Lessons from My First Year as a Product Design Manager

For the last two years, I’ve managed a team of 7–10 people at HubSpot. I remember the first couple weeks of being a new manager. My worst fear was that my direct reports were secretly thinking I was wasting their time. I’d been a designer for seven years but only at HubSpot for two years. How could I possibly have the brilliant Product Design answers they needed? As far as I was concerned, I was new to the field of UX, and now I was essentially starting a new career, starting at ground zero with the skills of management. I thought there was a good chance my direct reports were thinking, Ok..here we go again. I can’t wait to waste another 30 minutes of my week giving updates to someone who can’t actually help me in my career.

From experience I knew that a manager can be a positive force, or they can be a destructive, demoralizing force. I wanted to actually help my direct reports, but I didn’t know where to start. At the time, we didn’t have the support we do today at HubSpot for new managers. I had to figure it out on my own. The way I figure things out is by reading. A lot. Here’s what I learned that helped me the most in my first year.

Great Managers are Rare

One of the first articles I read was from Gallup entitled, Why Great Managers are So Rare. It opens with this arresting headline:

Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Woah. That sounds dismal. It goes on.

Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year, and having too many of them can bring down a company.

I hope I don’t help bring down the company.

Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units, Gallup estimates. This variation is in turn responsible for severely low worldwide employee engagement.

This is serious.

If great managers seem scarce, it’s because the talent required to be one is rare. Gallup’s research reveals that about one in 10 people possess the talent to manage.

Well, those odds aren’t great.

Fortunately that number goes up to two in ten if you have basic managerial talent and receive the right coaching. But still, the odds aren’t in your favor.

You can do one of two things with this information. You can freak out and decide management is not for you (a perfectly fine choice). Or you can freak out and take the craft of management seriously.

Management is Not Leadership

I decided to buckle down and learn the craft of management. Or was it leadership? I wasn’t sure.

Management is often confused with leadership. I think much of the confusion comes from the common practice of calling a management team a “leadership team”. It’s a way that “flat” organizations label management to make it sound less like there is a hierarchy of power, even though there is.

Leadership as a euphemism for management is also problematic because it leads people to believe that to be a real leader, they need to be a manager. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, if you’re not hiring leaders, why are you hiring at all?

So what’s the difference and how does management relate to leadership?

My favorite definition of management vs. leadership comes from the Harvard Business Review article, What Great Managers Do:

They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves. More important, you won’t win if you don’t think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

This is the exact opposite of what great leaders do. Great leaders discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their job is to rally people toward a better future.

This what an “aha” moment for me. The primary job of a manager is to turn the unique abilities of individuals into the high performance of a group. That’s where I realized I needed to focus. Leadership is a critical part of the job, but it’s a different skill. I could read books about leadership all day long, but it wouldn’t be hitting at the core competencies I first needed to develop as a manager.

Why a Weekly One on One is so Important

In order to deeply understand each of your direct reports and their unique strengths and weaknesses, you have to spend time with them. It takes time to build a trusting relationship. That’s the point of a weekly one on one. It’s about creating a safe space to open up an be vulnerable. A space where you can give and receive honest feedback. That’s where real growth happens.

The Manager Tools podcast taught me how important it is to make every effort to meet once a week, even if you have to move the meeting to a different day. This is the one time every week that your direct report has your undivided attention. It’s their time to let you know what’s going on, what they’re excited about, or what they’re struggling with. Make it more about them than about you. You should do more listening than talking in a one on one.

If you’re tempted to skip a one on one, don’t. This sends a message: “Our time together is not a priority for me.” That’s not a great way to start building a trusting relationship. Schedule your one on ones and stick to them.

Give Feedback Early and Often

The one thing that’s most important after meeting once a week is giving feedback. It’s your job to let your direct reports know how they’re doing — what’s going well, and where they can improve. When you’re managing someone new, start by spending more time telling them what’s going well, and give specific examples. You’ll build rapport and let’s face it, we’re all more motivated by hearing what we’re good at, than always hearing about what we’re bad at.

The quicker the feedback loop is between their action and your feedback, the better the chances it’ll actually help. They’ll also have the chance to apply that feedback to everything they do going forward. It’s never fun to get feedback six months late and realize you could have been working on something for that whole time. Don’t wait until performance review time to deliver a pile of feedback. Performance reviews should be about summarizing what you’ve been talking about week after week, and setting goals for future growth.

Giving feedback doesn’t have to be a huge ordeal. It can be simple and quick. Once again, Manager Tools has great practical examples on how to give quick, in the moment feedback.

You’re not Alone

The transition to management is stressful and disorienting. To make matters worse, your peer group instantly shrinks considerably. If your company doesn’t have a large management team, it could just be you, or one or two other people. Talk to them, compare notes. If you don’t have someone inside the company, find some folks outside.

The reality is, every new manager is going through the same challenges. It’s helpful to remember you’re not alone. When you feel like you’re in over your head, you can get perspective from others who are going through similar challenges or have already crossed that bridge.

What about the Product?

You might be wondering where the product comes in. Shouldn’t you be focusing on developing a UX vision and leading your team to glory? Yes, that’s a key part of the value you bring as a Product Design Manager. But first things first. If you don’t get a handle on the fundamentals of management, you’ll spend all of your time putting out fires, making bad hires, and dealing with unhappy employees. And remember, your primary leverage is your team. Even if you have the best UX ideas in the world, you won’t get much done without a committed team to help you craft that vision and actually execute it.

The Resources that Got Me Through that First Year

Harvard Business Review
This became my go-to resource for all things management. More than any other resource, it helped orient me and gave me a foundation to build on.

Manager Tools Fundamentals Podcast
This podcast is the best way to get down-to-earth, practical tips you can use tomorrow. The lessons that stuck with me the most were about one on ones, giving feedback, and delegating work. If you’re not a podcast person, you can find the same content in the book The Effective Manger by Mark Horstman.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott
This book should be required reading for any new manager. Kim Scott outlines a useful framework for giving honest, direct feedback in a caring way. But don’t be fooled by the title, this book is also packed with a treasure trove of practical management advice from Scott’s time in the trenches at Google and Apple.