanatory but this article is pretty comprehensive.
• ‘Your guide to defining clear project objectives for your team’ Article: This article is gold, as a complete overview of how a Product Manager can work with their team on projects to accomplish their goals. Alot more specific to Product Managers.

Building Trust with Your Team:

• ‘Questions managers need to ask during their first two weeks’ Article: Next steps of questions you need to ask your team in the first two weeks of becoming a new manager.
• ‘How to run your first meeting as a new manager’ Article: I’ve highlighted like half of this article, so it must be good!
• ‘The 25 best icebreaker questions for team-building at work’ Article
• How to Create a Personal User Manual: Atlassian have this guide on running this activity for a team, so team members can learn how best to work with each other and to foster psychological safety.
• ‘This Matrix Helps Growing Teams Make Great Decisions’ Article: This matrix is a great tool to help build psychological safety in a team and help team members build confidence in making decisions.

Rebooting or Forming a New Team:

• ‘The Indispensable Document for the Modern Manager’ HBR Article: Why and how to create a User Guide for your team to know how to work with you. You can also get each member of your team to create their own User Guides so everyone knows how best to work with each other. Especially great for newly formed teams, teams that need a reboot, and for onboarding new members.
• ‘Build a Tower, Build a Team’ Ted Talk: The Marshallow Challenge, typically used as a team-building exercise, proves that increasing high stakes decreases the chances of success of a team. A team needs both incentives and to be highly skilled in order to succeed.
• ‘Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive’ Article: “An engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied worker, but an employee who feels inspired at work is nearly 125% more productive than a satisfied one”. Apple, Google and the like seek to inspire their employees and reduce organizational drag -thereby making them more productive.
• ‘Give Your Team the Freedom to Do the Work They Think Matters Most’ HBR Article: “According to a 2017 Gallup Employee Engagement survey, 33% of U.S. employees are engaged, 51% are disengaged, and 16% are actively disengaged. Freedom-based companies, by contrast, can typically boast that more than 70% of their employees are “engaged,” according to Gallup’s data.” This article also has a list of ways to help a team become ‘liberated’.
• ‘Reboot Your Team’ Mind The Product Video: Mind The Product’s conferences are pretty jam-packed with ideas, and this video of a session at one of their conferences is no exception.
• ‘Get Your People Performing as a Team’ Article: How Skyscanner improved their product culture by getting their employees to work as a team.
• ‘The Simple Tool that Revives Employee Motivation’ Article: How a Head of Product or CTO can identify flagging motivation in their teams, the root cause, and what they can do about it.

Run Better Meetings:

• ‘6 types of meetings that are actually worthwhile’ Article: A quick list of meetings you should be having with your team.
• ‘First Round Review’s 6 Must Reads to Run Fast, Efficient Meetings’ Article: This is geared towards Head of Product or Founders, but the list on what meetings you should cancel and what meetings to replace them with is very insightful.
• Estimate the Cost of a Meeting with This Calculator by HBR: Meetings take up employees’ time, and therefore costs the company money. However, we are so used to meetings that we don’t really realise just how much money they can cost. Use this tool to calculate that and evaluate if a meeting is worth keeping or not.

Performance Management/Career Progression:

