A few years ago, I worked with a data scientist who wanted to transition to product management. We invited her to work on my team for a few months as a trial run.
As her mentor, I wanted to know why she wanted to be a product manager and how I could help her succeed. She mentioned that she had a lot of great product ideas but wanted to get better at presenting them to others.
Over the next few weeks, I found opportunities for her to present to engineers, partner teams, and executives. After each presentation, I shared what I thought she did well and where she could improve. Slowly but surely, she gained the confidence needed to present her product ideas more effectively.
However, I saw a more pressing issue that my colleague needed to work on—being comfortable with ambiguity. As a data scientist, she shared her work only after she was 100% confident about it. As a result, it took her a long time to deliver product requirement documents (PRDs), which was starting to block the rest of the team.
I brought up the issue with her: “I notice that you’re taking a long
time to finish your PRDs. Is there anything I can do to help?” “I just need to look at a few more metrics to validate my assumptions,” she explained. I offered my feedback: “Sharing the PRD early and often empowers the rest of your team to contribute ideas. I also wanted to write the perfect PRDs early in my career before I realized that collaborating with others was the fastest way to build the best product.”
Although my feedback was candid, she responded well because she knew that I cared about her success. We decided to meet for a few minutes every day so that I could help her polish her PRDs. It wasn’t easy, but eventually, she became more comfortable with ambiguity and was able to transition to product management successfully.
This story illustrates our fifth principle:
Principle
#5
: Be Radically Transparent.
Many people have written books about radical transparency, but the best framework that I’ve found is from the book Radical Candor
by Kim Scott. Kim recommends that you measure radical transparency on two axes: how often you care personally, and how often you challenge directly.
Care Personally
Caring personally is about investing in other people’s success:
- At least once a month, find time for real 1:1 conversations with your teammates. Seek to understand their goals and offer to help in any way.
- If people ask you for advice, share personal stories, and show vulnerability. Be genuine about your past failures and mistakes and what you learned from them.
- If people are doing a great job, praise them both publicly and
privately. Call out specific examples of things they did well and make sure that other people can see it, too.
If you build caring relationships with people, they will be much more likely to listen to you when you deliver constructive feedback.
Challenge Directly
Challenging directly is about giving constructive feedback effectively:
- Deliver feedback as soon as possible. For example, if your teammate ran a meeting that didn’t have clear next steps, pull her aside and provide feedback when the meeting is still fresh in her mind.
- Give specific examples in your feedback. For example, you could say to the same teammate: “You discussed a few next steps in the meeting, but I think people are confused about who is responsible for each task. Next time, it could help if you wrote the steps down on the whiteboard and assigned owners before the meeting ended.”
- Make your feedback about the work, not the person. For example, the above feedback is much more helpful than telling your teammate: “I think you could work on running better meetings.”
As Kim describes: “Be humble, helpful, offer guidance in person and immediately, praise in public, criticize in private, and don’t personalize.”
1
Empower Others
One way to measure your success as a PM is how successful your team is without you. If everyone on your team is executing well even when you’re not there, then you’re probably doing a good job
.
How do you empower other people on your team to lead? First, you need to make sure that they understand why the product they’re building matters to customers. Then, you need to set up the right processes to enable them to execute efficiently. When everyone on your team understands the why and can prioritize and execute without you, you’ll have more time to think about long-term strategy instead of worrying about daily execution. Everyone wins.