10 Tips To Lift Your Product Leadership Skills

Good leadership is a difficult practice. Good product leadership is even more so.

Good product leadership is more difficult to pursue when we couple the challenges of practising good leadership with the challenges of practising Product Management.

Product leaders have to navigate both. They’re on a tight rope; peddling hard to be a good leader in the organisation, carrying a deep well of practice knowledge and skills, while simultaneously protecting and empowering their teams to be able to discover and deliver valuable products.

Not only do product leaders have to lead the organisation, and their teams, their Product leadership credibility lies in the ‘Technical Product’ know-how and their ability to converse in the Product language with authority.

So here are 10 tips (in no particular order) to help you lift your Product leadership skills.

• Take stock of the types of skills you use to do your job.

Your job is to step out of the day-to-day and lead. That requires a whole lot of adaptive or human skills such as problem-solving, communication, and empathy. If you are using more of your functional or technical skills to do your job, you’ll need to change your habits. Don’t fall back into the Product Manager role.

• Continue to learn about Product Management.

This means you’ll read books, attend conferences, source case studies, ask for help and invest time networking with other Product leaders. While you won’t be doing hands-on product work, you’ll be coaching your Product team to do the work. Your credibility as a Product leader lifts when you know tools that can help draw out insights and you can assess and re-sequence product tasks.

• Diarise how you react and respond in conversations and to feedback.

Great Product leaders are self-aware. You should know and acknowledge the triggers that cause you stress or angst. Prepare a set of responses ahead of time so that you remain calm and reply appropriately.

• Set the vision and strategy.

Work with your teams to set the portfolio or product vision and create a resilient strategy. These will become the guardrails for the efforts and the outcomes that your teams will deliver over the course of the year.

• Course correct misalignment.

Listen and watch for day-to-day tasks and conversions that are misaligned with the vision and the strategy. Stop the work immediately and realign the team’s efforts and behaviours. If you don’t you’ll have a bigger problem to unravel.

• Coach and build confidence in your teams.

Do this by asking questions. It isn’t about telling your teams what to do but about asking the right questions to enable team members to solve the problems themselves. Asking good questions builds the learning muscle for both you as a leader and the team.

• Speak financial and commercials.

You absolutely need to know how your products and the broader business make money. You cannot grow as a leader if you don’t know how to draw insights from a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. You should be able to converse with the Executive team and peers about commercial relationships and the impacts it has on the business.

• Tell a damn good story.

Storytelling helps builds your influence which engenders trust in your capability.

• Work closely with your peers.

Don’t forget that as a Product leader the team you lead are not your peers. Your peers are leaders in other teams such as Engineering, Marketing and Sales. Your job as a Product leader is to collaborate with your peers to drive the growth of the business.

• Be kind to yourself.

We’re human, even leaders. So don’t beat yourself up when you make mistakes. Take a breath and be gentle with yourself.