How to Lead in Product Management: Practices to Align Stakeholders, Guide Development Teams, and Create Value Together

by Roman Pichler

Meetings: Prepare and facilitate meetings, including sprint planning, Daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

Productive work environment: Help with setting up an environment that is conducive to creative teamwork—

Organisational change: Work with senior management, HR, and other business groups to implement the necessary organisational changes required to fully leverage agile practices and empower product people, possibly as part of an agile transformation or improvement program.

Project management: The Scrum Master is not a project manager.

Product backlog work: Keeping the product backlog up to date and in good shape is a responsibility the development team and you share.

Team management: The Scrum Master should not manage the development team. Instead, the individual should help the team practise self-organisation so that the members manage themselves.

Scrum Masters are not optional but mandatory in order to establish an agile way of working and to support product people and their development teams.

Development teams that aren’t properly set up usually struggle to do a great job.

Bill Campbell once said, “…leadership is about recognising that there’s greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.”

(Cain 2017)

Newly formed teams don’t become productive overnight. It takes a while for a group of people to get to know each other, build trust, and be able to effectively collaborate.

include the team members in product discovery and user experience work and allow them to directly observe and interact with users.

years, I find that attending the Daily Scrum at least twice a week is usually beneficial:

Each sprint should have an objective that describes the sprint’s desired outcome, the reason for carrying out the sprint.

Formally speaking, a development team in Scrum does a good job if the team is able to reliably meet the agreed sprint goals and to deliver product increments that offer a great user experience and exhibit the desired software quality.

same: You should engage in enough discovery and strategy work to see things coming and to make the right choices. At the same time, you need to pay attention to the product details to offer enough guidance to your team and to collect the relevant data.

People require enough time to look ahead, to learn new skills, and to experiment with new technologies and tools.

you should lead the way and proactively guide the individuals to ensure that your product creates the desired value for the users and business.

power-interest grid, described in Ackermann and Eden (2011).

Stakeholders with high interest and high power are called players.

Subjects are individuals with high interest but low power—

People with low interest but high power are called context setters.

Your job is not to please the stakeholders but to achieve product success.

Everyone else is part of the crowd.

First, the individual stakeholders are often not aware of their respective needs and concerns, as the person in charge of the product communicates with the individuals on a one-on-one basis.

Second, the collective wisdom and creativity of the group stays untapped: Novel ideas often emerge when people come together and engage in open, constructive discussion.

Third, if there is no sense of togetherness amongst the stakeholders, it will be difficult to establish shared goals to wh...

Instead of interacting with the players on a one-on-one basis, aim to build a stakeholder community whose members work together for an extended period of time and who learn to trust, respect, and support each other. In other words, move from stakeholder management to stakeholder collaboration.

A great way to foster mutual understanding and to align people is to jointly set goals.

While you want people to support each other and work towards shared goals, it is helpful for everyone to understand what the group members’ roles and responsibilities

While video calls are great to exchange information, they are less effective in my experience to build trust, develop empathy, and agree on how to best work together.

consider having joint onsite meetings at least once per quarter to renew and strengthen the connections between the individuals.

A great way to improve the collaboration between the players and to address any issues and problems is to regularly carry out a stakeholder retrospective, for example, once per month.

Invite the stakeholders, together with development team members, to a kick-off workshop to create a product vision and initial product strategy. Ask the individuals to help you validate the strategy and to find a workable business model, as I describe in more detail in Pichler (2016, Strategize).

don’t allow individuals to use a personal conversation with you to make requests, like adding a new feature.

don’t put up with inappropriate communication behaviour, like blaming others, bending the truth, and intentionally dominating the conversation. Ask people to treat each other with respect even if there is conflict, avoid harsh and false speech, and attentively listen to one another. Be a role model and reflect on your own speaking and listening habits.

Untreated people problems seldom go away on their own; they usually grow bigger—like mushrooms in the dark.

do not put up with toxic behaviour, and don’t shy away from conflict.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A sprint goal states the desired outcome of a sprint—

Shared: If you want people to take ownership of goals and feel responsible for reaching them, you should ensure that the goals are shared.

explain to the person why the goal was chosen and patiently

concerns. Realistic: All your goals—apart from visionary

ones—should be achievable and...

Inspirational: Good goals create a natural pull, and people should want to work on them.

Alignment creating: Effective goals direct people and help ensure that their work results create the desired outcome.

Autonomy fostering:

Good goals therefore give the development team and stakeholders the freedom to figure...

Holistic and systematically linked: Make sure that your goals cover product vision, strategy, and tactics and that they systematically connect with higher-level goals guiding lower-level ones.

A vision is a high-level, overarching goal that is typically ambitious and inspirational. Consequently, it cannot be measured.