What we learned from our product leaders cohort
I’ve spent the past five+ years working around product teams and have watched the PM role evolve from a glorified project manager to a general manager. Product leaders are going to shape the future of leadership as we know it - and they need our support.
Product leaders don’t get enough credit. They carry a lot of responsibility within an organization but are often left by the wayside, or their role isn’t fully understood, creating tension. Organizations need strong product leaders to pull together their product and engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders. Don’t believe me, listen to my interview with Seb Saboune, Head of Product at Founders Factory.
Serving product leaders
Being a product leader can be an isolating role and at the beginning of this year, I started to think about ways to support product leaders. I wanted to bring product leaders together to show that one point rings true across the board: no one has it all figured out. The undefined nature of the PM role is part of the process. It’s likely that you’ll never find “the way”, so being able to work through uncertainty is the name of the game.
When lockdown hit, I accelerated the idea of bringing together the product community and kicked off the first cohort, a small group of willing volunteers, in April 2020. It was a wide mix of product leaders - managers, founders, strategists, and tech leads - from software to hardware, with varying degrees of experience.
These leaders made the commitment to join without judgment and with an openness to learn. At the beginning of each session, each of them shared what was on their mind or capturing their attention, and the group decided how to move forward. And we were off!
Learning together
By far the biggest theme was communication. It starts with the basics: keeping documentation and setting clear expectations at all stages of product development. But in order to get there, we learned that product leaders need to adapt to whom they’re communicating.
Product leaders have to juggle different roles. Within their own team, they need to set goals - agendas come in extra handy for this. They also have to act as a bridge between tech and non-tech in the organization. Here, it helps to use analogies and craft a vocabulary that everyone can use and understand. And with stakeholders, it’s important to (what feels like) over-communicate. Use open-ended questions and shift the dialogue to better expectation management.
It’s been challenging to adapt to fully remote levels of communication. Gone are the days of “quick walks around the block” and grabbing a coffee to smooth things over before they blow up. The cohort shared that when it comes to hard conversations, writing your thoughts out in advance, and assume good intentions is a good place to start. It can also help to prepare a visual to talk through during the discussion, to have something to talk “at”. Afterward, ask the person to write down what they understood from it to ensure there were no misunderstandings.
This kind of preparation is necessary now because working remotely has taken away the ability to pull people aside for a chat. It means that we all need to put more time into structuring and thinking about the message we want to get across.
Finding your footing
A major part of our discussions was finding confidence in an undefined role. (I will be personally working a lot on helping to achieve this - let me know if you want to join.) How do you know when to switch up leadership styles? How do you balance what works for your team and what your organization embodies?
You want to feel confident to do what you know your team needs without asking permission. This community of product leaders helps you achieve just that. In our sessions, I could see the energy and excitement of members when they shared with the others. It was one of the most rewarding parts of lockdown and I am looking forward to seeing how we evolve what community and online peer-to-peer learning develops in the years to come.
If you’re interested in developing your leadership style in these uncertain times, you might be interested in talking to us about some of our remote offerings.
At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
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