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10 Top Tips From Product’s Finest Leaders

Team Prosple

The key to learning from your team is to pay attention to the interactions you have with the individuals you supervise and to give yourself time to reflect on how you handle each circumstance.

Here you'll find ten bits of advice from the industry's greatest leaders, as well as supporting suggestions for the same.

1. Develop a Culture of Intention

It's difficult to know what culture to support a journey if you don't know where you're heading as a leader. As a result, your vision and the culture that supports it should be extremely explicit about who you want to hire and how you want to work. It should assist you in making decisions ranging from how you gauge personal success to what you include in your products. As a product leader, be deliberate. Be deliberate - that is, be clear about who you want to hire and how you want to work.

2. Rekindle your cultural embers

It's generally true that most people don't perform at their best in settings when they are entirely at ease. As a result, it may be necessary to instil a sense of urgency in order to keep employees engaged. Then, once that sense of urgency has been established, don't let it go.

If you succeed in one category, rework your strategy to be successful in others. If you reach your original objectives, consider what's next to the scale. If there's a major setback, make sure it doesn't happen again.

3. Determine whether or not you have the ability to manage others.

It's a case of watching, waiting and listening to spot a potential manager. Prospective people managers will exhibit management qualities long before they become managers - all you have to do is see them as they develop. Look for people who are mentoring interns, holding meetings, or organizing team efforts, for example. Consider what motivates people who approach you about people management positions. Inquire about their motivation, and see if they comprehend the job's responsibilities, not just the benefits they'll receive.

4. Define the term "product management" in your organization.

The job of product management is hazy, and many organizations haven't defined what it means to them. This isn't fair to your present team or anyone interested in joining them, so be clear and deliberate. Job architecture, hiring, performance reviews, and growth talks all help to set expectations. Keep your product management competencies simple, clear, and reasonable, and don't expect your product managers to be experts in everything. Product managers should be well-rounded but specialize in one area.

5. Work along with other groups

Collaboration with various parts of the company is a crucial function of product leadership. This allows the company to make the most of its various components rather than having them compete with one another. The true collaboration incorporates the perspectives of others, combines them with your own, and produces something unexpected. The more viewpoints you have, the more likely you are to solve a problem – which is why cross-functional teams are so vital. Never undervalue teamwork when it comes to product management.

7. Establish psychological security

Because of the psychological safety, they feel from people around them, the greatest performing teams admit more mistakes than any other. You may develop a culture of psychological safety as a leader by demonstrating your own:

Vulnerability – talk to people about your own ideas and, more importantly, your own blunders.
Curiosity — be curious about other people's viewpoints and ideas, and utilise active listening techniques to explore them alongside them.
Empathy - develop solutions based on other people's feelings and experiences.

8. Make Autonomy a Priority

Everyone in a Utopian world has the freedom to do whatever they choose, and everyone is extremely successful. In reality, though, things do not always go as planned. Leaders should make it obvious to their employees what they have and don't have autonomy over, as well as what they will be held accountable for. By doing so, you can guarantee that your team members are aware of what lies ahead of them and that they are able to work around any obstacles that may arise. After all, the ability to work around constraints necessitates ingenuity and invention.

9. Develop your leadership skills.

Inspiration over authority, ambiguity over clarity, being authentic over being right, improvisation over following the handbook, learning from mistakes rather than avoiding them, and hoping they're right rather than acting with certainty that they will be are all priorities for creative leaders. Because of Moore's Law's impact, this is becoming increasingly critical — we just don't know what will happen next, and we can't have the certainty we formerly had. As a result, it's crucial to embrace ambiguity and improvisation.

10. Take notes from the people you supervise.

Reading books on management and leadership is, of course, beneficial and can undoubtedly assist you in your work. Good management, on the other hand, cannot be learned from a book since there is no alternative for hands-on experience. Management, on the other hand, is about working with people and learning from them and your experiences with them.

The key to learning from your team is to pay attention to the interactions you have with the individuals you supervise and to give yourself time to reflect on how you handle each circumstance. What did you do well and what did you do poorly? What could you do differently next time to make the experience better? What has changed in the person you manage as a result of that experience? These are crucial questions to consider.