[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Product Leadership

[00:00:00] Janna Bastow: Welcome everybody. This is the ProdPad webinar series that we run here. We run these really regularly. So, this is just one in a series of all of talks, they’re a mix of presentations and fireside. 

And it’s always with a focus on the experts that we bring in here who bring this wealth of information and a focus on the content and the learning and the sharing. A little bit about us here at ProdPad before we kick off. So ProdPad is a tool that we built when we were product managers ourselves, myself and my Co-founder Simon, we were also the product managers behind the Mind The Product community.

Our tool ProdPad grew up around best practice and so it’s actually a tool that helps teams instill that best practice. And really, what we needed was something to help us keep track of, the more strategic work like what our vision was, what our goals were, but also the more tactical, like what our customers were asking for.

So we built this and now it’s being used by thousands of teams out there and it gives you added control and organization and transparency, and helps you create a single source of truth for all your product decisions. And it’s free to try, so you can jump in, give it a try. And we even have a sandbox environment that’s preloaded with example data, including how to use, lean Now-Next-Later roadmaps and OKRs.

Examples of those and you can move them around and see how it fits with your own data. And our team is made up of product people. So as I said, it was founded by two of the product people behind Mind the Product, if you’re familiar with that community. And our team is made up of product minds.

So, give this a try and give us your feedback. We’d love to hear how you’re getting on with it and what problems you’re trying to solve with it. And that feedback goes into the regular releases. We release once a week, at least into ProdPad and it’s just a constantly improving tool.

And on that note, I want to tell you about some of the stuff that we’ve been doing with it as well. So you all have heard about all this AI, generative AI stuff that’s out there. A couple of things we’ve been doing with this well, we’ve released AI into some really interesting areas, some interesting use cases.

And one of the really interesting ones is using it as a coach. So allowing you to sense check as to whether you’re on the right track with your work. So, yes, it can help you right. Your user stories and brainstorm key results and that sort of thing. But also it can help you sense check as to whether the vision you’ve written is actually any good or whether the idea you’ve put on your backlog or in your road map is actually aligned with what’s on your road map.

So it could be a bit of a sidekick, a bit of a coach. And so just with one click, it’ll give you that feedback and then you can iterate from there. And the other piece that we’ve we’ve put out there, and this is in private beta right now, and we’re actually reaching out to folks, if you want to be part of this private beta, let us know, just let us know in the chat right now, say co pilot, because we’re looking for interesting use cases that we can test this with, and what it is a an AI sidekick that sits Alongside your prod pad and allows you to ask questions like, Hey, can you summarize everything that this particular customer has said recently, and, help me figure out if there’s anything on the roadmap that I should be talking to them about how have we done on our on this particular goal that we’ve been aiming for can you help me log this idea and get it published.

Put into my pod pad for me. I’ve just, can you take this roadmap, this picture of a roadmap and upload it and turn it into an annex later roadmap that can take an image and turn it into a roadmap for you. So lots of really interesting use cases. Let us know how you would use.

Something like this. And that’s something that we can test for and start rolling out and doing some really interesting things with, so if you want to try that, say co pilot in the chat and we’ll look at getting you into this private beta that we’re rolling out now. So enough about us.

I want to introduce you to our guest. James Kanaka, who is a well, he’s got over two decades of experience in product management and digital marketing. He’s held leadership roles at companies like Amazon and ExpressVPN across the United States and across and in Europe here as well. He’s built and led multiple product teams that have delivered zero to one hardware products, including things like the Amazon Echo or the Alexa AI Assistant.

And he’s currently a coach for product managers, dedicating to helping professionals build and grow, that grow their careers in product management. So today he’s going to be talking to us about how to transition from product manager to product leader. So with that, I want to say a big welcome to James.

Hi James. One big welcome. 

[00:04:45] James Gunaca: Hello. Thank you so much, Jenna for both having me and thanks to everyone who’s. Taking time out of their day to be here or to watch this. I’m just really excited to be talking about, mastering this huge leap, from product manager, where you’re delivering things for customers and working with teams to product leader, where you’re responsible, not just for the products, but for the people you’re building relationships that have more to do with.

1 to many instead of just 1 to 1 and these decisions that you make the work that you do wildly different scope. And you’ve ever experienced as a PM but before I dive in any further. I just want to do a quick poll. Right? So in the chat, just type one. If the number one, if you’re already a product leader or two, if you’re someone who’s here because you aspire to become one, maybe you’re on that journey.

All right. I’m seeing some come in seeing some ones some one and a half one recently twos, right? So got a great mix of people in here, which is wonderful to see. So whether you are a product leader or you aspire to become one, The most important thing I want everyone to take away from today is that you’re going to need help and support to be successful.

So some of you, you may have heard of Phil Terry and his concept of never search alone when it comes to looking for your next job. That really resonates with me. And it’s why I also want you all to know that, you should never make the jump to product leader alone. It’s this massive leap.

You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to fail a lot and going through it on your own. It’s just not going to cut it in this environment in tech that we find ourselves in. But, why am I talking about this? What really inspired me to focus on this topic? Well, as I just alluded to, there’s been a lot of changes in the tech industry over the past couple of years, a lot of layers of management have been reduced or eliminated.

