Proactive Product Management
Product managers are directly responsible for the success of their products - and, challengingly, there are infinite levers you can pull as a product manager to increase your product’s success.
With so many levers and so many responsibilities, product managers can sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture and fail to stay proactive.
To help you succeed as a product manager, I’ve written this guide on how to become a proactive product manager.
First, we’ll define what exactly proactive product management is, and why it matters to your company. Then, we’ll discuss the key mindset to take to become proactive. Afterwards, we’ll dive into a game plan for how exactly to structure your next steps. Finally, we’ll conclude with suggestions for how to get started in your journey to proactive product management.
So, let’s begin by first defining what proactive product management is.
What is proactive product management and why does it matter?
Proactive product management is all about being on offense - that is, a proactive product manager looks towards the future to unlock new opportunities.
Proactive product managers seek to develop completely new markets with zero competition, and they seek to position their firms as creative monopolies. As Peter Thiel said in Zero to One, a “creative monopoly” creates new value in the world and creates more choice for consumers.
Proactive product managers are the core driving force towards creative monopolies. They integrate their knowledge about customer needs, industry trends, and technological capabilities to craft new offerings, and they drive product/market fit for new markets for their companies.
In contrast, reactive product management is defensive in nature. A reactive product manager is focused on putting out fires, positioning against competitors, and keeping the lights on for their product. Many times, reactive product managers are filling in missing roles within the company, such as the role of release manager, engineering manager, or customer success manager.
The work of a reactive product manager looks very similar to the work of a product owner or the work of a scrum master, because their focus is on day-to-day project management, execution, and communication. Their time horizon is at the “one day” or “one week” level, whereas their proactive counterparts are typically looking years into the future.
Proactive product management matters because our goal as product managers is to solve unaddressed pain for our customers. We want to create new value in the world so that we can capture that value for our businesses.
When we become reactive, we stop thinking about new markets to capture for our companies. Rather, we get mired in zero-sum games versus the competition.
And, when we become reactive, we aren’t able to level up our organization’s processes or strategies. We’re stuck doing low-level execution work instead of higher-level strategic work.
Your company hired you as a product manager to drive proactive outcomes, not reactive outcomes. So, it’s crucial for us all to move towards proactive product management.
Why is it so difficult to become a proactive product manager?
Product managers are both coaches and janitors. As coaches, our mission is to empower our teammates and stakeholders to deliver the highest possible value to our customers and to our company. As coaches, we define what problem to solve, for who, and why. We set the strategy and the game plan for how to win, and we help grow our teammates to be customer-focused problem solvers.
But, we also have responsibilities as janitors, where we’re keeping our teams unblocked. Whenever the team gets stuck, we have to jump in to make sure the work happens, whether that work is meeting notes, test cases, or handling angry customer calls. We’re shielding our teammates from blame and pressure, and we’re keeping the show running smoothly.
The problem with being a janitor is that it can easily eat up your “coaching” role. There are infinite things that you could be personally doing to clean up other people’s messes. People can throw an endless variety of tasks at you, and if you accept all of those tasks, you definitely won’t have time to be proactive.
I acknowledge that as product managers, we’re faced with lots of responsibilities, lots of deadlines, and not a lot of time to think. We have dozens of decisions we have to make every day, and we’re always up against the clock. Structurally, it’s difficult for us to carve out time to be proactive and to think towards the future, because the present always feels more urgent and more pressing than the future.
It’s especially difficult to be a proactive product manager at a small startup than it is as a large tech company. The reason for that is because large tech companies typically have strong processes and infrastructure to enable their product managers to stay proactive, whereas in a small startup, the product manager can wind up having to own adjacent roles like user research, product marketing, and product operations.
By the same token, it’s also much more difficult to be a proactive product manager in large non-software companies, because these large non-software companies typically won’t have the infrastructure that mature software companies have in place.
But, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that it’s impossible! Now that we know why it’s so hard for us to be proactive as product managers: how do we work our way out of this situation?
I’ll share the key to becoming proactive below.
