Product leaders without product management experience: is that work?
What about recent product leaders, who worked as PMs, lacking leadership soft skills? Here’s my point of view, considering a personal experience
Hello, I’m Tiago Ferreira, Sr. Product Manager in Brazil with +6 years of experience crafting products. With The Next Movement, I want to share part of my product management experience with the whole world, but also talk about career more broadly, technology, good books, and - why not? - philosophy, music, culture, gossip, just like an open diary. If you enjoy reading my article, subscribe and share it with your friends 🤓
Only a few hours separated my daily job from a highly expected vacation 13 months before I was hired at a big retail company in Brazil. I was leading two B2B products, and felt exhausted embracing the strategy shift from one of them.
While thinking about the coming trip to Patagonia, I received the shocking announcement that my direct leader would be replaced half an hour after I did a handover about the products I was managing.
The head of the B2B product argued that she wasn’t an experienced product manager, lacking the ability to develop the team with data analysis, agile, and product coach.
At the beginning of my product management journey, I would agree with that argument, because the lack of the strategy of one of the first products I worked with made me paralyzed couple of times. But, after five years contributing to different environments, such as startups and big companies, I learned that being a product leader requires a lot more than product management hard skills.
In Brazil, product management is still evaluating as an important discipline to help startups and big companies thrive. To adapt to that reality, it is common to see product leaders that didn’t worked as product managers before. In this process, I saw a lot of them learning with product managers and the environments on how to adapt and contribute in the best way possible to become a good product leader. They get often reskilled, focusing on OKRs, agile methodology (to understand the challenges of leading development teams), and how to achieve outcomes.
The theory matters, but you can’t thrive in product management until you practice in real life. I don’t consider myself an expert on product management, but while working with that leader I felt psychological safety and confidence, even considering a turbulent context.
We spent precious time doing forecasts, understanding the available data, and determining the storytelling to plan an enormous refactoring into an internal B2B product.
Those were moments where I felt genuinely challenged and learned a lot about how to be more pragmatic when working with data. Product management schools talk a lot about that, but years before that discipline spreads, administrators and managers have worked a lot analyzing numbers and dashboards.
I really enjoyed my vacation time but, after coming back to work, I had to dedicate plenty of time explaining all the raw job that I was evaluating with the old leader to, just in one week, receive the hard feedback that I was lacking organization leading two products. (Of course acting as a good product manager is a hell of a challenge, but I think a PM needs more than a week to reorganize all the things after a vacation.)
With more focus on the internal product, my team was dedicated to develop the first version of the refactored internal product, while I determined how we collect data and communicate an hypothesis on why I found a lead indicator.
I had to do this job alone, considering that we didn’t have data scientists, CROs or business analysts that could help us.
On 1:1s, this new leader preferred staying on track on what was happening, without proactively understanding how and why I was pursuing that approach on the product. From one side, I conquered the confidence quickly enough to contribute with the best way to pursue the outcome from the product. From the other side, though, I lost confidence in my leadership and decided to work alone - which I don’t see as a good thing.
Why leaders doesn’t necessarily need previous work as product managers?
The rule of thumb predicts that, to be good at leadership, you have to work before on the field you’re leading. In the product area that is important, because you could effectively coach, create and communicate strategy to foster delivery with real outcomes.
But a good leader needs a bunch of soft skills that don’t necessarily come from product management. I talk about empathy, active listening, critical sense, business knowledge, confidence, and ability to give and receive feedback, to name a few of them.
To cross the chasm until product leader, some companies and leaders tend to value product management expertise. In fact, that could happen in every sector: analysts becoming leads due to their astonishing performance.
But let’s consider some scenarios:
The recent leader received the challenge, but he hasn’t received any coaching or feedback;
After a couple of months, the new leader is hired in a different company, also leading without formal or continuous training;
The recent leader comes from a different business unit of the company, facing a new challenge.
Being experienced product managers or not, the lack of leadership skills could have originated by one of those described scenarios.
Leading product managers requires more soft than hard skills. Compared to software engineering peers, who tend to value leaders with hard skills in coding, PMs usually need a psychologically safety environment, genuine feedback, and empathy. Of course, APMs and other product people in junior roles demand more hard skills from their leaders - and, in this case, I believe senior PMs could help coaching them.
But good leaders extract the best from employees, no matter the size of the challenge.
That is one of the deepest foundations of leadership that requires a lot of skill sets - not just the product management skill set.