And this is still happening, even at my former employer. So when you combine that with maybe some of the experiences you’ve have of working with a bunch of shit bosses, I know I’ve had mine, the kind they either don’t know how to do the job that you do, or they don’t care about your career progression or all of the above.

I’ve experienced this firsthand, but I feel compelled to really help people be successful. And just because less managers exist. It doesn’t mean that less people need support, do great work and become the product leaders of tomorrow. I think it’s going to be harder for product people to develop and grow without great product leaders and great product leaders.

They have empathy and they know how to do the job really well. Who am I and what qualifies me to actually be talking to you all about this? So as Jenna said, my name is James Ganaca. What I focus on now is as a product management coach for PMs. But throughout my career I’ve interviewed, hired and promoted hundreds of product managers, and as Jenna said, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years across product and marketing and in tech, which included over eight and a half years at Amazon, both in the US and I moved to the eu, worked there for a few years, and now I’m here in the UK where I live.

And I’ve been coaching people for over five years now. This is my LinkedIn QR code. Feel free to scan to connect with me. I also dropped the link in the chat. Send me a message. I’d love to help you in any way that I can. But, having success early on in my career, It really disillusioned me, especially when I made this transition into a product leadership position.

I knew the job I was doing really well, and I had also hired and managed people in non product jobs. And so when I was moving into my first product leadership role, I figured, Oh, I would be great at hiring product people too. I also had great relationships and respect from other leaders, VPs and directors at Amazon who oversaw some of the best talent.

And so I thought that trust would be inherent and it’d be there too. And then I failed multiple times on different things and it was really difficult, but today like I’m 100 percent focused on helping product managers build and grow their careers. And so this jump from product manager to product leader, it’s not addressed nearly enough.

And with all of these layers of management being stripped away, it’s just created this gap. And there’s plenty of books and newsletters and podcasts and videos and webinars about being a great product manager or interviewing to be one, right? I’m in that space. I know. And there’s plenty of product leaders out there who talk about a product operating model or the importance of upskilling.

And these are all highly valuable, but there’s this noticeable gap for product managers who are looking to make this jump from product manager to product leader. And so I want to help close that gap, but where do you start? Well, there’s three facts. I think that every product leader current or future really needs to know.

And I’m going to walk through those and go into some more detail. Number one, though, becoming a leader of people is hard, but becoming a product leader is even harder. And you’re not going to be good at it on your own, but like, what is great look like? Well, great product leaders, they deliver results, right?

Product leaders build incredible high performing teams. Great product leaders motivate and inspire. These are all things they do on top of ensuring that great products are made. But how do you get there? Well, spoiler alert, there’s no playbook on how to be successful. And it varies from company to company.

Most companies, they won’t even be equipped to help you. Maybe you have a great leader to learn from and model off of. This is typically. Not the case, spend a moment. I just want everyone to pick a minute, right? Think about all of the managers you’ve ever had in your career product or not product.

How many would you say are great? Maybe one or two stick out in your memory. Maybe one or two stick out in your memory, but for the wrong reasons, most don’t, yeah. 5 percent is what I see. So when we have 5%, I did this audit myself, I think I’ve had over 27 different managers in and I think three of them actually even cared about my growth.

But when thinking about this transition, there’s going to be problems that you’re going to have to overcome and as product people exploring problem spaces is something I’m sure we’re all familiar with. So I thought I would just expand a bit on some of the problems you’re going to face.

Just reinforce just how challenging it is that you can think about it before going in or know what to focus on first product leader. You’re going to be involved with hiring people and you’re going to make mistakes. So if you’re going to be going down this path of becoming a product leader.

Here’s a tip, get involved with hiring before you ever become responsible for it and rely on people who are great at assessing talent already. My first senior PM hire. Was, I don’t know, I’d say coming on seven or eight years ago, and I remember it quite well because in the debrief for this candidate, I had a director of product management who was in there very experienced interviewer actually was the person, one of the people who interviewed me for the job I got at Amazon, and we were debating about whether or not this candidate was fit for a senior PM or PM.

And I really needed a senior PM because I’d already hired a couple of PMs. I needed someone more senior. And this director was just like, I just don’t feel like this person meets the bar. And I went against their judgment and I calibrated wrong. And the consequence was that I ended up hiring someone that was more like a PM than a senior PM.

And the need that I have for someone with that better strategic oversight and that autonomy that didn’t require a lot of direction, not what I got. To do a lot more handholding, a lot more coaching and development, which meant I couldn’t do the other things I was trying to free up my time to do, and that’s not even saying the impact that it had on that individual and their propensity to succeed in that role.

So that’s just 1 example, but then you’ve also got top performers. They might leave, they might have other interests, right? So you need to inspire them or you need to find ways to support them. One of my best performing senior PMs who’s now a principal PM at Amazon, they came to me one day and were saying, Hey, I really enjoy working with you and, I really see myself in this team, but at the same time, I’ve got these personal and career interests that, are drawing me to consider this other role and as, as their leader and as the manager of a team, I struggled because I’m like, Oh, I really want to help this person be successful and support them in their career growth.

