How to step into your power as a Product Manager

1 Aug

The nature of power

What does it mean to be ‘empowered’ as a product manager? We hear this term a lot, and we may think it means that someone higher up has to bestow power upon us. However, that’s not the case: you have more power than you think.

First, let’s look at a standard dictionary definition of power:

The ability to act or produce an effect - Merriam Webster

How often do we forget that we all have the ability to act or produce an effect? We have our individual thoughts, feelings and behaviour, which we alone control, in response to factors in our environment. But certain situations may challenge us, causing us to think we do not have power. That’s when we give our power away. Over time this can lead to learned helplessness.

Giving away our power means we do not achieve our goals, and we compromise or undermine what is important to us. In an example from earlier in my career, I was charged with developing new products to extend the product portfolio, and was reporting into one of the senior leaders. Every two weeks we had a product review with that senior leader and the CEO of the business. They had different opinions on what the strategy should be for the new products, and I often felt caught in the middle. I did not feel empowered to make my own product decisions, and it was frustrating for me - and my team - as we flip flopped every fortnight between different strategies, depending on who was at the product review. Our progress on building out the products was slow, and instead of these meetings being a positive and encouraging place where we shared progress and learnings, everybody in the product team dreaded them. I hadn’t yet developed my product sense to push back on certain suggestions, and felt beholden to the authority of my senior leader and the CEO. Over time I realised that I was not truly empowered in that role, as I had not been bestowed power by either the senior leader or the CEO. But more than that - I hadn’t claimed the power that I did have.

The nature of authority and power has been an important area of study since the end of WWII, with Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments in the 1960’s infamously demonstrating the most people will follow orders without question. French and Raven (1959) talk about six types of power:

legitimate - comes from a position of authority
reward - comes from the ability to reward others
coercive - comes from the ability to threaten and punish others
informational - comes from having control over information
expert - comes from having knowledge and skills
referent - comes from liking and respecting each other

The first three come from people more senior than you in your organisation - your manager, or a senior leader, whilst the other three are powers that everybody in an organisation possesses in varying degrees. And that’s important to remember, because you can feel empowered by embracing these three types of power.

Reasons why you don’t feel empowered

Power arises across all three of the perspectives in my model - self, others, context.

So let’s look now at the reasons why product managers don’t feel empowered:

(1) You have been told you cannot do something (others)

In this case someone has wielded their authoritative power to stop you from acting. That may be because that action may cause harm or be illegal, in which case it’s sensible to adhere to the warning. However, being told you cannot do something without good reason is disempowering, and creates a parent-child relationship instead of adult-adult. Over time this will breed dependency on authority.

In this case, you can ask yourself the following questions to ascertain if it’s a hard no, or if there is another way to achieve your goal:

Who said you are not allowed to do it?
What reasons may they have said you are not allowed to do it?
What has to happen for you to be allowed?
How do you feel about being told you’re not allowed?
How much do you agree with that?
What would you like to do about it?

Example from my experience in Product: GDPR regulations in the UK mean every company must have policies and procedures around processing the personally identifiable data of customers. In one scenario, this was causing the product team issues in being able to conduct continuous discovery through interviews: we needed to identify who the individual was to then contact them via email or phone. We were told by our Compliance team that we could not create a Google Sheet to store this data (a suggested MVP), so instead we worked on an alternative solution, in collaboration with our Data Protection Officer.

It may be that nobody has said you are not allowed to do something, but it’s a fear that is holding you back. In that case…

(2) You have internalised being told you could not do something in the past, and that’s become a limiting belief (self)

In coaching and NLP, we talk about limiting beliefs as goals you haven’t achieved yet. Many of our limiting beliefs stem from early life experiences, in childhood and adolescence. By the time we are adults our self image is formed, which is a collection of the attitudes and opinions we have received from others.

Not doing something because you believe you are not allowed to do something, is a self fulfilling prophecy, also known as the pygmalion effect. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) studied this phenomenon in teachers who were falsely led to believe that one group of students were significantly more able than another. The results of their study showed that both student and teacher expectations were raised in the group deemed more able, where students were enjoying increased self esteem and higher grades than their equally able counterparts. This demonstrates how simply believing something to be true can make it true.

