Letting Go is Leadership
Taking charge while letting others lead in product management
Is taking charge and controlling all decisions the best strategy for leading a product team? There is a good balance of knowing all details of your product and excelling at leading your product. There are a few ways to take charge while enabling supporters to lead too:
Recognize good leadership
Set a good example
Provide opportunities for others to lead
Over time leading a product team takes less effort by using these ideas.
Recognize Good Leadership
Public and private recognition of contributions by co-workers goes a long way in leading a team. Would you rather hear about how a co-worker appreciated your comments in a meeting or hear about how you made a minor error in calculating margin in a business case? Like most people, you would prefer to hear about being appreciated!
Example
Let's look at an example: your product is growing fast and another product manager has been added to the product team. You've both been handling everything together. The new product manager holds a series of meetings to address a long standing problem with the product costs. She finds a way to reduce costs but product deployment is slightly harder. You chose to recognize her leadership in reducing costs and quietly support the change in deployment.
Benefit
The benefit of complimenting her leadership results is you both have more time by splitting up the efforts.
Set a Good Example
Doing your fair share of the hard work is noticed by your product team. This means you treat the whole product team with respect and enable all team members equal ability contribute. Often this is easy to say and difficult to do.
Example
Let's say you are presenting your new product concept and business case to the product team. During this presentation, your lead business development colleague interrupts your presentation and finds fault with details that are not relevant. You might be tempted to point out that your colleague doesn't understand and shut him down. Instead you encourage the colleague to elaborate about the solution and incorporate his feedback into the concept.
Benefit
You've shown the team that all feedback is handled respectfully even when your treatment is unprofessional. You notice that your lead business development colleague starts contacting you early to let you know about issues.
Provide Opportunities for Others to Lead
Taking all the glory on each accomplishment shuts out others on the team from leading. A good leader is comfortable with others leading and stepping back to let experts lead their areas. This is challenging for product managers as their concepts turn into products and deliveries. The rewards for product management leaders that turn to engineering leaders to take a product over the finish line are immense.
Example
Your new product business case and requirements are finished. The product team as accepted the requirements. Your engineering lead has raised an issue that there are a few missing SKUs to cover new customer orders. Some members of the product team don't think additional SKUs are needed. You are unsure of the right answer and realize more investigation is needed. You don't comment and privately ask the program manager to recommend a solution.
Benefit
You are freed up from investigating this key issue and the program manager's expertise in building concensus is brought in to solve the problem. You have more time to focus on go to market and the next product version.
Conclusion
Getting results is what matters. Letting go of work that isn't core to your performance measurements lets others lead and frees you to lead where it matters.
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