Thread by @lissijean

So I haven’t been tweeting a lot lately because I overcommitted myself, but one topic keeps picking at me and I feel like we should talk about it.

Over and over I keep seeing people struggle with decisive decision making in #prodmgmt... at every level. /1

To me this is one of the most important skills a Product Manager can master - how to make decisions about their product and communicate it upwards. /2

When I talk to company or product leaders, they frequently complain that their people don’t “step up and make decisions and own the product”.

I find that interesting because almost every prod mgr I meet tells me they can’t because their stakeholders/ manager won’t let them. /3

So we have leaders telling people they want them to step up, and those people saying they can’t. What’s happening?

I’ve seen a few different scenarios. /4

In one case, the product is actually committed and planned and the product managers can’t make changes. That sucks.

But, this is actually not the most common scenario I’ve seen. /5

I’ve seen many organizations that have the culture, leaders, and infrastructure to have the product managers make decisions and own the products. Yet, these PMs are complaining that they get handed solutions.

So what’s really going on here? /6

The issue here is that the PM isn’t doing the work to get ahead of the manager giving the solution. They aren’t owning the vision (of course collaborating with team to find it) of their product.

Instead they are getting stuck in the busy trap, doing everything but that. /7

When you don’t go to your stakeholders or managers something for them to understand and sink their teeth into, they will fill that empty space themselves with whatever solutions come to mind. /8

You have to give people something to buy into and rally around. That is your job as a Product Manager.

So many of the problems I see are communication problems, not “permission” problems. /9

Many of the VPs or other leaders I’ve talked to are open to hearing other ideas. They are just not hearing any. /10

And this isn’t to advocate just picking a solution randomly and calling it your vision. You still need to do the work to prove it’s the right vision.

Doing this work means you have to start prioritizing your time so you make room for it. /11

Example:

I had a student in a workshop once that worked for a huge bank and was told to build something. She realized that they shouldn’t be building it.

She was terrified to bring it up to her manager but she did. As she put it “I was putting myself out of a job” /12

But she started the convo. And it turned into a month long convo. Her boss said “you know, you’re right. Let’s kill this product and put you on something else.”

Now she’s using all the processes she wanted to build something way better. /13

So dear Product Managers, when someone hands you a solution please poke at the constraints.

Sometimes they may be real. And that sucks, there’s lots of us trying to fix that.

But many times, they’re not. /end