Establishing Credibility & Building Relationships
The PM roles (Product Manager, Program Manager, and Project Manager) all need to lead cross-functional product efforts without having direct control of resources. A common phrase heard is “I have all the responsibility but no authority”. Last month at the Seattle ProductCamp, brainstormed in a session titled “Responsibility without Authority” to get ideas on how to establish credibility and influence your organization. Here’s a quick discussion of those notes generated from about 25 attendees. It includes identifying the major stakeholders, the roadblocks to influence, and suggestions for gaining credibility and the ability to influence.
Who Do You Need to Influence?
We started with building a list of who where the groups that primarily Product Managers had to influence in managing their product. We then circled back and added why the influence was needed. Here’s what was said:
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Stakeholder
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Why Influenced Needed? |
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Development
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Executives
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Sales
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Customers
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Marketing
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Customer Support |
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Operations
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Finance
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Partners
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In summary, there are a large number of internal and external stakeholders involved in the conceptualization, development, deployment, and ongoing operation of a product. A conversation with all of them is needed to gain alignment, support, and effectiveness in delivering to the customers, and in getting feedback from them.
Roadblocks to Effective Influence
This discussion was intended to identify what gets in the way of establishing influence with stakeholders above. We’ll just dive into the list:
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Politics
PM not an executive seat & functioning across the org No product management process
Silos exist in the organization |
Lack of a collaboration culture Data Credibility
Shared language
False consensus (I agree to what I understand)
Poor Strategic Vision
No resources to match vision
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This is a lot of stuff to trip over. As a summary, the major roadblock categories fall into these buckets:
- Lack of shared executive vision, expectations, objectives, and commitment across all the organizations
- Lack of clear PM roles and responsibilities communicated across the organization
- A culture of silos, working separately or even against other organizations
- Terminology differences between groups leading to misunderstanding or false commitment
- Lack of supporting customer data for cause
So How Do You Overcome These?
The following list contains some quick pointers to help overcome these obstacles.
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Learn to speak the language of other functions
Default to customer role
With Execs
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Create rapport with Sales
With Development
Communicate broadly and honestly |
The strategy required is a combination of building relationships with peers while also establishing credibility with execs. There are a few key executives in any organization that influence the overall strategy most, and these are the ones to build relationships with, either directly or through their direct reports who have their ear. Missing from the recommendation list is an important establishment and broad communication of the PM role, responsibilities and objectives. Without the path cleared in front of the PM, they are bound to trip.
Another major power center in most product companies is Development, and in this situation you have to win them over by demonstrating you’re a partner and willing to go to bat for them. You also have to prove you are credible source of customer and market info and have alignment with influential execs.
In order to have credible customer info, you need to be talking to them directly or have good contacts with other customer facing orgs, like Sales and Support, who have the info and will share it. Finally, in all interactions across the org, you have to be multilingual translator to align each of the functions and make sure everyone understands and shares the same expectations.
Summary
The amount of influence you have as a cross-functional leader is less a function of the org chart, and more about building credibility with key execs and peers through personal interactions. Use these relationships to help define the overall product vision and strategy, and then leverage the relationships to manage the development of the tactics within each of the necessary stakeholder groups to implement it. You may not always be completely able or successful in accomplishing this, but most of the time it will take you a long way to achieving your goals.
My thanks to the many participants in the Seattle ProductCamp who attended the session and provided a fun and informative discussion leading to this article.
Related Articles:
| File | Description | File size | Created |
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 Leadership_in_a_Cross_Functional_Role.pdf | 406 kB | 2012-09-03 20:46 |