Introduction
From experience, there are 4 qualities in particular that define a truly effective product manager. The first 3, in order, are recognition, influence, and strategy.
Without recognition, people do not respect nor recognize your authority and/or credibility.
Without influence, people are unlikely to help you drive your product’s vision and strategy.
Without strategy, your product and teams are flying blind.
The fourth and final quality is empowerment. Now, without empowerment, and I’m sure others may disagree, you won’t necessarily doom your product. Empowerment, from experience, is more of a multiplicative factor that amplifies the other 3 qualities’ impact on you, your teams, and your product.
What is empowerment?
In it’s simplest definition, empowerment is support. When you empower yourself, you’re supporting yourself in ways that help you to achieve your goals. When you empower others, you enable others to support the pursuit of their own goals.
Empowerment is essentially equipping someone with what they need and trusting them to carry out some particular activity or plan, whether it’d be yours, theirs, or a shared initiative.
What does this mean for product managers?
When a product manager has their recognition, influence, and strategy on solid foundation, empowerment is what amplifies their unified impact on a multiplicative scale. In other words, it is what scales you and your team to greater heights and achievements.
How do I effectively empower?
Here are 3 ways I’ve seen the concept of empowerment work and succeed for teams across dozens of industries and teams:
(1) Promote cross-functional collaboration – 84% of product managers attribute collaboration to be key to their product’s success. We achieve this by encouraging open communication and regular meetings (with an agenda, of course) with key stakeholders across all involved with your initiative. Methodologies like Agile or Scrum are great formats to start with and adjust based on your teams’ feedback and need.
(2) Foster a culture of continuous learning – A well-informed team is a powerful team. Provide every opportunity for people to learn, especially for topics they are personally interested in. Invest into training programs, workshops, resources, etc. Encourage your teams to share their knowledge and learn from each other.
(3) Delegate with trust and support – This will be the hardest for some. It’s important to be able to equip people with what they need, and then to let go, success in hand or not. When team members feel trusted, they are more motivated and generally perform better. Let people make mistakes so long as they learn from them.
Can you help me?
It depends if you’re ready to help yourself. Cheesy, I know, but a universal truth with ANY coach or mentor is that the coachee or mentee has to be ready to invest in him or herself. Their painpoints have to be so significant that they are forced to do something to relieve the pain.
If you’ve got your foundations as a product manager locked down and you’re ready to begin scaling to greater heights, let’s talk. Click the 1-on-1 Coaching button at the top right of this page to reach out to me. Answer a few questions, and I’ll reach out to schedule our most important call: a discovery call.
In about 15 minutes, you’ll learn a bit more about me. I’ll learn a bit more about you. Together, we’ll make sure you’re in the right place before we go any further.
So, if you’re looking for help getting yourself known and respected by your peers, reach out! If not, no worries! But, if one day you ever need someone to talk to about it, you know where to find me.