On managing your manager as a PM

I have written before about the importance of a manager, and how to boost your relationship with them. This is vital in any role, but especially so as a PM. Today I’d like to follow a prompt I received via LinkedIn, where my response highlighted the importance of ‘managing your manager’.

The hidden question underneath the exchange on LI is: what if my manager isn’t listening? What if I have really and credible evidence that they aren’t actually a good manager. What if I feel like they don’t understand my suggestions, and I can’t shake the feeling that it is them who are wrong, not me?

First off, let me state that these feelings are incredibly common around the industry. Whenever we work with opinionated, high-performing people, we can feel like they are off. I sense that this becomes amplified as we grow in our careers, as we acquire more and more experience. These feelings are tough to manage. They require a lot of us, and often the skills which are helpful here aren’t int eh ‘making a better pitch’ category.

Make it easy to see the gift in the feedback

A while ago I proposed a new product at Google to measure ads performance. It was complicated, it wasn’t scalable. It didn’t meet some of the key aspects highly successful products at Google had until then. When my manager was skeptical of my proposal, I was furious. I felt he betrayed me, and that he didn’t honor the work that I put into my proposal. I failed to receive the gift of his feedback by focusing on my pride.

The positive consequence was that I committed myself to proving him wrong. And I did. A combination of talent (we worked so hard as a team), and luck (thankfully a competitor launched a similar product), and customer success (advanced customers found the product superior in quality and precision) led to business outcomes which were significant. But I lost my cool along the way. Instead of wondering how to position my product, It became a personal exchange between me and my manager. Totally unnecessary energy spent.

Own the space, not the solution

Another time, and this time I was the manager, a report of mine was concerned about the request for ‘build versus buy’ of the product he owned. Thankfully, this request came from above, and I didn’t find myself negotiating with him my own request to him. The request, however, was legit, and worded perfectly fine. He simply took it too personal. Just like I did years earlier.

During this meeting I had an epiphany, and I could put it in words, too. Lucky to have had so many patient managers. The tagline I told my report was: Own the space, not the solution. By owning the space, and being passionate about it, we gain a way to split between important issues (such as threats to the space), and legitimate requests (how to best support the space). This allows us to remain cool-headed. Or at least only be hot headed when we feel a legitimate concern for the space we own as a PM. In my example from above: no one was challenging the space. But there were legitimate questions being asked how to best go after this space. And those questions were indeed helpful to think through. Just like with my report. The questions whether to build or to buy IS an important question to ask, and to answer.

I was so impressed when my report took this advice and truly acted on it. He was the true owner of this space, and he became the most informed person on ‘build versus buy’ in that space. Had the company decided to shift away from the current ‘build’ strategy, he would have still been the go-to-person for the job. And that is the ultimate testimony of trust in the PM owner.

Bring solutions, not problems

Managers generally react well to solutions, not problems. So when you interact with managers, look to bring solutions to them which various trade-offs. There are multiple layers here tho. First, you need to ensure you know what they care about. What does success look like to them? There is a chance we build solutions in a vacuum. Away from the forward looking changes our management would like to implement. We rook our proposals in outdated goals, or past incentives.

As PMs, we need to strike a balance between knowing the future, and staying grounded in the present. Our proposals need to reflect both parts, and show a bridge between what is, and what could be. That is, among other things, the hard part of the job.

Take something off your manager’s plate

Managers have an incredibly busy schedule, and they are likely oversubscribed. Often they are looking for proactive support. Look at what you can do for them, and make that your next project. Instead of wanting to wow them with something new, and taking a risk, signal to them that you are willing to make their life easier. This way you gain trust, respect, and experience.

Working on something you know is a priority for them also lets you ‘reverse engineer’ what they care about, and how they like to get things done. This can be invaluable info when you propose a suggestion of your own.

When nothing seems to work

Sometimes we get stuck, and feel like nothing works. This is a tricky place, and trust me, I have been there. At a previous team I felt like I was simply not doing a good job, and it was hard to understand what was off.

