Unlocking High-Impact Product Leadership: Mastering the 3 Core Competencies
Unlocking High-Impact Product Leadership: Mastering the 3 Core Competencies
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En 10 días empieza mi nuevo programa para líderes de producto, y quedan pocos cupos.
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Es un plan de trabajo personalizado con acompañamiento 1:1 para garantizar tu crecimiento.
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We all know Product Leadership is hard. In fact, many (if not most) companies have bad product leadership.
What may be more surprising is that the reason behind it is not:
Incompetent people in the role
Wrong company culture or “upper management doesn’t get it”
The problem is that the job of product leadership is ill-defined, and most people in the role end up doing something that isn’t product leadership, which lacks the impact we can drive through this function.
While there is plenty of literature, videos, and more on “how to do it properly,” it can get frustrating when it differs from your day-to-day reality and you feel you can’t change it.
Since I don’t want to add to that frustration, I want to share the three core practices you should master and how they should look in your day-to-day job so you can identify the gaps and start aiming for high-impact product leadership.
The 3+1 Competencies
In the following few sections, we will explore:
Leading with Strategic Context (and what does it mean)
Creating a team of High-Impact Product Managers
Building your Product Development Playbook
Each of those topics can (and do!) fill entire books, so my goal is to provide the mental model for you to connect it to your daily responsibilities, rather than a “how to” on each of the areas.
Wait! How can there be only three competencies in such a broad role, where dozens of frameworks need to be applied to have success?
This is where all other content gets confusing: you can map all of the practices you implement to these 3 areas, which are the ones you need to master, independently of the tools or specific frameworks you use.
1. Strategic Context
To build high performing organizations we need to have high-performing teams that are assigned high-relevance problems to solve.
The strategic context competence is all about solving that second part: identifying, selecting, framing, and allocating the right problems and opportunities to the teams.
This serves very important needs for the organization:
Create alignment: with strong insights, you will can drive the discussion with leadership to align on what are the most critical topics.
Focus resources to those topics.
Topology: ensure you have the right team structure to fulfill your strategy.
Empower: you can only have succesful outcome-oriented accountable teams if you give them the context and the problems, and let them figure out how to achieve the results.
How this works day-to-day
This is one of the key areas missing in product leadership. Usually the task is boiled down to negotiating with “the business” or other stakeholders a roadmap, balancing resource allocation to do “a little bit of everything,” and dealing with dependencies.
While there is some data-driven decision making, the role gets heavily influenced by project coordination and reporting.
What you should be doing instead, is focusing on having in place:
A Product Vision
A Product Strategy
Outcome-oriented objectives
Regular check-ins to see progress and refine your strategy and future decisions
Important note: no one says “I don’t want a strategy.”
If you feel leadership don’t “let you” or don’t care about these artifacts, chances are it is a trust issue. They don’t trust this will have an impact on the outcomes. You overcome it by showing success along the way.
For example, every time your strategy helps you decide on initiatives that move the needle, you highlight the importance of having it in place. This build trust and willingness to help in future iterations.
The real challenge is that while you transform what you do, you probably need to keep your previous responsibilities afloat, so it will be a bit of an overload.
Material
Empowered, by Marty Cagan (sections IV to VII)
2. High-impact PMs
Armed with great problems to solve, you must now have great teams that can actually solve them.
To have high-impact PMs you must define expectations on how the role is done and coach your people to be able to do it. Easier said than done :)
Additionally, you will need to take care of hiring, rewarding and promoting accordingly.
How this works day-to-day
Many 1:1s boil down to status report, and most career development happens in yearly HR-driven performance evaluations.
While there is a need for getting updates from your team, and a need to formalize career progress at a company level, your job developing your team goes way beyond this line.
You must have in place:
A definition of what goods look like (usually in the form of a career ladder for PMs).
An assessment for each of your team members, to understand where they are and what are their development priorities.
1:1 sessions mostly focused on actionable coaching (what about recent activities and results can be improved)
Keep in mind that you don’t need to have all the answers to coach your team effectively. Most of the time is more important to use the right questions and have them figure out the answers.
Material
Strong Product People, by Petra Wille, is the bible in this topic.
Empowered (Section II and III)
3. Product Development Playbook
Beyond very capable PMs, you need to create the environment for them to thrive.
In more predictable environments this will probably be called process. But since our product works constantly varies, we focus more on the set of principles and particular practices are more optional or subject to change. You may refer to this as a product culture, or a product operating model.
For example, OKRs are simply a good practice to give teams short-term outcome accountability, that help us empower them to solve hard problems. However, you can use other practice to fulfill that principle.
Furthermore, you can highlight which practices are:
Suggestions in the playbook (like describing a set of Discovery techniques teams normally use, but are not mandatory for each initiative)
Versus the ones that should be consistent across the organization (like OKRs, which probably you want to all teams to use)
How this works day-to-day
In summary, the playbook is all about:
Defining a good set of practices for your organization: what are your principles to define direction, discovery, delivery and optimization.
Collaborating with leaders in other areas (specially engineering and UX) to get involvement and buy-in on the defined practices.
Measuring and optimizing this practices over time. Continuous improvement to make sure you constantly adapt and innovate to achieve maximum impact.
Material
Lean Product Playbook, by Dan Olsen
Escaping the Build Trap, by Melissa Perri
Evidence Guided, by Itamar Gilad
Inspired, by Marty Cagan
Collaboration and Evangelization
All of this core competences are constantly done with others.
You won’t sit alone to define the strategic context. You won’t impose a set of practices to the engineer manager.
So a fourth dimension across all of them is collaboration: mastering how you get input, align and coordinate implementation with your peers, with leadership, and with the teams.
And beyond collaboration, you will need to constantly be sharing and preaching for the strategic context, for the good practices, for what good product management is. That’s why mastering communication and influence is also critical.
We may need to expand this one in upcoming articles :)