Mastering the art of Crucial Conversations to influence without authority | Product Manager Series - II

A product manager is no stranger to communicating when stakes are high and opinions vary. One of their key skills is to facilitate alignment and agreement on important matters. They drive the Vision, the Strategy, the Design and the Execution of their product. Any every product manager, despite limited authority contributes to some kind of an organisational transformation.

Vision is the goal to aspire to. It needs to be realistic and it really has to make a dent in the world in a compelling way. The vision is something that is consistently and constantly reiterated. See the redundancies in that sentence, they are not redundancies - they are just to emphasise what a vision reads like and sounds like. The vision stays constant, for at least a couple of years.

The Strategy on the other hand needs to be constantly evolving. A strategy is your best guess at what you think will work. A product manager’s role is to bring their team around to this way of thinking - of believing in one strategy at one point of time and then quickly moving them to switch gears when the need arises. At any point, a strategy will address the target audience, the problem, the value, the differentiation vs the competition, the monetisation and other performance indicators. You see how many different teams/ people this means. It also means being able to translate the strategy into a language that each of them understands. 

The Design of your product will make it appealing to your ideal customer. A great product manager creates personas for the different customer segments. The idea is move from demographics to psychographics - to understand the goals, pain points, motivation, of your customer segments.

And then where the rubber hits the road - Execution - that’s what puts the product in front of customers. And it literally needs a whole village to do it. A product manager needs to be relentless in calibrating their work with the multiple teams involved, usually with very wildly differing personalities.

As a product manager you “drive” all of these elements - and most of the work is about influencing and may be have very little authority. 

And that's where the meta-skill of of mastering the art and science of crucial conversations can be a game-changer. How? Here are a couple of examples:

Use conversation to craft a compelling vision for your team

To realise any vision, team members will have to go well beyond what is expected from their standard job description. That needs dedication and can only be inspired, not demanded. Your best bet is to keep communicating how critical their role is to the product's success and what that would mean for them. You will know the impact of your product only when the product hits the market. But conversations drive home the implied impact of the product - the changes that your team will go through together and individually when designing and developing it. That’s what you need to talk about. That's what will inspire them to go above and beyond.

Drive the product solutions, but own their problems

This is probably the toughest part of product management. While constantly working on the product, you own the problems of your team. Start by trying to draw a line from individual career development goals to overall product goals. These conversations are based on the psychographics of your team. 

In a team of highly talented individuals, every meeting is a high stakes one, where emotions run amok and opinions will differ. Conversations in a group setting can be governed by a simple framework though - 

1. Share the agenda prior to the meeting. As a product manager, you will need to figure out if this is an isolated event or a recurring one, if it’s a competency issue or a commitment one or an interpersonal one. When you go about, don’t use euphemisms for the issues, call them out like they are. If it is about one part of the team constantly missing deadlines, this meeting is to tell them how it impacts the rest of the team. That impact needs to be the context for the conversation. 
2. Make it safe for all parties. Easier said than done. Invariably when one feels attacked, they are likely to take offence. Make it safe by asking for solutions - ask for their point of view and yes even if they have been defaulting. When things get too hot, take time out. And stay focused. Quickly call you if you think things are digressing. If it isn’t related to the product and the situation being discussed, it is out of scope for that meeting. The objective of this exercise is to build trust and mutual respect within the team. A hands on meeting every couple of weeks makes this a practice and in time people come to see it as THE solutions meeting.
3. Finish clearly. Use command, consensus, consult or vote or a mix of all these to figure out where you are landing with a solution. And then transfer the decision to action by allocating responsibility and set clear timelines. 

Investing in relationships is the key to being a successful product manager. You need to work with the emotional dimensions of people day in day out and true dialogue is your best bet at creating shared meaning.

What has worked for you as a Product Manager? Or if you are a stakeholder of a PM, what skills do your favourite Product Managers have?

This is the second article in the series of how mastering the art of crucial conversations makes you an effective Product Manager. I’d love to hear your thoughts and take inspiration from your stories. 

More from the author in this series-

About the author:

My passion is to create opportunities and catalyse relationships that help us thrive! I believe that personal, organisational and societal change is an interactive development process and through my interventions I seek to build awareness and action across all. I have had the privilege to have coached and trained leaders and management teams in 40 plus countries globally and on all continents.

Over the last two decades, I have engaged with leadership development, L&D and talent management across the entire spectrum from diagnosis to design to implementation. Currently I run my own niche Executive Coaching Practice to accelerate the leaders path to success through my focus on #LeadershipBranding.

Drop me a message at [email protected] or to schedule a call with me please use : calendly.com/shivangi/15-mins-call

Here are 2 initiatives I have founded : www.thrivewithmentoring.com, a non-profit that catalyses women to women mentoring (currently present in 5 countries) and www.xponential.cc (through which I bring award winning leadership trainings such as Crucial Conversations and Power of Habit).