Relationships

One of the most illuminating signs of a successful Product Manager is the quality of their relationships. Good PMs build sincere and trustworthy relationships internally and externally. While most of us work with Engineering and Design primarily, it’s essential to also create connections with stakeholders in Sales, Marketing and Leadership; it’s also critical to have good relationships with outside partners like customers, technology partners and vendors.

Having a strong foundation of mutual trust and respect means more productive negotiations, goal alignment and conflict resolutions. It will also enable turning your ideas into funded projects, last-minute bug fixes and faster launches with an API partner. Perhaps the best reason to invest in your relationships is to create a team where great people want to work and these benefits:

• Goal alignment
• Better deals
• Better products
• Happier customers
• Better interpersonal relationships at work
• Common vision
• Job satisfaction

Now, let’s take a look at what ingredients make up a good relationship:

Open communication — Good relationships depend on open, honest communication. Whether over emails, Slack, meeting face-to-face or on Zoom, the more effectively you communicate with those around you, the better you’ll connect.

Respect — A sincere respect for each other’s ideas, backgrounds and context.

Self-Awareness — Knowing one’s self means humility, accountability, taking responsibility for your words and actions, and not letting your own negative emotions impact the people around you.

Inclusion — We’re all different and welcome people for who they are.

Trust — Consistency over time, delivering on your promises.

Product Manager <> Design

Designers and product managers spend a lot of time together — on problem discovery, user issues and in general design efforts. Here are some tips for a successful relationship:

Establish clear responsibilities — PMs own the problem, Design owns the solution and together you own the experience. Be collaborative in your approach and context regarding the product goal you want to be achieved.

Frequent collaboration — PMs should work with designers to establish the process and structure — including what type of feedback and when the feedback is required. On the flip side, PMs should engage Design early in the problem discovery process and even throughout the build and launch cycles.

Share insights — PMs should be sharing customer feedback and data insights with designers regularly.

Product Manager <> Engineering

Of all functions, PMs spend most of their time with engineers, as such a productive relationship between Product Management and Engineering is vital to launching great products. Good relationships will mean having engineers who help you make amazing experiences and engineers get a PM that shares product leadership with them.

Here are four ways to a successful Engineering — Product relationship:

Articulate your vision clearly — When working with developers be clear on your product vision and strategy. A good PM can go deep enough to explain the user and business impetus for all decisions and high-level enough to show you your North Star. This extends to decision-making as well, you should be making decisions and move on, ambivalence is painful.

Establish clear responsibilities — Just like with Design, PMs own the problem, engineers own the solution but together you own the experience. As an example, engineers dislike PMs who tell them what technical solution to implement or insist on shipping out feature-after-feature with no time for technical debt.

Make Engineers your partners — It used to be that PMs would perform all product thinking work like ideation and discovery and then pass on the requirements to their developers. These days the lines are blurred, and for the better, as engineers should be involved in the product process early on. As partners, your engineers need you to remove any obstacles that come in many forms such as politics, feature and scope creep.

Win Together — Winning and success is a team effort. You can bet any product you love has a great team of PMs, Design and Engineering behind it. So, when some great milestone or achievement is made, share the credit and celebrate with your engineers.

Product Manager <> Marketing

The PM — Marketing relationship is one of the most challenging relationships to maintain. Unlike other functions, there’s a lot of overlap in duties and outcomes. E.g. as more and more PMs expand into ‘growth’ activities such as acquiring users it encroaches on what Marketing typically does. Also, Marketing and Product Management often are the central hub of information in the company given their cross-functional roles. Establishing a good partnership will ensure they hit their growth targets.

Here are three ways to a successful Marketing — Product relationship:

Make Marketing your partner — Instead of waiting for the end of the build cycle you should include Marketing in the product planning stage to get them thinking on who to target and how to get the word out.

Share customer insight — PMs and Marketing should work to exchange all types of data and customer insight. PMs can share product metrics like feature adoption and customer insight from empathy interviews which engenders trust with Marketing while providing them the necessary context to grow your product.

Establish clear responsibilities — PMs and Marketing can find themselves fighting over the same responsibilities including growth strategies, customer development and even writing copy. It’s important, just like other relationships, to define the boundaries.

Product Manager <> Sales

PMs rely on Sales to sell their apps and Sales rely on PMs to build marketable products. With this in mind, it’s good to think of Sales as a part of your team rather than a separate group despite the different goals.

Here are some ways to improve your relationship with Sales:

Appreciate that Sales is a partner, not just a separate org — Often PMs think of their most important organizational partners as Engineering, Design, Market and Leadership. Including business development is vital to getting customers and getting revenue. Make your Sales team a partner.

Enable Sales — Assisting Sales with the right tools, and your time can save you a lot of time and shorten your sales cycle. Providing good product training with documentation, quick reference guides for features and FAQs will empower Sales to provide customers with the right information with little assistance from you. Of course, you can’t throw this over the wall and should be delivered in product demos and presentations.

Get Product Ideas — Your business development executive talks to key decision-makers and end-users all day long. To that end, they can be a great source of customer feedback, sentiment and feature ideas. Do your best to gather as much feedback.

Product Manager <> Leadership

As you advance in your PM career you’ll be spending more of your time selling new projects, using your product vision to impact overall business strategy and presenting to executives.

You’ll notice that senior leaders operate a different level than you are used to. They can see the forest from the trees, they can see trends happening before most of us and will go deep on a subject or even very high-level.

If you’re looking to climb that ladder or get your project funded here are effective ways to work with executives.

Be Direct — In meetings, execs don’t spend too much time on small-talk preferring to discuss the problem at hand soon. It’s a good idea to get down to business and present / provide data to the problem at hand. You should know your data inside out and anticipate hard questions from different points of view serving their functional area. E.g. if you are meeting with Marketing, Sales and Engineering leaders be prepared to discuss how things could impact their respective groups.

Know Your Stuff — Execs can sniff out bad data and information quickly so when sharing any quantitative insight (and you should always) understand the logic, how you gathered this information and how to action this data.

Big Picture — When talking to senior leaders don’t lead with the low-level details but rather think high-level by providing information such as revenue impact, strategy changes or even market share loss. However, be prepared to dive deep with supporting information.