Marty Cagan - EMPOWERED

Many of the points regarding team collaboration skills also apply to stakeholder collaboration skills, but it's actually easier to build trust and relationships with your own teammates (e.g., your designer and engineers) because you interact with them every day—focused on solving the same problem.

There are additional dynamics at play with stakeholders. First of all, while most PMs are individual contributors, most stakeholders are company executives. They are often very knowledgeable about their part of the business, and they are often used to giving orders.

The key to successful working relationships with stakeholders is establishing mutual trust.

For the PM, that starts with putting in the time and effort to understand what each of the stakeholder's constraints are. We discussed this under Business and Company Knowledge above.

But once the PM has put in that effort, she needs to personally convince each stakeholder that she understands what they are concerned with, and that she'll make every effort to come up with solutions that work for them.

And in any case, whenever she identifies something that might be of concern, she will preview those solutions with that stakeholder before the team builds anything.

Building this trust takes time, as there are less interactions, and each interaction carries more weight.

Again, in my work with product teams, I often observe PM/stakeholder interactions and there are many good coaching opportunities. I try to reinforce the actions that helped build trust and point out alternative approaches for actions that diminish trust.

Especially in medium to large‐sized companies, so much of product involves persuasion. This involves convincing your team and your stakeholders that you understand what you need to do, and you've got a solid plan to deliver.

My favorite technique for developing a strong and compelling argument is the written narrative, which is discussed in Chapter 11, The Written Narrative.

I also encourage PMs to take a presentation skills class where your presentations are video recorded and you are provided professional critiques. I've personally taken this class twice over my career and consider it invaluable.

Finally, so much of strong product management is actually about leadership.

Leadership skills are especially important for the PM because the product team and the stakeholders don't report to you, so you must depend on persuasion and leadership.

Which is to say, for the PM, leadership must be earned. It does not come with the title.

But this is also why so many strong product managers go on to become successful heads of product and CEOs.

So, how do you develop these leadership skills? The prerequisites are the items above. If you've done your homework and demonstrated your knowledge and skills, and you have earned the trust and respect of your team and your stakeholders, you are well on your way.

Beyond this, I encourage all product managers to become lifelong students of leadership. Most of us know people we consider terrible leaders. Some of us are lucky enough to know people we consider exceptionally strong leaders. Discussing the defining characteristics of each makes for excellent coaching discussions.

I absolutely love coaching tech leads. More often than not, these are the people behind the world's most impressive innovations.

A tech lead is essentially a senior‐level engineer who has taken on the additional responsibility of participating in the ongoing product discovery work. The tech lead is the key partner to the product manager and product designer.

They are asked to care not just about building and delivering reliable products, but also to care about what gets built.

Tech leads bring deep knowledge of the enabling technologies, and when that knowledge is combined with a direct understanding of the customer's pain and problems, magic can result.

If you've spent any real time with engineers, you know that not all engineers are interested in anything beyond coding, and that's fine. We don't need every engineer to become a tech lead.

I will say that many of my favorite product companies try to screen for this when they interview engineers—they want engineers who care just as much about what they build as how they build it. But even these companies make exceptions. It's only a problem if you don't have at least one such person on a product team, especially if you hope to be an empowered product team.

A surprising percentage of the tech leads I've coached have told me that, ultimately, they would like to one day start a company of their own. I strongly encourage this and point out to them the many successful CEOs in tech who started as engineers. When this is their goal, I often encourage the tech lead to consider the product management role for a year or two. Even if they go back to engineering, this experience is invaluable and positions them much better for a startup co‐founder role.

No matter what their career goals, the real potential of a tech lead comes from combining their understanding of technology with an appreciation for the issues customers struggle with.

I always encourage tech leads to visit as many customers as they can. But I also try to make a point—after visiting an interesting customer myself—to stop by and chat with the tech leads about what I saw and learned, and what they might think about that.

The bottom line is I have found that every single minute you invest in coaching a tech lead on either customers or business context will be among the best possible uses of your time.

Product designers have an especially difficult job. There are many design‐related skills, and while the product designer does not need to be an expert in all of them, she does need to have a considerably broad range of knowledge and skills:

Service design

Interaction design

Visual design

Industrial design (for physical devices)

Prototyping

User research

Most successful product designers are very strong in at least prototyping and interaction design, and they know enough about service design, visual design, and user research to leverage the relevant techniques and people where necessary.

As a design manager, your product designers often come from different backgrounds, so much of your coaching time will be spent helping the product designer address the gaps.

The other important responsibility to keep in mind for design managers is that they are the frontline for ensuring a holistic view of design. This means that, while there may be many product teams—each with a skilled product designer—the design managers need to ensure that the experience works as a whole, across teams.

Design managers ensure a holistic view by reviewing designs at the weekly one‐on‐ones and by holding design sessions with the broader group of product designers, especially to discuss difficult design problems.

One challenge when moving to empowered product teams is that most product managers and engineers coming from feature teams have never worked with a professional product designer, so they don't even know yet what they are missing. As a result, design leaders often need to raise the bar and educate product managers and tech leads about what strong product design is and how product designers contribute to successful products.

SVPG Partner Martina Lauchengco is publishing another book in the SVPG series, LOVED , discussing the critically important topic of product marketing. As many know, product marketing is adjacent to product management, but what most don't know is that product marketing has changed dramatically and has become more critical than ever. What follows is an excerpt from her upcoming book: