How To Succeed In Product Management | Jeffrey Shulman, Red Russak & Soumeya Benghanem 14: The Unpredictability of Managing Product Managers
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcome Aaron Bowen (Qualtrics) and Jake Wallack (Axon) to talk about managing product managers in an organization. The most effective way to do this is to trust your team, allow them to solve problems and make decisions as you guide them through structures that give them the opportunity to perform and deliver.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:41 Managing product managers
- 11:49 Be able to leave an organization and the decision-making quality should still be there
- 13:36 Start with the customer, learn from them, and use the information to make a decision
- 14:53 Your process and approach should be distilled down to the essence but not overly restrictive
- 19:48 Managers of PMs function as general managers
- 21:40 Be a ruthless prioritizer for your product and customer
- 25:13 The emotional - intelligence framework
- 29:15 What’s going to help a person grow as a PM?
- 33:45 Help shape the person to continue to deliver then hire and develop the right people
- 35:35 Organizational design is about everyone working together
- 37:46 Leaders should never tell high qualified members exactly what to do
- 39:40 It should be based on trust and your people making the decisions
- 41:52 PM skill: effective communication
- 42:25 PM skill: culture
- 43:32 PM skill: be able to take feedback
- 44:44 PM skill: navigate organizational politics
- 46:07 PM skill: vision
- 47:55 Habits of highly effective product managers
- 52:48 Make sure that everyone in your team are successful in what they’re doing
- 56:24 Motivate with accountability, get out of the way, and trust your PMs
- 57:26 Great PMs create structure for other people to operate off of