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

by Roman Pichler

You are leader and contributor. The former involves ensuring that the various workstreams, such as designing and building the product, preparing its release, and supporting it, are aligned—

for instance, by encouraging key stakeholders to participate in sprint review meetings.

In order to encourage change in another person, you have to be able to influence the individual. To do so, you first need to establish a trustful relationship with the person. This is only possible if you empathise with the individual, understand her or his perspective, and take a genuine interest in the person’s needs. And the best way to understand someone is to actively listen to the person, as figure 1 shows.

Come from a place of curiosity and care.

Listen with an open mind.

Speak and act with integrity.

Get to know people and allow people to get to know you.

Involve people in product decisions and encourage them to share their ideas and concerns.

Be supportive and offer help whenever possible and appropriate.

Strengthen your product management expertise.

Sometimes developers haven’t been taught that being a member of an agile team is different from writing code in a traditional environment. Members of agile teams are granted more ownership and freedom. But they are required to accept the responsibility that comes with it and to take on additional tasks, such as working on the product backlog and creating and refining user stories.

common mistake I see product people make is to manage an agile development team—for example, assist the team members to identify tasks, track progress within a sprint, or help resolve disagreements

you should manage your product, not the team.

If you find that the team members report their progress to you or expect you to tell them what to do, then the team is not yet self-organising and seems to regard you as a project manager or team leader. Share your observations with the team and consider not attending the meeting for the remainder of the sprint.

When I ride my bike, I focus on the here and now, and I look ahead at the same time. The former involves keeping the bike balanced, evenly turning the cranks, and choosing the right gear. The latter means seeing where the road or trail is heading so that I can adjust in time and, for example, turn the bike to the left or right, break, or avoid an obstacle. When you manage your product, you should do the 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.

your job is not to please or satisfy the stakeholders. Instead, you should lead the way and proactively guide the individuals to ensure that your product creates the desired value for the users and business.

stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your product, who is affected by it, or who shows an interest in the offering.

This results in four stakeholder groups: players, subjects, context setters, and crowd,

invite the players to attend the sprint review meetings in Scrum and operations meetings in Kanban at least once per month, as a rule of thumb. This allows the individuals to see for themselves how the product is progressing, offer their feedback, and share any concerns, thereby making it more likely to create a product that can be effectively marketed, sold, serviced, and operated.

Start with the users and their needs. Once you clearly understand why people would want to use the product, what job it should do for them, which problem it should solve, or which benefit it should create, consider how you can create value for the business.

A sprint goal states the desired outcome of a sprint—for example, find out if users are willing to share personal information before they start using the app, test integration with leading smart scales, or finish the dashboard in order to release a first version to the test group and learn how people respond to it.

Make sure that your sprint goals state the reason for running a sprint, like acquiring new knowledge, addressing a risk, or providing a benefit to users, and avoid listing product backlog items, which is a common mistake in my experience.

vision is a high-level, overarching goal that is typically ambitious and inspirational.

Consequently, it cannot be measured.

A goal expresses an aim, something we wa...

objective is a goal that can be measured. You can therefore select metrics to determine progress towards the goal. If the goal is strategic in nature, like a user or business goal, then the metrics would be typically referred to as key performance indicators or KPIs.

OKRs (objectives and key results) are the measures used to determine if an objective has been met.

Development team members and stakeholders wanted to be involved in most product decisions, something he was not used to. But over time, he learnt to appreciate the benefits of collaborative decision-making: Once a goal had been agreed, everybody would stick to it. People felt a shared sense of responsibility, and they help each other to reach the goal.

It helps you acquire new information, it increases people’s support in product decisions, and it allows you to build and strengthen connections.

find that I can suffer from expert syndrome—the more I know about a subject, the less open I tend to be to other people’s views. If this happens to you, then try to take your ideas less personally. After all, none of us was born with the ideas and beliefs we carry with us.

Additionally, try to be humble and grateful for other people’s perspectives, even if you disagree with them or regard them as inappropriate. We can still learn something from an ill-conceived idea, even if it’s only how easy it is to fall prey to our biases.

Before you say something critical or negative, first share a positive observation.

Name it: What is the problem?

Flip it: What is the positive opposite? Frame it: What is the desired outcome of the positive opposite?

Whenever addressing a problem, make sure that you separate the issue from the person.

Kind speech is therefore not about only saying nice things, always being cheerful and smiley, and ignoring difficulties and problems or sugar-coating them. It is about caring about the effect your words are likely to have on the other person and avoiding harsh, offensive, dismissive, judgemental, cynical, nasty, and divisive speech.

First, keep your speech free from anger or other unwholesome emotions—even when you feel unfairly treated, offended, or hurt. Responding to anger with anger will only worsen things. Consider not answering immediately but pausing for a few seconds to become aware of your feelings and to decide how to best respond. Second, be grateful for the other person’s time and interest, even if you disagree with the individual or don’t find the message very helpful. In the previous example, you might want to appreciate the fact that Julie is at least willing to engage in a conversation with you and share her perspective. Third, apply kind speech not only to the people who are present but also to those who are not. Avoid talking badly about others, and refrain from malicious gossip, divisive speech, and unkind comparisons.

Second, we are often attached to our ideas, opinions, and products, sometimes to the extent that we identify ourselves with them. When this happens, we are in danger of regarding disagreement as a personal criticism or an attack, even if this was not the other person’s intention.

Look for positive qualities in the individual. Think of something good the person has said or done and remind yourself of her or his positive qualities.

Stop reinforcing negative thoughts and emotions. When you continue to have negative thoughts about the person, remind yourself that clinging on to them is not going to improve anything.

See things from the other person’s perspective. Ask yourself what might have caused the individual’s behaviour. How did she or he experience the situation? What was it like for her or him?

Ask people to write their ideas on adhesive notes, briefly explain them, and then put them on the wall. Request that people refrain from analysing, judging, and criticising, and allow only clarification questions at this stage. Ideally, people feed off each other’s ideas—one suggestion sparks another one.

For example, ask the individual to explain why an idea is important to them or why they feel strongly about a suggestion. What are the underlying motives or concerns?

These include reviewing the latest key performance indicators (KPIs), carrying out competitor research, adjusting the product roadmap, updating the product backlog, refining user stories, answering questions from the development team, and addressing urgent support issues.

Mindfulness, therefore, is not about suppressing or getting rid of thoughts and feelings, particularly unpleasant ones like envy, anger, fear, or doubt. It is not about reaching blissful or special mental states, judging or fixing things, or being super productive and amazingly successful. It simply means paying attention to what’s happing in our inner world so that we become more aware of our feelings and thoughts.

What did I get done this week? Which challenges and difficulties did I encounter? What did I learn? How am I feeling right now? How did my moods and energy levels develop during the week? What changes do I want to make next week?

You might even want to jot down what you did and how much time you spend on major tasks. This can help you understand if you are neglecting strategic or tactical duties, for example.

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other,” as John F. Kennedy once noted.

Sustainable pace is an important agile principle. The “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” defines it in the following way: “The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely” (Beck et. al. 2001). The goal is to create a healthy work environment and to avoid that people are routinely overworked, lose their creativity, make mistakes, and eventually sacrifice their health.