Product Managers, Time Machines & The Power of Retrospection
As director of product at Ninjavan, I’ve had the pleasure of building up and leading the Ninja product practice. In my tenure, I’ve had to exercise all sorts of management and leadership muscles some of which I never expected to have to flex so readily and then some muscles I never knew existed in the first place.
It is though, not my first go at the rodeo, having also led a product team in my previous life. Each experience has been so unique that I feel my effectiveness and capabilities as a product leader has compounded positively across time. I often ask my product managers, as a form of reflective exercise,
“What would you have done differently if you could reverse time and do something all over again”
encouraging them to consider deeply the learning lessons in any activity. I find myself often asking the same question, reflecting against my own effectiveness, or lack thereof, as a leader and how I would have done things differently had I found access to some form of a Delorean* machine.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Delorean is the time machine vehicle that Marty McFly used in the film trilogy ‘Back To The Future’ which was popular in the 1990s.
As a PM I wear not only a tactical hat (executing product builds) but also (and probably more often) a strategic and managerial one. Thinking about team structures, considering team commitments, motivations, engagement and the overhead of managing people is now second nature to me. My product team is now maturing, so much so that I have begun the process of designing organizational layers i.e. beginning to have some of my more senior PMs consider building up their own teams.
As my senior team members start to move into these leadership roles I’ve noticed how they sometimes struggle with some of the concepts I’ve mentioned, specifically the mindset shifts required to be an effective leader and manager.
As I considered the means through which I could up-skill my team in this regard, I realized how in many ways I struggled with the same issues as a young upstart manager. It dawned on me that this was my chance to jump into that time machine, to perhaps adjust my trajectory as a young product manager — the only difference would be it wouldn’t be me at the end of that time continuum tunnel, it would be through the lens of my own junior managers.
This blog piece anchors around that concept- essentially what I would have told my younger self in retrospect but in actuality to the junior managers on my team who are looking for that guidance. What I am about to share are some insights into what to bear in mind if you are exactly in this spot — just or about to get into managing product teams.
A quick disclaimer is that my perspectives are biased towards product as a discipline. There are specific nuances about being a product designer or a product manager that makes our job what it is. Considerations such as how we float between functions, wear product owner hats, as well as the nature of the people we have to deal with influences the positions I take and the advice I formulate. Granted, most of what I share can be generalized for any managerial role so take everything with a dose of generalist salt if you are reading this from a non-product angle.
1. Decide on your management brand
“People remember you for how you treated them, not what you achieved”
The first and to me, the most important piece of advice I would have given my younger self is to decide what would be my management brand. What does this really mean?
I think a big mistake commonly made by all managers (people who manage other people) is the lack of an end goal. Just like everything else we do, both at work and in life, it often is most effective when driven by a clear, unambiguous and measurable goal. In that same vein, you should know when getting into a new management role, what success looks like to you.
One way of setting management goals is to consider (as an end goal) what you would like to be remembered by as a leader. The quote above sums it up perfectly, in my many years managing teams, I’m not sure anyone actually remembers or considers what I’ve delivered in terms of projects and products but I believe (hope) that my peers and reports remember me for the type of leader and manager I was through the experiences we had navigated together. This memory of my leadership approach is what I coin as your ‘management brand’. I’ve been blessed to figure this out for myself early in my career. The personal leadership brand I strive to be remembered by is to be a ‘nurturing yet demanding’ leader. This ‘brand goal’ guides and drives how I choose to do things, including the decisions I make and the ethos around which I baseline all my actions.
Your values, inherited by your management brand, form the foundation of every single decision you make. Therefore your ‘personal brand’ should be shaped by your values. Every manager’s style and brand will differ. You have to figure out what works for you i.e. what you would be proud to be remembered as. Once you have it in your head, reflect on your actions or non-actions and question whether it feeds the persona you wish to achieve.
2. Make sure you have cavalry to call on
It doesn’t surprise me that even though I’ve been on this horse for some time, this management stallion bucks me off every once in a while.
Often, I find myself in scenarios that I don’t know what might be the best way to proceed, and in those circumstances, I am thankful that I have built a network of peers, mostly product management leads like myself that I can throw a random question to and get some valuable responses.
As a manager, one of the moments you are assessed as a leader is when faced with questions from your direct reports. Another is when as a team you face a challenging situation, and the team looks to you for resolution. Every so often you find yourself in a bind, tongue-tied and thoughts muted, perhaps because you’ve never been in this situation or when you did, you didn’t pay enough attention to how it was eventually resolved.
