Product People — Lead without Title / Being Boss

If you are in the product management field, I am pretty sure that we all face such situations where we need to influence people/decisions in order to make constructive progress and that it too without much authority.

We need to bring all tech professionals together like QA, UI, UX, Data scientists, software developers, etc, and make sure we follow the right direction and take everyone’s buying to agree on a common direction. It’s not easy, especially without having the right authority. I heard that the product manager is the CEO of the product (I somehow don’t much agree with it)but the major difference over here is, Authority. CEO has full authority and the product manager has None!!!

• ‘telling people what to do’ without formally being authorized to do so is the essential skill of a product manager. You need to guide, mentor, and lead the decision/discussion without being their boss is not easy and can only be done by effective influence.
• The influence will be built with great coordination, working with the team on ground level, developing a deeper understanding of problems, involving yourself in actual needs, respecting everyone’s opinions, making the environment stress-free (open culture), and many more…
• It’s not an overnight process and usually takes a significant amount of time and effort. I would say, it’s a skill that can be learned/groomed/developed and evolve with experience.

Do your job right, and over time people will start to trust you and be influenced by you of their own accord. The best influence comes from a place of earned respect.

• As you grow in your career, you’ll have more people advocating for you, and being in your corner with you. When you have to make those decisions based on instinct, you’ll have people around you to whom you can say “just trust me on this, I have a good feeling about it.”

Here are some of the best ways to begin becoming a more influential Product Manager:

Be Data Driven:

• Numbers don’t lie. (sometimes they do, but that’s a topic for another day! :)) And without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.
• When a conversation happens based on data (historical/forecasted), it makes the conversation more healthy and organized. you’ve come armed with evidence that you know what you’re talking about.
• It gives confidence and felt like your instinct has some base/support.

Open To Listen:

• Be an active listener. You need to create a safe open environment where people feel their ideas can be shared, with no risk of feeling stupid.
• Active listening can mean asking questions, following up on points, or even taking notes. Show your teams that what they tell you has an impact and isn’t just falling on deaf ears.

Increase Knowledge:

• Knowledge is a great power. Develop more and more knowledge base around business, product, competitor, usage pattern, market, industry, etc.
• It will give immense support while taking decisions and making the audience aware of such ideas/plans.

Think — WHY?

• The people you work with are smart, and they’ll want to know the reason why behind all of your decisions. Bring them into the conversation, and help them to understand what drives you. Show them the data, and the research, and explain your reasoning.
• Explaining your ‘why’ is building trust between yourself and your teams. It shows that you respect your teams enough to explain the reasoning behind your decisions, and it opens the door for further communication.

Do Your Best / Lead By Examples:

• Set your bar very high and each time, try your level best to achieve new heights.
• Greatness is infectious. When you are committed to doing great work every single day, everyone in your team is most likely to follow in your footsteps. They’ll look up to you for guidance. They’ll look up to you as an inspiration.
• Do your job right, and over time people will start to trust you and be influenced by you of their own accord.

Be Contributor:

• Don’t just share opinions or orders. Be with the team and work alongside them. Doesn’t matter if that’s only writing up emails with great details or helping them to build the right case study or just reviewing the artifacts. Create some great examples of work so the team will inherit and set the right expectations.

Is Authority NOT needed? Let’s talk sometime later. As You move up the ladder, you’ll naturally gain more authority, but that doesn’t mean you need your influence any less. Whether you choose to continue as an individual contributor or go down the people-management route, your life will be much easier if people believe in you not because they have to, but because they choose to.