On their weekly coaching session, one of the participants of the CPO Bootcamp raised the following question: can you help someone switch from another discipline into product management?

The answer is, of course, yes – most of us didn’t start as product managers – so I decided to dig deeper into the question. It turns out that there was a specific product manager that the participant was struggling with, and behind her original question there were actually three different questions:

• How to motivate the mal-performing product manager to grow
• How to help them succeed
• How to know when it’s time to give up
  

It is such an important topic, that I have decided to write an elaborate, 3-part guide to help you answer each of the questions above. I’ll answer the first question here, and the following two in my upcoming articles.

Growing Is Painful

To start, we have to remember that growing in any profession isn’t easy. It is especially true in product management, where much of the growth that needs to happen is in soft skills and not necessarily in professional knowledge. Growing your soft skills requires expanding your comfort zone, which means leaving your original comfort zone, which in turn isn’t comfortable by definition.

Even people with a developed growth mindset – ones who fully understand that they always have more to learn and have strong internal motivation to grow and expand their skills – don’t always find it easy to try new things or challenge themselves. This is especially true when the requirement to grow comes from an external source, like their manager for example. No one likes to see their gaps pointed to, and for people who don’t have a developed growth mindset, it’s twice as hard.

Growth requires continuous effort, over a long period of time. To make such a continuous effort, one has to want it. Really really want it.

Two Types of Motivation

But what if they don’t? As the discussion in the CPO Bootcamp continued, another participant gave the example of a product manager in his team who is really good at some parts of the job but isn’t willing to take on additional responsibilities or dwell in new types of activities – although that’s what the job requires. It happens a lot: for example, someone who is really good in inbound product management but isn’t willing to do outbound (my take is that you can’t do the former without at least some of the latter), or someone who is a brilliant product manager and leads the team to build great products, but isn’t able to work well with the executive team to get their buy-in for these great products – and thinks there’s nothing wrong with it (and that the executives just don’t get it).

If your product managers don’t have an intrinsic motivation to grow, and you still need them to, you must instill it in them. There are two ways to do that:

Positive motivation: explain to them why growing is good for them. As with any conversation where you try to convince others of something or even simply get them to listen to you, they should understand what’s in it for them. In the examples I gave above, you can talk about how to make the impact at the magnitude they want to make, management buy-in is a must. Or how working on outbound product management would make them better inbound product managers. Whatever it is you are talking about, it needs to be true and significant (and not something you make up just for the sake of the conversation, like what my daughters do when they try to get the other one to give up on the toy she is playing with at the moment, and try to explain why it’s actually good for the other one to give up). You need to honestly believe that this growth is good for the product manager, and understand why exactly.

Negative motivation: explain to them that if they don’t grow, something bad will happen. For some people, the idea that their current performance will lead to a bad performance review generates enough motivation to change, while others need to understand that they might lose their job if nothing changes. Here too, only say things you truly believe in, but remember that sometimes people don’t understand how bad they are doing and need a wake-up call. They must understand that they are going in the wrong direction and that they need to change course sooner rather than later.

Setting Clear Expectations

Once you are ready, here are a few guidelines for the feedback conversation itself. Note that in many cases, this would be the beginning of a number of conversations that you will have with them on this topic, and the same guidelines apply for follow-up conversations as well.

Be As Specific as Possible

For people to be able to grow, they need to know what doesn’t work exactly. It’s not enough to understand that what they are doing is not good enough. They need to understand exactly what is missing, and as their manager, it is your responsibility to help them understand it as clearly as possible.

This part actually requires some preparation. Before you talk to them, make sure you understand exactly what is missing. Name the specific skills that they are lacking or are not good enough at, and think about specific examples that demonstrate each gap. 

Sometimes, they will have many gaps that they need to close in order to succeed. In these cases, I would recommend choosing the one or two that are most important and ignoring the rest for now. People can’t grow on too many fronts at the same time, and since you are here to help them succeed you must help them focus their efforts.

Be Honest and Direct

Oftentimes, out of empathy and the desire to make it less painful for our people, we miss on the actual point we want to make. If things are not working, your product manager will benefit most from hearing it loud and clear. Help them understand what you say and don’t dance around it. Otherwise, they are left to wonder what is it that you actually wanted to tell them, or even worse – it is easy for them to tell themselves that things are not so bad after all. Since that’s not the case, they will only be left with a blind spot regarding their weaknesses, and won’t be able to change anything effectively.

Make Sure They Know You Are With Them

Whether you use the sandwich method for feedback (start with a good thing, say something bad, end with another good thing) or have a harsh conversation with your product manager, it needs to end in them knowing that you want them to succeed. Understanding that you need to grow is hard enough as is, there is no reason for them to do it alone.

You can translate this intent into immediate action quite easily: at the end of the conversation, ask them what they are going to do differently – so that they have tangible, feasible first steps, and then ask them how you can help and what they need from you. This will make it super clear that you mean business and not just talk, while also immediately putting you on the same side with them. If needed, give them a day or two to think about everything you talked about before putting it into action, but make sure you meet again shortly after to discuss these next steps.

Next week I’ll write about how to actually help them grow, once they understand that they have to and are willing to start the hard work. The decision to do so is an important first step, but their journey just begins.