Ownership Must Be Seen to Be?Done

A former CPO Bootcamp participant shared with me a quote from her manager that I immediately adopted: he told her that when she is worried, he is not worried. But when she doesn’t worry, that’s when he starts to be worried.

As a manager, I see this all the time. What I need from my team is not only to do what they need to do. It’s to take the mental load off of me and make sure they got it covered.

Put bluntly, I need them to lose sleep over what they own so that I don’t have to. Or, more likely, so that I can lose sleep over other things that I own, and together we can achieve more.

Many product people are great doers. They are responsible. They do what they are supposed to do, especially when they are explicitly requested to.

But this is also a major barrier to their professional growth. They think they do it all just by doing it all. And as unintuitive as it sounds, this simply isn’t enough.

My husband once shared with me that he knows that I want him to be happy, and he sees that I work hard for that, but it’s simply not what he needs.

It’s kind of like that when you strive for more ownership. You do what you already do, just more and better, but that’s not what’s going to take you to the next level.

Instead, you need to start owning things fully?—?whether you have the formal responsibility or not?—?so your manager and others see your leadership and treat you as such. Only then will they feel comfortable giving you more responsibility.

Full ownership means taking things off your manager. However, they must know and feel that.

It’s also important to help them feel comfortable since anything that happens under their domain is still their responsibility, so you can’t simply take it and go.

So, how do you go about taking full ownership while still communicating with your manager all the time? Where is the balance between building trust and giving them peace of mind?

If you think about it, they actually go together. You don’t need to avoid communication to give them peace and quiet. Instead, you need to communicate the right way. It’s not about quantity (or the lack thereof). It’s about quality.

Here are a few guidelines that will help you grow as a leader.

Gray Box Communication

Think about it this way: you want to get more responsibilities, but, by definition, anything you own is also owned by your manager. You want them to sleep well at night, knowing that this is covered. But how can they know it’s covered if you don’t share with them what’s going on?

Simply knowing that you are a good person isn’t going to do the trick. You must let them into your world since, as I said, it’s still their world, too. They wouldn’t feel comfortable being left in the dark.

But on the other hand, you don’t want to force them into the details, or else what good does it do that you take ownership of something?

The balance lies in what I call gray-box communication. It’s a combination of black-box (here is the bottom line, and you don’t need to know the details) and white-box communication where everything is open and transparent.

The greater barrier that I see is moving from white-box communication to black-box. Many product people simply share all the details, but full ownership requires rising above them.

In gray-box communication, you start with black-box, focusing on results and bottom lines. But you also give some insight into how things are going. The next section explains how to know the right level of detail to get into.

They Should Never Be Surprised

Since your manager still owns everything you own, they should be able to answer questions about it at a decent level. They don’t need to know each and every detail, but the bigger picture should be solid in their heads all the time.

The bigger picture means understanding the main parts of what you do, how they work together, and making sure they know you thought about everything that might be relevant (more on that later).

Surprises can come in a number of forms:

It could be that something happened that they didn’t see coming. Perhaps you didn’t see it coming either (but that’s on you still). If the impact is not too bad, that might be something they can live with.

Another type of surprise is when someone asks or tells them something that they should have known. If you missed out on this one, you have put them in a tough situation and made them look bad. That’s a big no-no.

The third type of surprise is not often looked at as a surprise, but that’s why it is so often missed. It’s something that they think you should address, and they don’t know if you do. It could be something that they lose sleep over until they make sure you’ve got it covered, which brings us back to square one.

Even if the specific concern is addressed, surprises hurt trust. If you only handled something because I told you to, who knows what other things you are missing out on that I am unaware of? How can I sleep well at night now?

I don’t know what I don’t know, and it makes me worried.

It is your responsibility to make your manager feel good and certain that they have nothing to worry about.

Face Reality as It?Is

Everything I wrote up until now could be challenging to get used to if you are new to this. The good news is that it’s a muscle that you can train.

But when things don’t go as well as you expected them to, many people have a tendency to shy away from facing the hard truth.

Since you want to establish your ownership and leadership, doing so wouldn’t do any good.

As a manager, when things don’t go well, the last thing I want is to not know about it.

Not only because I could be surprised later on but also because I need to know that you are not going away when things are rough. If you want me to trust you, I need to be able to do so under all circumstances.

When things are not going well, you want to identify it sooner rather than later and decide on an action plan. You might want to update your manager in advance that you are working on it and that they don’t need to do anything, just to know that it’s happening.

If it’s major, you want to work through your plan with them to make sure that you think about everything that needs to be addressed, as well as to make sure they are aware of the up-to-date bigger picture.

No Excuses

Taking ownership when things don’t go well can be tricky. It’s especially true in product management when our results depend mostly on other people.

Full ownership means that you always have your eyes on the ball and let nothing stop you, even if it’s other people.

Someone didn’t do what they had to? Perhaps you should send more reminders or work more closely with them to make sure they get their part done.

Did someone misunderstand you? You should have explained better and made sure they understood what you wanted them to understand.

Things happened that you couldn’t foresee? Perhaps you need better risk management.

The ‘no excuses’ mindset could sound harsh from the examples above, but it is an extremely powerful one to carry. Because if everything is on you, it also means that everything is in your hands, and you can change and develop whatever is needed to get the results you need despite the challenge.

Address Everyone’s Concerns

Leadership is granted, not taken. Therefore, you need to make everyone around you feel comfortable letting you lead.

Various stakeholders have various professional concerns. The higher up you go, the broader is the perspective that you need to develop. Make sure you work with marketing, sales, customer success, and other functions to understand how they see things and whether or not what you suggest makes sense to them.

You also want to address the concerns that they don’t talk about. These include, for example, whether we can make it or not, what is the price that we will pay if we go down that path, are you the right person to carry it forward, and so on.

The best way to know about these untold concerns is to proactively ask for them. If you want people to follow you, you should ask them if what you suggest makes sense and if they feel comfortable moving forward with it.

When people see that you care about what they care about, that’s when your full ownership becomes a reality.

Since ownership is not yours to take, it’s not enough to do everything that needs to be done. The people around you must know that you are on it, and the real impact would happen only when you communicate openly and frequently. It’s not a chore. It’s what ownership means.

Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit”?—?an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook

Originally published at https://infinify.com on January 16, 2025.