Building reputation as a Product Manager.

Hi! Hope you are having a great start to your day.

Every now and again, product consultants join new product teams and I wanted to share with you how you can carefully build trust, establish integrity and character.

I mostly begin with arranging 1:1 meet and greet informal meetings with members of my (new) working team, the R&D teams and core business.

Specifically aimed at sharing my story and learning about the next person - their professional journey, major challenges they face and how they expect our new working relationship to feature in that story. I ask this question to everyone and most of the time, a pattern emerges — a problem that majority of them are struggling with.

It becomes my personal goal to solve that friction. If executed properly, this would be my window to establishing trust and reliability in new team.

A real life instance was :

In 2019, whilst shipping a new product for a Big Pharma, during our 1-1 sessions, I found out that the marketing teams struggled with a clear cut process for scoping and delivery of a new feature. Meanwhile, the delivery team struggled with evaluation and prioritization of new work, moving blindly with zero standard guidance or blueprint of the new feature. The existing process that existed was manual and there was no centralized container to track new feature requests before it was accepted in the backlog.

Even worse, external teams remained confused about how to submit new feature requests whilst the internal team struggled with saying yes or no, to new feature request and worst of all, there was no clear process for stakeholder communication.

This left everyone frustrated.

As much as this was not my JD, I made it my goal to solve for this problem. This problem was my window to build credibility not only in my team but across organization.

Fast forward to 2 months later, after a streamlined task ingestion process, deploying a real time status tracker, repository set up online and post 10+ sessions to educate teams across organization of all new processes — I had demonstrated myself as someone who meant business.

At other times, there was misalignment in dependencies which was critical to meet delivery timeline.

When you solve for problems that established teams have struggled with for a long time, it not only puts you in good light, but also establishes you as someone who drives result. An extremely important reputation for Product Managers to earn.

How do you build your reputation when you are new on a team?