Ownership: The Mindset Behind Amazing Product Managers and Leaders
What is Ownership and why does it matter?
As a product manager, ensuring you have a mindset of broad ownership is probably one of the most important things you can do to increase your effectiveness and advance your career. My experience has taught me that while hard skills are required to do the job, one of the key determinants of “greatness,” your ability to move up, and take on additional responsibilities is the personality and perspective you bring to the role . Key among these personality traits, a broad sense of ownership is the one that in my experience best correlates with leadership ability and readiness to take on larger roles.
The dictionary definition for “ownership” has not caught up with business culture’s (mis)use of the term so I’ll put forward my own definition. Ownership is the extent to which you feel you are responsible for a particular outcome, regardless of whether it is directly or indirectly part of your specific role. You could go further to say, “the extent to which you feel responsible and try to influence the outcome.” Leadership isn’t telling people what to do, it’s getting them to work together to achieve a goal. Success as a product manager is about mastering influence without formal authority. Moving up is about becoming a business leader in addition to a product leader. This is where that starts.
Ownership Types
To organize this a bit I think you can summarize ownership broadly into three categories as Product Manager:
Business objectives - do you feel responsibility for a broad range of outcomes related to the performance of the business regardless of whether your work directly influences all of them?
Cross-functional - Do do you feel responsible for the quality and impact of your cross-functional team’s efforts?
Interpersonal - Both at work and at home, do you own the outcomes in your life and in interpersonal relationships?
For the purposes of this article I’m really only going to talk about business objectives and cross-functional ownership. “Personal” ownership is the subject of an entire industry. :-)
Adopting A Broad Sense of Ownership
CORE
Business Objectives
If you are a senior product manager working on a popular feature of a SaaS platform you may be individually measured on KPIs around feature adoption, repeat usage, etc. Start with this as your core set of objectives - you are responsible for building the right stuff (roadmap) the right way to drive the desired business outcomes (KPIs) related to your piece of the puzzle. Ideally you know exactly what these are and it’s a regular conversation between you and your manager. No one is going to dispute that you are responsible for moving these KPIs in the right direction.
Cross-Functional
Your “Core” cross-functional team is likely made up of a UX designer and the engineering teams you work most closely with on a daily basis, but can include others. These are the “triad” members in Marty Cagan’s Inspired vernacular. With these groups your role carries the most formal authority and decisions carry the most weight with this team. While you should always try to provide context to bring people along, you can be more directive here as it’s part of the role description.
Ask yourself, even with this team, what is your level of ownership? Do you feel responsible for the quality of the engineering team’s output and the UX team’s designs? I don’t mean be judgmental or do people’s work for them. I’m saying do you feel like it’s your responsibility to make sure this team is performing at it’s best and actively doing things to help them improve? Matrix cross-functional teams by definition often do not have an official manager or leader. This is the role you can step into with an appropriate sense of ownership.
EXTENDED
Widening Your Aperture
Now go out “one ring” from your core business objectives and working teams. The first step here is simply being aware of a bigger picture. It’s too easy to get pulled into the day-to-day of rituals, user stories, triage, and life inside product and engineering only. Do you understand the higher level business metrics that your KPIs drive and do you understand the activities of the wider cross functional team and how they (hopefully) support your activities? Use of your feature probably has some impact on trial starts and trial conversion as well as retention rate. Have you investigated to see if there is data that shows the linkage between your feature and these larger business metrics? Are the activities of the next set of teams your work with aligned goals you are trying to execute?
Tuning Your Approach to Influence
How you approach people has to change a bit when you shift from the core team you work with every day to people you interact with less frequently. You have less formal authority here and need to remember you are trying to educate and influence primarily through visibility and education.
This is easier to see with an example. Let’s say your product marketing rep is trying to boost adoption of your feature (and thus retention rate) with some targeted emails to existing customers, but the segments they are targeting may not be a great fit for some reason. You’ve been digging in the product analytics and know that these segments make sense to target at a high level but their actual usage says otherwise. Maybe this person is aware or maybe not. If they are not dedicated to your product or feature they may not be as aware of the detailed data. It’s too easy when you are stressed and oversubscribed to look at the person as a roadblock to progress and escalate, or tell yourself “I’m doing my job well, they have no idea what they are doing.” Sit down, figure out why they are doing what they are doing and help fill in any blanks on customer knowledge or strategic context that will allow them to reach the right conclusion on their own this time and the next.
Assume people are good at what they do and that they just need some more context to do better. Most of the time people just don’t understand the customer or the company objectives well enough, so they are a little off the mark. This is especially true of people in “shared functions” where they might see a different part of the product or customer segment each day. As the product person on the team, you should know the market, customer, and business context required for your team better than most others. Give the team members visibility into data they may be missing and then help them understand how to apply it to their job if necessary. By helping someone to learn what they need to be successful in their job, their output will improve, and the team and the company will benefit. By taking ownership for the extended working team and their outputs, you improve the results you are measured against and do what is best for the business.