If this is the case, reframing a negative belief into a positive one can be helpful. This has the benefit of reprogramming the subconscious mind so it accepts the new belief. For example, take any negative belief, e.g. I’m no good with data. First, remove any negative words so the sentence becomes a positive, e.g. I’m good with data. For your brain to accept this (because it may look for evidence to the contrary!) you need to add a qualifier, such as ‘every day, I’m learning how to become good with data’. This is now a much more empowering belief that your subconscious mind will readily accept.

Example from my experience in Product: I used to hold a belief that I am rubbish at design. This came from conversations early in my career with a senior design leader who believed that design was something product people should not do, coupled with my lack of design training. It wasn’t until I changed jobs and moved to a startup that didn’t have design - so it fell on me! - that I realised I needed to overcome this. I took a short online course in the basics of UX design, and put it to practice. Colleagues started commenting that I was great at design, but I never believed them until I took an objective look at what I was then able to do and reframed that belief. I’ll never be Jony Ive, but I don’t need to be to create a quick wireframe to communicate a point.

However, overcoming self limiting beliefs only works if it is yourself that is holding you back. Sometimes, we need to look at the context to understand what else may be at play preventing you from acting…

(3) There are systemic barriers in place preventing you from being able to act (context)

There may be factors beyond your control that influence what you are able to do. These systemic barriers may be policies, procedures, or practices that prevent you from participating fully in a situation. Here’s three examples of how they may show up for product managers, and what you can do about it:

1 - limited decision making authority: when you need to seek approval from multiple layers in order to move forwards, you may become frustrated with how slow the process is. In this case you can work on building your expert power to build trust and credibility with senior leadership: get to know your market and customers intimately, clarify what you can make decisions on and over-communicate on what you’re doing and the results that’s having.

2 - lack of cross functional collaboration: when everybody is working in silos and focused on their own priorities, it can be hard to work together on building products. This is your opportunity to show you are a leader, by taking ownership of running workshops and setting up tooling like Slack, to overcome the lack of communication and alignment. Set the example of how to bring people together to work through shared problems (you don’t need to wait for permission on this one!)

3 - inflexible organisation structure: when there is limited or even a complete lack of specialised talent, such as product designers, it can be challenging to work towards product goals. In this case, you can advocate to your manager and senior leaders what it is you need, and how that will benefit your product mission. This advocacy could be in the form of case studies or success stories from other companies.

Change takes time, so if you are experiencing systemic barriers in your company that are preventing you from building great product, you need to be patient and not lose sight of your bigger goal. You have to repeat yourself several times before people start to take notice, and some people may respond quicker than others. Build your support network, build your allies - not just in product but in other parts of the business. And remember, your response to a situation is always within your control.

Example from my experience in Product: a sister company was experiencing issues with a project that was dragging on, much to the client’s dissatisfaction. We were at risk of losing that client if we didn’t turn it around. I joined the team and quickly learned that there were silos operating with the company between tech (product didn’t even exist before I joined!), sales and marketing. This was one of the underlying causes of project failure - tech would put a feature live without telling sales and then when it broke sales was on the frontline for unhappy client calls but with zero information on what had happened. In another example, marketing would be working on a campaign for weeks, and then at the last minute ask tech to do something, which turned out to be a lot of work and risked the campaign not going live. I introduced cross functional meetings and workshops to bottom out what the problems were and invite people to input on solutions. One of the key outputs was a marketing calendar for the whole year, which we could align with sprint cycles.

With great power comes great responsibility

Here are my parting thoughts on this topic: you have more power than you perhaps realise. As a product manager, you know your product inside-out, better than anybody else inside your business. That makes you an expert, and keeper of information. You can use this power to your advantage: to build relationships with your team, other product folk, stakeholders and senior leaders in your company; to build better products that satisfy customer needs.

Whilst there may be systemic barriers in place that affect how you exercise your power, it can rarely be taken away completely. In the words of Victor E. Frankl:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”