Strategic Thinking as a PM Leader - A Roadmap for Transitioning from Product IC to People Leadership

This is the 5th article in a series on how to navigate the transition from Product IC to people leadership, focused on strategic thinking as a product leader. If you just joined, check out the previous ones:

• Your Team Matters ?- How to build great 1:1 relationships with your team
• Building Team Relationships ?- For a high performing cross-functional team
• Context Matters ?- How to solve the information asymmetry when you become a manager
• Pass the Baton - How to successfully coach and pass the baton to your team

Strategic Thinking as a Product Leader

My last article discussed how to pass the baton to your team, the main goal to free up space for your own strategic thinking as a product leader. Don't do the things that made you successful as an IC. Teach those things to your team instead. Your "IC" work as a PM leader should now overwhelmingly consist of strategy on people, product, process and the socialization of that strategy.

People Strategy

More specifically, team strategy. Recruiting and retention comprise a big part of your job as a people leader. When you recruit for a role, keep in mind that you recruit not just for that role, but for the cohesion and success of your entire team. Step back and think through in success, what does your team look like? Most often, you'll want to achieve a balance on many dimensions:

1. Skillsets - My favorite framework for evaluating the strengths of a PM is the PM craft triangle , shared by my former manager Joff Redfern . I love the simplicity of PM through the lens of general manager, artist, and scientist. While every individual PM holds a singular spot in this triangle, when building a team you have the opportunity to balance out the overall team triangle. Depending on your product area, you may still want to skew the triangle to a certain dimension. Running a B2B product team that needs to work closely with sales and marketing? You probably want strong GM-types on your team. Hyper-focused on growth and scale? Stack the roster with scientists. Designing a beautiful, delightful consumer product? You may want some true artists building the core experience. Whatever the case, step back and evaluate what your team needs, particularly as a complement to yourself as the leader. For instance, I place myself strongly in the GM and scientist dimensions of the PM triangle. I know that I generally need strong artists to round out my teams to balance what I'm personally great at and can coach effectively. In other cases, I've found myself brought in to lead teams that already lean heavily towards artists, and I then need to bring in more scientists or a scientist mentality. Figure out what your overall team triangle needs to look like and hire/retain accordingly as your team needs evolve over time.
2. Seniority - As a new PM manager, you may think that you want the most senior and experienced people on your team, but that may prove suboptimal in the long term. Your product portfolio as a PM leader varies over time, and not every project suits a principal level PM. Maintaining a mix of seniorities on your team gives you more flexibility in assigning projects appropriately for skill level and interest. Often times, straightforward projects or experimentation sprints may not appeal to more senior PMs but are still important for the business. You'll want earlier stage PMs eager and willing to take these projects on and learn from them. Junior members of your team also provide mentorship opportunities for more senior folks who often desire that experience.
3. Career Goals - As a PM leader, you need to think towards the future and what your team may look like in a year or two. You will find yourself in a bind if everyone on your team wants to manage people and they're roughly the same seniority - you won't have enough opportunities to retain everyone! Too much uniformity in career goals could also lead to unhealthy competition between the people on your team. Definitely consider your directs' career goals as you build your team. If you already have a strong, senior IC that wants to manage people in the short term, you may want to find another strong PM that wants to stay on the IC path. Think about succession planning as well, which becomes more important as you lead larger teams. If you decide to leave your role, who do you think should succeed you? Senior leaders are expected to plan out their transitions, so as you think through the right mix of career motivations within your team, start identifying (and then coaching) your eventual successor. As you do this, align with your own manager on these plans so that you work in tandem.
4. Diversity - Everything I've mentioned above boils down to diversity within your team, but I want to specifically emphasize gender and racial diversity. Hopefully, everyone reading this article already realizes the importance of diversity for high-performing teams, but if not, do your research with articles like these . Hire and retain for diversity, and know that one is not enough. Research shows that "onlys" - being the only woman for instance - have significantly worse experiences on teams. I have definitely experienced this loneliness as an Asian woman in tech, especially on leadership teams. Though this research focuses on gender, I expect we can extrapolate the same being true of race. When hiring for a diverse team, a strategy I've seen work well in addition to implementing the Rooney rule at all stages of your hiring funnel, is to entirely focus on under-represented candidates to start. You force yourself and your recruiting team to search widely and deeply for the talent who already exists out there. The extra effort is worth it. The work doesn't stop once you've hired someone. Make sure under-represented team members have mentorship and growth opportunities so that you're not creating a leaky bucket of a team.

