As a leader, you should be critically concerned about where ideas come from and how they go from insights to actions. This process of value creation is fundamental to a firm's growth and at its core it is a very organic process.
While the technique or reaching agreement with your stakeholders one by one ahead of formal approval might seem a bit like playing politics, I prefer to view it as covering the bases. Leaders invest in people they trust and have a sense for, and the ceremony of a group meeting is the wrong place to try and build your trust and credibility.
As a Product Manager/Marketer, the more time you spend in the office, the less intelligent you become every day about the real situation of your offerings and your clients. You cannot build relationships, gain critical insights and frankly, grow as a professional from your office or cubicle chair. As important as all of your internal tasks are, you cannot create value for your firm by cloistering yourself in endless meetings and only gaining critical market context on the other end of a telephone.
Thanks to a good friend and the person I credit with the creation of the "Why is a Product Manager Like the Office Photocopier?" joke, I recently unearthed a listing of questions that we had established with the PM team to help teach and remind everyone of the True Role of a Product Manager.
Product Managers are often improperly saddled with blame for everything that’s wrong in the organization and a fair amount of what’s wrong in the world. Poor quality, revenue shortfalls, lack of leads, poor visibility, competitive encroachment, poor support, schedule delays and process deficiencies are just a few of the items that I’ve known Product Managers to be tagged with in the course of carrying out their jobs. Pretty much everything but responsibility for the Lindbergh kidnapping, and I’m sure someone tried to pin that one on an unwitting Product Manager at some point in time.
The relationship between the Product Manager (or PM team) and the Sales force is one that is filled with great potential for all parties and also prone to frequent misuse or abuse. Frankly, it is a complicated relationship that should be governed by some shared rules of engagement and some good commonsense about when to throw the rules out in support of getting the job done.
y posting, The Product Manager as MVP, offered my perspective on the potential for the professional in this role to have a material impact on a firm's success. I truly believe in the power of this function to shape firms, and for individuals and teams of Product Managers to serve valuable formal and informal leadership roles in organizations. I've also seen some remarkable wholesale failures in Product Management—at the team and individual levels. Truthfully, these failures often have their root causes at the top of the team or even elsewhere in the leadership or organizational design structure. Nonetheless, the symptoms become visible in Product Management. While we all love studying and reading about best practices and successes, in my experience, most of the best lessons come from studying the train-wrecks. Consider these as cautionary tales.
Few roles in B2B and technology organizations carry loftier expectations or face more challenging tasks than that of the Product Manager. This position tends to be backed by a job description with responsibilities that makes many executive roles look tame by comparison. The right person in this important role can mean the difference between wild success and mediocre performance for the business. And while organizations commonly under-staff (both in number and in power/experience) and over-describe (expectations are excessive), it is a thing of beauty when you latch onto a professional Product Manager that understands how to build value through this role. This super-employee operating in this tough role consistently gets my vote for MVP.
