What I should offer as a product manager is a strong managerial skill, along with solid core business processes.
This experience did, however, underscore two important lessons for me. First, I got the job because I had built a reputation as a great manager, and being a great manager can be a significant career differentiator. Second, no matter how brilliant a company is, it will not get far, let alone have an impact at scale, without strong management and sound operating systems—what you might call core processes. Over time, my experience made me a person many founders consult on the combination of these two elements.
The problem with learning “managerial” skills is that it’s usually high stakes conversations, and you cannot just go to a meeting and be the “fly on the wall” of someone else’s 121. It needs to be handled tactfully.
The hardest parts of company building and management are done in private: designing your planning process, deciding who gets promoted, planning a reorganization, reducing the scope of a person’s role. But how can you develop your own building and management techniques when you haven’t experienced enough similar scenarios to build pattern recognition? How can you test new approaches when each conversation has such high stakes? You can’t sit in on another manager’s 1: 1s. You don’t get to observe how your colleague handled that termination conversation. You’re not privy to how your peers give their reports difficult feedback. You’re asked to fly a very complicated aircraft, but you never get time in the practice simulator.
This was also a challenge Peter Paul Rubens faced in his apprenticeship model, while he was developing his masterpieces, because of spacing constraints it was only a handful of students he could entertain to chip in as apprentices..
Historically, the rooms we’ve been able to build have been too limited for this. They put a low upper bound on how many novices could be absorbed by productive communities. Peter Paul Rubens, while developing his baroque masterpieces in the early 1600s, could only allow a handful of apprentices in his atelier. How would it have looked with hundreds! The demands of the incompetent would have overwhelmed Rubens, making work impossible, turning his workshop into a school!
As Henrik Karlsson mentions, on one hand we apprenticeship that didn’t scale, and had schools which sucked as an ideal educational system but could scale, and we choose school.
We could have apprenticeships, which were effective but didn’t scale, or we could have schools, which were ineffective but scalable. We couldn’t have both. This was the trade-off we faced. We choose school.
Managers need to be good at self evaluating, and know their strengths and weaknesses better. And yes, if something is a strength it’s also a weakness too.
Interesting anecdote from the writer on how he discovered that “transparency” is a core value of his colleague through this example:
Not long after one of these frustrating conversations, my HR partner helped me organize a manager training for my division with Stan Slap, the author of Bury My Heart at Conference Room B. 9 Stan led us through a session on values in which he asked all of the managers to reflect on the values that were important to us and where we thought they came from. He invited participants to come onstage, in front of hundreds of other managers, to share one of those values. Eli raised his hand. This was the story Eli told: When he was around seven or eight, his mom fell very ill. Later, he would learn that she had breast cancer, but at the time no one in his family told him what was going on. They wanted to keep things as normal as possible. Of course, things were far from normal, and Eli noticed how much his mother was not herself, physically or emotionally. His mother’s condition deteriorated, and she eventually had to go to the hospital. Eli was not allowed to visit her. One day, while his mother was in the hospital, Eli’s stepdad came to pick him up from school. They drove to Eli’s favorite diner and ordered pancakes. While Eli poked at his pancakes, syrup dripping down the sides, his stepdad told him that his mom had died. Eli’s value was transparency.
How do you know you’re an extrovert or an introvert? Do you gain energy by talking to other people? If yes, you’re an extrovert..
Once you’ve started to understand your underlying values, it’s time to build awareness of your personal work style and preferences. The most obvious preference is probably whether someone is an introvert or extrovert. Do you gain energy from interactions with others or from quiet reflection on your own? One of my favorite litmus tests is: Do you talk to think or think to talk? Although I’m not a heavy extrovert, I’ll be the first to tell you that I talk to think, and that my best work is done in collaboration with others, not alone.
The other dimension is “getting things done yourself” versus “delegating things to others”. For example, a “Director” might be an extroverted but task oriented person, whereas a developer might be an introverted task oriented person.. etc it’s a 2 by 2 axis
Director (extroverted, task-oriented) Directors have strong opinions about the “right” answer and a bias toward rapid action because they care a lot about getting to the right outcomes quickly. They’re great at establishing a vision, but they want everyone to fall in line behind that vision. Often, they do the work themselves because they don’t enjoy building processes, or they dictate exactly what steps need to be taken, which can be disempowering for others. Promoter (extroverted, people-oriented) These talented individuals are charismatic and people-oriented. They tend to have a lot of ideas and the ability to articulate an inspiring narrative. They don’t like details or administration and they’re usually great starters but not always finishers. Overall, they can see the big picture and excel at inspiring others and building relationships.
Think of what needs to be achieved, and think of what all roles that are needed to achieve that too:
None of these work style preferences is objectively better or worse than another. Often, however, one might be better or worse in specific circumstances. For example, during a technical outage, you want to have systems in place that allow a small set of individuals to make a lot of big decisions quickly. You may not care about getting longer-term buy-in from others because you need to take action immediately. For that, you need a director. If you’re trying to build a planning process that enables you to decide what teams are going to work on for the next year, you probably want to build something that will endure and help people understand the importance of the work. You could do all the planning yourself with a select group of people you trust, but that would mean leaving out the people who actually have to do the work. Plus, you wouldn’t be helping them develop the skills they need for future planning cycles. You need a collaborator, and probably a promoter too.
On a side note, I have been intrigued by the psychometric evaluation tests to assess myself, and I wanted to find an easier way to do the same.
