How to Master the Art of Crucial Conversation to Influence without Authority? Product Manager Series II

A product manager is no stranger to communicating when stakes are high and opinions vary. One of their key skills is to facilitate alignment and agreement on important matters. They drive the Vision, the Strategy, the Design, and the Execution of their product. Any product manager, despite limited authority, contributes to some kind of an organizational transformation.

Vision is the goal to aspire to. It needs to be realistic and it really has to make a dent in the world in a compelling way. The vision is something that is consistently and constantly reiterated. See the redundancies in that sentence, they are not redundancies — they are just to emphasize what a vision reads like and sounds like. The vision stays constant, for at least a couple of years.

The Strategy on the other hand needs to be constantly evolving. A strategy is your best guess at what you think will work. A product manager’s role is to bring their team around to this way of thinking — of believing in one strategy at one point of time and then quickly moving them to switch gears when the need arises. At any point, a strategy will address the target audience, the problem, the value, the differentiation vs the competition, the monetization and other performance indicators. You see how many different teams/ people this means. It also means being able to translate the strategy into a language that each of them understands.

The Design of your product will make it appealing to your ideal customer. A great product manager creates personas for different customer segments. The idea is to move from demographics to psychographics — to understand the goals, pain points, motivation, of your customer segments.

And then where the rubber hits the road — Execution — that’s what puts the product in front of customers. And it literally needs a whole village to do it. A product manager needs to be relentless in calibrating their work with the multiple teams involved, usually with very wildly differing personalities.

As a product manager you “drive” all of these elements — and most of the work is about influencing and may have very little authority.

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