Every strong army has a reserve unit, a cavalry unit of knights ready to swoop in and cover your rear end when your plan A seems to be biting the dust. In my world, the unit of cavalry is exactly this support system, a bunch of product leader peers, whom I have built relationships with over the years and whom as a group hold decades of cumulative experiences I can tap on, on demand. In the past year, I’ve reached out to this group several times. Each time because I was in a bind and needed wisdom from this crowd. Each time I’ve asked, I’ve gotten a plethora of responses that I feed off to drive my own decisions. As a junior manager, access to such a group could be invaluable.
If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self to start investing in building this network earlier. I would have told me to take the lead, build those contacts, form those relationships and drive this community of support knowing that it would pay off handsomely in time, as it has proven so many times in my career thus far.
3. Start looking at the bigger picture — think the organizational level
Has a team been assigned to you or are you tasked to build it up?
At Ninjavan, we bless our people with opportunities. Under my charge, as part of my philosophy, I try not to spoon feed my guys. When I task a product manager to a senior management role, I tend to avoid dictating team structures and personnel hires. I like to drop product managers in the deep end, expecting them to find their feet, consider their team structures and execute on the hiring themselves. I guide with an invisible hand. This belief is rooted in my principles that ‘ownership drives excellence’ and is a natural extension of my personal leadership style.
What this means to the new manager is that he or she will need to know how to take the first steps and often this first step is in organizational design. As a product manager or designer who has primarily been an individual contributor for most of his or her working career, this sometimes is a struggle for this new manager. Some managers struggle with this task but in some circumstances, I’ve seen managers take to it like a duck to water.
Designing your team structure sounds straightforward but when attempted, can sometimes throw people off. The ability to elevate your thinking, to consider a bigger goal/objective then translating that to hands and feet on product management and design level can be a challenge. Further complexifying it with considerations of manpower availability, talent asymmetry in the market and sometimes budgetary constraints and quickly it becomes a complex quagmire the new manager gets overwhelmed by.
I’ve found myself many a time needed to guide junior managers through this process and again if I could jump into the Delorean and power back through time, it would be a skill I would have encouraged my younger self to master sooner rather than later. How would I have gotten started? I would have paralleled and shadowed colleagues I knew who held this ability, given their job scopes.
As a junior manager today, this is what I would encourage you to do. Seek out opportunities to learn how organizational design and structure is executed as a discipline. Observe, learn and internalize this skillset and I promise you that you will likely climb that management & corporate ladder so quickly, you will run out of rungs very quickly.
4. People before projects mindset
In my opinion, one of the hallmarks of a great leader is the effectiveness in which he/she empowers their team.
The ability to delegate vs abdicate when running big projects is something that junior managers often struggle with but in my opinion one of the most telling signs of a strong leader.
Seasoned managers understand and realize that building up the capabilities of their team member’s abilities, in the long run, is more powerful and impactful as opposed to constantly focusing on making up for teams’ under deliveries or underperformance.
As a junior manager, you are tasked and accountable for the deliveries and performance of a team of young product professionals (often APMs who are learning their craft). Is your default approach to teach and guide then correct their mistakes before it hits production, or is your approach to allow them the freedom and space to experiment, to try things and allow for failures — building the room for your reports to self-correct and manage the fallout? For most product managers, your instinct would drive you to learn more to the former, again primarily because you have been for the most part of your career — an individual contributor. It makes perfect sense and is a natural position to adopt.
Once again I ask the question of what I would advise my younger self and in this case, I would say “invest in the long play — don’t get caught up in the short term fears”. The fact that you are considered for a managerial role is a testament of your strong performance thus far. Hence, there is no need to focus on impressing the bosses of your own continued performance, instead, your focus should be on ensuring your team’s success which drives yours in the long run, in compounded form. A strong manager who runs an A team, that drives 50X value will always be valued many times over an individual contributor the drives 3x value. So start focusing on your people, invest in the energy and time to build them up.
No longer is the question you ask “How am I performing?” it should now morph into “How is my team performing and am I doing enough to support them”.
5. Collect Good People
My final piece of advice revolves around longevity as a product leader.
Navigating my career as a product leader, I’ve learned to accept that organizations value me for one of two things:
- Ability to build effective and motivated product teams and
- Ability to provide support frameworks, drive product vision and define processes in verticals I might have unique core knowledge in.
