When you think about execution as a Product Manager, you may think about series of steps, let’s take one type as an example:
-finding which problem to solve
-prioritizing this problem over other problems
-gathering resources and stakeholders
-moving through bottlenecks
-till one day, a part of the product is launched/executed
-track for feedback and improvements
And, when you move into people management or leadership roles and manage multiple product teams, each of your product teams is doing above steps in some shape or form - their own adaptations of it.
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You could imagine each of your product team as an important organ of your product area. Each organ is doing its own series of steps, and since every organ has its own goal - none of them are fully right or wrong in their approach - they do what they need to do. They adopt best practices as it suits them (also made popular in Spotify models where teams learn from each other’s ways of working and tools rather than standardize them across all teams)
So, the heart pumps blood. While the liver does metabolism. You cannot ask the liver to follow the steps to pump blood, but they follow some common principles - example both employ feedback loops, where the output of a process influences its own input, maintaining homeostasis within the organ and the body as a whole.
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Your leadership role is then to manage and thrive this organism (collection of organs that allow the organism to thrive), and not necessarily each organ. Or in simple terms, you start managing a “product area” and not “product team”.
Such a fundamental change in your responsibilities often gets reflected early in your role - from the kind of questions you need to ask.
A Product Manager would say “What can I do to unblock my team due to friction from a certain stakeholder” , whereas a Product Leader would ask “What broad alignments do I need with all stakeholders that my Product Managers get stuck the least possible times?”
You go from caring for “components” to caring for the “systems-in-place”, supported by right behaviors and incentives. Because without behaviors, systems are inconsistent and without incentives, systems don’t sustain.
Execution ability of your teams is then the result of which systems, behaviors and incentives you (with your team) have put in place. These are the three pillars on which product area execution depends upon. Let us go into each one by one:
I define system as a structure and set of processes that enable smooth information flow, collaboration, and decision-making.
First and fore-most, you cannot have a perfect system in place. More often than not, I have ended up reaching a Work-in-progress but stable system for my product teams to operate in.
To reach this state, you need to analyze five key elements and start with the element where you see quickest intervention possible and get some wins early on, while continuing to tackle the hard ones over a period of time.
The first one is Vision and Strategy:
Do the teams know where is the ship going and how do we go there?
You can also learn more how to view strategy in context of an organization (What Stanford teaches about Product Strategy). But essentially, you as Product Leader need to invest extraordinary time to make sure teams to know what’s our destination (Vision) and how do we get there (Strategy).
Next, you cannot expect your teams to make use of a good Vision and Strategy if you do not allow them a great playing field where they can explore and thrive i.e an empowered environment. This is not just a Product-Design-Tech empowered trifecta, but more cross-functional wide where all interdependent stakeholders feel comfort with product teams and together feel excited to work on the most meaningful problem.
While working on first two elements, it is essential to see which processes (supported by certain tools) need to be in place to put discipline to the madness. The process could simply be about how prioritization happens across multiple teams - which factors need to be included and what needs to happen when teams are feeding on conflicting resources.
While putting the system in place, it is essential to make sure that teams have good access to data and insights (both market and customer) and that it is actionable. Otherwise, the empowered teams will end up working on un-informed hypothesis and may end up solving the wrong problems.
Lastly, collaboration is key. But this is not your “let’s get everyone together and set common goals” collaboration - this is the hard part. This means working through the politics, conflicting incentives, tough de-prioritizations and more. Your product teams can figure out the usual collaboration challenges, but you as their leader is expected to resolve more systemic collaboration challenges that is not visible to a single product team.
Overall, for you to put systems in place, you should look into each of these 5 elements to ensure product execution is not stuck often and randomly but more structured and with feedback loops.
Do you have more to add? Don’t forget to leave a comment:
