So you’ve been promoted to a new product role, now what?
If you’re reading this article, congratulations! You’ve worked hard and shipped successful product(s) whose metrics are blasting off the roof. You’re now on a luminary path to become a future Product Leader — CPO, VP Product, Head of Product. It’s a big deal, so be sure to take the time to celebrate your accomplishments.
Going forward, building products that customers love is no longer enough. You have to create products that are business successful. And while it may seem that one leads to the other, this is usually not the case. It’s true that having a product that customers love is necessary in order to demonstrate business success, but that alone does not guarantee the success you are looking for. It’s a necessary but insufficient condition.
In the new role, you also need to cultivate new chops to navigate an executive career. As we dive in, remember Marshall Goldsmith’s words: What got you here, won’t get you there. From the ‘Product Strategy’ course that I took and my Product Management experience, I’ll now unpack six practices that you need to let go and add on in your enriched skill set as you step up the ladder in product organization.
Build depth of your own technical expertise (-) -> (+) Build knowledge of functional areas beyond your area of training and expertise
With the promotion, your scope of work multiplies. Hence, your depth of knowledge must decrease to allow your breadth of knowledge to increase. You need to let go of building depth of your technical expertise. What do you need to add on is other functional areas beyond your area of expertise. I will particularly emphasize on soft skills — soft skills, people skills, communication skills, leadership skills that you might not have learned when you were in a more technical role.
To be a successful executive, you must be a great manager. You have to expand your soft skills and learn to manage managers. Managing a manager requires you to learn how to pull back and trust your team. But it also requires that you learn to teach your managers how to manage. This means you must learn to master soft skills, since the additional scope and collaboration required to succeed necessitates self-awareness, ability to listen and take feedback, and partner with people of different backgrounds.
Narrow, practical, functional perspective (-) -> (+) Broad, strategic, enterprise perspective
Your skill, your expertise, and your perspective also needs to go from narrow, practical, and functional to becoming broader and more strategic and enterprise-wide. You are no longer a fish in the pond but a turtle in an ocean. Stop constraining yourself with a product or a feature and start thinking about suite or portfolio of products.
You have to ensure all the product areas blend together in a meaningful way. You need to scale what’s working but also add new innovative projects to expand the product area. You need to make certain that all the products function seamlessly and don’t end up disjointed and clumsy. You have to focus on a clean, simple product experience–not one that resembles the company’s org chart.
The end goal here is to become the storyteller for the vision of the company’s product. You must connect the corporate strategy for the company with the products built by you and your peers into a multi-year product roadmap.
Hands-on troubleshooting and problem solving (-) -> (+) Coaching and mentoring others to solve problems
It’s good to be a hands-on problem solver, it’s good to be hands-on troubleshooting, but you can’t do that for everything. As your span of control grows, as you become more senior, you have to really think about how you can coach and mentor other people to solve problems. So, you will become a facilitator for them and empower them to solve problems.
Competitive attitude towards peer functions (-) -> (+) Collaboration and empathy with peer functions
Your attitude towards peer functions is no longer competitive. It’s actually collaboration, it’s empathy, it’s understanding the contributions that they make. You are required to unify with peers, establish a culture that fosters growth and success, hone in on what’s working and drive it forward, and eliminate what’s not working. So, it’s essential you work closely together with the other product leaders and tackle impactful yet messy projects that might span multiple teams.
Functional view –“can we do it” (-) -> (+) Strategy view –“should we do it”
You shouldn’t just be focused on “Can we do this” or “How do we do this”. You need to actually ask, “Should we do this?” That is the essence of strategy. What should we do and what should we not do, that’s what leaders do? They make choices as opposed to just execute on orders that somebody has given to them.
You aren’t just accountable for delivery, you also need to set direction. This is a tough transition since until now direction has likely come from your leadership team. Now it’s not just how to build it and how it works — it’s why choose this feature or product instead of another? Which projects get light resources, heavy resources, or none at all? And why is a product feature sequenced with one set of milestones vs. another?
Minimize conflict within the team; strive for consensus (-) -> (+) Value debate and dissent; disagree and commit
As far as managing conflict in your team is concerned, don’t try to achieve consensus as you grow. To become a product leader, you actually want to strive for diversity in opinions, bring different points of view on the table, and actually strive for commitment, not consensus. I like what Jeff Bezos preaches at Amazon, disagree and commit. You’re never going to get a 100% consensus. That’s not the objective. The objective is to have a healthy debate but then move on — disagree and commit.
Conclusion
The goal of this article is to describe the skills that you need to add on as you advance in your career in product management. These new practices may look long and daunting — don’t try to do everything at once! Be patient and kind to yourself; Take it one piece at a time, and celebrate your success as you go.
Seek out to seasoned product leaders to mentor you, get as much feedback as you can, and take on projects where you learn and test these skills. This is the guide that I wish I had when I first was promoted in product management role. More Power to you & Best of Luck!