Lone Wolf or Over Collaborator - follow up story

Balancing the Extremes of Product Management

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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 balancing product management work:

Lone Wolf or Over-Collaborator?

What Prompted this Article?

This article started in 2014, when I received a bad performance review. Stakeholders didn’t trust me, and I didn’t collaborate enough. I was so much of a lone wolf product manager that this blindsided me.

I decided to be friendlier to stakeholders and peers. That helped a little.

Being friendly is different from building relationships. If I don’t have relationships, then there are no shared goals. Communication is difficult without relationships.

I learned about active listening and coaching. Slowly, these steps started breaking my lone wolf approach to product management.

It took meeting another hard-core lone wolf product manager, Mel, to see the damage of being a solitary product manager. Mel did outstanding product work, but no one sought him out for help.

After meeting Mel, I worked with an overcollaborative product manager, Sam. Consensus building was Sam’s approach to product management. He was well-liked, but he struggled to deliver on his work.

Neither of these extremes - lone wolf or overcollaborator - works for product managers.

I wrote this article to remind myself to balance getting product work done and building relationships.

What Happened After this Article?