How To Be A Great Product Manager

Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the privilege to work with a lot of really great Product Managers. Recently I got to thinking about what it is they do that makes them great. Those consistent behaviors and patterns which separate them from those who thrive and those who struggle to get things done. What follows isn’t exhaustive or any aspiration towards a doctrine, but it is a list of things I know to be true.

The advantage of kindness

Never underestimate the strength of being the person who everyone else just feels better is in the room. It took me years to really understand that being easy to get along with at work isn’t just something that makes me feel better, it’s something which builds faith and equity with everyone around you. Great Product Managers thrive in their careers when they have the confidence of those around them in their decision making, and become deeply trusted to be able to figure things out. Kindness is, of course, also a direct line into user empathy and doing the right thing for those who use what you build every day. I’ve seen this over and over where those who are kind, and become known for being kind, rise above those who perhaps might be more skilled in their craft, know the technical details of their work, or simply have a deeper bench of knowledge, but are challenging to work with. Kindness is an effective tactic for growing one’s career, as it offers opportunity to be invited into rooms you might not otherwise have access to. If you’re the one who’s taking a genuine interest in others, is selflessly generous with your time and insights, and is known for doing more for others than you do for yourself, it can take you far.

Grit is everything

As a Product Manager, you’re going to see red lights a lot more than you seen green. Over time, this can really grind you down, and I’ve seen highly capable Product Managers descend into the despairing pit of cynicism after which it is almost impossible to drag themselves out, short of finding another gig. An antidote to cynicism is optimism, and becoming fascinated with the shape of the problem. The best Product Managers are deeply curious, hopeful, growth-mindset oriented individuals. They know that when a door shuts, it’s only the problem taking another direction. They don’t throw their hands up and ask others to solve it for them, they continue to do it themselves. They know the work is to keep going. Sometimes you have to go around, or even through obstacles to overcome them. Sometimes you won’t like the decisions made by others for you. But it’s what happens next that matters. How you choose to respond. How you decide to still make the thing happen. How you understand that building great experiences for users is always the thing which unites. More on grit and how to build it from the inspiring Angela Duckworth.

Opportunity is everywhere

The best Product Managers know that however hard the work is, ultimately opportunity is everywhere, especially in times of extreme ambiguity. They have the superpower of proactively offering to help figure things out. They end meetings by asking what more they can do. They ask their managers and others if they can cover for them when their colleagues go out on vacation. They know that ambiguity and uncertainty hold enormous spaces of opportunity for being able to step up and solve problems. They know that in this ambiguity, their value can grow by being the person curious and dedicated enough to step up and say ‘let me deal with that one for us’. They use the words us and we a lot more than I and them. They know that the vacuum caused by uncertainty is where a Product Manager can bring clarity. And the more they do that, the more interesting opportunities will come.

Be the spark

Whenever I’m interviewing prospective Product Managers to join our team, I look for The Fire?. That sense of passion and commitment to their craft and their unfiltered joy in solving problems for others. That strong feeling that if they woke up this morning and were magically no longer able to be Product Managers, they would feel as if a large part of themselves was missing. That they can’t not do it. The best part of having a strong passion for the work is, of course, that it’s contagious. And when you have a passionate team around you, you build passionate things. You also build yourself into the best version of you that you can possibly be. I’ve always been a believer that users can tell when a product had a difficult birth. When it just got so iterated to death prior to launch that the team building it simply crawled across the finish line with the release. I deeply believe that if the team is having fun, it translates to the user having fun, coming back more often, and strengthening their bond with the product. Passionate teams are simply good for business. I’ve no idea what the internal dynamics inside of Duolingo are like, but I can tell they’re having fun with what they’re doing. I feel it. And when they do that, I also have fun learning. That’s why I use their product every day.