But if I let my top performer go, that’s going to create a gap on my team. Who’s going to solve those problems? I ultimately decided to support them and say, go do what’s best for you. That was what my instinct told me to do. Probably a good, a good insight in retrospect in terms of why I like working with people more than I work with companies these days.

But these are the types of challenges that you’re going to face. On the other end though, you’ve got the bottom performers. They’re going to drag you and your team down. So, ideally, you can lift them up or you shift them out. Another PM story, right? Hired a new PM, new to the company, became obvious within a matter of weeks.

Missing commitments. Others came to me to complain about them, and it reflected poorly on me and my ability to assess, right? And these things are going to happen. You’re not always going to get it right, but that also became an opportunity for me to demonstrate to my team. Hey, I’m going to address this, not just to the team that looks up to me, but also to the other leaders out there who observed and that’s just the people aspect, right?

This confidence that you’ve hopefully been building or you’ve built about being a great product manager. It takes people years. And you’ll need to build this for being a great leader too. So be humble, realize that being a great PM does not mean you’re going to be a great product leader. And some people make the move back and forth, right, going from a group PM back to I see I’ve seen this happen, and that’s okay.

You can dip your foot in, learn. And if it’s not for you, step out. Another thing, products that you manage, right? Let’s take this to the product angle. Some of them are going to fail. So knowing what’s core to your business and what is imperative to succeed versus what might be transformative or is a testing ground, you’ll have to make decisions about that.

When I started on Amazon echo, we just had one product, but in a few years we had the small echo. We had the echo with the screen. We had echo glasses. There was even an echo called look. That was a camera that would take a picture of you and talk to you about your fit for clothes. And it was this very experimental product that many people don’t know about because it was probably one of the weirdest things that they ever launched.

[00:17:06] Janna Bastow: I remember hearing about that when that was supposed to be launched, right? That was a a weird pivot out or something like that. Yeah. How long did that one last? 

[00:17:16] James Gunaca: I think less than two years. 

[00:17:17] Janna Bastow: Okay. And 

[00:17:19] James Gunaca: it was like, I think they even tried to pivot Yeah. So there, and there was more experiments.

[00:17:24] Janna Bastow: Okay. 

[00:17:25] James Gunaca: But in the experiment, high cost experiments in this particular case, though, like as a product leader, how are you determining where you invest or where you allocate the talent that you have, you can’t always just go hire someone new. So how do you distribute the talent? Well, I want to make sure that the core product, the core component to the success of the business was echoed dot.

This was the. 49 product. We’re selling millions of these a year. Can’t mess this up. This is what is driving penetration through millions of households around the world. So I want my best performer on that. And if I have to make a decision about who to put on this experimental product, that’s the type of judgment call you have to make again, becoming a product leader, really hard.

And this just emphasizes the importance of finding and having a good support system. Number two, the scope it’s drastically different. What you’re responsible for changes, and you’re probably already picking up on this. Some PMs think, and I hear this a lot, Oh, moving into a leadership position, I’m going to have more autonomy.

I’ll get to decide more things on my own. These are the wrong perceptions to have, at least I think that. And hopefully they’re not your sole motivation to becoming a product leader. The success or failure of a product line or the entire business at smaller companies will start to rest on your shoulders, right?

So you move from focusing on the viability of your product, the P and L of the entire product line, and it becomes this, like, resource prioritization exercise, so I talked earlier about, okay, how do you maybe assign different people to different products? Well, how do you decide, do you need a senior PM on this?

Do you need a PM on this? Do you need a principal PM on this? How does that work? And so you have to shift as well from this day to day task management, high level leadership thinking. And one of the toughest things that people have to overcome when moving from PM to product leader is how do you start to delegate, right?

You can hire people who can do what you did well. That is one way to take it off your hands, but you also have to sometimes give up maybe over the years of your experience as a PM. You got really great. Writing requirements or you’re you’ve now adopted really amazing tools like prod pad, to offload some of that manual work you’re doing, and you’re using technology to help you do that.

But when you’re in a product leadership position, maybe you’re not as close to those things, but you’re now responsible for how effective people on your team to do that. So you have to decide, do I step in and show them and do some of that work myself, which is going to take time away from some of the other things you have to do.

Or did you just empower and trust your team to be able to learn those lessons on their own because you’re not going to know what’s being done well versus what could be improved. So I was taught and adopted this practice of it doesn’t sound super great, but I’ll use the terms anyway of inspecting and auditing regularly.

Now, this sounds very managerial because it is. But what this means in practice is like sit in with the team and rotate through the rituals, but frame it as a way is like, Hey, I’m here to help people. I’m here to identify ways to help people be more effective. It’s lifting everybody up, not micromanaging.

So when I came and I joined express VPN, I had a team of five PMs and senior PMs spread around Europe. I made sure to be like, Hey, I’d like to sit in on how you do, your sprint planning with your engineering team, or I’d like to sit it on like a, on a retrospective. I just want to observe and see how different people are doing it within the company because it wasn’t consistent.