As YOU navigate your careers you will soon realize that a big part of your currency as a professional is your book of contacts. Organizations look for individuals who have influence and deep address books. When they bring you on, they expect you either have the reach and influence to draw the right kind of people to your organization and hence make building a solid team a real possibility OR you have a crack squad of product professionals whom you can pull in right off the bat to form this desired team. Both scenarios require you to be well connected.
I’ve learned this to be true in both my current role as well as in my past lives. I’ve also realized that I started late, building networks and meeting people in my domain only in the latter half of my time as a product person.
If I could speak to my younger person, I would tell him to ‘invest in the time and effort to meet like-minded people in your industry and further invest the time to make sure they grow into meaningful relationships for they will pay off one day’. In that same line of thought, my advise to all young managers, is to step outside of your comfort zone, go to events where like-minded professionals are bound to be found and network to death.
Put yourselves out there, follow through with those introductions to build meaningful relationships. I have to remind myself of this mantra on a daily basis. When there are events in my area, I push myself to attend even though the speaker or topic might not interest me, even though it might be late on a Friday evening where I would rather be at home with my wife and kids. I tell myself that even if I meet one solid person who intrigues and interests me, it would be worthwhile in the long run.
My former CEO Mykolas Rambus used to push me in this regard as a young professional, and I thank him for guiding me this way when it mattered. Another one of my former bosses used to claim that his hobby was ‘collecting good people’. I’ve found this to be invaluable advice. Something I wish I could have paid more heed to and driven myself more in the formative years of my career.
I have written this piece in hopes that it benefits young product professionals looking to expand their repertoire, stepping into the realm of people management.
These are my views and in a very large way represents my values. I am extremely proud of where I am today as a leader and as a professional, and I remain excited to see how my leadership and management brand evolves as I take on new challenges across varying industries and organizational structures.
As I sit here typing out this blog, I wonder what my older self, if he traveled through time to visit me now, would have to say. I wonder what advice he would have for me now. For that, we will have to wait a couple more years and hopefully I’ll be able to share then what advice and learnings I have for the next stage of my adventure as a product manager and leader.
Product Managers, Time Machines & The Power of Retrospection
As director of product at Ninjavan, I’ve had the pleasure of building up and leading the Ninja product practice. In my tenure, I’ve had to exercise all sorts of management and leadership muscles some of which I never expected to have to flex so readily and then some muscles I never knew existed in the first place.
It is though, not my first go at the rodeo, having also led a product team in my previous life. Each experience has been so unique that I feel my effectiveness and capabilities as a product leader has compounded positively across time. I often ask my product managers, as a form of reflective exercise,
“What would you have done differently if you could reverse time and do something all over again”
encouraging them to consider deeply the learning lessons in any activity. I find myself often asking the same question, reflecting against my own effectiveness, or lack thereof, as a leader and how I would have done things differently had I found access to some form of a Delorean* machine.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Delorean is the time machine vehicle that Marty McFly used in the film trilogy ‘Back To The Future’ which was popular in the 1990s.
As a PM I wear not only a tactical hat (executing product builds) but also (and probably more often) a strategic and managerial one. Thinking about team structures, considering team commitments, motivations, engagement and the overhead of managing people is now second nature to me. My product team is now maturing, so much so that I have begun the process of designing organizational layers i.e. beginning to have some of my more senior PMs consider building up their own teams.
As my senior team members start to move into these leadership roles I’ve noticed how they sometimes struggle with some of the concepts I’ve mentioned, specifically the mindset shifts required to be an effective leader and manager.
As I considered the means through which I could up-skill my team in this regard, I realized how in many ways I struggled with the same issues as a young upstart manager. It dawned on me that this was my chance to jump into that time machine, to perhaps adjust my trajectory as a young product manager — the only difference would be it wouldn’t be me at the end of that time continuum tunnel, it would be through the lens of my own junior managers.
This blog piece anchors around that concept- essentially what I would have told my younger self in retrospect but in actuality to the junior managers on my team who are looking for that guidance. What I am about to share are some insights into what to bear in mind if you are exactly in this spot — just or about to get into managing product teams.