At the time there was a lot going on. My on-boarding on the team has been tricky, the space was complex, and this part of the company was going through a lot of change. I tried my best, and gave it my all, but nothing seemed to mark the ‘success’ which I was hoping for in the first 30-90 days.

Finally at one point I got the message. The team felt I didn’t do a good job, that it wasn’t ‘clicking’ between us, and that they rather have someone else to work on this space. I was floored. My manager wasn’t helping, he simply stood there and nodded. So, I took the only alternative I had left: I left the team, and re-joined the team I worked with previously.

There, things clicked. My first product review was a massive success, we launched things right away, and life was good. The year before I worked midnight shifts repeatedly, banging my head against the problems, and didn’t find a solution.

In talking to my new boss at my former team and other colleagues, he looked at me when I described what was going on and just shook his head. He encouraged me to go and talk to HR, he had never heard such behavior before. It gave me some sort of consolation that he shared my feelings. Couple of months later my former boss of the team I left was laid off. He has multiple HR cases open, and it seems he didn’t quite fit in. I am sure he is wildly successful elsewhere.

This episode taught me that sometimes you are up against things you can’t control, nor influence, and the odds are simply stacked against you. Then leaving might be a good option. If you are where your value isn’t recognized, you are definitely in the wrong place.

And – pun intended – there is nothing wrong with correcting that.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 This is the ‘trust bible’ for business leaders, where Stephen M. R. Covey has built a framework on how to create, restore, and grow trust in teams and organizations. The Speed of Trust, is widely recognized as a landmark work in how leaders help drive success int heir businesses.

📚 A book which helped me is Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people. It truly changed me to my core, helped me build more meaningful relationships with others, inside and outside of work. It also helped me see how to become more humble as a person, something which had tremendously positive effects on my life and opened me up to learn a lot more.

📚 The book How to Talk to Anyone helped me build trust with individuals quickly when I needed to. It is a bit of a ‘guide to sure fire icebreakers’, applicable in any situation. Trust is the number one path to more objective information, especially so when the odds are stacked against you.

📚 The Coaching Habit, by Michael Stanier, is a practical guide to help managers learn how to become better coaches. The principles can be easily embedded in the day-to-day work, without feeling overwhelming.

📚 To learn about the growth mindset, read Mindset, by Carol Dweck. The book is a foundational shift in how we perceive the development of motivation, and skills. It provides practical approaches you can apply every day with your team to increase their performance.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 This is the ‘trust bible’ for business leaders, where Stephen M. R. Covey has built a framework on how to create, restore, and grow trust in teams and organizations. The Speed of Trust, is widely recognized as a landmark work in how leaders help drive success int heir businesses.

📚 A book which helped me is Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people. It truly changed me to my core, helped me build more meaningful relationships with others, inside and outside of work. It also helped me see how to become more humble as a person, something which had tremendously positive effects on my life and opened me up to learn a lot more.

📚 To learn the foundations of Product Management, I recommend reading INSPIRED by Marty Cagan. Marty has been leading the Silicon Valley Product Group for over two decades. His work is foundational for Tech Product Managers – a must read.

📚 The book How to Talk to Anyone helped me build trust with individuals quickly when I needed to. It is a bit of a ‘guide to sure fire icebreakers’, applicable in any situation. Trust is the number one path to more objective information, especially so when the odds are stacked against you.

📚 The Coaching Habit, by Michael Stanier, is a practical guide to help managers learn how to become better coaches. The principles can be easily embedded in the day-to-day work, without feeling overwhelming.

📚 The Harvard Business Review Manager Handbook is an incredibly powerful ‘getting started guide’ for the modern manager. It covers a wide variety of topics, including how to build rapport with teams, how to create highly functioning teams, and how to lead teams.

📚 For effectively giving and receiving feedback, and all teh ‘hacks’ around it, I recommend the book Thanks for the feedback. It introduced me to concepts such as ‘switchtracking’, or why we really hear ourselves differently than everyone else does. Fascinating.