And then I’m looking for things that are working really well that I can share with someone else and say, Hey, I saw this person doing it this way. And that seemed to really work for them. Why don’t you go talk with them and see if you can try to adopt that on your own? That ends up being the type of focus and attention that you need.

And it becomes less about the specific products and more about how is the overall product organization functioning. So again, like scope is different. Make sure that you’re finding other people that you can leverage to identify what works and what could be improved. And then finally, and this again is more of a elaboration on what already is true for PMs, like outcomes.

Which, PMs understand the importance of driving outcomes. They depend on relationships more than just as a PM, right? The relationships with your stakeholders and partners. It becomes even more critical, from as a PM, you’re influencing to get stuff done. But as a product leader, you’re having to resolve conflict.

Making sure teams are working well together. You have conversations with other leaders, your engineering leader, your design leader, or your research leader, their sales leader, who on their team are strong performers and what feedback can you get about your team that you’re not able to assess because you’re not there all the time conflicts are going to arise, settle those privately.

It was like, easy tip, you’re going to encounter conflict. I remember in a business review meeting at Amazon, 20 people in this room. And, my, one of my core stakeholders that most of my product team worked with was livid, like bang on the table, live it. And it was just shouting at my team.

And, I’m the kind of person that I wanted to step in and be like, Hey, that’s inappropriate. Like, how dare you? But I couldn’t. So instead it was, Hey, I understand. I hear you. You’ve got some concerns. Let’s you and I talk about this one to one and we’ll come up with a plan and a way to resolve it.

And then I met with that person in their office that day and said, look, I get it. You’re frustrated, but yelling at my team in front of their peers and their stakeholders. Is not the way to build trust with them. They’re just going to dislike working with you even more. It’s not going to motivate them.

Let’s find a way to motivate them and let’s solve the problem together. That is part of the work, a product leader versus a product manager next product strategy, right? It’s something I haven’t had a chance to talk about yet. This becomes broader in scope. When you’ve got to consider org dynamics, do you have the right skills in place?

What about leveling? I talked about this earlier. Do you need three senior PMs and two PMs, or do you need some POs? If that’s a function that exists within your company, what happens when you’ve got someone who is really keen on getting to that next level, but the scope of that role just doesn’t exist within the team, if you need a PM who maybe has super strong skills with respect to driving growth, If that doesn’t exist within your team, can you upscale them?

Do you find someone else? Do you move them to another position? If one exists, do you have to make difficult decisions about letting people go? If you’re not thinking about these types of challenges before making the move into product leadership, please consider them and know that’s what you’re going to have to do.

Have open eyes. You’re also going to need to motivate and inspire people. This one’s fun. I talked earlier about some of those experimental products. Some people don’t want to work on the quirky thing or they don’t want to work on the unexciting or boring things. Or people get stuck, need to get unstuck or working through difficult times.

The first two or three years of Amazon echoes growth were like unprecedented at the company. And it was like an exciting time. And then Google home and Apple home pod comes along and the party changed dramatically. And now it was tough times. It was, we’re not hitting our sales figures or falling behind.

Competition is becoming fierce. And like all of a sudden, what was a bunch of VPs being excited was now like drilling in on the smallest details. So how do you keep your team motivated and inspired and focus on the right problems when those difficult times happen to the tip here is like, don’t let morale be something that you have to fix that be something that you maintain, planned outings with the team building connections.

When I made my transition from marketing into product. It was also a change in my life, right? I had also recently got married and I decided like, Hey, I want to have a clear division between work and personal life. I used to do all these happy hours, go to all these events when I was in marketing.

Cause that was just like what I was used to. And I’m like no, I want to now, like I want to go to work and I want to leave work and I want it to be over. This was fine when I was an IC, I didn’t go to any happy hours. I’m just like, nope, not doing that. But when I became a leader, I knew that I needed to keep my team engaged.

And happy. So I set up events, got back involved in doing that. So those are just the three facts and some tips and some stories next. And finally, I want to share my framework for mastering this jump. And yeah, as Janet said, more questions you have, make sure you drop them in the Q and a, so I’ll be staying back at the end.

We would love to answer questions that people have. So let’s assume you’ve considered all that I’ve shared so far and, or maybe you’re already in this process. How do you master this jump for product people? We love frameworks. I’m going to share five things, five components think that you can follow to get there.

So first you need to understand where the opportunity exists. If there’s not space for a product leader in the company, opportunity doesn’t exist there. Well, how do you know if the opportunity exists? Well, is there a current product leader? Are they going to be around for a while? Or are they maybe going to leave?

Yeah. Is the product team growing right if you’ve got a manager who’s overseeing five plus people, there’s a good chance that they’re going to need to, have someone else come in. Also, a core principle, at least that I was taught was you need to as a leader, you need to have a succession need to know and be thinking who’s going to eventually be my backfill.

So key in on where this opportunity might exist. And just know that doesn’t exist within your company, making this shift from an IC role to another company into a leadership role, especially in this job market. Don’t expect that’s going to work. People who are hiring managers want people who’ve already done the job.

