The Key to Success: Cross-Functional Communication for Product Managers
This part of a product manager’s job is not widely discussed, yet is critical. It’s a key aspect of those good ‘ole soft skills. You must listen constantly and communicate constantly. That’s your job. It’s really about cultivating meaningful relationships throughout your company. As you think about improving cross-functional communication, take stock of the company culture, common practices and taboos. Use what already exists to your advantage and be aware of what may need to evolve.
Polish Those Communication Skills
You have to be a great communicator or at a minimum commit to improving your communication skills in order to succeed. There are a lot of resources that already exist in the world on this topic so we’ll cover this briefly.
Talk less
Be fully present. Check your ego at the door. Genuinely hear your team.
Strong written skills can’t be underestimated
Spell check is not enough. You can’t end a sentence with a smiley face. In a world full of Slack messages and Google Docs you still need proper grammar. Tone and word choice matter. Check out Copy Hackers for more ways to better your writing.
Be aware of cognitive biases
Communication is not just what you say, write, or your nonverbal cues. Understanding how your message might be received is also important. Awareness of the 25 cognitive biases will help you ensure your message is received as intended.
Shifting from Hero to Curator
This is a tough one so I will just say it quickly…let go of being the hero.
As product managers, those moments when we swoop in with just the right combination of resources and answers are our Red Bull — those moments give us the energy we need to quell the next crisis. But there is a new hero in town…the customer.
Modern product trades internal badges of honor for external rewards of overall business success. It’s softer and squishier, but overall it looks like this:
- Teams deliver more, faster
- Customers are happier
- Products, features and functions are more meaningful
Ok, that does sound pretty heroic.
As a product manager you’re a curator; thoughtfully assembling each piece of the puzzle by ensuring that the team has the data they need to be successful. The focus is on facilitation, communication and curation.
Rally the Team: Engineers, Product Design, Product Marketing
The old way of product discovery: going it alone, ignoring the user’s perspective, keeping it all in one tight, neat box is dead. As epic product managers, we can all agree on that; now, how do we bring everyone else on-board?
Engineering
The changes taking place in the role of product managers mirror those in the role of engineering. We have shifted from waterfall, to agile, to continuous delivery. The most successful companies (Netflix, Google, HubSpot, Pluralsight) are deploying code dozens if not thousands of times a day. Moving fast has never been easier.
Involving engineering in the product discovery process is vital; it makes the process better which means the results are better. When the engineering team sees how the customer is using the product, the team will understand and appreciate the customer’s needs and will naturally incorporate that learning into the product. Try to include your team lead or at least one engineer in several customer interviews each month.
Create a rhythm for sharing user insights and data with your dev team. Engineers are incredible problem solvers! With greater transparency about personas and the business, they will make more informed decisions about the product.
Product Design
Product managers and product designers go together like peanut butter and jelly — operating in lock-step to ensure that the information architecture and the visual experience of the product will WOW the customer. Your product designer should be a part of customer visits, interviews and user tests. Like product managers, good designers are hungry for customer data.
Product Marketing
If your company is big enough (or lucky enough!) to have product marketing, they are as much a part of your team as product design. Daily communication with product marketing will ensure that they are crafting the right content and tools for sales enablement and messaging for a release or launch. Regular check-ins with product marketing will ensure you’re on target to hit your sales and customer adoption goals. If you’re leveraging market and quantitative personas created by product marketing in your strategy and validation process, include them in your feedback loop.
Communicating Out
Build Relationships One-on-One
In many respects, your effectiveness as a product manager is directly tied to your relationship capital throughout the company. If you take nothing else from this chapter, please do this one thing: Go talk to people face-to-face! Or, via video call. Just skip Slack and email sometimes.
It’s a radical concept today, but it’s your ticket to success. As the chief evangelist for the customer and the product, the more you’re out sharing what you’ve learned the better off the entire company will be. The more you’re out fostering relationships, the more feedback you’ll get and the more closely you’ll be tied to what’s happening in the business.
