Leading Product Teams: Phil Karcher
Leading Product Teams is a series where I speak to people about their experiences leading teams of product managers. I’m intentionally talking to both people who recently had their first management experience, as well as those that have been at it for a long time, to pull out meaningful insights to help others improve and move up in their careers.
How did you get your start in product management?
“I was an industry analyst at Forrester, working with large enterprises and tech vendors doing innovative things. Eventually I got tired of doing research and providing advice, and wanted to actually build something. The very classic reason why people want to get out of consulting.”
Describe your first role managing other product managers
“While at OpenText my manager approached me about taking a Director role overseeing a platform team. At the time I was leading a Security Awareness Training product and enjoyed it so much I didn’t want to give it up. My boss and his boss would occasionally ask me for the next 6 months if I was still interested. Eventually I took the role, but ended up keeping my IC responsibilities so I was a player / coach.”
“Having finally accepted the role, I wished I had taken it earlier because it was a really good experience. It was intellectually stimulating seeing what it takes to develop a PM and you have more leverage and impact in the organization. There were all these new avenues I had just not been exposed to before.”
What was most surprising about your first time leading other product managers?
“I’ve had managers throughout my career, but as a new manager, I was coming to grips with what it means to be successful in this role. I’m now managing these people that have been doing their jobs for several years. I think it’s very different to get promoted and then recruit and build out your own team versus take over a team that’s already in place. My big question was how can I add value?
“I read High Output Management by Andy Grove, and the quote that stuck with me was ‘The value of a manager is the combined output of his or her team.’ If my employees are doing their job well, then I’m doing my job well.”
What did you do to improve your skills as a leader?
“I made it a mission to read, starting with top recommended books by SVPG. Working Backwards (about culture at Amazon), No Rules Rules (about culture at Netflix), and How Google Works. Those three were really helpful for me in thinking about product leadership. In terms of day-to-day and figuring out the intricacies of the role I looked to my immediate manager who had been the manager of my team previously. He coached me up a lot. All the while I was building my philosophy as a manager. One of the key things you need to do, I think, as a product leader, is to build your own framework, cobbled from your mentors, these books, product management thought leaders like SVPG, Pragmatic, Amazon, Chris Petersen [audible laugh], to find these things to point your people to and to guide your interactions day-to-day with the organization. Particularly for the coaching and developing side of the job. Decision frameworks, prioritization frameworks, things that point to the right activities and how they should be approaching their jobs.”
What would you say are critical activities for product leaders?
“I think modeling behavior for your team is super important. Product leaders need to continue to talk to customers and partners, and need to be able to still get into the details. There’s a danger for managers of product managers to just be a cog in the wheel — taking direction from up high and passing it on. I was fortunate I still had responsibility for my product line so I could continue to do that easily.“
“[connecting work to business objectives] was particularly important for me leading a platform team, with people who owned different parts of the product. I think this still applies in general too, especially in a company with a lot of products: You need to tell people how their work ties to the larger business objectives. One thing that I thought I did well was giving everyone on my team a goal to show quantitatively how something they decided to do during the quarter impacted sales or solved a problem for customers. Forcing them to tie their activities to business objectives and show analysis with metrics.”
Where do you see new product managers struggle the most?
“I think the biggest challenge gets to something I read in [Product Leaders blog] related to empathy and emotional intelligence. It can be hard for a new product manager to understand the context and the goals of the different departments they work with, whether it’s engineering, sales, or support. An experienced product manager can regulate what they say to drive toward the shared objective. It requires a combination of the hard skill of business knowledge and understanding the other business functions. I don’t know how to teach that. It’s something you just pick up from exposure to and working with those functions. Coming in cold you just need to learn, and be humble. You have to embrace being a newbie.”
“Storytelling is another skill new PMs struggle with. Taking people on a journey, whether it’s execs, or customers, or getting sales people energized about something. Being able to tell people what we’re doing and why they should care. It’s also part of the empathy piece — narrowing your story and level of detail to exactly this audience to accomplish the goal.”
[PRODUCT LEADERS] Check out other posts about how empathy can help you be a more effective leader and why new product managers need to learn, be humble, and confident to lead effectively.
What feedback do you have on the Profile of an Excellent Product Manager?
“I agree with it generally. I agree the hard skills are overemphasized as they are the easiest to find just by looking on LinkedIn. I think judgment needs to be featured. My advice to my team when I left my last role was that you need to develop a portfolio of case studies where you exhibited good judgment that led to some positive outcome. You can ace any interview if you have 12 scenarios that say ‘faced with this scenario, given this data, this is how you navigated and exhibited good judgment. Or how you self-analyzed to see what you could have done better.’”
[PRODUCT LEADERS] You can view the Profile of an Excellent Product Manager here. With everyone I interview I’m looking for honest feedback on the profile so that I can fine tune it over time. I’d love to hear from you as well. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss the profile or anything else.
Key Takeaways From Phil’s Experience Leading a Product Team
Insights
“The value of a manager is the combined output of his or her team.”
Even as you move up, you should always be talking to customers.
Modeling behavior for your team and linking their work to business objectives are two of the most important things for a product leader to do.
A lot of people that are new to product management really struggle with empathy within the organization, being able to fine tune a message to a particular audience, and lead cross-functionally to a common goal.
In the end judgment is the ultimate measure of a product manager.
Cool Management Technique
Give your team members a goal to quantitatively connect how the work they did in the quarter either had a business impact (sales, gross margin, etc) or solved a customer problem, regardless of which part of the product they work on. This is even more important for platform teams that are one step removed from the end customers.
Reading List
High Output Management by Andy Grove
Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.