So, yeah, please don’t contribute the resume submissions for management roles if you haven’t had management experience.

But what can you do before you get in there? Well, get involved with recruiting. This becomes a big part of the product leadership position. Assessing, evaluating talent, both before you bring them in as well as once they’re already doing the job. And not just for product management roles, right? Hiring is hard.

It’s a lot of work. I guarantee you, if there are people within your company that are hiring, they would love to have more people interested in helping them assess talent. So, go talk to your engineering manager and say, hey, can I sit in on some interviews with some people? Or go talk to your HR partner if you have one and say, hey, what is it, what is involved in becoming someone who can run interviews on my own?

Right from phone screens to product sense interviews to maybe you don’t have to let go. Be able to do tech assessments for engineers. Let’s leave that to them. Same for like designing research. You don’t have to be great at assessing all the skills. But be able to assess people’s fit for the company and maybe fit for product roles.

The sooner you get involved and you build this muscle and you learn from others, the better position you will be in when you have to make your first hire.

Next, learn how to give and receive great feedback. If you’ve been working for any number of years, you’ve probably had an annual review. Maybe you’ve gotten peer feedback. Some of that feedback, most of that feedback, it’s good. It’s shit. I’m sorry. Like, it’s just there’s it’s really hard to give good feedback and you have to learn and you have to practice.

Good feedback is not excuse me. Hey, you did really well on that requirements document or hey, that pitch, with that senior leader, it went great. Nice job. That’s like motivational talk. Hey, you were able to influence that in that tech lead to change their mind on something, and I want to know more about how you were able to achieve that, or I think that’s something that someone else on the team could benefit from.

I’d like to see you help encourage someone else or help teach someone else on the team what you did to be successful there, right? Actionable feedback, constructive feedback. Also, here’s where I think there’s opportunity for you to do better and here’s some ideas or some projects or some things that you could do to improve in this area where maybe there’s opportunity for growth.

So, find people who are good at giving great feedback, ask them, how do you do it? How did you get better at this and model off of people who have been successful because you’re going to have to be giving and receiving feedback. To your team, to your colleagues, to your peers, to your managers, et cetera.

And so that’s a core skill you’re going to need. Build your roadmap. Surprise for product managers. I don’t just mean your product roadmap, but like your career road map, make a plan, so I remember when I asked earlier, type one in the chat or two in the chat, whether or not you’re a leader, you aspire to be.

And some said like 1. 5, I love that means like your. On the journey, right? So if you know that’s the destination you want to get to apply your product principles to this and build a plan towards it. What does, what are you doing now? I’m going to use the noun next later. What are you doing now?

What’s happening next? What’s happening later? You can use that framework. You can, or use another one, but apply your product principles to this. Aspect of your career and then engage your support system right throughout the journey. Make sure that you have a support system ideally internally, but also externally.

Jenna mentioned earlier about, the importance of community with respect to mind the product with respect to these webinars and so you’re already doing a great job. By taking time from your day to be here, I’m sure many of you read newsletters you listen to podcasts, you watch videos but you’re hopefully also connecting with people that you can learn from because as product people, we tend to be empathetic, which means we’re invested in other people achieving more because we all want to see better products created because I don’t know I tend to believe that some people get in product because they’re tired of using crappy products.

At least that’s what drew me to it. So engage your support system, because again, like if I leave you all with anything, I want it to be this, never make the jump alone. Failure’s hard, the scope is different, the stakes are higher than anything you’re ever going to face when it comes to making this jump.

How else can I help you? Well, I’ve got some questions I see coming through, but again, I currently work with PMs around the world on building and growing their careers. I run a community that today is focused on helping PMs land their next product. So that’s called product sphere. So we run workshops, we do group coaching, we’ve got a lot of dedicated content.

That’s easy to navigate, helps people negotiate great offers that companies big and small around the world, you know, and offers that they’re excited about. And so today. Actually, at this event, I’m excited to announce that I’m expanding this community to help people get to that next level, whether that be product leader or just, senior PM or principal PM or some other product role.

But this is just a look about what it looks like inside the community. If you’re interested you can scan this QR code there’s be a form to fill out on the landing page. If you’re interested in learning more, I want to thank you again, Jenna and also for the folks here. I see you’ve got some questions, but would be happy to talk with you all, understand how else I can support you.

But again, thank you so much. And yeah, what what questions can I answer? 

[00:34:41] Janna Bastow: That’s awesome. Thanks so much James. Really good to to have you chat us through that and really good insights about what to expect out of the the product leader role but yeah, thank you actually there was one question I had was you said don’t get your resumes in if, you don’t have the required experience and there’s a catch 22 there.

Right? If you don’t have the leadership experience, how do you get the leadership experience? How do you get your foot in the door? And also, while you answer that question somebody in the chat has said, could you show that QR code again, please? Thanks. Is that just because it’s a really neat looking QR code?

It’s a very neat looking QR code. QR 

[00:35:18] James Gunaca: code monkey, I think is the, that’s the tool that I use. All right. 

