The Product Manager Makeover - The People Behind The Product
I’ll say this out loud - Product Management is 50% relationship building and 50% everything else. Yes, 50%. No matter if you are highly technical, great at problem-solving, or a wizard at prioritization; if you are bad at building relationships with your stakeholders, product management is going to suck for you.
But what do I mean by relationship building? and why? and how?
Let’s get into it.
This is Post 3 of my series - The Product Manager Makeover where I discuss skills needed to make a top-performing product manager. If you haven’t read the previous post, you can read it here.
The What
When writing this article, I struggled massively as to how to define the ideal relationship between a PM and his immediate stakeholders. And then I came up with this
This is how I like to define relationship building for PMs
A PM’s relationship with his team (engineers, designers, QA, business counterparts, etc.) should be such as
There is mutual respect and trust between you two
You can communicate anything work or project-related freely with the other without fear or judgment
You have each other's best interest in mind while making any decisions
You engage with each other outside of required interactions (meetings, team-sponsored lunches) and official channels (mail/Slack)
Your interactions are not always transactional
You like collaborating on projects
You are inclined to help and support each other whenever you can
You don’t want to punch each other in the face - very important
But why do you say we cannot be close friends? Isn’t it better for our relationship to be stronger?
You can, but should you? Three things:
At the end of the day, you need them to get the work done and take appropriate actions if that doesn’t happen. How often have your close friends taken you for granted? Don’t lie to me now.
You need to work together. You cannot sulk or ghost them or end the friendship if they hurt your feelings
It is good to separate personal and professional. Do you want them to know you were out on a date when you called in sick?
The Why
Why is product management different than any other job? Why is there a special emphasis on relationships in product management when I have already spent many years in the corporate environment working on teams?
I failed to understand it as well in the first 6 months as a PM. I came from a consulting background where everything was super formal and methodical. You need a data point. Mail. You need to correct something in a document mail. You want to discuss something. Mail and ask for time. Everything was organized. Your day ends when you close your laptop!
Product Management is not like that. It is continuous. It is chaotic.
Every day you’ll be fighting multiple fires. Your calendars will be flooded with meetings, and you’ll need to provide inputs on dozens on other things outside of those meetings. Additionally, your day doesn’t get over when you close your laptop. Sure, you go back home but your work is not done. Anytime anything breaks in your product and your customers are impacted, you go back to work. No matter what time. It is your product.
When the scope of your work is so vast and nature is so volatile, every single day you’ll need to call in for favors. Need a data point to be presented to the CEO later today, go to your analytics POC and request them to run a query for you for your meeting. He/she needs to drop everything they are doing and help you.
Your sales calls and tell you they need to onboard a client immediately, call your ops team and request them to do it on a priority.
You are in a War Room, and you need a config to be uploaded immediately. Call your app dev and request them to add the config.
You get the drift.
Your relationship with that stakeholder determines whether they’ll be willing to help you or not. They can very easily say -” Please speak to my manager and this task assigned to me and I’ll take a look”. By the time you do all that, you have lost precious time.
Your relationship or the lack thereof determines if someone is going to pick up your call at 9 pm in the night when they most likely know, you need them to do something for you.
Do you remember how we say, PM is the CEO of the product?
That is partially true. The correct version is “PM is the CEO of the product without any of powers”. You don’t have any authority over engineers, designers, etc. and you don’t manage any of them.
How does the PM get anything done?
The answer is by building a relationship with their stakeholders.
The How
Now that we know what and why? Let's answer the how.
How do you go about building relationships with your team? But even before that how do you determine if you already have a relationship with them?
Do this test.
If you take a lift (elevator for my American friends) and this person is the only other person in the lift. The lift suddenly breaks down (I know not ideal) and you now have 30 minutes to spend together before the lift restarts. Do you know this person enough to talk to him/her/them for the duration and not descend into awkward silence?
If not, you’ve got work to do.
So now we come to the million-dollar question - how does one build a relationship with their team/ team members?
I unfortunately don’t have the answer. Yes, now you can shout at me for wasting your time with this clickbait article but hear me out.
The reason I cannot tell you how to build a relationship with your team members is because it is so unique to one’s personality, context, and culture.
If you are a naturally extrovert vs an introverted person, this might look entirely different for you. Similarly, if you are part of a 5 personal team holed up in a small co-working space where you see each other every day vs if you are part of an MNC where your team members are spread across 10 countries and 15 time zones, you are going to have very different process for building relationship.
Culture plays a massive role as well. In fact, it is an entire area of specialization for academics who study the nuances of workplace behavior and expectations within different cultures and nationalities.
