My top 4 tactics for building influence as a Product Manager
Being able to influence as a PM is pretty crucial to your success in the role. We all know how much plate spinning is involved in product management and this gets 10x harder if you can’t call plays and influence situations to keep everyone focussed.
But influencing doesn’t just happen in the moment. It’s a culmination of how you conduct yourself over a period of time.
If you’ve just left an interaction frustrated because you were unable to Jedi-mind-trick everyone into your way of thinking then (apart from checking your expectations), it might be worth reflecting on how you could have managed that interaction better and built your influence in advance.
So these are my top 4 tactics for building influence.
1. Build Rapport
Make a list of the most important relationships across your organisation for you to be able to win in your role (you could use stakeholder analysis for this but a list will also work). In a startup this must include the founders and/or C-suite but there will be others who are critical to the success of the product. These include engineers you work closely with, designers, marketers and sales people. There may also be influential people outside of your immediate circle who have a tendency to assert themselves every now and then sending your plates crashing to the ground (believe it or not, they are usually trying to help).
Invest in those key relationships. Take time to check in with those people and learn about them. What motivates them? What pains and pressures are they feeling? Empathise! The VP of Sales isn’t needlessly bugging you…she’s trying to make sure her team hit their number for the quarter and sees you as a blocker or facilitator of that.
Make sure to publicly praise and promote others where justified. Apart from just being a nice thing to do, putting others before yourself shows you are secure in your role and respect and value others — major rapport points!
Be a diplomat. This is a big part of the PM role and probably deserves a write-up to itself, but helping to resolve issues and negotiate a way forward between multiple parties will build a ton of credibility and build your relationship with those people. After all, you’ll be solving a problem for them and helping them move forward with their own agendas.
2. Show you are safe pair of hands by understanding first and acting second
Whether you’re delivering a new feature or fire fighting you need to be able to act cooly and calmley to get things done (you can do this whilst still acting with high agency).
Make sure you understand enough of the facts before diving in. Actively listen to engineers, customers or whoever you need to in order to get the full understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. Why are / were things done that way? What was the context at the time?
For significant or controversial issues or decisions be sure to seek consensus. There’s no harm in running a decision or potential solution by stakeholders to make sure you have the necessary cover. In fact, they’ll likely value being kept informed and you’ll be showing them that you’ve got everying in hand. Of course, if you’ve previously built rapport with them it’ll be a lot easier to informally call them / slack them to get their input.
When you are ready to act, act with commitment, confidence and urgency. Own the problem and follow it up to conclusion. Don’t leave lose ends… they’ll almost always come back to bite you and undermine all the good work you’ve done so far (it’s worth checking out Extreme Ownership for more on this).
3. Know your shit!
As a PM you should be the expert on your product. This means having complete knowledge of the product functionality, user metrics, your customers and the market.
If you are new to a company take the time to learn this stuff by living in the product. Take the sales training, join the CS team for a day every week, and do the market research. Once you’re confident, identify opportunities to prove your knowledge. Make presentations, show the market data you’ve collected, present a new take on the user analytics etc.
If you’re presenting a case for something make sure you have the evidence to hand. Get the data, or at least references to known experts who recommend the course of action you want to take. If you’re selling an idea, everyone will expect you to have done the legwork so you’ll quickly lose credability of someone else is able to torpedo the idea having only thought about it for the last few minutes.
4. Deliver!
When it comes to credability and influence there is no substitute for having a reputation for just consistanly and relentlessly delivering. This is a highly valued superpower that breads respect amongst your peers and superiors.
The other really valuable biproduct of constantly deliverying is that by doing it you will learn and grow your skills and capabilities no end.
If you do everything else on this list but fail to follow through and actually get shit done you’ll quickly find yourself sidelined and left out of the big decisions.
If you liked this article be sure to follow me on twitter @Tim_S_Wilkinson and LinkedIn tim-s-wilkinson/
Productheads is a product focussed training, recruitment and consultancy company helping early stage software startups build great product and great product teams. www.productheads.io
