Why Relationships are King (or Queen) to Promotions and What Minorities Often Get Wrong

Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! ??

In our 57th installment, our guest was Yue Zhao , a career coach for senior managers and directors. She has coached hundreds of aspiring executives and helped them break through to VP+. Prior, Yue was the Chief Product & Technology officer at Fuzzy Pet Health (Series C, Matrix, Greycroft), PM manager at Meta, and first PM at Thumbtack (Series I, Sequoia, Google Ventures). She is also a venture partner with LifeX Ventures, an $100M early-stage fund investing in Healthtech and Climatech. You can find her at www.yuezhao.coach .

Below is a guest post from Yue about the simple truth of why promotions are all about relationships and how Director to VP+ promotions are driven by perception and relationships. Most importantly, your relationships with your peers.?

Early in my career, I was focused on learning the hard skills of my job. I built financial models, wrote product requirements documents, and helped synthesize customer feedback and research. Some functions like engineering or data science require deep functional expertise that originates in school. However, while building a solid foundation and technical expertise is an important factor for promotions in early career, it’s not sufficient as you move up the career ladder.

From Director to VP and above, the key is to focus on people and the relationships between people. As a manager, a large percentage of your job is to recruit, delegate, and manage performance. As you move up the career ladder, this becomes an even larger percentage of your job, and at a much larger scale and with more complexity.?

To resolve conflicts that teams cannot, properly prioritize when there is not a clear choice, and keep morale high within the teams through difficult times, leaders rely on the foundation of trust they have built with each person on the team.

From my observations, minorities tend to transition away from building depth of expertise to building relationship skills later in their career than white males. It stems from a few factors:?

• minorities tend to value functional expertise more as this is how they got ahead in their school years.?
• minorities are less frequently presented with opportunities to build relationships with senior leaders.?
• minorities may find it more challenging to find commonality with the “in-group” at more senior levels, leading to procrastination or avoidance that becomes self-fulfilling.?

Unfortunately, these tendencies to delay the uncomfortable set minorities back in terms of the rate of promotions and advancement.?

I began to see the importance of relationship management across functions in my early days at Thumbtack. When the company numbered 20 people, everyone was, in some ways, a jack-of-all-trades. An engineer would run customer support. A product manager (PM) would run the research. Engineers and PMs were their own data analysts. As the company grew to 60 people, it needed to specialize, and I was tasked with setting up functions until we were able to hire a “head of” for each function. Over the next 18 months, I became, temporarily, the head of customer support, head of analytics, head of product marketing, head of research, and more. With each role, the job was not to be the functional expert but to be a bridge for people and relationships to establish cross-team processes and hire great people who could succeed in the company culture. This insight led me to double down on honing my ability to relate and empathize with all kinds of situations and people, rather than investing in a specific technical skill set in a single domain. I also returned to product management, where the day-to-day jobs require building relationships and influencing people across all functions.

If you want to become an executive, invest in learning and building strong relationships over the years with influential peers, sponsors, the board of directors, promotion committees, and teams large and small. This takes conscious effort and time. There are few shortcuts. This is why people who are well respected and have been at organizations longer have more trust and credibility that can be difficult to replace.?

So, how do aspiring executives begin to build trust and relationships across an organization??

1. Try to “break in” to some powerful “brand name” networks. People often use brand names on resumes to shortcut the process of understanding who is in your network and who will support your career. If you’ve worked at a certain brand name company or startup funded by a tier I VC, or if you went to an Ivy League school, it is more likely that alumni of those organizations will answer a cold email or help you out. These fringe connections can be compelling in giving aspiring executives opportunities to grow their careers. Whether it’s through networking events, working at those companies, or getting a mentor or career coach with such a network, being on the “in” can open you up to opportunities you would otherwise never come across. Most jobs are never posted on a job board or LinkedIn.
2. Find professional commonalities. Focus on what you can help them with at work. Perhaps you are both struggling with a particular process. Perhaps you are both aspiring executives who want to get ahead. Perhaps you both agree that there’s a better approach to the product. Find the commonalities that will allow you to converse, share ideas, and build camaraderie. One shared perspective is often enough for a recurring coffee walk to catch up. It also can result in shared projects or tasks you kick off and lead together.?
3. Find ways to help them advance their initiatives or careers. Support them first, and they’ll be more likely to support you.
4. Join or create your own rotational programs: Many companies will ask their high-potential leaders to do a “tour of duty” across different parts of the organization. This allows the future executive to better understand how each function operates and build critical relationships within each function. I encourage aspiring executives to pursue opportunities to build relationships in other functions as they can. Perhaps it starts with a regular coffee chat that evolves into partnering on a task. Then you might get to work on a project in another team or do a formal rotation. The exact timing and scope of work will vary for everyone depending on their unique situation and aspiration, and career coaches are often well positioned to surface trade-offs and help with figuring out a good timing.

Remember, if you “got lucky” for a promotion, it’s likely due to a relationship you nurtured. If you failed a stretch assignment, it’s likely because you didn’t build your relationships with the right people or in the right way. If you feel stuck, it’s likely because you haven’t found the right people to role model or person to pull you up. Nurture your relationships, and the promotions will follow.?

?? For more content on career growth and promotions, subscribe to Yue’s newsletter at yuezhao.substack.com . If you’re interested in career coaching, reach out via www.yuezhao.coach . Finally, check out her book on helping minorities breakthrough to the C-Suite, available on Amazon Globally: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQM9LMH6

I hope you enjoyed reading this guest post from Yue.

If you don't want to miss the latest AI trends and want to learn more how to build products and take them to markets with generative AI, check out my latest book, “Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI ”. Featuring over 150 real-world examples, 30 case studies, and 20+ frameworks, “Reimagined” offers an extensive guide for integrating generative AI into product strategy and careers. Grab your copy on Amazon: https://a.co/d/btmnJfu .???