This is the first post under the topic ‘Stakeholder management in the Product Leadership series
Monica joined Bling-bling as its first product manager. Bling-bling was a promising tech startup in the consumer product space. At the time of joining, she didn’t know that this was going to be a rocketship ride. In the next few months, the startup grew at an exponential pace and also raised loads of money.
Monica doubled up, worked hard, and contributed her best to the growth of the company. She was rewarded with 3 promotions in less than 2 years and became Director of Products with a team of 5 PMs reporting to her. It was nothing short of a dream cum true. Isn’t this why people join startups – faster career track and the related rewards?
The startup expanded to multiple product lines, multiple business units and hired large teams to run these units. The founders hired SVPs to lead these business units and important decisions were delegated to them. The product and engineering teams were still centralized and a lot of product requests started coming to Monica directly from business units rather than from the founders. Monica ran faster to cope up with the change. Instead of working for 10 – 12 hours earlier, she started putting in 16 hours now.
Despite all the hard work, things started going south.
Business and operations leaders started complaining that the product development has become their bottleneck and “nothing is moving”. On the other side, engineering management started complaining that the product team does not provide enough clarity and they were also unhappy with how things are. The PMs under Monica were slogging just like her but without any signs of reprieve.
With a heavy heart, Monica quit not seeing the day when her firm became a unicorn. Her initial feelings were disappointment and self-blame.
The introspection….
Monica decided to pause and reflect on what went wrong. When her emotions settled down, she took the help of a mentor and understood the following –
1. During the initial days of her journey, the teams were small and she took orders directly from the founders. There was only so much that the small teams could deliver and Monica was able to cope up with it by stretching herself a bit. After all, the startup media and icons advise you to push yourself off the limits. However, that worked only for a while.
2. As teams became large, she practically did not have the time to manage everything to the detail as she did in the past. Instead of acknowledging this limitation and whole-heartedly delegating the responsibilities to her team, she pushed herself more hoping that more of what she did earlier (working harder) would help her sail through.
3. She realized that she should have spent more time with the stakeholders (business & engg leaders), understood their perspectives, and brought everyone to a common understanding of what the strategy should be and how to prioritize and resource them right.
3. When requests were bombarding her from different business units, she attempted to satisfy all of them and ended up satisfying none of them. She rarely said ‘No’, nor did she bring the key stakeholders into a room to agree on a realistic roadmap.
4. She consulted with her manager (who was one of the founders) from time to time but then, the founders themselves were going through a transition from running a startup to a mid-sized company. So they couldn’t help her much.
Takeaways…
1. In fast-growing startups, your role can change in a blink without you realizing that the change has actually happened. You need to reevaluate your role every six months and if needed reinvent yourself.
2. There is always more to do in any firm. Working mindlessly on low leverage tasks would not take you anywhere in leadership roles. Ask for help and prioritization and bring all the stakeholders to the same page.
3. As you grow, the mix of time you spend on day-to-day activities changes. You would spend more time with stakeholders and your team to align/influence/motivate them and less on daily fire fighting.
4. There is quite a mindset change when growing up in the career – from viewing stakeholder management as overhead to a recipe of success.
5. It is important to focus on root causes and not on the symptoms. When stakeholders say – ‘product team is not delivering’, they only call out the symptoms. The root causes might be one or more of the following – poor prioritization, lack of delegation, not asking for help/resources, not being transparent, not being able to influence, inability to say NO, not communicating enough, and many more.
6. When the resources are constrained, more often than not, the stakeholders do understand and help you prioritize. Do not assume that they can’t help or are not willing to wait.
7. Having a mentor is the secret sauce to success. When no such person is available within the firm (e.g. early-stage startups), seek out mentors from the industry, especially ones who have gone through a similar journey.
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