Operate like a PM Leader: Context, Clarity, and Coaching (Part I)
How to elevate your behaviors through the 3 C’s of PM Leadership. Start with context.
This is the first of a series of notes on how to operate like a PM Leader. It’s a collection of my reflections, tips and lessons learned over the years. I’ve coached dozens of Product Managers that firmly believed if they “do good work…growth and promotions will come!” Admittedly, I believed and operated under the same assumption for quite some time. While that is true to a certain extent, growing from a Product Manager to being a Product Leader is much more about the intangibles. What you deliver is table stakes, but how you deliver it is what becomes much more important.
Time Commitment: ~5 minute read
Whether you’re an individual contributor or manager, making the jump from being a “Product Manager” to “Product Leader1” is one the hardest career chasms to cross successfully.
A prerequisite to operating like a PM Leader is that you’ve mastered how to drive impact. You are very consistently executing and delivering while maintaining a high quality bar. This means that:
You identify what to build and why: You can turn ambiguous opportunity into succinct product strategy
You consistently execute well: You develop, deliver and, when needed, effectively pivot your roadmap and your users/customers are getting clear value from it
You can measure and show your success on the scoreboard: You’re successfully moving whatever metric or measure of success for your team “up and to the right”
You have a high say/do ratio: You do what you say you’re going to do
If you’re doing the above consistently and feel like your growth has plateaued or that the “promotion is just not happening”….you’re not alone. This is a pitfall that I experienced and one I’ve seen PMs struggle with a lot. Personally, I had mastered the ability to deliver impact (the what), but got really eye opening advice that I needed to focus on my behaviors (the how). The 3 C’s were a huge unlock for me: gather and share the right context effectively, drive extreme clarity, and continuously coach those around you. Let’s take an example through this framework. I’ll break down each of the C’s and what it might look like to start bringing them to life in your day-to-day.
Example: You find out your roadmap is being changed to deprioritize fancy 0 —> 1 feature X that your team has been really excited about and instead you’re being asked to build a more complex feature Y. Feature Y is barely user facing and its all about compliance.
You are absolutely going to pivot, build this new feature and deliver the impact! That’s your bread and butter. But how you do it is what differentiates a Product Manager from a Product Leader.
Context
“Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information-in-context — connecting the dots.” - Michael Ventura
Context is the why behind decisions that are made. As a PM Leader, you need to first understand this “why” and then communicate it effectively — over and over again. The art of gathering and sharing context can be broken down for this example as such:
Ask the right questions: Once any sort of strategic decision is made it’s your job to understand the context yourself. By digging into key questions, you begin to show your manager (or whoever you’re discussing with) that you’re thinking and operating like a product and company leader. Do this by…
Finding the connection between product decisions and business outcomes: “How are we thinking this new direction will impact the business?”
Knowing the time horizon: “When do we expect the decision to build feature Y will start yielding outcomes?”
Understanding and anticipating any secondary effects: “This pivot may be tough for X person to swallow. They joined the company to specifically work on feature X. How should we plan to get ahead of this?”
Distill down to the key message: You should begin to understand the context of this decision by now. In this example, assume you learned that building Y feature will help us deliver value to customers in healthcare, will unlock deals in that vertical in the next 6 months, and ultimately lead to more revenue for the company. You probably got a ton more detail, but you need the “punchline” on why this matters for your team. Let’s distill…
“We’re pivoting our roadmap to help lead the business in unlocking a new vertical.”
“We want to serve healthcare customers in the next 6 months, but need to build critical features built to do this. We’ve been tapped to help lead the charge here.”
Share, reinforce and repeat: Your job as a Product Leader is to clearly communicate strategic decisions across your team(s) and reinforce those decisions. Your next steps might be to…
Share the decision and key message in critical 1:1 conversations, then
Talk through the rationale, opportunity, and your excitement for the decision in your next team meeting
Write it down and disseminate appropriately. Scaled communication is crucial to sharing context
Follow up privately with anyone that might not be totally bought in. Your role goes beyond the execution, it’s also about maintaining good team health and strong morale
Circle back with your manager (or the original decision maker) on how things are playing out across your team
By following the steps mentioned above, you are owning the context of a decision. The more times you go through this loop, the more context you build and are able to share. Not only are you going to execute on the decision and deliver for the company, you are now beginning to manage the intangibles. 1/ You’ve begun to display your potential as a product leader by probing to clearly connect product strategy and decisions to business outcomes. 2/ You’re able to translate a giant web of a decision to a very clear and concise message that can be communicated with ease. And, 3/ you are owning the message and sharing it with your team in a graceful and methodical way.
This is one example of how to exercise your context muscle. It obviously can be tweaked to fit the situation — but the principles and fundamentals stay roughly the same. Gathering and sharing the right context effectively is an important skill that skews your behavior towards PM Leader. It requires a lot of practice (it took me a lot of trial and error to get right…and I’m still nowhere near perfect) but becomes second nature the more you do it.
Next up, we’ll talk about how to ensure you drive extreme clarity. What exactly is your team supposed to do next? Are there new stakeholders that have input on specific details? Methodically answering these (and other) questions is what drives extreme clarity.
If you have feedback on this post or want me to explore a specific topic related to Product Management, please reach out!
Product/PM Leader: This is self explanatory when moving from Senior IC → Manager. Most of the time, making that jump requires that you’re operating and being recognized as a Product Leader. So if your aspiration is to move into PM management, then you almost certainly need to understand how to behave like a Product Leader. For IC’s, making the jump from Senior IC → Principal/Staff IC also requires this behavior shift. At the highest IC levels, you’re expected to influence (without authority) and are typically working on some of the most complex and ambiguous problems at the company — hence the need to behave like a Product Leader. So for simplicity’s sake, Product/PM Leader == PM Manager or Principal/Staff IC PM.