A quick disclaimer is that my perspectives are biased towards product as a discipline. There are specific nuances about being a product designer or a product manager that makes our job what it is. Considerations such as how we float between functions, wear product owner hats, as well as the nature of the people we have to deal with influences the positions I take and the advice I formulate. Granted, most of what I share can be generalized for any managerial role so take everything with a dose of generalist salt if you are reading this from a non-product angle.
1. Decide on your management brand
“People remember you for how you treated them, not what you achieved”
The first and to me, the most important piece of advice I would have given my younger self is to decide what would be my management brand. What does this really mean?
I think a big mistake commonly made by all managers (people who manage other people) is the lack of an end goal. Just like everything else we do, both at work and in life, it often is most effective when driven by a clear, unambiguous and measurable goal. In that same vein, you should know when getting into a new management role, what success looks like to you.
One way of setting management goals is to consider (as an end goal) what you would like to be remembered by as a leader. The quote above sums it up perfectly, in my many years managing teams, I’m not sure anyone actually remembers or considers what I’ve delivered in terms of projects and products but I believe (hope) that my peers and reports remember me for the type of leader and manager I was through the experiences we had navigated together. This memory of my leadership approach is what I coin as your ‘management brand’. I’ve been blessed to figure this out for myself early in my career. The personal leadership brand I strive to be remembered by is to be a ‘nurturing yet demanding’ leader. This ‘brand goal’ guides and drives how I choose to do things, including the decisions I make and the ethos around which I baseline all my actions.
Your values, inherited by your management brand, form the foundation of every single decision you make. Therefore your ‘personal brand’ should be shaped by your values. Every manager’s style and brand will differ. You have to figure out what works for you i.e. what you would be proud to be remembered as. Once you have it in your head, reflect on your actions or non-actions and question whether it feeds the persona you wish to achieve.
2. Make sure you have cavalry to call on
It doesn’t surprise me that even though I've been on this horse for some time, this management stallion bucks me off every once in a while.
Often, I find myself in scenarios that I don’t know what might be the best way to proceed, and in those circumstances, I am thankful that I have built a network of peers, mostly product management leads like myself that I can throw a random question to and get some valuable responses.
As a manager, one of the moments you are assessed as a leader is when faced with questions from your direct reports. Another is when as a team you face a challenging situation, and the team looks to you for resolution. Every so often you find yourself in a bind, tongue-tied and thoughts muted, perhaps because you’ve never been in this situation or when you did, you didn’t pay enough attention to how it was eventually resolved.
Every strong army has a reserve unit, a cavalry unit of knights ready to swoop in and cover your rear end when your plan A seems to be biting the dust. In my world, the unit of cavalry is exactly this support system, a bunch of product leader peers, whom I have built relationships with over the years and whom as a group hold decades of cumulative experiences I can tap on, on demand. In the past year, I’ve reached out to this group several times. Each time because I was in a bind and needed wisdom from this crowd. Each time I’ve asked, I’ve gotten a plethora of responses that I feed off to drive my own decisions. As a junior manager, access to such a group could be invaluable.
If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self to start investing in building this network earlier. I would have told me to take the lead, build those contacts, form those relationships and drive this community of support knowing that it would pay off handsomely in time, as it has proven so many times in my career thus far.
3. Start looking at the bigger picture — think the organizational level
Has a team been assigned to you or are you tasked to build it up?
At Ninjavan, we bless our people with opportunities. Under my charge, as part of my philosophy, I try not to spoon feed my guys. When I task a product manager to a senior management role, I tend to avoid dictating team structures and personnel hires. I like to drop product managers in the deep end, expecting them to find their feet, consider their team structures and execute on the hiring themselves. I guide with an invisible hand. This belief is rooted in my principles that ‘ownership drives excellence’ and is a natural extension of my personal leadership style.
What this means to the new manager is that he or she will need to know how to take the first steps and often this first step is in organizational design. As a product manager or designer who has primarily been an individual contributor for most of his or her working career, this sometimes is a struggle for this new manager. Some managers struggle with this task but in some circumstances, I’ve seen managers take to it like a duck to water.
Designing your team structure sounds straightforward but when attempted, can sometimes throw people off. The ability to elevate your thinking, to consider a bigger goal/objective then translating that to hands and feet on product management and design level can be a challenge. Further complexifying it with considerations of manpower availability, talent asymmetry in the market and sometimes budgetary constraints and quickly it becomes a complex quagmire the new manager gets overwhelmed by.
