Stepping into a people and product leadership role is a significant career transition. Unlike your early days of being a PM individual contributor (IC), you are now responsible for more products or an expanded product line, and to the people who perform the front line PM roles you used to have. As you grow, you may even manage additional managers with teams of their own. Not only is the job larger and different, most managers are untrained in people management. In my ~25 year career in technology, I have found that there is a dirty secret in tech companies. Next to no tech companies actually teach management as a professional career skill. For what it’s worth, MBA schools don’t really teach it either, but they try. They include classes on teamwork, leadership foundations, and communications. The challenge is that you must do it to get better at it. You can’t just learn management without the experience.

While leading in a product organization, you are still a PM in every sense, but now you must also manage others too. Over time the proportion of time you spend leading people and ideas will increase while the amount of time spent directly contributing to hands-on product evolution will decrease. I.e. In time you won’t write feature level requirements anymore. For a while you will read them and help improve them with feedback. As you grow, however, you will need to ensure you train your team and your managers on the skills to be an excellent PM. As a people leader your principal product is your team. As a PM leader, however, you still need to ensure the product meets customer and company needs too. To help illuminate the progression, a PM of 2 years experience will not be setting the company strategic product direction, and a chief product officer won’t be writing individual feature PRDs. The transition from one role to the other is slow and built year by year with increasing responsibilities and experience.

What I personally feel is critical in a PM leadership role is the formation, distillation, and broad dissemination of product ideas. All PMs think about their product and customers. Fewer widely share their thinking and vision to show thought leadership for consumption, examination, and challenge however. As a leader of a PM organization or even a single team, you must step out in front to lead by sharing your product vision and exposing it to criticism.

Taking a step forward to write down and share your vision for your PM organization is inherently risky. Your CEO, your manager, your peers, your reports will ask you questions about it and challenge your thinking. This may happen on a reply-all thread or in a meeting and it might be uncomfortable. Leading means taking the risk to be visible. You can’t lead with personal emotional safety as your first priority.

In case you’re worried about making your ideas public, let me assure you, you will take the slings and arrows of the crowd. I.e. Leading is a contact sport and you will not escape the critiques and examination of others. People can be unruly and you need to know this going in and manage the feedback without malice. Some are simply armchair critics who won’t step forward themselves. It is your job to get out in front and lead your organization. Taking arrows and sharp feedback is part of the process. Even the CEOs of the most successful companies get roundly criticized internally and externally on a regular basis.

Defining product vision and strategy is not for the faint of heart. Your ideas won’t flourish in a vacuum. In the face of feedback, the ideas themselves will develop with peer inspection and revision. For this reason, sharing early thoughts and drafts can also help. Just as you would speak to multiple customers on a product feature, multiple points of view from various stakeholders will inform and shape the end result. This is also a good way to give your team and peers input and involve them in the process. Ultimately as a leader, you’ll find that your team desires clear thinking and direction which they understand and be motivated from.

Fortunately there are many ways to share your ideas. Given the nature of product futures and planning, these will usually be internal to your company. Emails to your organization, presentations, open documents, or internal public speaking are all methods. Publicly you can blog or speak at a trade show. Ultimately, writing helps you form and sharpen your ideas, and sharing helps others understand what you think and believe. Not only will you become a better leader, you will build resilience to the early discomfort you may experience as you put your foot forward.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.