Building Trust within Product Management

Hi everybody, my name is Lynne Levy. I'm a mentor and coach for product managers, and I want to talk to you today about leadership in the world of product management. I did a presentation last week at MIT with a bunch of Boston-area product managers, and it was a huge success in terms of really looking at skills required to lead awesome teams. So I thought I would share it with you folks. So let me share my desktop real quick. Okay. So what I want you folks to do is I want you to think about your favorite leader. What made them a great leader? Chances are they were great communicators, that you trusted them, that you felt that they had your back, and that you could be your authentic self with them. And here's the reality, teams that have inspired product leaders drive innovation. Now, this does not necessarily mean a leader and his or her direct reports. It could also be about inspiring teams such as your cross-functional team or your engineering team. So we're talking about direct and indirect teams. Now, I looked up the definition of leadership, and it was crazy. I found so many of the old-school definitions about command and control, But I like this one from Harvard, which is, "Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people towards achieving a common goal." Essentially, getting people aligned. This is what product managers do every single day. You folks are leaders. You build a vision, you influence, you influence people across the organization. You're results-oriented. Your goal is to inspire and motivate and to collaborate. You give feedback, and you build environments of trust with your team. And when you can step into a leadership role and see yourself as a leader, this is when innovation will take off, and this is when your career will really start to accelerate. So the challenge in the world of product is we spend so much time and energy on the hard skills of product management, processes, talking to customers, A/B testing, designing UIs. But the challenges we experience are all the soft skills. It's the leadership skills that we're missing. So let's talk a little bit about building trust. And I want to show you folks just a couple of quick tools to help you start on this journey to become an inspired product leader. So really the number one way to build trust with your teams, and again, this could be your direct team or your indirect team, is to ask questions. And the questions should not be like the grilling type of questions, but questions coming from a place of both positivity and curiosity, where the person is comfortable answering the question. Okay? And you want to listen to their response. You want to ask open-ended questions, you want to lean in, and you want to listen to what they say. You don't want to listen to respond, you really want to listen to what they say. And you also want to have others speak first. So ask questions, but give your thoughts and insights towards the end of meetings. And for those who are quiet on your teams, ask for their input. And I love the prompts, "Tell me more," "Yes," and "Have you thought about this?" And asking questions starts to create an environment of trust with your direct and indirect teams. And you want to create an environment where questions are a positive thing. Okay? And you want to lead by example as the product manager. And when you ask questions to somebody, it makes that other person feel valued. Heck, you want their advice, you want their input. They feel like they're part of something. Okay, and again, you want to create a culture where not knowing is a good thing and questions are encouraged. Now, when you start to build trust, then coworkers start to become like family. And as Simon Sinek says, your coworkers are not like family, they are family. We spend so many hours a week at work. Let's start to build trust where we can be ourselves in the office. The second thing to do is to open yourself and be vulnerable. And again, this is about building trust. You want to share your weakness. Now, this is not about admitting everything that's wrong, especially if you don't know somebody. So you want to slowly step into vulnerability. Okay, as I like to say, you want to build an environment where you can fail fast and accelerate and grow. So you want those small experiments. You want to reflect on what's working and what doesn't working, and so that you're constantly improving and growing. And I'm a big believer in we all need to drop the "I'm the decision-maker" mentality. Everybody brings something to the table, and you want to leverage the strengths of each person on your team. Okay? And when you can do all of this, this is when innovation really takes off and your career starts to take off. All right, so like I said, I'm Lynne Levy. I'm a product management mentor and coach. If you would like to learn more leadership skills, I just, I put the link in the chat for more information. So thank you all. Have a great day.