[00:35:22] Janna Bastow: I love a new tool recommendation. I’m going to check that one out. Cool. And yeah, sorry. Back to the question about how to get an actual product management experience as well. 

[00:35:30] James Gunaca: Yes. So the short answer is getting leadership experience happens most easily at the company that you already work at.

Right. And so, and I want to also just elaborate on this point about the resume and application thing. I only really emphasize that when people who are in an IC role wanting to move to a manager role. Now, if you’re like a PM, who’s maybe worked on in an, in a specific industry, and maybe you want to transition to another industry, don’t let that stop you from applying.

Apply. There’s valuable insights and experience that you have. I’m sure that people that maybe only worked in another industry don’t have. So don’t let that be a barrier. But when it comes to a leadership position, the reason I give the guidance is twofold. One, like, you’re unlikely to get success in terms of even being interviewed.

So lots of rejections, which are tough, but your propensity for failure is going to be much higher. As you join a new company, let’s say you get a job, your first job as a people manager, but you’re having to learn all these new skills as a people manager at a company where you have no built in trust with anybody.

You your team doesn’t know you or trust you. And all of a sudden, they’re going to find out that, hey, this person who’s now my boss has never managed someone before. And so the hill you have to climb in terms of establishing that trust. Becomes incredibly challenging. And so I think it just, it means that the likelihood to failure is much higher and failing as a product leader is consequential, not just for you.

Right. This is something else. And this is more of my personal belief, right? People who want to move into a leadership position, hopefully are understand that it’s not just the scope of the products, but you’re responsible for people’s careers. You’re going to have to fire people. You’re going to have, you might have to lay people off, which sucks.

It sucks. I’ve had to let someone go and that meant that they got, they had to like leave the country and that was really like, they had just had, they just had a child and I’m like, I had just had a child and like, these are the types of difficult situations you’re going to find yourself in and if you’re not ready for that or if that’s not something you’re interested in, just know that as a product manager, you don’t have to go be a people leader, you can be a principal PM for life or a senior PM at some companies for life for your career.

Yeah. 

[00:37:56] Janna Bastow: Yeah. So 

[00:37:56] James Gunaca: don’t look at this as the only path that you have to go. And I hope that perspective helps. 

[00:38:00] Janna Bastow: Yeah, that’s a that’s good insight. And actually, you’re talking about principal PM and other roles like that. Can you speak a little bit about the different tracks? So you mentioned IC. So, you’ve got IC versus manager.

What are those different paths? And how does somebody know whether they should go for? Manager or work their way up the IC path. 

[00:38:20] James Gunaca: Sure. So in terms of the, there’s really just two tracks, right? It’s on the IC side, it’s PM or sometimes there’s junior ones, but like PM, senior PM, most commonly principal or staff, some other companies will bake in some more layers there.

And at some point there’s like the high, like the peak of the IC. And for many it’s principle or distinguished, which I’ve seen very rare 

[00:38:44] Janna Bastow: distinguished product manager. I think somebody brought it up at a mind of the product talk and said that she’d looked it up and there’s something like 60 distinguished product managers in the world is one of those rarest roles out there.

[00:38:56] James Gunaca: Yeah. It’s the unicorn role, at many companies I have found like a senior PM, you can be in that role and there’s not going to be pressure for you to be like promoted. There will sometimes be pressure to get you to want to be a people manager. And so that’s the other track.

And so that usually starts at a equivalent of a senior PM. And then you’re like leading one or 2 PMs and that grows and scales. And this is where it gets to be much more ambiguous. Some companies have the group product manager title. Some don’t, some just go straight to head of product as a title.

Some it’s a director. I’ve seen a director of product management being someone who just has two direct reports and that’s it. And, they could maybe have 5 years of experience, whereas a director at a company like Amazon, which I can speak to, they’re overseeing an organization of at least like 100 people or more, right?

And so, like, the titles is a lot more ambiguous depending on the company, but then that can go up to VP of product and then CPO in terms of, like, product leadership positions. They, I think I just did this in terms of, like, job growth. I’ve been reporting on this year. Product leadership positions represent, like, less than 1 5th of total product jobs.

And so, and that number isn’t potentially growing, right? It’s something I’m looking at over a longer period of time. Does that kind of answer the question that you were sharing? That 

[00:40:19] Janna Bastow: absolutely gives some some really good insight and a framework for thinking about those two different sides.

And so, I’ve got a really good question in the Q and a here, and it’s actually got a thumbs up on it as well. So, multiple people want to ask this one. It seems like making the jump is more challenging at smaller companies, because as you said, the opportunity just might not be there for those of that, for those of that.

For those of us who don’t necessarily want to work at the biggest few companies, how should we identify and evaluate prospective employers? 

[00:40:49] James Gunaca: Great question. So, a good tip on researching companies, and this is why I love the age that we live in go to LinkedIn, the company page, go to the people tab, type in the word product, how many people show up, right?

Is it three? Is it 30? If it’s more than five, There’s opportunity for leadership positions there. What’s not easy to assess externally is do product people report into product people, or do they report into non product people? Most commonly, I find some product folks report into engineering, which can be a challenge, but also an opportunity.

