Intersection of People Leadership and Product Management :
I have recently switched into a people leadership position. I was having lunch with one of my favorite product people, and while talking about my current role, he mentioned that I am product managing, people leadership. I had never really thought of what I was doing like that before, but when I did, it made a whole lot of sense.
Things that do go well together between people leadership and product management is that you manage the expectations of your stakeholders which is primarily your team now. You need to serve them as well as the market demands and other stakeholders. Your manager has expectations from your team and you, other folks do too and as with everything else, not enough time to get all of it done. So most of your time is spent on setting the right expectations of what you will be doing and more importantly, what you won’t be.
As a people leader you are continuously getting feedback on how the team and the individuals are doing, sharing the successes and collectively trying to get better (customer surveys? :) ). It is also about setting a vision for the team that all of us subscribe to , a culture to operate in, getting everyone’s buy-in, creating a plan to get there and executing it (product roadmap?). It is also being able to react to organizational and environmental changes(Agile, anyone?).
Though my role has changed, I feel a lot of parallels with my former product manager role. And of course, I document all of this on Confluence still!
Once a product manager, always a product manager.
