14: The Unpredictability of Managing Product Managers

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcome Aaron Bowen (Qualtrics) and Jake Wallack (Axon) to talk about managing product managers in an organization. The most effective way to do this is to trust your team, allow them to solve problems and make decisions as you guide them through structures that give them the opportunity to perform and deliver.   Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 01:41 Managing product managers 11:49 Be able to leave an organization and the decision-making quality should still be there 13:36 Start with the customer, learn from them, and use the information to make a decision 14:53 Your process and approach should be distilled down to the essence but not overly restrictive 19:48 Managers of PMs function as general managers 21:40 Be a ruthless prioritizer for your product and customer 25:13 The emotional - intelligence framework 29:15 What’s going to help a person grow as a PM? 33:45 Help shape the person to continue to deliver then hire and develop the right people 35:35 Organizational design is about everyone working together 37:46 Leaders should never tell high qualified members exactly what to do 39:40 It should be based on trust and your people making the decisions 41:52 PM skill: effective communication 42:25 PM skill: culture 43:32 PM skill: be able to take feedback 44:44 PM skill: navigate organizational politics 46:07 PM skill: vision  47:55 Habits of highly effective product managers 52:48 Make sure that everyone in your team are successful in what they’re doing 56:24 Motivate with accountability, get out of the way, and trust your PMs 57:26 Great PMs create structure for other people to operate off of