Regardless of the nature of the products, I wouldn’t argue that technical skills, business management and leadership are the three pillars of shaping a proficient product manager. Depending on your education background and work experience, your technical capabilities may overweigh the other two aspects if working in a highly technical-competitive environment whereas the people skills and leadership will be significantly practiced if you work with a cross-functional team or you need to oversee a group of junior product managers. Having worked in product management for almost 4 years, there is no doubt that my technical knowledge, my interpersonal skills and business domain knowledge were developed and maintained. Consisting of 7 people, my product team went through the forming, storming and norming phases and now each one works as an expert in his domains (within my product only) towards the product vision. It took 18 months to form such a high-performing team, with trust, transparency and even a strong emotional bond built in. I didn’t recall if I ever cultivated my leadership skills in this process as everyone tends to be self-organised, self-managed, result-driven with domain expertise. In other words, I would rather say that I have some sort of “servant” leadership style as I mainly provide support to facilitate their personal development and I think this type of leadership works well in the Agile development process, at least in my product delivery.
My perception about my “servant” leadership style was broken down two weeks ago when I started a brand new project with a new team, again a cross-functional team of 4 colleagues with whom I never met or spoke before. We were supposed to secure a deal with a new client upon the successful completion of a two-week trial. The goal of the trial is to diagnose the current product and propose a new solution based on evaluation results. Despite the client being impressed by all results we have presented and delivered at the end of the trial, more importantly, the day-to-day work, collaboration and team interaction triggered my thoughts about “re-positioning” my leadership style and how to build a high performing team in a short period.
1. Understand the current situation and set up the goals
I wasn’t identified as the project lead at the beginning as we didn’t know each other’s role until we had the kick-off meeting with the client, who talked about his expectation and the issues to be addressed at the end of the trial. Prior to commencing with the work, we had an exploratory discussion internally to share our thoughts on the client’s initial talk in kick-off, clarify a few things from product, design, technical and business perspectives and set up the objectives both personally and a team as a whole. Followed by confirming the expected deliverables, everyone is aligned on what success looks like. Considering the skillsets required in this trial, I was appointed as a product manager role instead of a marketing specialist.
2. Get to know each other by open and honest communication as well as informal talks
Getting a general view of the explicit knowledge and capabilities in two weeks wasn’t too challenging to me as everyone’s domain expertise and performance can be evaluated in daily stand-up, progress review and day-to-day deliverables. In addition to supporting them in creating high-quality outputs, the tacit knowledge, such as their work style, preferred way of communication and their traits also play an essential part if we want to achieve a great outcome in two-week time. My approach is to hold several one-on-one talks with each of them to get to know their background, the project experience, their typical workday, their career interests and the ideal teamwork scenario they would envisage. I believe that by fostering open communication and leveraging the informal talks, the team shall engage in honest feedback, creative thinking, active and reflective listening so that the trust and confidence can be gradually built up.
3. Delegate but keep an eye on the big picture
One of the challenges faced by the team is to get familiar with the client’s product, along with the business environment and identify stakeholders with interests against power quickly in order to define our solution scope and solution requirements. Given the language barrier between the team and the client and the time constraints, neither the team was able to communicate effectively, nor can they research on the client’s business and product. In order not to delay the work, I decided to step in to complete the business analysis first. In the past, I would probably start defining the solution scope right after and carry on the rest until I came up with the whole solution plan. This time, I would rather delegate the work to my team and let them define, finalise and own the solution. Helping them reach a level of independence by assigning responsibilities (not tasks) and providing feedback makes them accountable for the project and feel supported in reaching the goal. While monitoring the progress, facilitating discussion and offering feedback, let the team decide the action to take whenever an issue or an opportunity arises.
4. Be decisive
To avoid inappropriate decisions, it’s important to always obtain the team’s view and other project key stakeholders’ feedback. However, when it comes to delivering results and meeting objectives, be precise and decisive, even though you are still steering a new team. Needless to say, this should be based on your expert judgment on the project situation as well as your understanding of the client’s and team’s best interests. As you are still responsible for the success or failure of a project and the team, it’s necessary to establish your decision-making framework.
Originally published at http://chrissylovesmarketing.com on November 27, 2021.
