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

by Roman Pichler

It helps you reflect on your current leadership ideas and behaviours and offers a collection of practical techniques to align stakeholders, guide development teams, and create value together.

The main practices covered, which include goal setting, listening and speaking, conflict resolution, and decision-making, are applicable whenever you lead and collaborate with others.

To get the most out of this book, you should be familiar with core product management concepts and techniques. If you lack this knowledge, you might struggle with some of the examples used. The book assumes that you work with or are familiar with agile practices and that your development team uses a framework like Scrum or Kanban, or at least some of their elements.

No model took into account the specific challenges that product people face, including having no transactional power and playing a dual role that involves leadership and active contribution. Instead of subscribing to a specific leadership model, I have carefully selected and combined practices from different frameworks that I have found valuable in my work over the last fifteen years, both being a product person in my own business leading a dispersed team and teaching and coaching other product people, as well as advising companies to develop their product people into empowered, inspirational leaders. Additionally, I have applied Buddhist insights, due to my background as a practicing Buddhist. These include mindfulness, open-mindedness, and compassion. I believe that at its heart, leadership is about supporting and guiding people; it means caring about others as well as looking after yourself. I have made every effort, though, to avoid any form of dogmatism, and I truly hope that you will find this book helpful, no matter what your preferred leadership theory and spiritual practice may be.

key leadership challenges product people face as well as techniques for influencing others and helping them change for the better.

True leaders understand that leadership is not about them but about those they serve. It is not about exalting themselves but about lifting others up. Sheri L. Dew

While helping a group of people achieve shared goals is a general leadership objective, I find that there are six common challenges that make leading stakeholders and development teams special: As the person in charge of the product, you typically lack transactional power; you lead a comparatively large and heterogeneous group; you have limited influence on the group member selection; you actively contribute to reaching the goals while guiding

others; you offer strategic and tactical leadership; and you usually work with agile practices, as I discuss at the end of this section.

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. It also comprises regularly assessing product performance and monitoring progress against the product roadmap. Additionally, you may have to coach or mentor some of the individuals and help them acquire the relevant product knowledge so that they can do a great job. As if this were

not enough, you also have to help progress the product—for instance, by observing and interviewing users, analysing user feedback and data, revising the product strategy, adapting the product roadmap, prioriti...

Guiding the development team and stakeholders towards product success requires leadership at three levels: vision, strategy, and tactics.

vision of your product;

lead the effort to create, validate, and evolve an ef...

you should guide the development of a pr...

you should work with the development team on the product backlog to determine, capture, refin...

The vision should guide the strategy, and the strategy should direct the tactics. At the same time, insights gained on the tactical level—for example, by testing prototypes or product increment with users—should i...

A common way to share product ownership is to have one person in charge of the overall product and

individuals owning product parts, like features and components. You may therefore end up with an overall product owner or manager who closely works with feature and component owners.

for mature, stable products whose strategy is unlikely to change significantly.4 Agile Processes Most digital products are developed using an agile development framework like Scrum or Kanban.

self-organising.

This includes the right to determine the appropriate workload, reject work items if they exceed the team’s capacity, and only work on what has been agreed for a sprint or what is within the agreed work in progress (WIP) limits.5 These rules increase productivity and create a healthy, sustainable work environment. But they mean that you can’t push work on to the team or interfere with the work during a sprint.

Instead, the development team pulls work from the...

Additionally, you have to make yourself available to the dev team, jointly work on the product backlog, participate in meetings like sprint planning and review, answer question...

shared goals

acquiring new users, retaining existing customers, or increasing revenue.

But as the person in charge of the product, you usually don’t have the authority to tell people what to do, as mentioned before. How can you then influence people and encourage individuals to be, for instance, more open to t...

The FBI therefore developed a different method, called the behavioural change stairway model (Voss 2016), which is based on the following insight: 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.

If you want people to truly trust and respect you, then you have to show them that you genuinely care for them and that you are interested in their perspectives and would like to understand their needs. In other words, you have to strengthen your ability to empathise with others.

An FBI agent will most likely disagree with the terrorist she or he negotiates with, and the individual probably won’t find the hostage taker a very likeable person. But this doesn’t prevent the agent from empathising with the terrorist, taking a genuine, warm-hearted interest in the individual, and treating the person as a fellow human being, despite her or his deplorable actions.

The same is true for you: No matter how difficult or challenging a stakeholder or development team member

If you tell people what they should do without carefully listening to them and taking a respectful interest in their needs, the individuals are unlikely to follow your advice, even if you are factually right. In order to take on...

There are two common barriers to empathy: First, we can be so caught up in our own thoughts and stories that our ability to be receptive to the needs of others is reduced. The same is true when we are tense, irritated, or worried: Experiencing negative mental states makes it harder to relate to and understand others.

being an effective leader requires you to cultivate a genuine caring attitude for the people you want to lead, whether you like them or not. If this intention is not present in you, then you may not be ready yet to lead others.

mindful of your mental state and lead with presence,

curiosity and care: Take a genuine interest in the other person, make an effort to listen with the intention to understand, and refrain from prematurely judging what the individual is saying. Imagine being in the position of the other person. What would this be like?9

Becoming a competent, well-rounded product person requires a continued learning effort in my experience. There are two reasons for this: First, product management is a multifaceted and comparatively young profession that is still changing.10 Second, there is no standard education path, at the time of writing, to become a product professional. As product people, we therefore have the challenge not only to acquire a wide range of skills but also of different education backgrounds. Some of us may have started our careers in marketing, others in development, sales, or project management, for instance.

Retrospectives are a great opportunity to collect feedback from the development team and stakeholders, understand if you effectively guided them, and adapt your leadership behaviour as appropriate. After all, leadership is not only about achieving results and getting things done. It’s equally important to pay attention to how we accomplish the desired outcomes: What is the impact of your leadership style on the stakeholders and development team members? And what effect does it have on you? Does it support a healthy and creative work environment, or does it cause people to feel stressed or intimidated?

The strength and endurance of a company does not come from products or services but from how well their people pull together. Simon Sinek

Trust is the magic ingredient that allows relationships to blossom. To

trust someone means to have faith in the person, to believe that her or his intentions are good and that acting on the individual’s advice will be beneficial. When you trust a person, you feel safe in her or his presence and you are comfortable to speak your mind.

Gaining people’s trust is therefore vital to guide and align people and to move forward together.