Tips for Becoming a Head of Product

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Becoming a head of product and managing a group of product people is a significant career step. In this article, I share my recommendations to help you get ready for the new job and be off to a great start.

🎧 You can listen to the audio version of this article here: https://www.romanpichler.com/romans-podcasts/tips-for-becoming-a-head-of-product/

Be Prepared to Look after People, Not Products

When you become a head of product, you move into a line management position. Consequently, your focus shifts from managing a product to looking after the product people on your team and empowering them to do a great job.

Instead of creating, for example, product strategies and roadmaps and tracking KPIs, you should help the people on your team acquire the right knowledge and develop the right skills so that they can carry out the relevant work on their own. This will allow them to take full ownership of and responsibility for their products, and it will increase their motivation, productivity, and job satisfaction. A great way to do this is to mentor and coach people. For instance, you might show the individuals how they can make effective strategic product decisions, create an actionable product roadmap, and effectively use the right KPIs.

Another key aspect to support the people on your team succeed is to create the right environment for people to succeed. This includes establishing psychological safety, fostering collaboration and trust amongst the product people, establishing clear roles and expectations, which I’ll discuss below, and ensuring that everyone has the right infrastructure and tools available.

Becoming the head of product therefore requires you to let go of your role as a practicing and presumably successful product person and to step away from the many joys and challenges of managing a product. For some people, that’s straightforward. But others find it hard to no longer be actively involved in making product decisions, regularly talking to users, engaging the stakeholders, and working with development teams.

Additionally, being an effective leader requires you to cultivate a genuine caring attitude for the people you want to lead, whether you like them or not. It means that you’ll have to deal with people issues on a regular basis, help and support the individuals who are on your team, constructively address problems and offer advice. To put it differently, to lead means to serve and support others.

If it’s hard for you to let go of being actively involved in managing a product or if you don’t find it rewarding to help and support a group of product people, then becoming a head of product is probably not right for you, at least not at this point in time.

Grow Your Leadership Skills

To be able to effectively lead and support a group of product people, you will benefit from having developed strong leadership and people skills, including the following ones:

• Empathy: You are able to reach out with warm-heartedness even to individuals who you don’t agree with and who you find not likeable, value their perspectives, and take a genuine interest in their needs.
• Trust, integrity, and respect: You can earn the trust of others, speak and act with integrity, and create an environment where people feel safe and respected.
• Active listening: You are used to listening to others with the intention to understand, not to answer. You give the other person your full attention, and you keep an open mind whilst hearing what the individual has to say.
• Feedback: You are able to offer constructive feedback so that the other person can receive it and benefit from it. You are also able to skilfully deal with difficult feedback and criticism that others share with you.
• Goal setting: You can lead others through shared goals that create a common purpose and give the individuals the autonomy they need to do a great job.
• Decision-making: You understand how groups can effectively make decisions, and you are able to secure strong buy-in to important product decisions from others, including the stakeholders and development teams.
• Conflict: You can constructively deal with disagreements and conflicts rather than ignoring or suppressing them, or ending up with damaged relationships, bad feelings, and mistrust.
• Time management: You have learnt to effectively manage your time, and you are able to practice sustainable pace.
• Group dynamics: You know what it takes for a group of people to effectively work together, and you are able to help a group of individuals jell.

A great way to develop these skills is to manage a larger product together with a group of product people who you lead — without being their boss. But even if this option is not available to you, guiding a group of stakeholders and one or more development teams will allow you to practice the skills listed above.

Ensure that Your Core Product Management Skills are Strong

Being able to effectively lead others is great. But I find that it usually not enough. To be able to guide, mentor, and coach other product people, you should ensure that your own product management “hard” skills are strong and that you don’t have any major gaps in your product management knowledge. This includes the following ten capabilities:

• Formulating an inspiring vision for a product.
• Carrying out the relevant product discovery work and taking into account product ethics.
• Creating and validating a product strategy including market and user research.
• Developing a product roadmap and setting realistic product goals/outcomes.
• Selecting the right KPIs, tracking product performance, and updating the product strategy and roadmap.
• Creating and adapting a business model and generating a financial forecast.
• Creating user models like personas (based on first-hand knowledge of the users and customers).
• Working with the product backlog: Stocking, prioritising, refining, and updating a backlog; capturing product backlog items as user stories.
• Validating solution ideas: Using, for example, product demos, usability tests, and A/B tests.
• Working with data: Selecting data samples, analysing them, and drawing the right conclusions.

As you might have noticed, the list above includes strategic and tactical product management skills. Both are necessary in my experience to effectively support the members of a product management team, understand the challenges they are struggling with, and offer helpful feedback and guidance. What’s more, having solid product management skills shows the people on your team that you are a competent product person. This is likely to increase their respect and trust for you.

Read On …

To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-moving-into-a-head-of-product-role/

Learn More

You can learn more about becoming an effective product leader by attending my product leadership workshop and reading my book How to Lead in Product Management.

Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-moving-into-a-head-of-product-role/