A rich life outside of work

Near the end of our interview process, I always like to ask the question “so what does life look like outside of work for you?” and while it’s always a fascinating set of answers that come back, the thing I’m really looking for is how the candidate answers the question, and to what extent their work defines their life. The question gets to the heart of what it might be like to work together. It goes beyond the craft of sprints and tasks, and pokes at what really makes someone else tick. Over the years I’ve had some incredible responses to this. I’ve seen people talk about their passion for their families, their travels all over the world, their hopes and dreams for themselves, and really how work fits into what they want to do in life. One of the best things I ever heard in an interview was from a prospective Junior Product Manager, who said “you have to understand that this is my job, not my life”. It took me many years to understand this perspective for myself, but here it was articulated by a fresh college graduate. Would that we were all so lucky to have that perspective so young (they were hired).

Crafting the job you want, not the job you have

A lot of what we do as Product Managers involves the craft of repetitive tasks. Backlog grooming, stand-ups, documentation or the wealth of recurring meetings we all have on our calendars. It can really weigh you down, and there are often days when you feel you’re just going through the motions turning the handle at the rock face of a sprint. A few years ago I went through a positive psychology exercise called job crafting, and it was genuinely transformative. It helped me understand where I was spending my time in recurring tasks, asked what it was that gave me energy throughout the day, and where I might be able to provide opportunity for others in delegating tasks. I was getting ground down by the volume of status updates and recurring meetings, wanted more time for the kind of deep creative and strategic work which was more energizing for me, and didn’t have enough investment happening in order to solve the gnarlier problems of the business. I also had members of my team eager for more exposure to stakeholders, keen for more ownership and agency in their roles, and simply wanted the opportunity to step up. So we moved things out of my world and into theirs, creating opportunity for them and space for me. More on job crafting here.

Reading the room

I often give new Product Managers a great book by Euny Hong which describes the Korean articulation of nunchi. It’s the ability to read the room, adjust one’s communication style, and lean into the norms of a specific situation based on who else is there. For example, when dealing with stakeholders, crisp, clear, brief communication is often the most helpful. Listening more than speaking, and saying more with less but also framing the message in a way which articulates ‘I got this’. This sense of saying more with less, is one I see Product Managers struggle with a lot (and the irony of the length of this article isn’t lost on me of course, but hey, this isn’t for the boardroom). Very often less seasoned Product Managers will waffle on in efforts to articulate their value, and grandstand how much they know, rather than answering the question in a crisp way. Too often I’ve seen Product Managers lose themselves in an answer, and when they do, I’ve seen others smell blood in the water and call it out. There is real power in the kind of listening and humility which results in saying less, and next time you’re in a large stakeholder meeting, take a look around and see who’s talking. Sometimes there is just as much power in saying nothing at all, but it’s a delicate balance learned over many years of practice. The key here is to make what you say matter. More from Euny Hong here.

What versus why

Very often what makes a great Product Manager is their command of the outcome-driven metrics associated with their product. Those numbers which don’t just articulate what is going on, but why. I feel like I see this all the time, where teams understand that they are being tasked with a problem, but success is framed by the operational ‘did it go out the door or not’. While important, this is only part of what happens in driving a positive outcome, and only really gets you to day one for users. I’ve seen teams take victory laps on shipping something, and then a few weeks later someone will ask ‘so did it do what we wanted?’ followed by an uncomfortable silence from the Product Manager, who has moved on to the next thing. Great Product Managers know what success looks like, but they also have a keen sense of what it isn’t. The key thing here is to remember that when we look at numbers, very often these are human beings we’re talking about. A lot of this can be lost in the abstraction of scale, but at the end of the day, when we talk about user engagement, uniques or return visits, we are talking about people doing things with what we’ve built.

Above all, product work is about helpfulness, and shipping something only begins that journey for users. I’m sure there are many exceptions to this list. But over the years these are behaviors I’ve seen to be true in the teams I’ve run and the product work I’ve done as an individual contributor. They’ve proven helpful for me, I hope they prove helpful for you.

Something I always share with my Product Managers is something Conan O’Brien said at the end of his time on The Tonight Show. Faced with an incredibly contentious and public disagreement with his employer, he chose to rise above it and offer some guidance for those watching. It has always stuck with me as the bullseye of what makes great Product Managers. He told the audience “Cynicism leads nowhere. But if you work hard, and you’re kind, trust me, amazing things will happen.”