The key to becoming a proactive product manager
As product managers, we’re used to juggling a wide variety of priorities across multiple stakeholders, whether those stakeholders are customers, executives, or other cross-functional teams.
When we juggle this work, we always tackle the initiative with the highest return on investment (ROI), which is defined as benefits divided by costs.
Urgent work typically has higher benefit than non-urgent work
Important work always has higher benefit than trivial work
Easily-accomplished work typically has low cost
Difficult work typically has high cost
So, we’re not just tackling all of the easy tasks or all of the hard tasks - rather, we’re tackling the task that gives us the highest ROI.
Since we already have this skill set of “assessing ROI” and “ordering our backlog of work”, the key to becoming a proactive product manager is to turn ourselves into a stakeholder too!
In other words, we need our “proactive initiatives” to be included in the list of priorities that we’re juggling on a day-to-day basis, and these proactive initiatives need to have their own deadlines, definitions of success, and ROI estimates.
Personally, I find that it’s helpful to think of myself as two separate people: Clement the executor, and Clement the strategist. The executor needs to find a way to balance the strategist’s needs against all other stakeholder needs.
We want to have these strategic proactive initiatives prioritized alongside all of our other “reactive” work because we only have one person’s worth of bandwidth.
In other words, we’re going to be set up to fail if we consider these strategic initiatives as “separate” or “in a different bucket” from our other initiatives, because then we don’t have a clear set of tradeoffs to work through.
After all, you’re not two different people with two different brains! You’re a single person, so you have to prioritize everything as a single list instead of two separate buckets.
So again, the key is to advocate for “the product manager” as a crucial stakeholder with its own needs and deadlines. It helps to think of “the product manager role” in the third person, so that way you can exert pressure on yourself and on others when it comes to making tradeoffs and prioritization decisions.
Now that we know the key to becoming proactive, let’s talk through the next steps we need to take to actually become proactive.
Steps to take to become a proactive product manager
Whenever I think about any kind of change or transformation, I first identify what end state I want to see.
So, if we’re looking at becoming proactive product managers, it’s crucial for us to define what the end state might look like.
The end state for a proactive product manager
Say that we were empowered by our organizations to be proactive product managers. What might that look like?
I would expect that as a mature software company, we would have the following artifacts:
Product strategy thesis
3 year product vision
1 year product vision
1 year product roadmap
Documented personas
Competitive analyses
Industry trend analyses
And, I would expect these product artifacts to be updated every year, at minimum.
Working backwards from there, how much time would we need to dedicate to this work as proactive product managers?
Before we can answer that question, we first need to look at the roles and responsibilities within our company.
How organizational roles impact product management responsibilities
At a mature software company, we would expect that personas would be owned by a dedicated User Research team, we would expect that competitive analyses would be owned by a dedicated Product Marketing team, and we would expect industry trend analyses to be owned by a dedicated Business Development team.
If your organization already has these roles, then it shouldn’t be your responsibility (even as a proactive product manager!) to take on this work. Therefore, you’d focus your time solely on the product strategy, the product vision, and the product roadmap.
So, you would likely aim at allocating about 10-15% of your time tackling this kind of proactive product management work.
But, if your organization is a small startup, then it’s likely that you don’t have cross-functional stakeholders who own personas, competitive analyses, and industry trend analyses. In cases like these, you’ll have to own these artifacts.
That means that you’d need to allocate about 25-30% of your time towards proactive product management instead, because now you’re covering a wider set of outputs that you’ll need.
So, we now know what we want our end state to be, and we have a sense of how much time we’ll need to allocate towards that end state.
Let’s now discuss the steps that we’ll need to implement before we can get to that end state.
Identifying our initial state
First, we need to identify what our initial state is. In other words, how many hours per week are you working, what are the buckets of work that you tackle each week, and how much time do you spend in each bucket?
While this step may sound basic, I’ve coached product managers around the world and I’ve found that 90% of product managers don’t have a clear sense of how they’re currently using their time on a weekly basis.
