Your #1 job as a PM 🏅

I came to reflect a lot over the years what the #1 skill is that I need to truly master. There are a lot of things that flood my day, most of them I hear or see for the first time. So it takes some time until patterns emerge.

In the initial years of my career, I focused hard on the basic toolset: planning, OKRs, PRDs, crafting good product decks, making it through tough review meetings, understanding the details, becoming an expert in the field I was workin in. What I didn’t quite understand tho was what was lying outside of the walls of concrete, learnable and observable skills.

At the time I used to always wonder: What would ultimately glue the pieces together, and make me stand out over other folks? How could I shine but not in an annoying way?

My initial hypotheses was dead wrong. I thought I shine by having the right answers. This might be to do with the imposter syndrome we all go through as PMs I believe. Or because of how I thought the world works. I grew up, and got rewarded for, knowing things, and knowing them well. This is all well and good, but I didn’t get how annoying this came across often. It took a lot of work, and a lot of conversations with people who knew that deep down I wasn’t motivated by making people feel stupid. I was unaware, and truly believed this was a viable path for me. But most of all: I always signaled that I was willing to learn.

During this time, a lot happened, and one patter started to emerge that to this day is what I consider the most relevant skill as a PM: it is to make people want to work with you, on the specific problem, and – most importantly – with each other. Achieving these things is always hard, and sometimes impossible. If all you get is a ‘assignment’ participation, you are going to get mediocre output at best. If you manage to get people excited, then you are on a winning track.

Make people want to work on a specific problem

I remember when we built this feature in Ads for causal testing. I was so proud of it, and it was the project I relocated to the US for. It was my life, for a while. We wanted to integrate a capability from Google Drive, to make it easier for customers to directly connect Google drive sheets with relevant data through the tool. Uploading CSV files was possible, but clunky. We knew this would make a big difference. So I traveled to meet with the GDrive folks in Boulder, Colorado. During the meeting I had two options: to share what we needed, the technical details as I understood them, and ask for their help in executing this. It probably would have worked. They were an exceptionally kind group.

But instead, I started by telling them what we do with the feature. That we are scaling causal measurement – the holy grail in Ads measurement – to Google’s top customers. That they are so invested in this, and that they are beyond excited to get a more self-service version of it into their hands. I could see how the eyes would light up in the room. This went from a ‘snooze’ feature-request meeting, to a meeting where engineers worked on something that touched the biggest customers of Google.

It didn’t occur to me then how big this idea really was. I felt truly passionate in this moment, this wasn’t a strategic move. I spoke from the heart, with my honest excitement. And I think this is important to remember. However, even if you expose to the team a less passionate version of a story, make the story about where the ship is going, and the impact the team will realize once things fall in place. Even if this gets delivered in a more ‘standard’ way, I still believe it has the power to move more hearts and minds than talking about the tactics.

Make people want to work with each other

This is the key thing, and I believe people in creative thinking jobs need to always make the decision. There simply is no: I need you to do this now and I don’t care what you think. So how can we make teams not just execute, but start caring about each other as well?

In my experience, it is to be humble, and start with respect. You got to find out who you are talking to, and what they care about. And then, you need to find a way to make people understand that they are actually similar to the folks around them. I like to have a team meeting, where we can be a bit social, talk about how everyone is doing. You know when there is trust when people share stories of their pets, or their loved ones.

I also find it wise to invest some time 1:1 and understand who a person is, so that you can calibrate the team approach toward those aspects. This isn’t a form of ‘profiling’, but to find out what aspects are unifying you and the other person, and what the persons values and interests are. In times where we spend most of our interactions in Zoom, this is even more critical. We simply don’t bump into each other at the watercooler, and find out that the other person also loves hiking and just got back from a nice hike I did 2 years ago as well.

So how do I really make people want to work with one another? Well, ideally sharing the common cause and making it easy for them (but explicit) that they want to work on it. In some ways, I try and collect a signal that they are up for this task, and that they understand the commitment I anticipate it will need. That is how I select the working group. It is a commitment not to do the work at all cost, but a commitment to be honest with the rest of the team about how one fells about the tasks at hand, their status, their risks, and the overall goal we are working toward. I consider this right in line with the basic respect I owe to everyone working on something that is a tough problem.

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.

📚 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.

📚 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 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.