From ‘getting it done’ to ‘making it happen’
Five stages on the road to becoming Accurx’s Product Director
I’ve now been at Accurx for two wonderful years. For the first year, I was a Senior Product Manager, working within a team to ‘get things done’ — building products to solve the problems of our users.
After 12 months leading an amazing product team, I was promoted to Product Director and Clan Lead (I’ll explain this later) to focus on our products in secondary care — a new market for Accurx.
This meant I didn’t lead a product team anymore, but instead was overseeing lots of different teams. I had to learn how to ‘make things happen’ rather than execute them personally.
Having been in this leadership role for over a year now, it feels like a good time to reflect and to look back on the whirlwind of it all. Here are the five big stages I went through as I stepped out of my comfort zone, becoming Accurx’s Product Director.
My five stages on the road to becoming Accurx’s Product Director
1. 😮 Woah, this is weird and different
In the days and weeks after taking on my new role, I felt adrift. Being in a product team means having the routine and comfort of your ceremonies. Every morning at 9.45 we’d have stand up together, and every Friday we’d have planning and a team retro. Nice and familiar. Suddenly, I was a Product Manager (PM) without a team. How would I know what to prioritise? What would anchor me if I didn’t have these rituals?
In reality, I was able to use a lot of the skills and techniques I’d used in my team to apply to the whole side of the business I was now leading. At Accurx, we’ve called them ‘Clans’. There’s a GP Clan, who work on all of our primary care products, and I was tasked with spinning up and leading the Trusts Clan — to extend our company into the secondary care market.
But I knew this wasn’t something I’d be able to do alone. I needed people who I could confide in, share my thoughts and sense-check my decisions. I needed a ‘first’ team — one whose time I would prioritise, just like I had with my product team. So my priority became building a strong Clan Leads team, recruiting my colleagues Mike and Satya (even pulling Mike with me from my product team into this new world of Clan leadership!).
Once they were by my side, we helped each other focus and understand what was important. We even ran a kick off, just the three of us, getting to know each other more as people, as well as talking through everything on our minds through a ‘pre-mortem’. This workshop identified what was in our heads as we embarked on this new challenge.
It was still hard to know whether I was spending time on exactly the right things… but with my Leads team set up, at least I knew where home was.
2. 😨 Oh no, I’m overwhelmed and underqualified
After the initial joy of finding my team, imposter syndrome started to set in. I started to doubt that I was cut out for the role, that my manager/mentor/all round good guy Benji had made a mistake in backing me for this step up. Starting a new role that I hadn’t done before was of course going to move me out of my comfort zone — but how does anyone learn anything new if they stay doing what they already know how to do?!
I knew it would be even more important to make sure I was giving and receiving honest, actionable feedback from those around me: my Leads team, those within the Clan, and my direct reports, as well as senior stakeholders across the company. I made sure to ask for it and give it at every opportunity.
The constructive points I received helped me course-correct my approach, and the positive feedback was incredibly helpful to combat that imposter syndrome — which never disappears, by the way. I occasionally find myself reading back over positive peer feedback for reassurance on those days I feel like a fool who’s about to be found out. 😅
3. 😬 The decisions are getting bigger
One of the hills I was worried about climbing was making the first ‘big decision’. I was now accountable and responsible for a large portion of the company, as well as for one of our top goals. And soon enough, there it was, right in front of me. Aaand… I made it. And the second one, and the third. I was used to having to make hundreds of decisions while product managing a team. In my new role these were more or less the same.
The only difference? The decisions changed from team-level decisions of ‘should this go into our MVP or not?’ or ‘how many users should we include in the beta test?’. Instead, they became choices that had a bigger impact — on the products and the people within the Clan e.g. ‘should this team stop work on this product months after starting but before we’ve launched it?’, or ‘should we move these people to different teams where their skills are needed?’.
These questions required a lot more time and care to come to a decision, especially the ones that weren’t easily reversible. Once I had a couple of these bigger ‘people-affecting’ decisions under my belt, it built my confidence that I could make them… and a bit more confidence I could do the actual role!
4. 🤓 Learning how to work through others
It became clear to me that doing a role like this well would be impossible if you don’t love working with people. Luckily for me, I do. But the past year has taught me a lot about building and leading teams.
No team starts out as ‘high performing’. It takes time, effort and trust between those within it, and space from those around it. My role includes a lot of coaching — working through tough problems with the Product Managers in my Clan, helping them get to decisions or chatting through tricky stakeholder conversations to get them to plan their next move, rather than jumping in and solving problems myself.
It was a relief to find how much satisfaction I got from other people doing well — whether that’s someone smashing an important meeting with stakeholders, celebrating with their team after launching a product, or recently having the pleasure of promoting two of my wonderful direct reports to Senior PMs 🌟! If I was still trying to ‘get things done’, then I would probably feel quite dissatisfied in my role. We often talk about PMs being the ‘people clapping the people being clapped’ vs getting the applause themselves, or being the ‘janitor’.
My new leadership role involved being even more in the shadows a lot of the time — and being comfortable with the fact that sometimes a sign of you doing a really good job is no one knowing you were even involved!
5. 😌 Oh, I get it now, it’s a lot like PMing a team, but there are more teams
Once I had found my groove a bit more, had my first team, and had set up regular catch ups across the Clan with key people, I could reflect on how many of my Product Manager skills I could bring with me into this new stage in my career. The differences between team and Clan came down to there being more. More people to align, more inputs coming in for decision making, and more and higher stakes in the decisions I did have to make.
I have to recalibrate how much to collaborate vs when to lead and make a decision solo. My default as a PM was collaboration to the max and I ‘put my foot down’ incredibly sparingly. In the Clan Lead role, I had to quickly pick up a new skill: forging ahead with decisions that not everyone got to have a say in, or even agreed with.
Because there were so many more people (today there are 60 people in the Clan), there’s no way I could get everyone’s opinions on everything. In fact, it was actually my job to have opinions on things and follow through on them! The Clan needs to be able to trust me and my decisions. If I over-index on getting consensus from everyone then I’d never get anything done. This was the case when writing our Clan strategy that laid out how we were going to approach secondary care.
On the one hand, I had to become comfortable talking about our ‘bets’ vs being 100% sure that what we were doing would be successful. On the other hand, I had to get the right balance between obtaining inputs from stakeholders vs being confident and forging ahead.
This is definitely something I’m still working on, as I am with the whole role!. But writing this blog has been a really great chance to reflect on how far I’ve come in the last year, and how grateful I am to have been backed so fully by Accurx to grow into my new life in leadership. If you have a similar story of progression and various stages on the way to becoming confident, I’d love to hear it! @Jennifer_Rose_S
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