22.5 Leadership & Stress
Being a product manager can be tough. PMs deal with problems all the time, and often they are the ones who others look to for guidance and leadership, especially when bad things happen. It can be difficult to handle the stresses of the job—not only when there's an immediate issue, but also in the long term as you try to balance achieving your work goals and your personal goals.
This checkpoint will focus on strategies that can help you be a better leader to others and manage the stress of the PM role. While these issues might not come up in your upcoming job interviews, they are essential to your long-term success as a product manager. As you near graduation day, it's time to think deeply about your PM career, and prepare for the challenges you might face.
By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:
- Implement strategies to handle stressful situations as a product manager
Being a leader
Leadership skills are one of the most important soft skills you'll have to master as a product manager. Why does your leadership matter? In short, to lead your team and product toward your vision, you need to create trust with the people around you. When you establish trust with your team and reach a point where they want to follow you, it makes your job easier, especially when negotiating and persuading others.
This isn't an easy task. You're in a position of great responsibility for your team. You're the primary advocate for your team's work and goals. You have to convince both people above you and the teams working with you that your vision and roadmap are correct. You have to build trust with stakeholders around your company so they'll be honest with you, give you the information you need, and believe in your decisions. Being a strong leader can help you succeed in all the other areas of product management.
Here are a few of the strategies you can use to build trust with your coworkers. By now, you've learned the specific skills that go into each one of these strategies. They take a long time to master, and it can be overwhelming to try to achieve all of them at once. Instead, try to work on one skill within each category at a time, and ask your manager to give you feedback on how well you're doing at each skill.
Domain knowledge
You need to be an expert on your product. You should know your own product inside and out—how it works, important metrics, what's next (the roadmap), how it relates to other product areas, what your competition is doing, and what ethical and legal issues could emerge. You should be able to answer any question about your product immediately or with a little research. Most importantly, you should know your users and their problems. Aim to be the world's leading expert on your product and users; this will give you credibility with your team and stakeholders.
Tech and design skills
You don't need to be an expert designer or a veteran coder. However, you do need to understand the work those professionals do and the rationale for the decisions that they make. Your team will respect and seek out your opinion if they know that you understand how they work and appreciate the constraints they're working within. If you can provide useful, specific feedback or be an open-minded listener who always strives to understand more, others will respect and value your opinions.
Mastering communication
If you want to be someone who others want to work with, you need to improve your skills as a collaborator and communicator. Do more listening and less talking. Focus on clearly and succinctly communicating your ideas in a way that makes sense and is valuable to your audience. Make sure other people know that you understand them by repeating or reiterating what they say.
Effective management
Be the person who keeps everything in sync by maintaining plans, tracking progress, and holding the team accountable for their part in moving the project along. Many people loathe this kind of work, but it's pretty easy to do, and others will appreciate it if you take ownership of it. Make sure your stories, roadmap, and vision are all clear. Keep everything up-to-date. Establish processes that help your team do their jobs. They'll appreciate you for it.
Celebrate wins
Be your team's cheerleader. Celebrate hitting a milestone or the launch of a new feature. Announce and promote your wins, and communicate the progress you've made on your KPIs. Make their successes visible, both internally to the team and externally as you share progress news with the rest of the company. Highlight their contributions to the team's and company's success; this will help your team members feel better about themselves and the work they are doing.
Handling stress
For some new product managers, the stress of the role can be hard to handle. Stress can be thought of in two ways: the stress over issues that require your immediate attention and action and the long-term stress of working in product management. Handling both these types of stress will not only make you happier and better at your job, it will also make you a stronger leader for your team.
The stress of immediate problems
Product managers deal with problems every day. Maybe your new feature shipped with a critical bug. Or your database crashed and took your entire site down. Or maybe a new B2B customer signed up for your product on the condition that you launch a specific new feature within a short timeframe.
The most important thing you can do to deal with such stressors and show leadership is to stay calm. Don't get angry with collaborators who are requesting a new feature that will mess up your carefully planned roadmap. Don't get upset with the developer who missed a critical bug in testing. Don't show frustration about your database crash.
Instead, show your team what it means to have control of the situation. Focus on the outcome that you want. If that new feature has a bug, the right outcome is to get it fixed as quickly and effectively as possible. Make sure your team knows what outcome you want. By being clear about your expectations, you'll help them shift focus from the problem to the solution.
Second, figure out the next step. Can you roll back the change that caused the bug? If not, is there a quick way for your developers to disable that feature so that other users don't experience it? Keep your team in sync and give them clear directions about what they need to do next.
Finally, overcommunicate about the issue to other stakeholders and customers. Handle all incoming inquiries about the issue so that the rest of your team can focus on fixing the problem. If others in the company try to interrupt your developers or designers, politely ask them to come to you first so your team can get back to work on addressing the issue.
The stress of the moment will be high, but if you follow the systematic approach described above, you will be able to solve the problem. As a bonus, other people will follow your lead, since they probably don't know what to do. This is another way you can show leadership during difficult times.
Ongoing stress at work
Product management is stressful work. It's the kind of job that "follows you home" in that it can be hard for some people to turn off their minds at the end of a day. Even after your work hours are over, you might keep thinking about other ways to move your KPIs, revisit that argument you had with your lead developer, or ruminate over how to convince the CEO that your plan for the roadmap is the correct one.
There are several strategies you can use to leave your job at work. First, keep yourself organized in the same way you keep your developers organized with backlogs and roadmaps. Find a system for tracking your to-dos and other tasks. There are many great task tracking tools you can use, and you can even use project management tools like Tracker or Asana for managing your own needs.
At the end of the day, write down a list of what you need to do tomorrow. For example, if you need to think through more ways of moving your KPIs, put that at the top of your list. You could even block off a couple of hours on your calendar to devote time to thinking about the issue. That way you can take these issues out of your head; you don't need to keep thinking about them when you leave the office. Write it down, and let it go.
Also, remember to discuss these issues with your manager. It can be difficult to tell if you have the right amount of work to handle. Your manager can help you assess your workload and prioritize your tasks. Make sure you specifically ask your manager what your top priorities are. If there are any tasks that you feel are important, but that your manager did not call out as a priority, ask how you should handle those.
Finding a mentor can help too. A mentor is someone you can talk to and ask for advice or an outsider's perspective on your issues. Ideally, this is another experienced PM in your organization who's not in your chain of management, or a more experienced PM outside your company. Make it a point to meet with your mentor on a regular basis, and be honest about your problems. The more open you are, the better your mentor can help you.
Finally, find healthy nonwork habits. Things like regular exercise, proper sleep, meditation, and social activities are all known to help people reduce stress levels; these will improve both your physical and mental well-being. You can also help to organize social activities for your coworkers, such as team lunches or after work events—anything that helps your team get out of the office will improve your morale and help build relationships.
Practice ✍️
Read through the list of issues below. For each one, write down a short description of the next steps you would take. Challenge yourself to think deeply about these situations—not only about what actions you'll take, but also how they might make you feel, what unhelpful reactions you might be tempted to adopt, and what strategies you'll use to respond as your best self.
- Your team is stressed due to long hours working on a new feature.
- You have been losing sleep because your KPIs haven't been moving in the right direction, and you can't stop thinking about ways to fix them.
- You got a bug report from your support team that one of your customers can't log in and the login recovery feature isn't working.
- Your CEO informed you that a big customer signed up on the condition of a new feature, and now you're contractually obligated to ship this new feature that's not on your roadmap within the next month.
Write these answers in your Notion Page