I’ve found myself many a time needed to guide junior managers through this process and again if I could jump into the Delorean and power back through time, it would be a skill I would have encouraged my younger self to master sooner rather than later. How would I have gotten started? I would have paralleled and shadowed colleagues I knew who held this ability, given their job scopes.
As a junior manager today, this is what I would encourage you to do. Seek out opportunities to learn how organizational design and structure is executed as a discipline. Observe, learn and internalize this skillset and I promise you that you will likely climb that management & corporate ladder so quickly, you will run out of rungs very quickly.
4. People before projects mindset
In my opinion one of the hallmarks of a great leader is the effectiveness in which he/she empowers their team.
The ability to delegate vs abdicate when running big projects is something that junior managers often struggle with but in my opinion one of the most telling signs of a strong leader.
Seasoned managers understand and realize that building up the capabilities of their team member’s abilities, in the long run, is more powerful and impactful as opposed to constantly focusing on making up for teams’ under deliveries or underperformance.
As a junior manager, you are tasked and accountable for the deliveries and performance of a team of young product professionals (often APMs who are learning their craft). Is your default approach to teach and guide then correct their mistakes before it hits production, or is your approach to allow them the freedom and space to experiment, to try things and allow for failures — building the room for your reports to self-correct and manage the fallout? For most product managers, your instinct would drive you to learn more to the former, again primarily because you have been for the most part of your career — an individual contributor. It makes perfect sense and is a natural position to adopt.
Once again I ask the question of what I would advise my younger self and in this case, I would say “invest in the long play — don’t get caught up in the short term fears”. The fact that you are considered for a managerial role is a testament of your strong performance thus far. Hence, there is no need to focus on impressing the bosses of your own continued performance, instead, your focus should be on ensuring your team's success which drives yours in the long run, in compounded form. A strong manager who runs an A team, that drives 50X value will always be valued many times over an individual contributor the drives 3x value. So start focusing on your people, invest in the energy and time to build them up.
No longer is the question you ask “How am I performing?” it should now morph into “How is my team performing and am I doing enough to support them”.
5. Collect Good People
My final piece of advice revolves around longevity as a product leader.
Navigating my career as a product leader, I’ve learned to accept that organizations value me for one of two things:
- Ability to build effective and motivated product teams and
- Ability to provide support frameworks, drive product vision and define processes in verticals I might have unique core knowledge in.
As YOU navigate your careers you will soon realize that a big part of your currency as a professional is your book of contacts. Organizations look for individuals who have influence and deep address books. When they bring you on, they expect you either have the reach and influence to draw the right kind of people to your organization and hence make building a solid team a real possibility OR you have a crack squad of product professionals whom you can pull in right off the bat to form this desired team. Both scenarios require you to be well connected.
I’ve learned this to be true in both my current role as well as in my past lives. I’ve also realized that I started late, building networks and meeting people in my domain only in the latter half of my time as a product person.
If I could speak to my younger person, I would tell him to ‘invest in the time and effort to meet like-minded people in your industry and further invest the time to make sure they grow into meaningful relationships for they will pay off one day’. In that same line of thought, my advise to all young managers, is to step outside of your comfort zone, go to events where like-minded professionals are bound to be found and network to death.
Put yourselves out there, follow through with those introductions to build meaningful relationships. I have to remind myself of this mantra on a daily basis. When there are events in my area, I push myself to attend even though the speaker or topic might not interest me, even though it might be late on a Friday evening where I would rather be at home with my wife and kids. I tell myself that even if I meet one solid person who intrigues and interests me, it would be worthwhile in the long run.
My former CEO Mykolas Rambus used to push me in this regard as a young professional, and I thank him for guiding me this way when it mattered. Another one of my former bosses used to claim that his hobby was ‘collecting good people’. I’ve found this to be invaluable advice. Something I wish I could have paid more heed to and driven myself more in the formative years of my career.
I have written this piece in hopes that it benefits young product professionals looking to expand their repertoire, stepping into the realm of people management.
These are my views and in a very large way represents my values. I am extremely proud of where I am today as a leader and as a professional and I remain excited to see how my own leadership and management brand evolves as I take on new challenges across varying industries and organizational structures.
As I sit here typing out this blog, I wonder what my older self, if he traveled through time to visit me now, would have to say. I wonder what advice he would have for me now. For that, we will have to wait a couple more years and hopefully I’ll be able to share then what advice and learnings I have for the next stage of my adventure as a product manager and leader.
