Driving Change: How Product Leaders Can Evangelize Product Management Best Practices

As a product management veteran with over 20 years of leadership experience, I've worked with numerous organizations looking to transform their approach to building and delivering products. One of the most critical factors in the success of these transformations is the presence of strong product leaders who actively evangelize and promote product management best practices within their companies.

These product leaders come from various roles - from CPOs and product managers to designers, engineers and sales people. What unites them is a shared passion for putting the customer at the heart of everything they do and a deep understanding of the value that effective product management brings.

Evangelizing Product Management

So, what does it mean to evangelize product management within an organization? At its core, it's about advocating for a product-led approach to decision making. It's about educating stakeholders on the principles of product management, such as user research, data-driven prioritization, and continuous iteration. It's about influencing a company's culture to embrace experimentation, learning, and customer-centricity.

Product leaders who successfully evangelize product management often employ several key strategies:

1. Building alignment around a shared product vision. Effective product leaders rally teams around a compelling vision of the future. They paint a picture of the customer problems they're trying to solve and the value their products will deliver. By getting everyone aligned around a common goal, they create a sense of shared purpose and motivation.
2. Advocating for the user. Product management evangelists are relentless advocates for their users. They bring customer insights and feedback into every discussion, ensuring that the user's needs are always front and center. They push their teams to validate assumptions with real data and to make decisions based on what will deliver the most value to customers.
3. Promoting cross-functional collaboration. Great products are built by cross-functional teams. Product leaders who evangelize product management work tirelessly to break down silos and foster collaboration between design, engineering, marketing, sales, and other functions. They create processes and rituals that bring teams together to solve problems and make decisions.
4. Measuring and communicating impact. To build buy-in for product management practices, product leaders must be able to demonstrate their impact. They define clear metrics and KPIs that align with business goals, and regularly report on progress. They celebrate successes and openly learn from failures, using data to continuously improve their processes and decision making.

Consider the example of a product leader at a fast-growing e-commerce startup. He knew that to secure ongoing investment in product management, he needed to show the tangible impact it was having on the business. He worked with his team to define a set of key metrics, such as user engagement, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. He then set up regular reporting cadences to share these metrics with executives and stakeholders, along with insights into what was driving the numbers and what actions the team was taking to improve them. By consistently communicating the impact of product management in this way, he was able to build trust and credibility with key decision makers, and secure the resources needed to continue scaling the function.

Key Focus Areas for Evangelizing Product Management

To truly drive the adoption and impact of product management best practices, product leaders should focus on the following three key areas:

1. Proactively educating and enabling the broader organization.

One of the key responsibilities of product leaders is to ensure that the entire organization understands and values the role of product management. This requires proactive education and enablement at all levels, from executives to individual contributors.

Product leaders should start by creating a clear, compelling narrative around what product management is, why it matters, and how it drives business value. They should share this narrative widely and consistently, using a variety of channels and formats to reach different audiences.

Some effective tactics for educating the organization include hosting workshops, creating educational content, sharing success stories, encouraging PMs to present their work, and partnering with HR and L&D teams to incorporate product management training into onboarding and development programs.

By investing in ongoing education and enablement, product leaders can help build a shared understanding and appreciation for the PM role across the organization.

2. Cultivating strong relationships and influence.

Product management is inherently cross-functional, requiring close collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. To be effective evangelists, product leaders must cultivate strong relationships and influence across the organization.

This starts with building trust and credibility through transparent communication and proactive collaboration. Product leaders should also invest in developing their influencing skills, such as persuasive communication, active listening, negotiation, and coalition building.

Tactics for building strong relationships and influence include regular stakeholder meetings, active participation in cross-functional initiatives, mentoring colleagues, presenting to executive teams, and building a network of alliances and advocates.

By cultivating strong relationships and influence, product leaders can more effectively drive alignment and outcomes, and champion the value of product management.

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3. Nurturing a healthy, thriving PM culture.

To truly evangelize product management, leaders must go beyond individual practices and focus on nurturing a healthy, thriving PM culture.

This means creating an environment where PMs feel empowered and supported to do their best work, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, promoting diversity and inclusion, and focusing on developing and advancing the skills and careers of PM teams.

Some ways to nurture a healthy PM culture include:

• Defining and communicating a clear set of product management values and principles
• Creating forums for PMs to share learnings and best practices, like regular meetups or communities of practice
• Investing in tools and resources that enable PMs to work more efficiently and effectively
• Encouraging PMs to participate in external events, networks, or thought leadership opportunities
• Recognizing and promoting top PM talent into leadership roles

By nurturing a healthy, thriving PM culture, product leaders can create an environment where product management can flourish and drive real impact for the business.

Evangelizing product management is a multifaceted, ongoing effort that requires product leaders to educate, influence, and inspire at all levels of the organization. By proactively enabling understanding of the PM role, cultivating strong relationships and influence, and nurturing a healthy PM culture, product leaders can champion the value of product management and drive transformative outcomes for their organizations.

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It's Time to Drive

As a product leader, you have the power to drive transformational change by evangelizing product management best practices. Start by educating yourself and your team, finding small opportunities to apply practices, enlisting allies, measuring your impact, and continually advocating.

To optimize your evangelism, focus your efforts on the highest-leverage next step, whether that's establishing a cross-functional working group to align on prioritization, publishing a compelling case study about a product win, or implementing a product management onboarding program.

With passionate leaders like you advocating for the practices that create great products, the future of product management is bright. Embrace your role as an evangelist and amplify your impact!

What' Next?

In Part 2 of this 2 part series on Product Management Evangelism we will dive into common challenges with strategies to overcome them.

Join the Conversation

If you find this topic interesting and would like to join us for a group conversation on Product Management Evangelism and Empathy please RSVP for this Thursday's free roundtable discussion at https://www.meetup.com/theproductgroup/events/298490850/