Product Manager to People Manager
Becoming a people manager, I found the same problem I originally set out to solve with Path to Product. The typical advice is generic — rarely based on real, specific scenarios, much less scenarios in your discipline. (Yes, it’s important to build trust and communicate… now what?)
I have found managing people as a product manager to be both easier and harder than I expected, in ways that flouted typical “people leadership” advice.
Easier: The heavy product management workload can help fight the temptation to micromanage.
I’ve read a lot on the dangers of micromanaging, especially in an execution-heavy discipline. If you’re accustomed to doing the work, and perhaps still doing some in addition to your management responsibilities, people say that micromanaging is a natural reaction.
I’ve found the opposite to be true — the total volume of individual contributor plus manager work acts as an effective deterrent to micromanagement. I was prepared to make the conscious choice to “let go,” but I was never really confronted with it — there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to effectively take on another PM’s responsibilities. Setting clear expectations for what success looks like (both for outcomes and some level of process) makes letting go and trusting the team the easier thing to do.
Regularly empowering the PMs you manage to make independent decisions also makes ongoing evaluation and support easier, because you can see how they approach problems without your influence. PMs I work with are accustomed to making decisions, articulating their rationale, and coming to me for a quick gut check — so I understand their process, and I don’t wonder what kinds of decisions are being made when I’m not present. Over time, we can build intuition together about what kinds of situations require more or less support from me.
Harder: General people management motivators can be dangerous applied in a PM context.
I took an intro to people management course this year. It emphasized finding the unique motivators for your team members (achievement, results, recognition, praise, connection with others…) and leaning into those to create momentum. If your direct report was uninspired by the work itself, the course suggested, perhaps they could be motivated by praise or by their colleagues.
I found this advice difficult to apply in a product management context. It’s great to draw motivation from strong relationships with colleagues (I am lucky to feel this boost every day!)… but a product manager who is primarily motivated by relationships will make poor decisions to please stakeholders or minimize trouble for others. Product managers who are motivated by praise might hesitate to say no and face criticism when it really counts. Product managers must make business results the priority, and not allow their decision-making process to be influenced by other personal or social factors. There is no “right” way to be motivated (no more than there is a “right” personality for product managers in general), but there is a “right” way to stay true to your core responsibilities. This will often mean making stakeholders unhappy and delaying praise for long periods of time in order to drive to the appropriate business decision.
I find that I need to be clear about the difference between the responsibilities of a role or project (always present) and the motivating elements of a role, project, or team dynamic (not felt every day) — and make sure the two haven’t been confused.
Both: Moving into people management represents a fundamental shift in the type of product problem being solved.
This was alluded to often in the Reforge Product Strategy course that I took this year, but it didn’t quite stick for me until I went through a planning cycle in the “manager” chair instead of the “IC” chair.
My first years of product management were all about doing the work right — building the core skills, making the right decisions, influencing the right immediate stakeholders.
Now I’m thinking about whether we have the right people on the team to do the work right, how we effectively set expectations and enable autonomy within a shared understanding of “what good looks like,” and how we expand or contract our commitments given a set of priorities, resources, and organizational constraints. This is a different set of problems and a different set of solutions.
You’re no longer presenting a specific recommendation — you’re presenting an appropriate process for getting to solutions that aligns with the company’s product management approach. You’re making decisions that are intuitive rather than analytical, because there is no spreadsheet matrix that will tell you what might inspire an individual or create a balanced working dynamic between PMs, designers, and engineers of different levels and strengths. The product is now the way goals and expectations are set, the structure of teams, and the people on them.
Only a few quarters in, I’m sure this is the tip of the iceberg — but I’m excited to invite people managers to our Path to Product journey. What have you discovered about the unique challenges of managing product managers?