COMPANY LEVEL
The outermost ring is basically “the company” at the highest level - the top-level metrics and remaining teams that comprise the rest of the business. Do you feel responsible for the success of the company and the impact and alignment of the activities of the employees? Empathy is a big part here too. Do you know enough about all the other functions in the company not only to understand what they are doing but why they are doing it, and what creates urgency for people in those roles? How can you help them?
To act in the best interests of the company as product manager you need to have awareness and visibility into the entire business, even if at a high level. That’s true at every level of product manager job from entry level to VP. Be aware of the big picture. Be able to draw the linkage from your KPIs to the top-level metrics for the company. Have empathy and understand the the goals and struggles in other departments. Be part of the larger org and take action to influence outcomes outside of your immediate circle.
Why Ownership is So Powerful
Ownership is the Mindset Required to Move Up
There are so many things you could focus on as a product manager to improve your performance and set yourself up for career advancement. If I had to pick one that is the most correlated with effectiveness and career advancement it is ownership. As you move up in the organization eventually your Core will become an entire function (like Product) and Extended will be the entire company. Surprise! Senior roles are more about influence, driving alignment to the strategy, and ensuring the performance of top company-level metrics. You have fewer outputs you are individually responsible for, and are instead responsible for the outputs of an entire organization and their impact on the company. By adopting a mindset of broad ownership you are previewing your ability to carry more responsibility and make things happen in the wider organization.
The first step in adopting this mindset is just being aware that this is something you should be thinking about (complete, you read this article), and then finding ways in your everyday experience to learn about more of the business and effect change on a larger scale. A good related read is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. The book and its examples are largely about their time as Navy SEALs in Iraq, so not a direct application to product management. However, I think the authors do a good job of explaining how they created a culture of success in their team by taking a wide definition of ownership in all aspects of their job. That mindset absolutely applies to product.
Ownership Expectations Mismatch: Why Careers Can Stall Out
More times than not, I’ve seen a product manager’s narrow view of ownership be the reason their career has stalled out at the IC level or junior manager level. In many cases both the PM and their manager have failed to articulate why the person is not ready to move up, which is frustrating for everyone. It’s also easy to miss because it’s not a critique of their outputs as a product manager or even their interpersonal skills. It can be the silent career killer. Maybe the problem is articulated as “you need to demonstrate more leadership” but there’s not enough detail to act on. My main reason in writing this is trying to provide a model for thinking about this and some more detail so that ICs and managers can have better conversations about what people need to do to be more effective.
If ownership is going to be a problem for a product manager, it’s typically in the “extended” zone where that happens. A narrow sense of ownership usual manifests as “the hole is not in my side of the boat” or “well I did my part correctly” typically when talking about the extended cross-fucntional team. If this is happening in the Core with the engineering and UX them I’d argue it’s something that needs immediate coaching as you’re below the “minimum” expected level of ownership for the role. If you find yourself thinking these kind of thoughts it’s a sign you need to step back and evaluate the role you need to play as a leader in your role within the company.
Being aware is one thing, but you as an individual need to be willing to adopt the mindset and the responsibility. Sometimes people look at this mindset as “not holding people accountable for poor performance” and “working harder to compensate for others,” so they are not interested. I think that is the pessimistic view that assumes more people are bad at their jobs than are not. If you look at it as “I have an awesome, capable team, imagine what we could do with more focus and context,” then stepping into a leading role is very compelling.
A product manager being told they are “lacking a sense of urgency” is another way this can manifest. I used to look at “sense of urgency” separately from ownership, and after many years I landed on “a sense of urgency comes from an appropriate sense of ownership.” You can’t tell someone to have more urgency about something if they don’t innately feel it. Most of the time when I’ve heard the feedback or even given it myself, it was because the PM was not acting with urgency to deal with something in the Extended zone. The PM didn’t think (or know) it was theirs to act on and that they should act like they own a wider outcome. Typically the people giving the feedback are senior leaders and executives who have figured this out for themselves and have a mindset of broad ownership themselves, hence the mismatch in expectations.
How to Get Started
Adopting a mindset of broad ownership is the one of the single most important things you can do as a product manager to be more effective in your role and move up into leadership positions. It takes a lot of self-awareness, reflection, and effort to get good at this because it’s in addition to all of the other stuff you are doing every day in a very busy product manager job.
If you are an IC, do the simple work of writing down what’s in each of the “rings” in your sphere of influence. Can you back-trace from the top level company metrics to the ones you most directly influence? Do you know how direct the linkage is between these and what the trends and other contributing factors are at each level? Who’s in your core team and who’s in your extended team? How do you approach interactions with these teams? How do you react when it appears that someone’s efforts are not aligned with your product goals or that of the company and product strategy? Are you coaching and educating or are shutting down?
If you are a team leader the best thing you can do is have a dedicated conversation about ownership and your expectations. Run your employees through the questions listed above and see if you agree with their answers. Once it’s out in the open, making the appropriate adjustments is much more straightforward.
Looking to level up your product team to adopt a mindset of broad ownership? Struggling with ways to coach employees to embrace this style of leadership? Want to tell me what works and doesn’t work about this model of ownership?