Product Strategy

This article isn't meant to be a deep dive into product strategy, so I'll focus only on the areas where I've seen PM leaders frequently stumble, including myself.

1. 70/20/10 Portfolio Balance - No surprise that I urge for balance in the product portfolio balance too! A rough framework I try to follow is 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% venture. Core should be a no-brainer: the next logical step in your product roadmap and something everyone on your entire cross-functional team could come up with. Core should rarely occupy 100% of your portfolio; you need to keep your eye on the future, opening up new growth opportunities for your product, team, and company. Strategic often times is a slight pivot on your core that opens up product market fit; read this article on adjacent user theory to kickstart your thinking here. My very first product at LinkedIn fit this "strategic" category. We discovered that a large portion of Premium subscribers then were salespeople, without any tailored features or marketing. Capitalizing on this, we launched a new subscription product for salespeople, opening up a new market. This wasn't our core business at the time, but it was a calculated and strategic bet to expand our product market fit, and it paid off. Now, LinkedIn Sales Solutions has become part of LinkedIn's "core" as a billion dollar business. Reserve the remaining 10% of your portfolio for venture. This is the "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" category. Experiment, play, test out a Hack Day project. Even if the product "fails," you will learn. I'll offer another personal example for this category: Teammates on LinkedIn. A few years back, I launched a product that allowed members to label their teammates on LinkedIn, which in turn improved the relevancy of their feed and notifications. Ultimately, we sunset this product after a year because the results did not justify the investment. But we did learn that teammate data does improve the relevancy (and thus engagement) of your professional feed, just not at the cost of the user friction of adding it. Carve out enough of your venture portfolio to learn about your users and their behavior, incorporating that into future products and features.
2. Stagger R&D Phases - The holy grail for planning is to stagger your R&D phases perfectly so every function is fully occupied and productive. This rarely happens but still represents an aspirational goal. As a PM leader, try to think at least 1 year ahead for the strategy. As your team starts to flesh it out and work with design and user research, ideally engineering should be building the previous project. As eng wraps up, they can smoothly transition to the next project. Sometimes on more venture projects, it makes sense for the R&D trifecta of product, design (incl. research), and eng to work completely synchronously in rapid iteration and prototyping. The recently launched Discover Tab on LinkedIn (only ramped to a small % of LinkedIn members) was one such project that benefited from completely synchronous R&D to quickly iterate. But generally speaking, product and design should look ahead, which also helps engineering prepare.
3. Focus on the right problems, not solutions - As a PM leader, you set the strategy and the foundations. In doing so, you need to point the ship in the right direction, which means solving the right problems, then let the crew take over. As you think through product strategy, it's more important than ever to deeply know your user base, the problems they struggle with, and what jobs they'll hire your product for. This is not to say you shouldn't eventually turn your attention to the solution, but if you identify the right problems, your team can now fill in the solutions. In the summer of 2020, LinkedIn saw record numbers of conversations and creators posting on the platform, accompanied by an increase in unproductive content as well. It was critical for myself and other leaders in the company to frame the right problem: how do we minimize the un-constructive, dismissive, and derisive conversations in order for members to get value from the productive, respectful, and professional conversations which they "hired" LinkedIn for? Then, multiple teams and hundreds of team members across all functions could go and tackle the solutions, most which I couldn't have come up with myself.

Process Strategy

Probably the least appealing for most people, but no less critical in running a high performing team. What rhythms and rituals facilitate operational excellence for your team and organization? Even IC PMs have experience in creating productive processes, so I'll focus on a few areas more unique to when you become a people manager.

