From Product Management to Product Leadership: Building a Legacy

By: Milan Đorđević

There are two types of jobs in this world that are difficult to understand by your family, friends and the casual observer. The first one a Product Manager. The second is obviously the one of Chandler Bing. No, really, what was Chandler doing all those years?

What does a product manager do?

A product manager is responsible for shaping the product, communicating with stakeholders, providing developers with stories and defining the product’s entire roadmap. Product managers thus have great responsibilities and challenges to overcome. They are the product’s voice, conscious, nanny, and annoying aunt Muriel. They are the team’s mother, grandmother, punching bag, and a white wall to bounce ideas and problems off.

A product manager has to master organisational processes, translate stories into tasks, lead the prioritisation of these tasks, and manage stakeholder communication. They have to gain the respect of their colleges and prove themself as the go-to person for any product related issues and ultimately grow into becoming the product’s promoter and guru.

This is in fact a journey towards product leadership. A journey that starts with knowledge authority and ends with a legacy built by shaping the awe-inspiring products that customers love, competitors copy, and team members believe in.

The Product Know-it-all

Gaining the respect of your fellow engineers, designers, C-level executives, process managers, analysts and marketeers begins with knowing your product, far and wide. When the need for troubleshooting arises, great project managers know where to ask for help, they provide the necessary instructions and follow-ups. They are the product’s table of content, expert and PR manager.

The first few steps towards product leadership are not necessarily exciting. They include arduous documentation, detailed manuals and complex Gantt charts. A good product manager doesn’t take all the knowledge to the grave — they promote it, store it and make it easily accessible. It is their heritage.

The Sprints of Our Lives

Coming from a project management environment is beneficial when taking over the product development processes, no matter the style and method. Taking Scrum as an agile development framework, it is important to understand the interrelations between priorities, resources and estimations. A product manager is always expected to have them in perfect balance, all while organizing Sprint grooming, planning, review, retrospective and joining daily standups (in Scrum, a Sprint is a time period during which specific development work has to be done and ready for review).

Throw product and feature specifications and numerous stakeholder meetings into the mix, and you’ll further understand Product Managers’ need to adjust their attention span, dedication to detail, their understanding of the urgent and the important, and their shrewdness for planning for the now, but always keeping an eye on the future.

Needless to say, being agile is beneficial for the entire business, the engineering teams and the whole tech department, but it also provides product managers with greater flexibility and freedom to ride the ever-changing waves of market and consumer trends. After all, everything was supposed to be finalised yesterday anyway.

The product and the team’s dedication is a reflection of the product manager’s responsibility, involvement and quest for answers. Lazy product managers have lazy teams, slow apps, and too many loading indicators. ‘Being in the driver’s seat’ is a cliché comparison that does indeed apply here.

The Developer’s Challenge

At times, being a product manager feels like being the dumbest person in the room. The engineers solve the problem, the designers visualise the best possible user experience and the data scientists have the numbers before the product manager even thought about the query. But you have to keep in mind that that’s not what product managers are there for. They’re there to ask the questions and break down problems into smaller quests and provide a different set of eyes that see the bigger picture, unlike all the other experts in the room that are only focused on completing only their part of the project.

There will always be some who challenge the product manager’s authority. At times, it will seem like they speak in riddles and radiate supremacy. But rising above it, being a Jack of all trades, keeping a cool head and having the bigger picture in mind results in long term respect, appreciation and sense of security when the product managers are around. They are the glue that holds everything together.

Pixel Perfection vs Product Leadership

There comes a time when you have to let go. Instead of pixel perfecting and micro managing the product, product leaders relinquish control. They part ways with Sprints and tickets. They inspire the rest of the team, envision the evolution of products and new ways to meet customer needs, and provide value never expected before.

By inspiring the team, taking over the product’s vision, and sharing their knowledge and expertise, a product manager becomes a product leader. As the famous Latin proverb says: per aspera ad astra. “Only through hardship (and Sprints) to the stars.”

Credit: 55th issue (2018) of the ESTIEM Magazine

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