Product Management: 3 Tactics for Exerting Stronger Influence & Leadership

1. Get Out Of The Building

So you're an expert on your product. Terrific! So are the engineers who built it - making your value marginal. 

The bottom line is this:  if you spend the vast majority of your time entangled in products, your perspective on everything becomes product centric, a clear disconnect with the real world.  So get out of the building and put yourself in situations where you're learning about the business of your target customers and the market dynamics driving their businesses.  This knowledge will give you the credibility and respect necessary to drive key product and market decisions.

2. Get Out Of The Building

Remember the catch-phrase "you are what you eat?" A slight variation applies to product management - you are what you do. So if you spend the majority of your time down in the product weeds, you'll never be more than a product expert, and treated accordingly.

Get out of the building and improve your market and business domain expertise beyond anything present elsewhere in the organization.  The perspective that sales, services, support and individual customers bring to the table only represents a small slice of the real world.  Product management has to be the conscience of the organization with a bigger picture perspective so that product direction is constantly aligned with broader market needs.  It's much easier to influence others to your way of thinking when you've done your homework more thoroughly. 

3. Get Out Of The Building

Expand your vocabulary beyond product talk and learn another language. If product management is supposed to represent the voice of the market, it needs to speak the same language. Who else is going to help sales, marketing, services and operations align with those who have your future revenue in their pockets?

The moral of the story is this:  Strong product management teams and great product managers are just as business savvy as they are product savvy.  Product managers need to know their products, but not so well that they mortgage their own ability to influence the future direction of those products.  After all, products are your lifeblood, but the only way they will continue to generate revenue is if product management can understand and articulate (to the rest of the organization) why the market needs them.

If your product management team is out of balance, sign them up for Product Management University where they'll learn simple tactics for understanding the bigger picture and transforming that expertise into execution to deliver market-leading products.

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