As a product manager, you should never be tied to your desk. How does one accomplish this? You need to walk all over the building. Come in early and see people in the kitchen. Stay late and talk to the support reps about what happened during the day. Instead of eating with your team, have lunch with a few sales reps. Or better yet, do ride-a-long calls with the sales or support team. You’ll sit with them for a few hours, listen in on their phone calls and learn a ton. They will appreciate that you actually care about them and the customer.
Pro Tip: Learn everyone’s name. When you see people in the hallway, say hello using their name.
Meet with Small Groups
Depending on your company size and culture, it may make sense to host small group meetings from time-to-time. Reminder: meeting are usually ineffective. To host an effective meeting will require a lot of preparation on your part. Consider working with product marketing and holding a monthly product demo for the entire company (if you’re small) or a few select teams. The key here is to only demo working code. No prototypes!
Work side-by-side with Support
You should also always do backlog grooming with a few support reps and maybe even folks from the operations team. It’s not only important for the Support team to have a voice, but it will also benefit everyone to all leave the meeting on the same page. Make this huddle with the Support team a part of your regular work cadence and everything will move much smoother.
Share customer insights with Marketing
Share interviews and discovery work with the Marketing team. Great marketers are always on the hunt for a great customer story. The marketing team may not always have the same relationships with customers that you do. In addition, they may not have the time to invest in customer interviews and development work. These insights and stories are critical to ensuring that marketing effectively communicates the right benefits. In addition, by helping the Marketing team to become even more effective you might have some leniency the next time you need help with a product launch.
Communicating Up
Saved the best for last! Communicating up is a special skill. What and how you communicate up to Executives is highly dependent on your company culture. That being said, there are some rules of the road.
Connect cross-functional leaders
Directors and Managers are a key audience to leverage. They are often responsible for operationalizing the high-level strategy and actioning on feedback from the front-lines. They are right in the middle of everything. Fostering strong relationships with Directors and Managers is a great way to source customer insights, business insights and evangelize your product.
Help these leaders become more successful in their roles by involving them in product experiments and updates. They will appreciate the transparency and being more knowledgeable about what’s going on with your product team will give them confidence, too.
Give a formal update
In regular updates to your C-Level Executives and Vice Presidents it’s essential to share the following:
- Any changes since the last update. Share what’s different about your roadmap, releases and/or forecasts.
- Highlight anything that will incur new costs or new risks.
- Share anything that will impact a particular department. If you’ve decided to sunset a feature and it will result in Support calls make sure to share with your Services leader.
- Deliver new insights to the Executives. Share what you and your teams are learning, results of experiments and important ideas.
If you’ve mastered pre-flight mentioned above, none of this should come as major news to anyone. Try not to turn a formal update into a long, drawn-out bragging session. And don’t go into too much detail. If your update is more than 5–10 slides in a presentation it’s way too long.
Develop a cadence
Part of your role as a curator and influencer in the company is to build your reputation. Establishing a regular cadence for communication with the Executives eliminates surprises for everyone. Depending on your culture you can touch base during office hours or set aside a formal meeting. If you’re new and feel like it’s too big of an ask to get dedicated time, try to catch leaders in the hallway or in the morning. Find a format that works for the leadership and make it a regular thing.
The C-Suite does not want surprises. You must become a master of the pre-flight. Make it a regular part of your repertoire to run early ideas by your C-level executives. Don’t waste their time, but make sure they are always in-the-know.
Words (and People) Matter
And there you have it. Sharpen those soft skills product managers! Creating a successful product manager is way more about how you build influence than it is about perfecting a prototype. Be intentional with your language and how you foster relationships and the results will show it.
Full disclosure: I wrote this over 3+ years ago when I was a product manager. It occurred to me recently that it wasn’t serving anyone collecting dust in my Google Drive so I decided to share. This one is dedicated to my two favorite PMs— Matt and Dave. You know who you are!
