Telling Our Stories: Leading Product Managers
Considerations for PM Managers
This is our final post in our four-part series that focuses on the Women in Tech (WIT) Employee Resource Community (ERC) at Box. In this series we’ve highlighted Women in Tech (WIT) at Box, our Public API service as led by Marie Rogers, and highlighted the career and work of Boxer Anna Wojsczc. In this final blog we will hear from Daphne Zhao, Director of Product Management.
Navigating ambiguity is an essential part of the role of a product manager (PM). However, for a PM manager, empowering their team to navigate ambiguity may prove to be more ambiguous because there is not a standardized approach to do product management and everyone does it differently. In the past years of leading product managers towards our shared goals, I’ve been exploring ways to navigate this ambiguity. As a partner to the Women in Tech (WIT) Employee Resource Community at Box, which provides support to women working in technology roles at Box, I’m invited to share my insights on how PM managers can effectively lead PMs in navigating ambiguity.
Understanding PMs
Before diving into leading PMs, let’s first get onto the same page of the role of a product manager.
Why PMs exist
Product management emerged as a profession in predominantly software companies as a response to the ever-increasing complexity of product development, particularly when it comes to dealing with speed and scale. As a company grows — that is, more products and features are added, customers become more diverse, and the team expands — complexity grows exponentially. As a result, problems the company needs to solve grows exponentially and choosing where to focus quickly becomes the most important decision a company makes. The need to effectively navigate and balance these factors led to the creation of a dedicated function focused on overseeing the development of products.
What PMs do
PMs are responsible for guiding the entire product development cycle, from ideation and development to launch and scaling, with the aim of delivering value to customers while achieving business goals. A PM’s core competency lies in identifying what problem to solve and working with a team to solve it.
What traits successful PMs share in common
Successful PMs share several key traits that enable them to excel in their roles and drive successful product development.
Good common sense
Successful PMs are right far more often than they are wrong, and when they are wrong, they learn from their mistakes, develop specific insights into the reasons for those mistakes, and share those insights with the rest of the team. PMs with good common sense, or a strong intuition for problem solving, tend to be right a lot. Common sense can be referred to by different names in different contexts, such as business acumen when identifying the business value of solving certain problems, or technical sense when optimizing architectural design. Despite the term “common” in its name, common sense is an uncommon trait that sets successful PMs apart.
Strong ownership
Successful PMs demonstrate a strong desire for ownership, possessing a natural inclination towards achievement. They are highly motivated and seek to take on challenging tasks and projects with a sense of purpose, always striving to deliver results that align with their vision and goals.
Effective communication
Communication is essential for most roles, and especially so for PMs, as they deliver results through collaboration with others. Successful PMs communicate effectively, tailoring the amount of information, level of detail, and way of communication to different stakeholders, ranging from developers to executives, based on each party’s unique needs and priorities. By conveying information in a way that is clear, concise, and relevant, PMs can build trust, establish alignment, and foster a shared understanding of the product’s goals, enabling the team to work together towards a shared vision.
So how can PMs with these traits be identified during interviews?
Hiring PMs
For hiring managers, while working with a PM candidate on a real project would be the ideal way to gauge their common sense, ownership and communication, it’s not feasible during an interview process. Even though assessing PM candidates can be ambiguous, it’s still possible to gain insight into these traits through other means, such as:
Starting with resume
A PM candidate’s resume can serve as an initial indicator of their communication effectiveness.
A well-crafted resume should prioritize its content and be concise. Do they showcase the impact of their achievements, instead of just listing their job responsibilities? Do they highlight their most impactful achievements, instead of listing almost everything they did? Is the layout designed with usability in mind?
The intuitive navigation and information design principles discussed in the book Don’t Make Me Think are about web and mobile design but they very well apply to any form of communication including resume. For example, is it easy to navigate, e.g., using headlines and lists instead of long paragraphs, using consistent visual cues such as bullet points and indents? Is it easy to understand, e.g., using plain language instead of jargon, keeping it short and concise? This is especially important for a PM because it shows their ability to simplify communication for their intended audience, which is a good indicator of how effectively they would communicate with users in their products.
Diving into a past project
During a product manager interview, a deep dive into a past project can provide valuable insights into a candidate’s abilities in various areas — their ability to identify a problem and articulate the business value of solving it, and their skills in prioritization, decision-making, and identifying key metrics to keep the team focused. Overall, a deep dive into a past project provides a comprehensive view of the candidate’s abilities across common sense, ownership, and communication.
Collaborating on a hypothetical project
PM candidates don’t necessarily come from exactly the same product domain, making it difficult to assess their in-depth understanding of a specific project. Additionally, the fast-paced nature of the tech industry means that being able to adapt and learn quickly is essential.
To better assess a PM candidate on these aspects, a domain-agnostic interview approach is used, where candidates are asked to think through a hypothetical project in a domain neither the interviewer nor the candidate worked at. During the interview, the candidate is expected to collaborate with designers and other product managers to discuss the project, allowing the interviewer to assess their ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team. This approach not only provides insight into the candidate’s problem-solving skills but also their communication and collaboration abilities, which are critical for success as a product manager in any domain.
Developing PMs
The ultimate goal of building and developing a team of PMs is to empower them to take ownership and drive their own projects, meaning they should be able to work independently without needing constant direction or guidance. When the team is capable of working autonomously, the PM manager can shift their focus to higher-level strategic initiatives, making themselves redundant in the day-to-day operations of the team.
