A recipe to fail your team as a product manager (or team lead)
From the perspective of a team member
For anyone being led, good leadership is one of those things that you never really know you need until it’s absent. Then it slowly eats your joy and will to do the job. In the past four years, I’ve been fortunate to work at very amazing fast growing tech startups, assuming various roles, leading myself, being led, and also leading people.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about leadership and product management, and I don’t know if it’s the industry (tech), but a lot of people seem to take the title of product manager or product owner too literally, forgeting that while the outcome (the product), should be good, the product cannot be good without a functional team to build it. I remember my first opportunity to lead a team a few years back, the first thing that crossed my mind was “What are all the things I hated when people were leading me, I need to not do those”. So in the spirit of that, here are six things you can do as a product manager to ruin the trust with your team, build discord, and also reduce the team’s efficiency.
1. Forget leadership
I think leadership as a concept gets a bad rep, maybe because it’s accompanied by so much charlatan chatter, but the truth is, you can’t scale a team and build a successful company without good leadership. A lot of people get the opportunity to manage a team based on their competence to produce results (most of which they did on their own), and when they assume the position they flop because while they’re good on their own, personal success doesn’t equate to success in leading a team. It’s your duty as a manager to invest in learning the different aspects of leadership, yes, including all those charlattan-esque concepts. Learn them, it will help you navigate your team.
The better scenario would be companies investing in their managers to help them lead better, but if your company doesn’t, it’s going to be up to you to consciously learn the ropes on how to lead your team because at the end of the day, you’ll be blamed for your team’s lack of efficiency, poor products and poor performance.
2. Setting ridiculous deadlines
I love deadlines, deadlines are great, they bring structure to projects and keep everyone on their toes, but you know what’s silly? Deadlines that don’t make sense, and I don’t think this is talked about enough. There are a lot of reasons why managers set the ridiculous deadlines, to name a few: inexperience with the work to be done, trying to move too fast, trying to please another stakeholder.
I’ll address inexperience with the work to be done in a later section, but let’s talk about trying to move too fast. The popular guise for that is “We’re a fast growing company”, “we need to beat our competition, we can’t be late”, e.t.c, but the truth is, 9/10 times, rushing to get something out against logic always ends in shitty products, so it always blows my mind when people do this. It always ends in tears, always. Also, you know that deadline you think the customer will leave you for if it’s not met? It’s completely made up by one person and can be changed. It’s your job as a product manager to communicate sensible and feasible deadlines with your clients, that way you won’t disappoint them, isn’t not disappointing your clients the main goal here?
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be times when the team has to grind non-stop, day & night to get stuff out, but if that’s the norm, you’ll burn out your team, release shitty products, and have the same team scrambling to fire fight in the end when everything goes ablaze, because it will. If you think this is wrong, look at your product, yes, you.
Another reason is trying to please your bosses; just like everything above, product managers should be leaders, and as a leader, you should protect your team, they don’t need to be under any ridiculous and unrealistic stress. It’s your job to fight for better deadlines and make a case for better timelines and expectations. If you can’t set feasible deadlines for all stakeholders involved, you’re probably doing your job wrong. I bet you got hired for the job because of what you could do, so your higher bosses should be able to trust you when you say X can’t go out till next month, but then if you’re also having a case of the “ghetto bosses”, I sympathize with you.
A good option you can try is letting your team pick their deadlines, and trying to negotiate that deadline to please all stakeholders.
3. Not trying to learn the technical stuff
Wait, before you close the tab, hear me out. I know the technical knowledge of product managers is a contentious topic because one doesn’t need to be thattt technical to lead a technical team (Someone is probably screaming Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, well, you’re not Steve Jobs so stop, and he knew his shit).
That being said, it’s just common sense that you’d have better and more productive conversations with people when you understand their language (not programming language), so a good recipe for miscommunication and silly deadlines is when a product manager just lacks the understanding of what it takes to get stuff done. Mind you, you don’t need to be a super star developer to lead a team of developers, sometimes that might even be counterproductive, nonetheless, it helps to know what is going on, so you can first understand, discuss and then make smart decisions.
Empathy is also an important component of good leadership, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, and you can’t do that without understanding. Understanding the work to be done, what it takes, and how they feel in general. A friend of mine indicated their interest to be a product manager recently, and while I shared a lot of things they should check out, I also advised they invest in technical knowledge, it shields you when developers are giving their bullshit (we sure love to bullshit), and it just helps you.
4. Keep Lying
I’ve always found lying (especially in a professional setting) very weird. You’re not talking to 8 year olds, everyone can see through your lies so just stop. I know you think you’re slick, but you’re really not, they know you’re lying and are just being quiet. It goes without saying that lying erodes trust, so once you think you need to have like four different versions of a story to please different people, you’re definitely doing something wrong.
Every team member deserves honesty, and it’s your job to learn how to have honest conversations, even though they might hurt different stakeholders. Lying should never be an option. Lying to your team about what management said/expects should really not happen. 9/10 times they will find out, they always do, and you end up looking stupid. Be honest with all stakeholders, about tasks, expectations, timelines, merits, benefits, feedback, responsibilities, e.t.c
5. Not looking out for your team
C’mon, don’t do that. Throwing people under the bus? Why? Just why. I mean, there’ll come a point where every one has to be responsible for their actions, but there are times for that, and there are times to shield your team. As a leader, you work for the people — your team, yes, you’re a product manager and your job is to make great products that will increase your company’s value but you can’t do that without your team, if you can, just fire them already 🙄, but if you can’t, then you need to treat them right.
6. Not listening to your team
As a manager, a great source of strength is feedback. Feedback is typically so hard to get from people on a normal day, so whenever you get the chance to get feedback from a team member, listen to it, think about it, and try your best to make actionable steps from it. Nothing builds resentment like a team member that thinks their voice doesn’t matter.
You should ensure everyone feels heard, which might also including taking visible steps when feedback is given, ofcourse this depends on the feedback, but you should be smart enough to discern. When people feel their voice doesn’t matter, they stop contributing, and when people stop contributing you lose the sauce of your team. This relates to blockers too, if a team member has a blocker or communicates an impediment to their productivity, it’s important you take the necessary steps to take that out of the way so they can be their most productive self. Things like this go a long way in helping a team member feel heard, seen and appreciated.
You can also try to get external opinion for things that you don’t easily understand, no one is perfect at understanding every thing, so if there’s something foreign to you, talk to more people, don’t rely on yourself.
No company’s perfect, we’re imperfect beings, and companies are made up of people like us, imperfect, still learning, but we need to be open to learn every day. Managing people isn’t an easy task, it’s actually very tough, but you can thrive.
I hope this recipe helps.
