Sticking to Your Leadership When Facing Powerful Stakeholders

As product managers, you often need to deal with stakeholders who are a few levels above you. At that seniority level, they don’t always see things through but still have a lot of impact on your ability to proceed in your own direction. Here are a few tips to help you maintain your leadership even in these challenging relationships.

The Chameleon Quality

We all have different identities that we use in different situations. As product leaders, using these identities smartly is a powerful tool to make an impact. Here is how to use it with the people you work with as well as your customers.

Smart Use of Principles

Principles are a very powerful tool in product leadership. They can help you create clarity and alignment, and separate the wheat from the chaff. Here are a few ways to use them in your everyday tasks, and some cases where they are not the right tool.

Are You Bounded by Authority?

Everyone treats authority differently. Some of it is cultural, and some of it is personal, but how you treat authority impacts your ability to lead. Especially in product management, where authority is limited, you need to act beyond the limits of formality. Here is how.

The Power of Summaries

Product leadership is such a hard role, one of the hardest. You live at the heart of endless conflicts caused by a variety of points of view that collide with each other. You are involved in complex decision-making under extreme uncertainty. Here is a simple tool that will help you shine and help others along the way.

The Art of Arguing

Most of us try to avoid arguments with our peers. We have so many of them regardless. However, provoking productive disagreements is a key leadership skill you want to master. Here is how fostering healthy debates is essential for effective leadership and better outcomes. Yes, you want people to argue with you.

Leadership Without Authority on Steroids

Leadership without authority is product management 101. You must master it to succeed, in most cases with developers. But as a product executive, you must take it to the next level – and this time use it with the entire management team.

How to Encourage Your Team to Take More Risks

Taking risks is an inherent part of product leadership. But what happens when your team members have a hard time doing so, at least to the extent that you need them to? Here are a few things you can do to help them master this important skill.

The Right Way to Ask For Additional Resources

Did you ever find yourself struggling to explain to your manager why you need more people? You know you can’t continue this way, but while they sympathize with your struggle, they are not willing to give you what you ask for. The good news is that there is another, much more effective way to ask for additional resources, and here it is.

Finding Your Sweet Spot When Managing Product Managers

A good manager balances being involved in the details and giving their people more freedom. This is often easier said than done though. As a product leader, is this a skill you already master?

3 Misconceptions About CEO Communication

As product leaders, we constantly struggle to balance between getting guidance from above and setting the direction ourselves. The CEO, or any of the founders if you are in a startup, seems to rightfully want to set the tone. Or do they? Here are 3 things you want to pay attention to.

Empowerment Is Not the Opposite of Management

In the effort to create empowered teams, many managers struggle with their role in the process. It is easy to think that an empowered team requires less guidance, but it’s far from the truth. It requires a different kind of guidance, but your management and leadership are still required nonetheless. Here is the right kind of guidance to bring to the table.