While engineers tend to follow standardized workflows and use similar tools across companies, product management is still relatively new and diverse, leaving no unified approach to it. Despite so, there are two important aspects to consider when developing product managers:
Developing generalists
PMs are generalists rather than specialists, meaning that their skill set has breadth rather than depth. They are involved in a variety of tasks such as UI design, UX research, financial modeling, marketing, business development, contract negotiation, technical writing, and support, among others, but are not necessarily experts in any one area. They know just enough of each discipline to drive the entire product development cycle forward.
Therefore, each PM should solve the end-to-end customer experience, rather than just a portion of it. This enables them to take a product, no matter how small, all the way to market. As they progress in their career, their scope should expand, allowing them to solve the end-to-end customer experience with increased depth or for broader product areas.
Giving autonomy while providing air cover
It may sound like cliche, but I want to spend some time discussing autonomy because as previously discussed, each PM should own the end-to-end customer experience, and this requires a certain level of autonomy to fully assume responsibility for it.
The PM manager should understand the importance of providing the team with autonomy to bring them to their A game so jointly they can maximize the impact to the company. It is the manager’s responsibility to ensure the team has the needed space to think, drive, and make decisions.
It’s worth noting that giving autonomy doesn’t entail abandoning them with all the problems. Instead, it means
- Aligning on the goals while taking several steps back from dictating what to build
- Asking the right questions without steering the conversation towards any particular conclusion, so the team can digest and incorporate those questions into their thinking and decision-making
- Living with any failures from the team and taking responsibility for them
In rare cases where the team is struggling to hit a timeline, the PM manager should step in and help GSD, which could be brainstorming user flows, discussing technical tradeoffs, addressing legal and compliance requirements, finding beta customers, doing manual QA, or writing product documentation. Not only does this help the team achieve their goals, but it also helps the PM manager earn trust from the team in two ways. First, by demonstrating that they can also do the work, they assure the team of being able to understand the challenges they face and therefore assess their work effectively. Second, their willingness to help out shows that they’re committed to supporting the team’s success.
Once the team achieves impactful accomplishments, it’s important to celebrate and amplify their success by advocating for them in the broader organization. This means recognizing their achievements, sharing their success stories, and highlighting their contributions to the company. By doing so, the manager can create a culture of recognition and inspire the team to continue pushing boundaries and delivering impactful results.
Evaluating PMs
Evaluating the performance of PMs contributes to the ambiguity surrounding the PM role, because PMs deliver results through others and the business impact of their work often takes time to materialize. To properly evaluate PMs, it is important to consider multiple dimensions. Some key dimensions to consider include:
Product metrics
Product metrics are often considered as an indicator of PM performance as they reflect a PM’s ability to set ambitious yet realistic goals and meet or exceed them. Metrics such as customer adoption, user engagement, revenue growth, and retention rate are some of the KPIs that can be used to evaluate PMs. However, it is important to understand this approach has its limitations in practice due to several factors.
- The business impact takes time to materialize. An enterprise feature may take several months for a customer that wants it badly to adopt because of all the internal processes they have to go through, let alone customers who haven’t heard about it. Adoption and engagement already takes some time to measure, while metrics with lasting impact like retention and revenue require an even longer time horizon and a larger sample size to measure.
- Different product areas and features are interconnected, making it difficult to isolate a specific feature’s impact. For example, an increase in adoption of one feature may have an unintended consequence of decreasing usage of another feature. Customer dissatisfaction with one product area may negatively impact their willingness to try out new features in other product areas.
- The same amount of quality work may have varying impact based on the product’s current state, making it difficult to compare the performance of PMs working on different products. For example, a PM that inherits a product area that has been underperforming for a while will have to fix the product before they can do anything to move the needle even a bit. In this case, how does the PM compare with another PM who took a fast-growing product area without accumulated tech debts?
Despite these limitations, product metrics are still an indicator of how a PM performs but should be considered along with other dimensions.
Collaboration effectiveness
Collaboration effectiveness is a strong indicator of a PM’s performance, as they rely on others to deliver results and it’s crucial that others respect them, trust them, and enjoy working with them.
Although it’s difficult to measure precisely, collaboration effectiveness is arguably the most tangible dimension to evaluate a PM’s performance. Feedback from key stakeholders such as their direct team (engineers and designers), PM peers, GTM organizations (marketing, sales, customer success, etc.), and executives can provide valuable insights into a PM’s collaboration skills. By regularly soliciting feedback and acting on it, a PM can improve their collaboration effectiveness over time.
Strategic thinking
A PM’s ability to think strategically and align product goals with the broader business strategy is also an indicator of their performance. It requires considering not only the company’s overall goals but also external factors such as market trends, user needs, and the competitive landscape. Additionally, PMs should be aware of other critical initiatives within the company and collaborate with other product teams to ensure alignment with their roadmap.
Measuring a PM’s strategic thinking is not easy as well, but it can be evaluated through their ability to anticipate market trends, make tradeoff decisions that drive business value, and adjust their product roadmap when necessary to align with the company’s evolving priorities.
A huge thank you to all our contributors for this series highlighting the inspiring work of the talented women leading this ERC and the impact they are making in shaping the future of work. Let’s continue to honor and support women well beyond Women’s History Month!