Having said that here are some things that worked for me and hopefully for most of you as well.
Take a genuine interest in them
The key to building a relationship with someone is finding similarities and bonding over that. This is an overtly simplistic view but essentially what I mean is to find something that you both like to talk about.
When I entered the workplace, I found out that most of my colleagues liked talking about sports. Specifically cricket and football. After every important match, they would discuss the previous day's match very passionately and I would often feel left out not able to contribute as I had absolutely no interest in either of the sports.
So, what did I do? Obviously, started watching football and cricket.
No, I am just kidding. The first lesson in any kind of relationship building is to be genuine and be yourself. If you have to fake aspects of your personality to build a relationship, either romantic or platonic, the foundation of the relationship is inherently weak and is bound to crumble.
Instead, I tried to find an overlap between our interests.
Some of them watched F1 which I love to watch, and we used to talk about it.
Some of them loved traveling and I love traveling as well. We would discuss our experiences and plans.
Food. Aviation. Politics and the list goes on.
Bottom line - Find something to talk about.
If you have 0 overlapping interests, find someone you both hate and talk about that. That’ll be abundant in an office setting.
Take initiative
I am going to take an analogy of a romantic relationship which is super inappropriate but super useful in demonstrating the principle
When you met your partner/spouse and you two fell in love, someone had to muster the courage and initiate the first conversation. It is also likely that you did not and now they are married to someone else 😟
Extrapolating from that, as a PM you will need to make the first effort to build a relationship with your team.
Why?
Because you need them more than they do. It is unlikely an engineer is going to call you at dinnertime to fix something in the PRD but you are likely to call them to fix a production bug immediately.
It is rather simple when you are already an established PM in the team and some new engineers and designers join. You’ll most probably get to know them organically.
It can be a bit more daunting when you are a new PM joining an already-established team. Not only you haven’t established any credibility yet with the team, but they are also wary of how the new PM is going to be, to work with.
Take the first step. Introduce yourself individually to all of them.
Over the first few weeks, find time to meet with everyone and know more about them. Start with what they are working on and then try to move on to who they are outside of work.
Be patient. It can take weeks or months. But be proactive. That is what matters.
Spend time with them
You might be cringing, but I am only speaking the truth.
“Oh, but I spent the entire day in a war room with them, why can’t I have my lunch in peace?”
Because that is when people shed their corporate veil and be themselves. 30 minutes of lunch together where you discuss your frustrations about the low hikes this year and how overworked you are will do more for your relationship than weeks and months in the daily sprint.
So, the next time your engineers ask to join them on a coffee break, put aside that PRD you are working on and join them!
Two things to keep in mind
Be yourself. Don’t feel pressurized to do things you normally won’t. Team members are going for a smoke? You can just stand with them and not smoke. Does the smoke bother you? Just politely say no and say “Let's catch up for coffee in the pantry when you guys are back”
Don’t impose. Try to read between the lines of when you are welcome and when you are not. Someone with high EQ will be able to gauge this easily.
Have their back
Even if you don’t do the first 3, do this.
You can still work with people who don’t really like you. You’ll find it very difficult to work with a team that dislikes you.
I’ll cover more about this point when I talk about managers in a later post, but the idea is very simple. You have to shield the team from external attacks and criticisms. In such events, instead of throwing the team under the bus, take accountability yourself and later reprimand/ do a retro internally.
Once the team knows they can trust you, they’ll go the extra mile with you.
Be approachable
This is the last point but also in some ways the most fundamental point. It is applicable to anyone that is working with a team and not just a PM.
Don’t let your fancy B-school degree get to you. There is no hierarchy to flex here. Every member of the team from engineers to analytics to designers to QA and of course you (the PM) form an integral part of the team and no one is more important than the other.
Unless your team members see you as someone who they can come and talk to for anything they need help with, you’ll always remain on the ‘outside’.
Don’t let that happen.
After all this, a follow-up question I often get is - Can introverts not become PM then? Absolutely, I have seen and worked with some amazing, introverted PMs. There are many areas of product management that introverts are naturally stronger at such as empathy and attention to detail. When it comes to relationship building, it would seem that extroverts have a certain advantage here because they feel more comfortable mingling with groups of people and hence have surface area in terms of getting to know each other.
However, if you are naturally an introvert you can
Focus more on building strong individual relationships by 1-1 chats/ meetings
Manage your social energy throughout the day so that you can participate in some group interactions outside of meetings
Just get a fake work persona - you know what I am talking about!!
Stay tuned for the next part of The Product Manager Makeover, where I talk about metrics and why PMs must master the art and science of metrics.