• ‘Strengthsfinder 2.0’ Book: Buy this book for each of your team members and get them to use the accompanying code to access the online quiz to find out their strengths. The school of thought is to focus on building on your team’s inbuilt strengths (ie. building them up) when judging performance, rather than always focusing on what they are doing wrong (ie. decreasing morale). This was a core principle in one of the previous companies I worked at and it was a great morale booster.
• ‘Betterment Tested Three Performance Management Systems So You Don’t Have To’ Article: What are the effects of different performance management systems on teams? Are they effective?
• ‘Grow them or lose them: how we do performance management at CharlieHR’ Article: An example of a startup trying to do performance management better.
• Monzo’s Progression Framework: Monzo have designed a career progression framework for key roles at their company, and made it public. This is a great example of a transparent framework to attract the best talent in the industry seeking roles with clear progression paths and fair assessments of their skills. It’s pretty radical, but very effective.
• ‘Hire Leaders for What They Can Do, Not What They Have Done’ HBR Article: How to increase diversity amongst leadership and stop rewarding incompetent leaders by hiring leaders for what they intend to do with your company rather than what has worked before.
• ‘How do you promote someone in a startup?’ Article: What to do when you want to recognise someone’s hardwork and provide them with career progression, but there aren’t any manager roles available in your company.
• ‘How Individuals Advance at Buffer, Without Becoming Managers’ Article: Another example of a career progression framework.
• ‘The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager’ Article: If you’ve got to do Performance Reviews at your company, then at least here’s how to do them right.
• ‘How to Save a Dying Low-Morale Team’ Article: From the perspective of a manager’s who has actually done it and succeeded. I’ve highlighted about half of this article.

Giving Feedback:

• ‘Radical Candor’ Book, ‘Thoughts on Gender and Radical Candor’ Article: Giving feedback is a skill that requires practice and needs to be constantly rethought when new evidence of biases come to light. Read the book and the article written by the author in conjunction.
• ‘Crucial Conversations’ Book: A blueprint for diffusing tension in a conversation, if you need it.
• ‘Our 6 Must Reads for Managers to Give Feedback That Helps People Grow’ Article: A roundup of resources on giving effective feedback.
• ‘The Culture Map’ Book: Don’t underestimate how different cultures can be, especially when it comes to receiving feedback (i.e. British and American cultures give feedback in completely opposite ways).

Check Your Biases when Managing People:

• ‘Why People Get Away with Being Rude at Work’ HBR Article: “Victims of rudeness were perceived as performing considerably worse on the job than employees who hadn’t been mistreated, regardless of the employees’ actual performance.”
• ‘What is Gender Bias in the Workplace?’ Article: A comprehensive guide on how gender bias manifests in the workplace.
• ‘Are Men Are Talking Too Much?’ Tool: Is gender bias playing a role on your team? How much do men speak than women in meetings? Do women feel comfortable speaking up in meetings? You can start investigating all of this, with this handy tool.
• ‘10 Performance Review Biases and How to Avoid Them’ Article: It’s so easy when evaluating your team to fall into the trap of letting your biases affect your evaluations. In doing so, you are effectively demoralising your team -driving them away. Have this tab open to remind you of what biases you may have when writing any evaluation.
• ‘Evidence That Minorities Perform Worse Under Biased Managers’ HBR Article: “Overall, minorities in these stores performed on par with other workers. However, when minority employees worked with unbiased managers, they served 9% more customers than other workers and ranked in the 79th percentile of worker performance.”

Pay Transparency:

• ‘Why this tech startup CEO listed all of his employees’ salaries online for anyone to see’ Article: “What’s more, the salary transparency seems to have aided recruitment. When Buffer made its salaries and salary formula public in late 2013, job applications within a 30-day period increased over the previous 30 days by roughly 229%, from 1,263 to 2,886, Quartz reported.”
• ‘Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries’ Article
• ‘Opening Up About Comp Isn’t Easy — Here’s How to Get More Transparent’ Article

Delegating and Managing Your Time:

• ‘For Delegation to Work, It Has to Come with Coaching’ HBR Article: Us the dial tool in this article to determine how and what tasks you can delegate, now that you’re a manager with a whole new set of responsibilities.
• ‘Manager Energy Drain’ Blog Post: Use the colour coding method in this blog post to see where you are spending your time and manage it effectively.

If You Have to Fire Someone:

• ‘How to fire someone (like a grown-up)’ Article: A quick guide to the process you should go through if you do need to fire someone.

If you like this article, you might also like these:

Product Management 101: NPS® scores

A Reading List, by a Product Manager for Product Managers