You get in there and then you’re having to make the case for why it’s important maybe to have someone leading the product team. Who can guide them and make sure they’re great product people. And I think you’ll find that it’s not a difficult case to make if the product team is actually delivering great work or has the potential to deliver more great work if they’re led by someone who can help them be better product people, generally non product people, leading product people.

Will result in what I described earlier, right? You got a manager who doesn’t know how to do your job or do it well. 

[00:42:06] Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

[00:42:06] James Gunaca: So I think that’s one way to potentially evaluate prospective employers. I guess the point about not wanting to work for one of the biggest few companies, I don’t think they’re actually that few in number companies with more than 200 employees that have product managers, you’re going to find there’s going to be product leadership positions in those companies.

But the numbers are scarce and so I think just in the UK alone, like the number of product leadership roles is like. In like the hundreds, maybe it’s small. 

[00:42:38] Janna Bastow: There’s another great question here. They said I’m a firm believer that product managers are the managers of the product and product leadership is there to help title together, remove obstacles, all those things you mentioned.

But how do you handle this differentiation when other people in the company expect the product leader the director in this case to speak with absolute authority about that product? 

[00:42:59] James Gunaca: So I think this is where keeping a close connection with what your PMs on your team are doing will enable you to speak with authority.

But at the same time, you’re going to have to build trust with that. Those other leaders, maybe not in your function that you will get to the level of detail that’s necessary when that need arises. And so, I’m trying to think of, like, a specific example where I can maybe illustrate this.

But, let’s say you’re in a situation where you’re being asked a question that, someone on your product team is going to have the direct and quick answer for in a healthy, empowered environment, you’re going to be able to respond to that question and be like, let me check with the person on my product team.

And I’ll get back to you on that today. Or I’ll get back to you on that. You don’t want to make a time come in. That is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable answer to a question. Now, if you’re going into a meeting with founders and like, then you have to spend time getting up to speed. And ideally, you’re not waiting until the day before that meeting to ask your product team to like debrief you on everything.

Think about the rituals that you have, the mechanisms that you have. That enable you to have a steady flow of information about what’s going on. For example, at express VPN, we would do monthly reviews where each of the different, we were had like a team tribe structure, team squad tribe structure.

I think where each team within a tribe would present what’s going on a monthly basis, not just to me, but to other leaders of the tribe. And that was a way to understand what was going on with the ability to go into more detail and depth one to one with people on my team. I knew it was my responsibility to understand what was going on.

But if I got asked a very technical question, like I’m going to go ask the expert, I’m not going to speak about it. Incorrectly, because if I spent all my time doing that and having that deep knowledge about all of the products, then I’m not able to spend as much time doing the other things that I described, which are more.

I think that is where the relationship and the context setting with other leaders becomes important. 

[00:45:04] Janna Bastow: Yeah. You 

[00:45:05] James Gunaca: can reinforce, but it requires some confidence and some backbone. 

[00:45:09] Janna Bastow: All right. Cool. That’s some good insight. Thank you. And this next one you can skip if you’re not familiar with this term, because I didn’t, I just Googled it in the background.

They said when evaluating the skills of product managers, many people recommend nine box. Are you familiar with nine box? 

[00:45:23] James Gunaca: So I think we called the nine blocker at Amazon 

[00:45:26] Janna Bastow: nine blocker. So it’s when you compare performance versus perfor potential. 

[00:45:31] James Gunaca: Yeah. And so basically you have, think about it like a tic tac toe grid 

[00:45:36] Janna Bastow: where you’re 

[00:45:36] James Gunaca: basically scoring on these different dimensions.

[00:45:38] Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

[00:45:40] James Gunaca: So this one’s, I think evaluating product managers is actually probably one of the harder things. And so now I’m like, Hey, you could probably give a talk specifically on how to do this. But at the same time, evaluating people is going to vary by company because there’s evaluating for the function and there’s evaluating for like the company.

And the outcomes of the company. 

[00:46:03] Janna Bastow: Okay. That’s fair. Well, that’s possibly a really good follow up because they’ve said where’s a really good place to get a step by step walkthrough. So it sounds like it’s a really deep thing and maybe there is something to follow up on with that. So we probably won’t be able to get into today, but there are some other questions here that we could dive into because we’ve only got a few minutes left here.

[00:46:21] James Gunaca: Sure. 

[00:46:22] Janna Bastow: So, really good question there, but maybe it’s something we answer at a different time. So, and Jamie in the chat said it’s a common practice in HR, especially larger companies, which is probably why I don’t know about this thing, because I’m not HR in large companies. So, somebody asked this is a I’ve got a couple of questions that come into the the chat here just to, to us here.

What do you do when you’re the only product person and have to be the be a leader, but have a normal PM title? Yes. I love this one. Your title versus your responsibilities. 

[00:46:52] James Gunaca: So don’t take on the responsibilities unless you’re going to be granted. What should come along with it? 

[00:47:00] Janna Bastow: So 

[00:47:00] James Gunaca: if you’re being asked to, yeah, if you’re going to be asked to manage people, you got to tell your boss or whoever, like, okay, so does this come with a promotion or does this come with a different title?