So, take the time to document how you’re using your time each week. Below is an example breakdown table that you might use to take a look at your week.
If you have a particularly large bucket, i.e. any category where you’re spending more than 10 hours a week, break it down into smaller buckets so that you can analyze your time more clearly.
For example, I’d want to break the “reactive work” bucket down so I can understand what’s eating up my time. I might find that I’m spending way too much time writing tickets, or I might find that I’m spending way too much time coordinating releases.
Now that we have our current time allocation, we can take meaningful next steps towards changing that time allocation.
Shifting our responsibilities as proactive product managers
Let’s look back at our time allocation goals. I’m going to assume the most aggressive stance, where we need to carve out 30% of our work week to focus on proactive product management deliverables. Assuming that I’m working 40 hours a week, that means that I need to switch out 12 hours of reactive work for proactive work.
But, that doesn’t mean that next week, I should drop 12 hours of reactive work right out the gate - such a shift is indigestible for our manager and our teammates!
You’ve probably been working reactively for many months in a row, so they’re not going to know how to deal with you stepping away from reactive work.
Therefore, we shouldn’t make the shift happen all at once. But, we can iterate our way towards that end state.
First, we should plan on moving 2 hours each week from reactive work to proactive work.
Then, once people are comfortable with that shift, we can then move another 2 hours a week.
Finally, we can repeat this process until we reach the end state that we want.
So, let’s talk about those first 2 hours that we want to move each week. The most crucial thing to do is to identify which responsibilities you’re going to delegate or drop so that you can move those 2 hours per week into proactive product management.
You can use the Eisenhower matrix below to identify what kinds of work make the most sense to delegate or drop, by analyzing the urgency and importance of your backlog of tasks.
Once you’ve decided on which kinds of tasks you plan to delegate or drop, you now need to align with your manager on your decision. Why is this so important?
Regardless of whether your manager is hands-on or hands-off, you need them to support your decision. That way, if anyone else in the organization escalates concerns about your new behavior to them, they’re not caught by surprise, and they’re ready to defend your decision.
Trust me - I’ve done this wrong before. Every time I’ve taken unilateral action without my manager’s knowledge, I’ve regretted not letting them know up front. You never want your manager to think that you’ve gone rogue or to think that you’re not a team player.
Assigning ourselves proactive product work
Once you have your manager’s alignment on the specific tasks that you are going to delegate or drop, you can now assign yourself “proactive product work” as a stakeholder.
As an example, let’s say that you decide your first assignment should be to pull together user personas. Give yourself a clear date within the next 2 months on when that assignment is due, and broadcast this date to your manager, teammates, and stakeholders so that they now expect the personas documentation from you.
As an example, I might send out a Slack message that says “By May 20 at 5:00 PM Pacific, I will send out user persona documentation to this group.” By doing so, you now have public pressure and accountability for delivering on this personas work.
Or, if you work in an organization that doesn’t use Slack, invite people to a calendar meeting where you will share out the user persona documentation and talk them through the results.
Since the organization now has expectations that you will deliver this work, you can now force tradeoffs between your “proactive work” vs. your “reactive work.”
Why does this matter? Well, if you say “I’m going to work on personas but I don’t know when I’ll deliver an output”, you’re going to forever deprioritize the work because you don’t have a deadline.
Or, even if you attempt to prioritize it upwards, if you don’t have a clear delivery deadline in mind, your stakeholders will tell you “Focus on my work first, and delay your deliverable because it has no deadline.”
So, by establishing a clear deadline, you can now hold yourself accountable, and you can justifiably deprioritize lower-ROI responsibilities.
Allocating time for proactive product work
Once we have a real deliverable with a real deadline, we can now carve out time from our schedules.
Create “immovable meetings” for yourself on your calendar that are publicly visible, and make sure each meeting has a clear agenda. Again, it’s all treating “the product manager” as a key stakeholder, and these meetings are for you to work with “the product manager” to execute on their needs.
