Part 1: The job of a product manager is to convince others
I’m writing a three-part series around the importance of convincing others as a product manager. While diving into this topic, I’ll also explore the difference of being a written versus visual communicator and review Gamma, a new business communication tool I’ve enjoyed using.
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Part 1: The job of a product manager is to convince others
Part 2: Being a visual versus written communicator
Part 3: Product review of Gamma
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Reading time: 7 minutes
Topic: Communication
Have you ever been in a situation where you had to convince your manager, an investor or a CEO that you should invest in a 0→1 product launch instead of building out an existing product? Have you ever had to convince multiple stakeholders who had drastically different objectives to just focus on a single goal to ship an MVP and get customer feedback?
Communications is about imparting information and an opinion to an audience. As a product leader, having strong communications skills is important. Being able to persuade an audience of a strong opinion or a direction to take can literally make or break a company.
Most people assume the worst that can happen is making the wrong decision. However, there are many more other things that can go wrong as a product manager when influencing others. I’ve stack ranked in order of severity what I think can go wrong with decision making
Getting stuck in gridlock and not making any decision
Making a decision at the wrong level
Making the wrong decision
#1. Stagnation is the worst because as a company, you’re not getting any feedback on whether what you built solved a real customer problem. Stagnation is the enemy of company growth.
#2. As a product manager, you’re guiding them on what is the most important decision to focus on, what decisions don’t matter. I would say there’s higher leverage making a decision on design principles that guides the design process rather than giving feedback on a specific design mock-up
The product manager isn’t anyone’s manager but a peer to all the people who they are trying to convince, and they need to convince with humility and persuasive data & research. Influential communication is even more critical as you get promoted to be a manager of PMs or into executive roles.
When people say that product managers are a multiplier, it’s largely due to this influential communication. Your scope of influence is quite large and you can either convince a dozen people to get behind a single objective or you might be held in gridlock purgatory wondering why you ever signed yourself up for this project. In fact, it’s a skill that PMs continue to have to refine, no matter what level you find yourself at.
Communicating an opinion and persuading others about your opinion can be done through telling a story. I’m going to focus more of my time on getting a better understanding of what format does “convincing” take at your company rather than on how to appear more convincing (though do let me know if you’d like me to dive into it!).
As a product manager, I spend all day convincing others. I might be convincing the executive team to sunset a product where maintenance cost isn’t justified, I might convince an engineering manager on the engineering investment and impact for a one-way technical architectural decision, or I might be convincing an engineer to scope down a feature.
I would say this is the hardest skill to measure from a product manager because there is no direct tie to user metrics or business outcomes, it’s purely a binary question for a single decision of: “Were you able to convince this person on this decision?” This is critical to point out, as we have started to see more P&L tied to product managers and a clear revenue target assigned to the product function.
So what goes into convincing others?
There are a few factors that contribute whether it’s straightforward to convince an audience:
Trust (high versus low)
Number of decision makers (small to large)
Trust
You might be in a low trust environment or high trust environment. It’ll be obvious to you in which environment you’ve been placed, because coworkers will either start by understanding the opinion you have or question it immediately.
A lack of trust can be exhibited in multiple ways:
A coworker questioning your rationale behind closed doors, instead of coming directly to you
Needing to have multiple meetings to rehash the same arguments without an ability to get to a decision
A direct conversation where someone will actively discount your thought process
If you feel like there’s a lack of trust, you’re most likely right.
There are multiple variables that might lead to a lack of trust within an organization:
You’ve just started working together and/or you are new to the organization: people don’t know who you are and don’t believe you have the context to make the right decision.
The best thing to do here is bring an ally who has more history at the company and support your decision publicly
The functions have historical bad blood: There might be some historical context where product management and another haven’t gotten along or where there was clear strife and there’s an identity issue where teams struggle to get along, potentially due to scope ambiguity or different styles.
The best thing to do here is have a cross team project where both teams are accountable for the outcomes, and the CEO holds both function leaders accountable
Teams speak in different languages and there’s a lack of translation. While one team might be more convinced by numbers, the other team makes decision based on customer research, however, you haven’t realized that. One team might communicate through written documents, another through visual slides.
The best is to understand what language the team speaks. If you’re working with a product marketing team, how can you translate why you’ve prioritized a specific product based on the leads it creates and the potential revenue it supports?
Group of decision makers
If you’re in a small start-up with 10 people, decision making is easier:
In a small start-up, there are so many decisions to be made: How to price a product, what kind of marketing initiatives should exist, which customers to talk to for user research, which feature to build next. Turns out there are too many decisions to make that most likely there’s just a lower probability of people fighting over the same domain of decision making power.
On the flip side, as teams are so small, if there is a joint decision that needs to be made, it’s easy because there’s only max 10 people you might need to convince. If you’re in person, all it takes is tapping someone on the shoulder and sharing your thoughts
Challenges become bigger as your start-up grows or if you’re already at a large tech company with hundreds, or even thousands of people. The minute the circle of influence you need to manage grows, the importance of influential communication becomes critical.
I’ve had to manage and convince a group of 50 people when I built out our first international payments product at Brex, which spanned legal counsel, partnerships, marketing, executive team and other product teams. Not only is it challenging to keep into account people’s various opinions, but also each function has a different objective, I have to speak in a different language for each team that I worked with.
When thinking about how straightforward it will be to take to convince your company on a decision, think about those two things?
How much trust have you built up with critical stakeholders?
How big of a group of decision makers do you need to convince?
For the rest of this three-part series, I’d like to focus on where teams speak in different languages and how to improve your business communication based on how the company communicates.
In the next part, we’ll talk about the advantages and disadvantages of written versus visual communication. The last part, we will review an interesting recent business communication tool, Gamma.