As the importance of product management for business success becomes clearer, many startups give one of the founders the product leadership role. It can be a full-blown CPO responsibility or a CTO who runs both product and technology. These founders have many great qualities, but many times prior product experience isn’t one of them. This situation is very common and requires the founders to close many gaps in the way they think about product management in general and their product specifically (that’s where my mentoring services come in handy). Regardless, there comes a point in time when another product person is needed.

As founders who are committed to the company’s success, they are happy to hire an experienced product manager, someone who can take over the day-to-day and help design solid product management processes for the entire company. The founders I work with are great people with no ego. They understand that the product manager they hire must be able to run independently and be given broad ownership so that they can deliver the results they expected them to deliver by hiring them in the first place. 

However, when everything is signed, and the new product manager (that they think greatly of) is about to join the team, many of them share with me that they are confused regarding their role here. If they can’t be the professional mentor of the product manager, what is it that they should be doing? And are they even needed? My answer is yes, they are needed. Not only they have a lot of responsibility in making this a successful and productive relationship, but they also have a lot to contribute and it would be hard to succeed without them. Here is what I tell them, and they typically return to say that it worked perfectly.

Of course, the same applies even if you are not a founder and find yourself in this situation. With so many skills that a product manager needs to have, any product leader is about to find themselves managing someone who has more experience than they do, at least in some aspects of the role. What I say here applies to these situations as well.

Give Them the Right Goals

Setting your own goals and figuring out what you need to be working on is hard. If your manager isn’t a product person and doesn’t know what you need to be doing, they just want you to do the magic, you probably felt it yourself. I know that was one of the hardest things for me when I first reported directly to the CEO, who couldn’t (and wouldn’t) give me any guidance.

The difference between working in a complete void, and working against a given goal is huge. That’s true even if the goal is so big that you don’t know where to start.

Generally, giving people problems to solve (rather than telling them what to do) is the right way to manage smart people. This also fits nicely into your desire to give them enough leadership room. Another advantage of this approach is that it makes your people real partners. You let them participate and take a share of the results you need to achieve.

So even if you can’t guide your people regarding how to do things, you can definitely guide them regarding what they should be working on. Give them the right goals, the right problems to work on, and make sure when all of these goals are achieved it creates a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.

Give Them Context

The problem with goals is that they are always part of a larger context, and if the context is ignored even achieving the goal fully can entirely miss the purpose. That’s, for example, what makes OKRs such a powerful framework as opposed to plain KPIs. The context is built in as part of the objective, and it’s not just the results that you are after. 

As their manager, by definition, you have a broader perspective than they do. It comes with the role. And it doesn’t matter that if they were sitting in your chair they would have the same perspective. The fact is that you are sitting in this chair and not them, so it is your responsibility to make sure the context that you have is passed to them as clearly and as fully as possible.

When it comes to the bigger picture, what we are trying to do here and why, and how all the parts are connected together, there is no such thing as over-communication. In other words, no matter how many times you repeat this, it wouldn’t be too many. 

I’m a big fan of transparency here, to whatever extent you feel comfortable with. When I manage a team, I’m always trying to share as much as possible not only regarding what I think they need in order to be able to perform a certain task, but also anything else that is happening in the company. These can be things related to the product or the strategy – for example, we are working on a plan to enter a new market – or even things like we started looking for a new office, we are about to hire a customer success lead, and so on. 

Knowing that things are happening in the company will strengthen their sense of ownership, and you’ll be surprised to see that in many cases these “FYI”s lead to great collaborative ideas that you couldn’t have come up with yourself.

This is part one of this guide. Next week I’ll talk about another very important aspect of this topic – how to help your people make better decisions. Yes, you can do it even if they are more experienced than you are. So go ahead and work on the two aspects listed above, and stay tuned for next week’s guide to do it even better.