MProduct <Education>: How to Win Over and Influence Your Team
Welcome to MProduct Education. The primary function of this biweekly series is to consistently provide aspiring product managers (PM’s) with tools that can be used throughout their career as a PM. Whether you have just learned the operating functions of a PM or are well into your career within the realm of product, our educational content will always be created for those hungry to push their boundaries of PM knowledge.
This piece’s focus: Winning Buy-In From Your Product Team
The Issue
As product managers, we face an extremely difficult task: leading without formal authority. Because we do not have the power to fire nor affect the wages of anyone whom we work with, we technically do not hold any real authority over them. However, that does not mean that we cannot lead teams as product managers. To influence behavior without formal authority, we need to win buy-in from our engineering, design, sales, and whomever else we work with. We must provide a vision to our team that will inspire them to hop on the same page and pursue the products and features that we have decided to prioritize. That leads us to our next point:
How to Win Buy-In
The term “buy-in” is often confused. At MProduct, we believe that a product manager has gotten “buy-in” from our team when they have successfully convinced their teammates to pursue a certain idea with energy and enthusiasm.
The most efficient way to earn buy-in from your team is simple: by winning their trust. Leaders that are trusted are infinitely more likely to win the enthusiasm of their followers.
Many think that the only way to earn trust within a company is to be the most talented one in the room. To be respected by the engineers, a technical product manager might believe that they need to be the best programmer in the room. Or to garner admiration from designers, the most creative artist. In reality, there are only two things that we as product managers need to accomplish in order to earn buy-in from our teams:
1. Develop a logical connection.
2. Develop an emotional connection.
At the end of the day, our team members are human. To earn their trust, we must show that we understand not only the company, but more importantly, we understand our teammates. People respect a product manager that can logically explain their reasoning for prioritizing certain product and features over others, while people also trust a product manager that actually cares about them. Our teammates want to feel like they are contributing to something important, and it is our job to make sure that they do. In doing so, we inspire them to join us on our product journey. So the question is, how exactly does one develop both logical and emotional connections with their team? At MProduct, we broke this question down into a few easy steps. Here are our simple tips on how to develop both a logical and an emotional connection:
I. Developing a Logical Connection
a.) Advocate for long-term thinking.
Often, our team will come up with many interesting ideas that are unrelated to our product goal. These features may seem cool and fascinating to our team at the current moment — in fact, some ideas we may even like ourselves. Unfortunately, these suggestions often do not align with the business goals that we must meet. No matter how cool these ideas are, nor how frustrated our teammates are going to be if we reject their ideas, we cannot pursue them.
So how do we break the news that we cannot commit to the ideas that our team has come up with? By creating a team culture that constantly focuses on the long term. Strava’s senior product manager, Rodrigo Davies, explains it extremely well. Teammates who focus on long-term sales and strategy are more likely to “look beyond what’s in front of them” and instead “think about the future,” putting aside any rash product choices that our team may be overly invested in.
Therefore, from the very beginning, we must get our team thinking about the long-term strategy of the company. We have to constantly remind them what the company hopes to achieve on a broad-level. Of course, let us not be rude when turning down an idea. That creates the opposite emotion of what we are trying to achieve. Instead, we must gently explain why we must focus on the features that are critical for the company.
b.) Be transparent.
The easiest way to lose trust is to be opaque in how we describe our vision to our team. When explaining why the company is pursuing certain features over others, we will often discuss the company’s budget, assets, and business case.
As product managers, we must be blunt about these things. Sugarcoat as little as possible, and get straight to the point. There are only X amount of resources to accomplish task Y, and our team needs to know exactly what the two variables are. Being direct to our team will actually result in higher trust, as they will see that we have no hidden motives. As a result, our teammates will respect us more as leaders. Transparency is key in developing a connection with our team, and therefore an important tool to use.
II. Developing an Emotional Connection
a.) Be empathetic.
This tip is simple. The best way to present a rational argument to our team is to understand who our audience is. Before even thinking about convincing a group of engineers to develop one product over another, we must really try to understand our team’s goals, aspirations, and thought-processes in order to make them want to work with us. After all, our teams are comprised of humans, not machines.
The easiest way to develop an emotional connection is to verbally recognize what our team wants, and try our best to accommodate. We will not always be able to grant our team exactly what they want, but if we show our team that we at least recognize their wants, we will very quickly build rapport and win them over. Empathy is a key trait of product managers with high emotional intelligence, who tend to be spectacular at getting team buy-in.
b.) Leave room for other ideas.
Although we may need to prioritize certain features in order to align with our business objectives, we can still be open to ideas from our team. Davies states that all product managers should try to leave a little bit of room at the end of every meeting for teammates to discuss ideas for future iterations. This way, our team will feel heard, and more likely to listen to our ideas in return.
If this is not possible, we should at least try to have one-on-one informal chats with our teammates in order to hear them out. Listening is a crucial skill for all product managers to excel in, because we never know what key insights we may discover. By listening to our teammates, we give ourselves the chance to uncover innovative ideas that we ourselves may have never come up with.
Overall, building trust is crucial to winning buy-in from our product teams. Communication is an integral skill within the realm of product management, and the best managers understand how to use both logical and emotional communication to create the most effective and efficient teams. Connections, when built correctly, will create an unbreakable bond between a product manager and their team. And only through connections can we truly win over and influence our team.
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As always, we are committed to creating the next generation of Product leaders and hope you will come join our MProduct community. If you want to keep up with what we are doing, follow us on Medium and LinkedIn, or check out our website here!
Go Blue!
MProduct Links:
Medium: https://medium.com/mproduct
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mproduct
Website: https://www.mproduct.org/
References:
Achuthan, A. (2017, July 29). The Product Manager’s Guide to Getting Buy-In. Retrieved from https://medium.com/startup-grind/getting-buy-in-aba18cc8cc77.
Davies, R. (2018, January 4). How to Get Buy In as a Product Manager and Say No to ‘Jeff Mode’. Retrieved from https://medium.com/pathtoproduct/how-to-get-buy-in-as-a-product-manager-and-say-no-to-jeff-mode-d3df44ec18b2.
Jillean. (2019, October 16). How to get product roadmap buy-in. Retrieved from https://roadmunk.com/guides/get-product-roadmap-buy-in/.
