Be the Best Employer

Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.

— Amazon Leadership Principles

That looks very familiar to me, I think that’s exactly what I’ve been saying is an AspenBridge Team. As we’ve been doing for the past couple of months, I think we can dig deeper into what that actually means, but so much of this statement has already been covered, both in our Amazon Leadership series recently and our earlier posts (which is why you’ll find this post littered with links).

As a product manager, your team has to produce great products. You’ve got to have the vision on what your customer needs, you need to deliver it on time as we talked about earlier this week, on budget, you have to “think big” and push the team to its limits to innovate the highest quality solutions to delight customers. So it’s a performance play.

That’s asking a lot of your team, so besides investing in your culture by hiring the right people and helping them develop, you need to build a culture of trust where people feel like they have personal ownership and responsibility over the product, so they and can take risks in the name of learning. …and sometimes the team decides against an idea, but everyone feels like they were heard.

That is, your team needs to be a place where people want to work because they feel their opinions are valued, and they have the direction, and support they need to bring all of their ideas and skills to work, feel safe in expressing their opinions, and deliver greatness.

So product management is as much about a superior product as it is building a team of people that are happy to come to work for 40 hours a week and devote their time to a common cause. A product without a stable team will be short lived. A happy team that supports a mediocre product will soon be out of a job.

Both are necessary for long term success, and when you have a product that pushes the limits, developed by a team that feels they truly own and are proud of the result, you’ll have a team that everyone wants to be a part of.

That’s how you become the best employer.