Let’s say that you’re tackling personas. One of your meeting agendas might look like this:
Review existing organizational materials on personas
Identify gaps in materials
Prioritize gaps in user research knowledge
Write up a plan for closing these gaps
Assign action items and due dates for the plan
Now, people know that there are real repercussions if they attempt to book over this meeting. You can justifiably turn them down by saying “this work is high-priority and has an upcoming due date”, and you can work with them to find a different time on the calendar instead.
Prioritize your “proactive work meetings” as though they were customer-facing meetings. That is, it’s okay if you have to move the meeting due to a legitimate emergency, but it’s not okay to move this meeting for recurring internal meetings or randomizing one-off meetings.
Once these meetings are on your calendar, give the heads up to your teammates that you now have these real commitments to tackle.
As you work your way through more and more proactive product deliverables, your teammates will come to appreciate this work as high-priority, and they will get used to you dedicating a significant portion of your time towards proactive product management.
Need help coming up with a targeted, specific game plan for your situation at work? Our coaches at Product Teacher have helped product managers step up into more strategic roles.
The snowball effect of proactive product management
Many times, when we’re in a reactive state, we don’t even have the time to be proactive. If you’re trying to jump from 0 hours per week of proactive work to 12 hours per week of proactive work, it’ll feel like an insurmountable mountain to climb.
Thankfully, proactive product management has a snowball effect, where being proactive for a small period of time will help you unlock even longer periods of time to be proactive.
So, let’s talk about four small nudges that we can take right now, regardless of our workload, to kickstart our path towards proactive product management. I’ll start from the smallest nudge and work upwards to larger commitments.
Note that you don’t have to use all of these tactics; I’m simply providing these as suggestions of how you can break out of the rut of reactive product management.
Tactic #1: Wake up 30 minutes earlier than usual. Take this time to work through “what time can I recover today.”
Decline low-priority meetings where you won’t have a meaningful impact, delegate work to others, or defer non-important work by a week.
You’ll likely get back more than the 30 minutes that you invested this morning. With that newfound time, start identifying what you want your end state to be as a proactive product manager, and identify areas where your time is being spent on low-ROI tasks.
Tactic #2: After you end your work day, take 30 minutes to document “how was my time used today.”
This is a low-effort task that you can do right after work, while it’s still fresh in your mind.
All you have to do is look at your calendar and your Slack messages to see how your time was used, and bucket them into broad categories.
Trust me, it’s much easier to document your time within the same day. If you try to look back on your time after a month has passed, it’ll take 2-3x more time for you to correctly identify how your time was spent.
Tactic #3: Drop all your 1:1’s for a single week. Let people know that you have a time-sensitive conflict and that you’ll catch up at the next scheduled 1:1.
Typically, 1:1’s are “not urgent but important”, so a single week will rarely put any initiative or any relationships at risk.
Use this time to identify tasks that you can delegate, and pull together a game plan for how you’ll delegate these tasks. Note that when you delegate tasks, you may need to put together clear guides for the new task owner so that they can smoothly transition into an ownership role.
Tactic #4: Block off 2-3 hours during the weekend, ideally when you have the most mental energy. During this period of time, identify “what are the key deliverables I need to create as a proactive product manager, and why do they matter?”
Because this is a high-effort task, you should not put this work during a low-energy period of time.
I realize that sacrificing personal time is painful. But, by making a small investment upfront, you’ll be able to snowball and get more and more time to think proactively and strategically.
Final thoughts on proactive product management
At the end of the day, what matters the most for product managers is not how they spend their time, but rather what results their teams deliver.
Therefore, we can’t just linearly add time to our calendars to become proactive.
Rather, we need to force hard tradeoffs, create processes, and delegate our work so that we can focus on moving the needle for our company.
By treating ourselves as key stakeholders and assigning ourselves proactive product deliverables, we can force clearer prioritization across the company and drive outsized value for our customers and stakeholders.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Siamak Khorrami, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Alina Ha, Juliet Chuang, and Shanthan Gangupantula for making this guide possible.
