A Product Management Mindset

A few weeks ago I started as VP of Product at a new company. This is the third product team I’ve been a part of over 8 years, which is enough to know that Product Management tends to be defined and perceived slightly differently at each organization. A lot of conversation around the differences tends to focus on tactical things like where it falls within the organization and what responsibilities it includes or doesn’t include. But in my experience, much more important than that is the underlying mindset or philosophy of what it means to be a product manager.

As I wrote out my tactical 30, 60, and 90-day goals to share with the company, I realized that it would be even more valuable to communicate my personal version of that PM philosophy. That way, regardless of how the specific tasks or goals change over time, my team can understand the context behind what I am prioritizing and my working style.

I sat down to think about it, and came up with a list of 10 critical things that I think great product managers do. Some, or maybe all, of these may sound obvious or noncontroversial, but I’ve seen smart product managers who have had missteps with each of them.

I should also mention that many of these ideas are not entirely my own but are either ruthlessly stolen from or heavily influenced by product people I admire. Most notably:

• Ken Norton who pointed out in his timeless essay on Product Management that, “remember friend, nobody asked you to show up”
• Josh Elman who concisely defined the role of product management as to “help your team (and company) ship the right product to your users”
• Steve Jobs who famously argued that “innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 [good ideas]”

Great product managers…

1) Develop collective ownership and understanding to empower the whole team

Product Managers are often described as “product owners.” I see the logic there, but great product managers focus on establishing a collective ownership felt by the whole team. This comes from a clear articulation of goals and values and frequent explanation of how each decision is being made against those values. Collective ownership is powerful because it enables anyone on the team to understand and make key product decisions. It also encourages others to proactively look for ways that they can individually contribute towards the team’s goals in ways that aren’t coming directly from the product manager.

2) Shepherd decision-making (and never pull rank)

I’ve often seen new PMs who believe that their role is to aggregate a bunch of input data and then use their unique expertise to ultimately decide the path forward as the final product decision-maker. Great PMs instead shepherd all stakeholders through the decision-making process. They understand that an articulation of product goals is a much more important deliverable than a roadmap snapshot. If this is done well, more and more major decisions end in consensus, and the ones that don’t, end in a shared understanding of the logic and criteria used, even if not everyone agrees with it. If a PM finds him or herself pulling rank as the ultimate product authority, something has gone wrong with the process leading up to that point.

3) Tie product strategy, goals, and plans directly to the objectives of the business

It sounds obvious but is often overlooked. A lot of PMs think their responsibility is primarily as an advocate for customers or users. There is some truth to that, but ultimately the real responsibility is to the business. A great PM draws a clear line connecting the needs and goals of the business (i.e. revenue targets) to the product strategy and each item on the roadmap.

4) Provide purposeful coordination and frequent, clear (over-)communication

Communication is the most critical aspect of a product person’s role and also the most common point of failure that I’ve seen. Even if you do all the other aspects of the job exceptionally well, everything can seem terrible if you don’t effectively communicate. I’ve seen multiple examples that usually look like this: Engineering is working on the right stuff, but the delivery team is unhappy with prioritization; at the same time, delivery is trying to advocate for customers and push towards business goals, but engineering feels like they keep raising unimportant and overly-specific issues. A great PM is concerned not just with good outcomes but with making sure everyone understands what they are and how they were arrived at.

It’s very hard to truly “over-communicate.” I like to think of striving towards the ultimate goal of someone on my team finally saying “yeah, yeah, shut up. We all already know that.” A great PM that I used to work with shared a good anecdote for just how hard this is to achieve. She ran a feedback session on product collaboration with her delivery team in which attendees put ideas on post-it notes in the five “starfish” categories: “do more,” “start doing,” “keep doing,” “do less,” and “stop doing.” At the end of the session, the “do less” and “stop doing” buckets remained completely empty.

5) Regularly ask: “what can I do to make your life easier?”

Great product managers practice servant leadership. They strive to personally improve the way work gets done across the org. They very rarely see something as “not my problem.”

6) Gracefully acknowledge the reality that the answer is often “no”

One of the hardest parts about working in product is the mathematical reality that there are always way more good ideas than there are resources to work on them. Great PMs understand this and don’t shy away from saying “no”, but they do it in a way that is productive and informative. Rather than just saying “we can’t get to that” or “it’s not important enough” or even worse putting it in “future roadmap” limbo, they explain “here’s why that doesn’t achieve our primary goals as much as the things we are prioritizing ahead of it.” Saying “no” is not about asserting authority, but rather about applying a consistent way of making decisions that is tied to the company and product goals. If the person with the idea responds with “well, I actually think this accomplishes our goals better than the things currently ahead of it,” now you have a valuable and worthwhile discussion.

7) Ask and answer “why,” and challenge others to do the same

It’s a pretty well-established principle that PMs should be experts on the “why” and should ask the right questions to get to deep and meaningful answers. I would extend that to argue that great PMs should also challenge others to think in the same way. As an example, they should encourage engineers to push back on any feature that they personally don’t see the business value behind and ask questions until they’ve been convinced that it exists or they’ve convinced the PM it doesn’t.

8) Advocate for whoever isn’t currently in the room

As I mentioned above, often PMs are described as advocates for customers or users. But great PMs strive to understand the perspectives of every part of the internal organization and represent them as well. They can anticipate the argument of a marketing, sales, or engineering team member and provide that devil’s advocate perspective in any relevant discussion.

9) Eagerly welcome input, opinions, and data from all sources

Great PMs are data-driven and welcome data and anecdotes from any relevant source. That, of course, doesn’t mean they use all the data or weight it all equally, but it does mean they should never be dismissive of a new data point.

10) Roll up their sleeves and do stuff

Finally, great PMs rarely think “that’s not part of my job”. They look for ways to provide leverage as an individual contributor, whether it’s proving out experimental analytics by writing some sample queries, filling-in on a support call, QA-ing an important feature, building demos, etc., etc. As Ken Norton astutely pointed out: “product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while).” That means as a product manager you are uniquely positioned to temporarily press pause on your day-to-day and dive-in on a valuable task that no one else in the organization is ever going to be able to get to.