Product Managers: You Have Responsibility and Authority

One of the oldest adages related to product management is:

“All of the responsibility and none of the authority.”

I remember the first time I heard it. I was commiserating with a fellow Product Manager, Alex*, after a tough meeting with executives. It was my first Product Management role. And at that moment, I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment. There was no doubting it.

If I recall correctly, we had both been through a bit of a gantlet about our product plans and had to go back, review them with our teams and present back to the exec team in a week, probably to face a similar drubbing. We felt like “Gap Filler” (another metaphor I’ve heard used by product managers). i.e. we were to go do some work to fill in the product planning gaps and come back for the execs to decide our fate.

Responsibility vs. Authority

I’ve heard that Responsibility/Authority phrase many times in the ensuing years. You’ve probably heard it as well. While it seems like a truism, let’s investigate it in more detail. Let’s start by looking at the two key words — Responsibility and Authority.

Responsibility: n. a form of trustworthiness; the trait of being answerable to someone for something or being responsible for one’s conduct; e.g. “she holds a position of great responsibility”.

We often think of responsibility as a burden, but it is in fact a trust that we’ve been given to perform certain acts.

Authority: n. the power or right to give orders, take actions or make decisions; e.g “he has the authority to issue warrants”.

And authority is power to act that you are given related to your responsibilities. So responsibility and authority are closely inter-twined, and you can’t really have one without the other.

What Alex and I felt was in fact quite wrong. We had both the responsibility and authority to engage our teams and ask them to participate to define our product plans. If we didn’t have that, the executives could have simply said “Thank you” and made the decisions for us.

We had authority. What we didn’t acknowledge at that moment was the limit of it. Bruised egos aside, we were definitely not at the same level as the executives and we needed to understand that. We were definitely NOT “CEO of the Product”, but there’s a huge spread between that and the “Gap Filler” feeling we had at that moment.

Types of Authority

There are many types of authority. Organizational authority is the one that comes to mind first. i.e. the one that the CEO, the military commander, the captain of a ship, the coach of a sports team etc. all have.

By virtue of their title and the explicit definition of their responsibilities these people have organizational authority over others: the company, the military division, the ship’s crew, the team’s players etc.

But there are other types of authority and it’s important for Product Managers to understand them because they are an explicit part of the role and can be developed and leveraged for personal and professional benefit.

The ones that are most relevant in this context are:

Positional Authority

As a Product Manager, you have a job to do. You have responsibilities, based both on your job definition and, more importantly, based on what your management expects of you.

The title Product Manager carries weight. In the same way that Salespeople are expected to sell, Marketers are expected to Market, Developers are expected to write code etc., Product Managers are expected to manage their product.

Product Management is a leadership role, even if you don’t have anyone directly reporting to you.

This is both explicit in the job title and implicit in the expectations others have of you. No one else will do your job, unless and until, you fail to do it yourself. So don’t squander this authority, because once you lose it, you’re likely out of a job as well.

Performance Authority

IF you’ve been in your role for a while and you’ve shown your product management prowess, you’ll likely have some credibility and authority based on previous performance and success.

Anyone with a history of success in their role will get latitude and a level of freedom to act that someone without that will not. This is true in any role — think about successful sales people or successful marketers etc.

Unlike Positional Authority, this authority is implicit and and can vanish quickly if you make notable mistakes or the *perception* of your ability to perform wanes in any way. And never let your ego take charge here. It’s a very short path from hero to zero

Expert Authority

Product Managers need to have a broad set of knowledge to do their jobs well. It’s likely a mix of the following:

• business knowledge
• customer insights
• market understanding
• competitive knowledge
• technical understanding

Ideally, as a Product Manager, you have worked to gain understanding in these areas in the context of your product. And in areas like customer insights and market understanding, you have better knowledge than anyone else in the company.

You have a level of expertise that is needed and valued. This affords you some level of authority, specifically when discussions or decisions are needed in these areas.

While there are MANY types of authority, I’ve focused on these three types to help decompose the authority Product Managers have.

• Positional Authority is explicit and the one that Product Managers need to understand from the day they start their role.
• Performance Authority is built over time based on a history of delivering results.
• Expert Authority is gained (and retained) based on the view that the Product Manager IS an expert in the areas they are responsible for.

All three are important and build on one another. Start with the first, build the second and maintain the 3rd and you’ll likely never have to worry about how much authority you really have.

And you’ll never find yourself in the “all of the responsibility, none of the authority” quagmire like Alex and I were in, so many years ago.

Saeed

A little feedback on the article

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’d like some feedback on the article to make it better. Just 3 questions. Should take 1 minute, but will really be valuable to me. Thanks in advance.

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*name changed to protect the innocent. :-)