1. Product and Design Reviews - Now that you manage a product team, you'll need a process, even if lightweight, to keep abreast of all the projects and products within your scope. This could start as simply checking in during individual 1:1s but likely you'll need to review with the design team as well. Work with your design counterpart on the best way to stay up to date and give feedback as new product and design definitions evolve. Depending on your organization, a process may already exist at a broader level that you can tap into, but be intentional about this process.
2. Planning - Similarly, your scope expansion will make planning more complicated than before. Maybe you now map to a large engineering team with flexible bandwidth between projects. You'll need to consolidate plans at your level and adjust accordingly depending on priorities and resourcing. How far ahead do you want your team to plan and share with you to give you enough time to give feedback and adjust? Consider the right balance between planning ahead and not spending all your team's time planning and re-planning. Be mindful of whether the cadence of your planning process mis-incentivizes the product portfolio. For example, I've found that the quarterly planning process, common in tech companies, can sometimes detrimentally skew product roadmaps towards short-term goals vs. making strides on long-term strategies or "big rocks."
3. Performance - One obvious difference transitioning to a people manager is the new performance review work you take on. Plan ahead for how you'll keep track of and give feedback to your team on their performance. Especially for direct reports working towards a promotion, you'll need to work on a plan to help them get there. As you lead larger and larger teams, becoming a manager of people managers, you'll need to consider how to calibrate performance between teams as well.

Socialization Strategy

Socialization of your strategies is so important I've put it in its own category. A metaphor for product management I learned from Shyvee Shi comes to mind: A PM is like an orchestra conductor. A PM leader might be a conductor that's directly responsible for the 1st violinists, but they sure as hell can't create great music without making sure the 2nd violinists, violists, and cellists all play in symphony as well. In many ways, my recommended socialization strategy is just the inverse to what I described in gathering context for your team . Gather the relevant context, develop your strategy, and push it back out through the same channels.

1. Cross-org - Share your product strategy with peers across your company and enlist help where needed. Where do your strategies and roadmaps overlap? Can you leverage anything that already exists or expertise from others? Even people strategy should be socialized. Team diversity should exist at every level and you can more easily see and correct for gaps as you fan out to larger teams beyond your own.
2. Cross-functional - Make sure your cross-functional partners buy into the strategy and communicate the same messages to their own teams, outside and across. Product strategy is the obvious area to socialize, but process strategy is important here as well, considering you need all functions to move in synchrony.
3. Executives - You'll need the support of leadership to execute on your strategy. Do the pre-work to convince your stakeholders of the strategy and roadmap so that they help you deliver rather than question strategy during product development, at which point you waste time and cycles.
4. Get Feedback and Iterate - Socialization isn't a 1-way street. With each socialization conversation or meeting, get feedback on your strategy and how you communicate it. Iterate on your strategy and the storytelling. I think of socialization as a chiseling process, honing your strategy and roadmap - helping you add detailed touches while chipping away the unnecessary.

In Summary

Your "IC" PM work becomes dramatically different when you transition into a people management role. Suggested areas to focus on:

• People - Aim for balance and diversity on skillsets, seniority, career goals, and demographics.
• Product - Balance your portfolio (70/20/10) and stagger your R&D phases to plan ahead. Through all of this, ensure you focus on the right problems to start.
• Process - Think through how to conduct product and design reviews and planning. Remember to plan ahead for evaluating your team's performance, an entirely new area as a manager.
• Socialization - Socialize, socialize, socialize the above. When you get tired of saying it is when people are really hearing it for the first time. Socialize across the org, cross functionally, and with executive leadership. Socialization is also a chance for iteration and refinement.

Obviously, strategic thinking as a PM leader is much more than the above, but I hope this article serves as a useful starter kit for areas to consider. I'd love to hear your ideas as well as what you've found helpful to spend time on in the transition to people management. My next and last article in this series will cover how to think about your own ROI as a manager.

Resources

I realized I linked to a bunch of resources in this article, so I've consolidated them below for ease of reference:

• The PM Craft Triangle
• Why Diverse Teams are Smarter
• McKinsey article on "Onlys"
• Primer on the Rooney Rule
• The Adjacent User Theory for expanding your product market fit
• My prior articles: Your Team Matters , Building Team Relationships , Context Matters , Pass the Baton