Break Free from Being Mushroomed - follow up story

How to Reclaim Your Product Management Role

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for premium subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about asserting myself after being kept in the dark:

Break Free from Being Mushroomed

What Prompted this Article?

I was struggling to deal with a new stakeholder after a re-org. Let’s call the new stakeholder Andrew.

I was affected by a large reorganization of the product managers, in which several directors were moved to individual contributor roles. As a result of the restructuring, Andrew moved from people management to become my product line's strategy lead. He became an individual contributor and had to sort out his new role.

Andrew kept me in the dark and undermined my cross-functional work with engineering, marketing, sales and finance. He did this for the following reasons:

I was angry and frustrated with Andrew’s leadership style.

On the other hand, he was making progress and I was the only one affected by his lack of collaboration.

I wrote this article to figure out how to deal with Andrew and get rid of my anger. I decided to take these steps:

What Happened After this Article?