The Real Art of Product Management

A lot has been written about Product Management. How it’s being the “CEO” of the product, or how it’s living at the spiritual intersection of business, technology, and the customer. While there are some truths (and falsehoods!) to each of these, my own experience in Product Management has revealed something deeper, and something far more important. The real art of product management, I’ll argue, is mobilizing a group of people to build impactful software, where, in the end, each and every person believes it was their idea.?

Let’s unpack that a bit.

As a Product Manager, you may have a team (hopefully). Perhaps that team was there before you arrived. Maybe it was just recently assembled, perhaps by company leadership. Within that team, you, as a product manager have a certain authority and power to make decisions — what the team is going to work on now, next, and later (I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point). That’s great, but what every Product Manager quickly realizes is that in order to make increasingly bigger, more complex, products and generate greater impact, it’s probably going to take more than one product team’s effort.?

So, how are you you going to align not just your team (still hard), but multiple teams (even harder), each perhaps with some competing priorities (seems impossible), to advance your idea? That’s leading by influence, and a lot goes into it. In my own professional Product experience, I’ve come to see three really important actions that separate the great Product Managers from the average ones, and I’d like to take you through these three, because I believe they’re essential, learnable, and unfortunately, all too rare.

1. Argue for what you believe in
2. Build trust
3. Be humble

1. Argue for what you believe in

The best product managers I know all have a shared passion for ideas. And those ideas all tend to stem from an intense focus on identifying problems, and theorizing different solutions. They like to envision a future world wherein those ideas exist, and play out scenarios about how they might eradicate problems. They see second and third order effects that show how those ideas might grow and ultimately develop into something even greater. And when they can truly “see” that future, and it feels entirely plausible, almost inevitable, then they distill that into a vision, a story, that they can share with others.?

Throughout my career, some of the best ideas I’ve seen shared were heavily questioned, rejected, even vilified. In order to advance an idea, to see it more than just an idea, requires truly arguing for that idea. That can mean everything from superior storytelling (written, visual, etc.) to stronger financial forecasts. The “how” will vary from idea to idea, and audience to audience, but great Product Managers understand this. They tailor their arguments accordingly because they know it’s going to make a stronger impact. They also aren’t afraid to be a broken record. They’re eager to argue for what they believe in, because they see that a better future is attainable.

Now, that’s not to say that one should go out there and relentlessly, and annoyingly, argue. With anything good in life, if you take it to an extreme, it’ll probably kill you (or maybe just be a career setback in this case). What I’m trying to communicate here is that great Product Managers realize that humans, on average, feel a strong inertia toward the status quo, and one of the best ways to combat that force is through highly effective argumentation. When you go back and study the history of great products, you find that virtually all of them started with one of these stories.?

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2. Build Trust

It takes a village to build any great software product, and more specifically, it requires several expert disciplines: engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, testers, end users, marketers, product managers, and so on. The best product managers know this, and understand that without an effective team, one built on mutual trust, there will be no product, or at least not a very good one. Therefore, they do a few important things behaviorally:?

1) They empower the person closest to the problem to solve it. When there’s an issue during the development cycle that’s clearly an engineering decision, great product managers enable their engineers to make the call, and they back that decision. That doesn’t mean zero critical thought, or doing things blindly - the team should always be thinking critically and asking questions, but when it comes time to make a decision, they rally around the expert closest to that problem. Sometimes that’s the engineer, sometimes it’s design, other times it’s QA, and so on, but empowering the person closest to the problem to solve it is one of the most powerful ways a Product Manager can build trust, and it also happens to be my favorite definition of agile (an article for another day).

2) They understand what makes each discipline’s job hard, and also rewarding. We all have hard jobs, that’s why it’s work, right? But the best Product Managers take time and care in understanding each discipline and what makes that job difficult. At the same time, they pay careful attention to the things that motivate and reward engineers, designers, etc. Armed with that knowledge they approach solutioning in ways that minimize pain, and at the same time, maximize the reward. That’s not to say that they make everything easy - nothing with significant impact is ever truly easy. But when confronted with multiple ways of tackling a particular problem, each with a similar likelihood of success, great Product Managers quickly spot the ones that minimize pain for their colleagues and encourage their pursuit.?

3) Take a few bullets. Great Product Managers realize that engineers and testers, in particular, live in tricky spot. When software “just works,” rarely do they get the credit they deserve for that success. It’s only when things are going poorly, when the site is down, the app has crashed, and so on, that they’re getting recognition, and not that kind anyone wants. It’s in these moments, particularly the most emotionally charged ones, that Product Managers have an opportunity to take a bullet. Simply getting in there (a midnight outage call) and saying, “that’s my bad,” even when it couldn’t possibly your fault, is not only one of the quickest ways to defuse a stressful (and often unproductive) situation, but it’s also one of the quickest ways to build trust from your engineering and QA counterparts who know very well that it couldn’t have possibly been your fault, but now know that you fundamentally have their backs.?

3. Be Humble

The best Product Managers know that everything they achieve is a result of hundreds, if not thousands, of small decisions made by teams. Even if the idea started with them, that means absolutely nothing when it comes to execution. Therefore, they work extra hard to speak as “we” and to give credit where credit is due. When they get up to speak in front of a crowd, they’re quick share credit rather than claim it. They’re almost a little embarrassed when someone (mis)attributes success to them personally, no matter how professionally driven they are.?

They also recognize that throughout the product development lifecycle, many of their own hypotheses turned out to be wrong. They lean in to design research because of that, and let user feedback guide the team toward the best possible solutions in the pursuit of a big idea.?They experiment, they embrace the scientific method, and they make it safe to be wrong, because they know that continuous learning is the only way to grow anything.

We often think of humility as a personality trait, and while it may be the case that some people naturally have more of it than others, there’s no question each and every one of us can learn it, practice it, and benefit from it.?

The net result of this is that each member of the team truly feels like the idea was their idea. Having bought into a vision from the start, being afforded the opportunity to make the important decisions along the way, having the safety that comes with a highly effective team, a product manager that has their back and isn’t out for all the credit… all these add up to powerful individual and group dynamic where great software, that solves real problems and returns outsized financial returns to the company, is the outcome.