Stepping Into Leadership
How can a product manager lead their product when there is so much competition to lead?
Many product managers are urged to lead features, requirements and their products cross functionally. In high visibility products, often there are many team members who feel responsible for leading the product. How can a product manager lead their product when there is so much competition to lead?
Perhaps you are new to the team or the team has never seen a product manager leader. How can you overcome these challenges with out being too overloaded to lead the team? With product teams springing up in all sorts of industries, you will likely find yourself in situations in which you need to lead a team that doesn't want your leadership. With thoughts on leadership methods you can overcome this conflict and become a product manager leader.
Embrace Opposing Views
Understand the motivations and opposing views of the team. There are many ways to get results and your way might not be the only way. Even the most difficult people are seeking results. Let's say an aspiring leader in engineering is opposing your new feature ideas. Becoming defensive about the engineering opposition will be frustrating and wasteful.
A productive approach is to get to know the engineering leader's motivations. After understanding the engineering leader's situation, you come to learn that a few of her key people want to learn a new technology and are likely to leave the team if they don't have the new technology experience. Loss of these key engineering resources would be devastating to the product. After continuing to work with engineering, you realize the new technology solves customer problems and you can prioritize features that address the concern about losing key people.
Ask Open-Ended Questions
Asking good questions takes finesse to avoid causing new levels of conflict among team members that aspire to lead the product. The best questions get the whole team thinking about results. Bad questions lead to some team members feeling put down or shown to have made a wrong decision. When team members are busy placing blame on each other then they can't focus on results.
Suppose your product team has learned that your IT team is unable to deliver a key change on the customer dashboard that is used for your new feature. You have no extra budget to develop a temporary dashboard to deliver the feature to customers. You join the weekly product team meeting to find a lot of blaming talk. Its time to ask questions about getting results even with the challenges.
Questions that help:
Are there other ways for customers to access our feature besides the dashboard?
Can we re-use a little used feature on the dashboard with special guidance?
Would customers be willing to wait a little extra?
Is there anything we can do to help IT?
Questions that don't help:
When did IT tell us about the delay?
Why doesn't IT want to do this feature?
Does IT understand why customers want this feature?
Generally focusing on the future is more productive than focusing on the past.
Recognize Results No Matter What
Take the time to recognize team member's initiatives. Looking outside of your area and thanking others for their help leads to more teamwork. The team will naturally follow a leader that understands their challenges and recognizes their efforts. Would you rather deal with someone who gives you compliments or someone that is passive?
Take a classic product team with engineering, sales and support. It is the committed time to deliver a key new feature. You are the product manager who needs to resolve a deferred bug in the new feature. The support team is going to get a bunch of extra support calls and the sales team is going to have irate customers if the product ships without the fix. Engineering, Support and Sales feel you don't have a role in resolving this issue. You decide to assert your key role in delivery decisions by:
Recognizing the hard work engineering did to get to this point
Reminding sales about their close relationship with customers
Asking support how they handled a similar issue last time
After discussing the issue further, the product team realizes there is a simple workaround that can be used until the bug is fixed if you write up the work around.
Conclusion
Being on a product team with a bunch of strong-minded leaders means you have more challenges in asserting your leadership. It doesn't mean others lead the product. Only the product manager can lead the product. Embracing opposing ideas, asking productive questions and recognizing results put you in charge of your product.