Like, there, there needs to be an exchange. There needs to be a mutual benefit between what you’re doing and what the company is getting. Companies will always try to bias towards what’s going to benefit them the most. You can’t entirely blame them right there, especially if, there are for profit companies, right?

That’s. Why do you think they always want to pay you less than they know you’re going to drive value for the company? That’s you know why they always ask you the salary question So i’d start by just saying like hey if you’re going to take on incremental responsibility make sure You’re confidently saying, okay, I appreciate the opportunity, but I want to make sure I understand, it does this come with a title change?

And if the answer is no, then the follow up ends up being, okay, well, what needs to happen or what do you need to see so that I can have the recognition either in terms of pay or and job title? That’d be a reflection of what I’m actually doing. 

[00:48:06] Janna Bastow: All right. Really interesting. I’ve actually approached it the opposite way, where I’ve taken on more than my title has allowed, but I’ve been able to then say, I do have set experience doing this, that and the other, which then allowed me to move on up Out of said company and take that experience with me to other companies and expand my my remit doing so 

[00:48:27] James Gunaca: I don’t think that people need to be wed to the job titles that their company gave them internally, the title group.

Product manager doesn’t exist at Amazon, but that’s what I refer to my as my role there, because that’s what’s more commonly understood in terms of the scope. 

[00:48:43] Janna Bastow: Yeah. All right. 

[00:48:44] James Gunaca: You were going to say something else. 

[00:48:45] Janna Bastow: I was going to jump into another question here, because we’ve got a couple of thumbs up on it.

Adam left a question saying as a product lead. Now I feel removed from him. The customer needs getting all insights second hand. How do you recommend keeping a close lens on the customer when leading across a group of products? I think this one is so important. So I wanted to really tackle this one 

[00:49:10] James Gunaca: earlier.

I mentioned getting involved in the rituals of your product team and so assuming your product team is doing discovery sessions or they’re sitting down with customers. Or the reviewing customer feedback find ways to rotate between those on the different product teams that you order the different product groups that you manage.

Right? So that is 1 way that you can stay close. Others is to make sure that there are, uh, pull mechanisms in place so that. Customer feedback is coming to you. Naturally, you don’t have to go out and seek it out. It will just find its way to you. So this can be making sure you’re subscribed to certain slack channels, or this could be, getting email alerts on some, frequent basis where customer feedback finds its way to you.

You don’t have to go seek it out and just make sure you’re being intentional about finding ways to have it brought to you, but be okay with not being as close to it as you were as an IC. 

[00:50:03] Janna Bastow: All right. That’s good insight. And I’ve got one last, maybe we can answer this as a some hot tips on this one.

How can you still be a successful product manager making the shift to strategy and leadership and when your team rely on you too much for your your deeper tech expertise? 

[00:50:21] James Gunaca: Yeah. I’m looking at that question. I’m like wondering what the UCD meant. Okay. So. 

[00:50:25] Janna Bastow: User centered design, I imagine.

[00:50:28] James Gunaca: Thank you. Yeah. Sorry. Too many acronyms.

Okay. So how to be successful in making the shift when your team relying on you too much for your expertise. Again, I think this is part of the challenge you have to overcome is resetting and managing the expectations of people who were maybe familiar with what they could rely on you for when you were an I.

C. Versus when you are in a leadership position and some of this will require like 1 to 1 follow ups with your key stakeholders, right? Who maybe have that mindset of their expectations of you. Yeah, and so having 1 to 1 is not just about you and your direct. It’s about you and your peers groups and saying, like, hey, I understand.

This is something that you’ve continue to go for go to me for, but I’m letting, that I’m empowering my team to be the ones who could answer those types of questions. And so if you see me. Redirecting or saying, I’m going to get back to you or have someone get that information.

That’s why. Right. So letting people know privately how you’re changing some of your behaviors, because you will have to change some of them. You’ll have to let some of those things go. 

[00:51:33] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That’s some really good advice. All right, so I think we’re just about out of time here. Let me just take us back to here.

So we’ve got some details for you up on the screen here. But James, thank you so much. How can people find you and find more information on you? 

[00:51:48] James Gunaca: Sure. So I encourage anyone who wants to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll also just drop my LinkedIn again in the chat. Also, if you’re interested in the product community that I described, send me a message about that, or I put that QR code up on the screen earlier if you’re interested in getting support on making that transition.

But yeah, those are some ways to keep in touch, or if you’re local here in London, Catch me at any of the product management events, whether that be product tank, product group, and so forth. 

[00:52:19] Janna Bastow: Excellent. Well, definitely see you there. And speaking of other upcoming events see you back here, everybody for another one of these online webinars November 19th, same time, same place.

We’re going to be talking about how to do growth product management. So. On that note, I want to say big thank you to James for coming along and sharing your expertise. Really great to have you here. Thank you everybody for all your questions, for jumping in on the chat and for making today a so much fun.

So thanks again. Good to see everybody here and see you back here the the next time. All right. Take care. Bye for now.