Simple Lessons I Learned as a Product Manager
I recently gave a talk at Product School about soft skills. I talked about the simple lessons I have learned over the years. In retrospect, they all feel like common sense. But when I started, I saw other capable PMs carry themselves with such finesse and panache, that the path to get there seemed extremely long and complex. Since then, I have realized it is less about deep technical knowledge, domain expertise and frameworks, and more about relationships, finding the right balance and clarity of purpose.
So, here go a dozen lessons and some imperfect and exaggerated hand-drawn sketches to drive home the learnings:
1. Find your tribe.
I spent a long time as an engineer being envious of the PMs around me. During that time, here is what I thought marked a great PM:
But I now know it’s always about the people and the relationships we build. And so my first lesson is to find your tribe. Find those people who are as passionate about solving problems as you are, the people who always have your back, the people whom you have fun with while working on things that truly matter. If there is one thing to take away from this note, it is this: Find your people.
2. Know when to zoom in and zoom out.
Finding the right balance between immersing yourself in the nitty-gritty details and delegating tasks is not easy, yet it is an art we need to master to ship high-quality products in a timely manner. Over time, you will begin to develop an intuition for which way to lean to solve the problem at hand. Sometimes, your team relies on you to help close the gaps, and sometimes you rely on the capable people on your team to unblock the plan.
3. Feedback can be a gift.
There are three entities involved in the feedback loop: The giver and her context (her personality, frame of mind, tone, situation, motivation, role), the feedback (content, packaging, format, timing) and the receiver (his personality, frame of mind, situation, role). These elements have to come together in a cohesive manner for the feedback to have its intended effect.
4. See the forest for the trees.
Not aligning on a clear vision makes the root of our decision-making tree, the “why,” unclear. There is always going to be disagreement over the smaller decisions that are supposed to ladder up to the key outcome. When you find yourself constantly driving alignment and answering lower-level questions, ask yourself if the North Star is clear.
5. Communicate, communicate, and then do it some more.
One of the key jobs of a product manager is to communicate the required context in a timely manner to unblock people. Below are some things to keep in mind. Remember what you need your key audience to take away and why they should care. Analyze if your message comes through for the 30 sec scanner (your first 3 lines should capture the summary), the 5 min peruser (next level of depth) and the 30 min absorber (finally, the deep dive).
6. Identify key stakeholders early on, and drive alignment.
Not everyone in the company needs to be super-excited to launch your product, but you do need to identify the key stakeholders and sponsors early on, and ensure they are aligned and excited to see your product launch, or we risk landing in a situation like this:
7. Prioritize: You can’t have the cake and eat it, too.
When aspiring product managers reach out to me about transitioning to product, I often ask them if they know the one key thing they are optimizing for. They often say yes, but the story goes something like this: “I really want to transition to product, and I love the current scope I have. I talk to various cross-functional teams and get to work with people from so many different domains! I also love that I can deep-dive technically in [insert domain].”
That’s multiple priorities: Switch to product, develop technical/domain expertise, work horizontally with multiple cross-functional teams!
Prioritize, and design your actions based on your prioritization.
8. Bring people along on the journey.
This is similar to aligning key stakeholders early on, but the job doesn’t end there. Once you have the initial alignment, keep people in the loop, especially for key milestones, so you don’t land in a product review that looks like the one above!
9. Let it marinate.
This picture speaks for itself and with such a lovely phrase: “Darling, let it marinate.” You don’t have to jump in to solve all problems immediately. Sometimes, letting things marinate and taking space in people’s heads might just be what the idea needs to realize itself.
10. Strong opinions, weakly held.
Influence without authority often means you need to convey the conviction and confidence necessary to motivate the people in the room to invest their time and effort into your vision. But no one really knows how the world will receive your product. One can predict and have reasonable hypotheses, but that is, by no means, a guarantee for the outcome we want. And this brings us to the second part, “weakly held.” The more we approach critical feedback and new information with curiosity and an open mind, the more we can nudge our product toward the right direction.
11. Thank your failures.
My path to product management had failures along the way for which, today, I am thankful. At the time, they seemed like impossible setbacks, prime ground for my imposter syndrome to fester. As painful as they were, I am a little bit wiser today and in a better place, thanks to those painful learnings.
12. Recognize your strengths, and manage your weaknesses.
Sometimes, we shine such a bright spotlight on our weaknesses and obsess so much over fixing them, we forget we are already good at something. A little nurturing might put us on the path to greatness. Remember to shine.
