Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager by Bavaro Jackie & McDowell Gayle

Author:Bavaro, Jackie & McDowell, Gayle [Bavaro, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CareerCup LLC
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

The relationship between PMs and executives is parallel in many ways to the relationship between engineers and PMs. In both cases, one person has broader context, while the other person is closer to the work and getting things done. If you imagine how you'd like engineers to work with you, a lot of that will apply to you working with executives. 4

Work for founders and executives that you respect

Founders and executives shape the culture and direction of a company.

If you don't believe in them or are not aligned with their approaches, you'll be fighting an uphill battle. You might be protected for a while if you have an excellent manager, but you'll be at risk if that manager leaves or is blocked by the people above them. It's unlikely that you'll see a lot of career advancement, and it probably will not be worth the emotional stress.

A particularly important example of this is with the head of product (or with the founders if you're the head of product) at a startup. Many PMs are caught by surprise at how involved the head of product can be with every design decision. If you fundamentally respect them, this can be handled with some discussion, gentle nudging, and letting them think that things were their idea. If you don't respect them, it will be infuriating and you might hit a stalemate.

Seek to understand

It's surprisingly common for people to brush off ideas from executives. They might assume that the executive is out of touch with reality or too attached to their own ideas. Sometimes, the PM will claim that the executives don't understand product best practices.

Even if there are elements of truth to those thoughts, you're doing yourself a disservice if you think of your executives as pointless obstacles in your way. Their ideas might seem strange, but that's often because they're viewing things from a much larger perspective than you are. Even when their ideas aren't directly relevant to the work at hand, it's often a valuable insight into the bigger picture.

Understanding an exec

Noah Weiss, VP of Product at Slack, had worked with his team to come up with a massive end-to-end overhaul of the customer experience that touched the home page, product positioning, team creation screens and onboarding flows. He warned the CEO, Stewart Butterfield, that this ambitious plan would take time: "We're not going to see results as quickly with this plan. The curve is not going to bend as quickly."

Butterfield replied enigmatically: "You're thinking about it backwards. If you bend the culture curve, the growth curve will follow."

Weiss wasn't sure what that meant, but the meeting was over so he put it aside. Maybe it just sounded profound but wasn't.

Then, the next morning, Weiss had an "aha" moment and understood what Butterfield had meant! To take on a project of this size, he'd have to change the whole culture of how they build product. "If we didn't change the culture, we couldn't take on this bet. And if we couldn't take on this bet, we certainly couldn't hit our growth goal at the end of the year.

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