Managing Product Managers as a Product Leader
As an individual contributor (IC) product manager continues to grow in her mastery of the field, she will one day manage other product managers. But, once she becomes a PM manager, she will no longer focus solely on IC day-to-day product work.
Rather, she is now a people manager. Her goal is to direct the work of IC PMs and to enable them to achieve the most that they can, rather than to get into the weeds of a given product or feature.
In other words, PM managers (e.g. directors of product, VPs of product, etc.) have more in common with other people managers (e.g. director of customer success, head of sales, etc.) than they do with IC PMs in terms of their responsibilities.
When you find yourself making the jump from IC product management to people management, keep in mind that you now need to empower your direct reports to perform executional product work, rather than taking it on yourself.
That can be a difficult transition to make. Many newly-promoted managers struggle with juggling all of their responsibilities while getting detailed knowledge on how their direct reports are doing.
To enable you to scale as a product management leader, consider some of the following tactics below.
Creating Weekly Status Reports
For each of your direct PM reports, request a weekly summary of what happened that week. This exercise isn’t just valuable for you as a leader – it’s also valuable for enabling your reports to clarify their thoughts.
It’s best not to let this be a free-form summary, since that will lead to inconsistent updates from each PM, which creates mental overhead for you. Rather, establish a baseline template for each PM to use.
You can use a lightweight structure like this:
Top 3 priorities for the week
Progress against the top three priorities
Qualitative updates
Quantitative metrics
Fires, blockers, or newly-discovered opportunities to escalate
That way, you’ll be able to stay in the loop without having to spend time to sit down and debrief with each PM every week.
As an additional bonus, you and your PM team will have a running historical log of how the PM has been developing over time, which means that you’ll be able to give them more accurate performance reviews.
Using weekly status reports is a great way to stay connected to the work at a high level, without getting drawn into the details so much that you’re unable to focus on higher-leverage priorities.
Empower Product Managers to Set Their Own Goals
Product managers love having ownership – after all, their job is to fill the white space!
Therefore, empowering your direct reports to have ownership means that you can focus on the higher-level strategy and vision, rather than trying to define every goal across every single team.
In other words, while you’ll establish the problem area for your product manager direct reports to tackle, they’ll own designing their success metrics, measuring the baseline, setting their targets, and establishing their delivery timelines.
Your role should be to identify a coherent team vision and team philosophy, and to serve as a mentor to your PMs, rather than setting each person’s goals and metric targets on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
Democratize Feedback Across the Team
Consider creating a “scrum of scrums” meeting, where every sprint, all of your PMs come together to review one another’s target metrics, timelines, features, prototypes, feedback, and release progress.
This is a good way for PMs to have visibility into each other’s work, and also enables you as their leader to rebalance priorities or workload, depending on the situation.
As part of these scrum of scrums meetings, rotate across each PM to ask them to demo their functionalities. This strengthens each PM’s presentation skills and clarifies their thought process regarding downstream impacts.
It also helps raise visibility across the organization of upcoming features, progress towards metrics, and keeps everyone on the same page.
Set Transparent Expectations on Meetings
For your entire PM team, give them clarity on the meetings that you’re running, so that they know when to expect new priorities.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to keep your IC PMs in the loop about the following three kinds of meetings:
Meetings with direct reports
Meetings with cross-functional counterparts
Meetings with executives
Let’s dive into each.
Direct Reports
First, let them know what your 1:1 cadence is with each of them.
You’ll typically want to have weekly 1:1’s with your direct reports, unless you have so many direct reports that you need to meet once every 2 weeks instead.
For these 1:1 meetings, your PMs will set 100% of the agenda, the topics, and the direction of conversation.
Be sure to emphasize that your role in this meeting is to help them, and not to judge them. That way, they feel empowered to come to you for both tough questions as well as for other topics such as professional development.
And, let them know how your team is going to drive quarterly planning. For example, you might all meet one every three months in one location for an all-day quarterly planning session.
Counterparts
Let your PM team know when your regular syncs with your cross-functional counterparts take place, and what the general content of those meetings look like.
You’ll likely be meeting weekly with directors in engineering, product, and design, where you’ll be going over milestones and tracking for upcoming and in-progress work.
And, for your cross-functional counterparts, you might have monthly 1-hour long minute steering committee meetings with decision making stakeholders for each product, such as with sales, marketing, and finance, where each team provides status updates, shares the upcoming roadmap, and makes prioritization decisions.
Executives
Let your direct reports know about your interactions with your executive team as well.
For example, you might have monthly 1-hour product council meetings with the executive team to approve the roadmap, discuss financial metrics, and approve or change resourcing plans.
And, you might have quarterly meetings with the board to discuss financials, industry trends, competitors, and significant strategic plays.
Key Product Management Leadership Principles
As product managers rise the ranks and join the leadership team, their work shifts away from the day-to-day execution for a single product. Product leaders are expected to guide multiple product teams towards success, while simultaneously driving executive-level decisions with their counterparts from other departments.
While each product leader has their own take on how to enable their product teams, there are a core set of product leadership principles that are evident from the best practices above.
First, each product leader needs to create a culture of ownership and open communication. Product leaders need to enable their direct reports to take charge, since it's impossible for any one person to personally manage more than a couple of teams at any given time.
Since product leaders must distribute individual product ownership to their direct reports, they must create channels and norms around open communication. Without open communication, product leaders cannot expect to keep their direct reports in sync with their expectations.
Second, product leaders rely on various rituals and events to keep teams running effectively. Regularly scheduled events create consistency and set expectations across the organization.
Use daily and weekly meetings to maintain momentum, and use monthly and quarterly meetings to set the strategic direction. Use 1:1's to know how each product manager is progressing in their career trajectory, and empower them to ask questions or raise concerns to be worked through.
Third, product leaders should never let themselves become the bottleneck. Product leaders set the direction for the entire product portfolio, and should not be overly involved in minor product decisions.
One of the ultimate goals of any leader is to multiply their impact by creating strong leaders who can achieve goals in ever-more diverse ways. By teaching product managers how to take on additional leadership responsibilities, product leaders can simultaneously reduce their own workload while strengthening the talent of their own employees.
Probably the most counterintuitive finding is that more knowledge is not always better. By maintaining some distance away from each product, product leaders can make more objective calls.
Closing Thoughts
Shifting from an individual contributor role to a management role can be jarring, since the expectations are wildly different.
Individual contributors are used to being responsible for every single detail, whereas people managers are tasked with setting direction and enforcing consistency across many teams without necessarily knowing every detail.
By keeping the above principles in mind, you'll be a more effective product leader.
