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It's hard to get better if you don't know what better looks like

The product leader

A product leader leads the product managers building ships (products). They hire the best shipbuilders, create a proper environment for building ships, and they provide their people with the support and tools they need to do great work. The ships your teams build can only be as good as the shipyard that produces them.

The product manager's job

It's the product manager's job to come up with a product solution that is valuable to the user, usable by the user, buildable by your engineering team, and still viable from a business perspective. It's all about finding a balance between these four dimensions.

Again, what's the job you said!?

• Go out there and listen to your users and customers to understand their problems and how you can possible solve them.
• Conduct several experiments and prototypes to test your assumptions and various solutions before building them (to minimize the risk of building the wrong thing in a beautiful way).
  
• Maximize value but minimize the effort to build the actual solution and make sure the winning solutions can be built by the team in a reasonable amount of time.
  
• Deliver the product and optimize (or even innovate on) it based on feedback.

By this definition, a product manager is not a person who only collect requirements, write concepts, and maintain a backlog without making any decisions.

Do you know what better looks like?

If you don't know what makes a good product manager, how do you make sure your product managers know what they are expected to do? How do you hire the right person? How do you show them their necessary areas of personal growth?

Help your product managers understand what you think makes a good product manager. Help them identify their gaps to see what they should get better at, and help them understand what better really looks like.

Product vision, product strategy, goals and principles

For some organizations, product vision, strategy, goals and principles are very scary things - so much so that they avoid creating some or all of them. People think that it's a complicated and difficult process.

In fact, it's all about decision making. These things provide the guardrails for making decisions and prioritizations faster, and better. You need that, because there will always be more work than there is capacity to do it.

How can I grow and learn as a product manager?

• I can learn by consuming books, podcasts, blogs, conference talks.
• I can apply what I have consumed and learned to my daily work.
• I can reflect and get feedback on what I have applied.
• I can contribute back to the community and my colleagues by showing up at events to share my experiences, teach others, write articles, onboard new product managers, and become a mentor.
  

"Strong Product People" by Petra Wille

One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.

Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.

Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?

• What must you do to deliver on this?
• What needs to change?
• What do you need to stop doing?
• What needs to be added?

If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.

"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith

I'm a Yes-person! Yes to everything and everybody.

I don't think I am alone. We say yes too often.

Saying 'No' to people when they ask you? Hell no. I don't want to disappoint people or hurt any feelings. I want to be polite. And what if I miss out on something if I turn it down?

But I also know that my reluctance to say "no" leaves me overcommitted and overwhelmed.

Zoe Chance decided to let 'no' be her default response for an entire month, which she dubbed 'NOvember'. As the month progressed, she started to feel less stressed and more in control of her own decisions, her time, and her life.

She started giving her MBA students a 24-Hour 'No' Challenge. To practice saying no! 

It's about being kind to yourself. People won't hate you. You may find it empowering.

• Why are you asking me?
• Whom else have you asked?
• When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
• According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?
• If I couldn't do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me to do?
• What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?

I read somewhere that the best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule, like “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night" or "I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone".

People respect rules and they accept that the rule allows you no choice.

We all have our practical skills which can be acquired through education, training programs, learning by doing. Skills we are not born knowing. Something we must teach. "Hard skills" as we often say.

In the book 'The Song of Significance', Seth Godin says we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to skills like 

• Decision-making, 
• Eager participation, 
• Dancing with fear, 
• Speaking with authority, 
• Working in teams, 
• Seeing the truth, 
• Speaking the truth, 
• Inspiring others, 
• Doing more than we are asked, 
• Caring, and 
• Being willing to change things.

He says that we tend to underinvest in training on these skills, fearful that these things are innate and can't be taught. 

We downplay them, calling them "soft skills", making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

These are interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. Human skills. Skills that amplify your hard vocational skills.

Adam Grant refers to "character skills" in his hook 'Hidden Potential', which are never too late to build.

• Take initiative to ask questions, 
• Seek information, 
• Get along and collaborate with peers, 
• Pay attention, 
• Take on challenging problems, 
• Do more than the assigned work, and 
• Persist in face of obstacles.

These skills can actually all be learned. Even though they are more difficult to measure, that doesn't mean we can't improve them, can't practice them, or can't change the way we do our work.

Why do we need empowerment?

What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?

Leader-follower

In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions. 

They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion. 

You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions. 

Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?

Turn disempowered phrases like 

• "I would like to", 
• "Could we", 
• "What should I do about" 

... into empowered phrases like 

• "We intend to", 
• "We plan on", 
• "We will". 

Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.

Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do. 

Resist the urge to provide solutions.

When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.

What comes first, mindset or behavior?

Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.

When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.

That's how you turn a ship around.