by Janus Boye
Anyone can learn a framework like OKRs for example, but to be the best product leader you need more than that. You need the strategic skills to lead without authority, to inspire and to empower.
This quote is from a recent conversation with Berlin-based product manager Lisa Mo Wagner. In our call she talked about what it really takes to be a true product leader, she shared her take on the changing role of a product manager, being a part of building something super valuable and plans for 2021.
Lisa works as senior product manager at Berlin-based fintech Finiata, is the organiser of Women In Product - Berlin and is our expert of the month.
How do you get into product management?
While product management has been around for several decades, and many books have been written on the topic, it’s one of those fields where many come from very different backgrounds. The responsibilities can vary widely from industry to industry and there’s a seemingly never-ending debate on whether you need to be technical or not, to be a good software product leader.
Lisa is not technical and started her career working as head of support in a start-up right out of university. There she was tasked with writing a user manual and her days went writing page after page after page.
At some point, Lisa stopped and asked:
Wouldn’t it be better to just improve the product rather than writing an extensive documentation?
She then approached the big boss and asked for some product tweaks. This led to a close collaboration with the developers and furthered her understanding of how to speak to the engineers and build the key internal relationships.
Lisa has written more about her path into product management in this post: Another accidental PM — How I got started as a non-technical product manager.
How to become a successful product leader
In our conversation, Lisa also shared what I think is a good take on true leadership:
It’s not about soft skills or hard skills. It’s about strategic and tactical.
She loves to solve problems by empowering teams and facilitating decisions. Communication is a key part of what she does and in these COVID times, Lisa was also the one who brought up the usage of emojis at a recent Hamburg meeting in our product management peer group.
To assume good intentions has become a habit for Lisa. On the topic of building a written relationship and tuning your empathy skills via written communication, she also reminded me of the legendary Linus Torvalds quote:
On the Internet nobody can hear you being subtle
According to Lisa, this is similar to her main take away from the famous book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Yes, good communications skills are key, but the book clarifies what that actually means. To Lisa, it doesn’t mean that you can’t offend anyone or should just chit-chat. You want to be transparent and direct in a way that still works for everyone. The base is relationships. If you don’t know someone, you can’t be as candid.
As an additional reading tip for becoming a good product manager, Lisa recommend this post on leading rather than commanding by Martin Eriksson: Product Managers – You Are Not the CEO of Anything.
Recent learnings in the world of product
Making it through COVID times is a big part of what’s going on right now, also for Lisa. Trying to steer, so that we go forward better is how she described it.
With all the uncertainty right now, we attempted a look into 2021 and Lisa in particular reflected on how we do meetings. She’s bringing PANDA to each meeting, which stands for:
Purpose
Agenda
Notes
Decisions
Actions Items
She’s already shared more about her tangible approach to improving meetings. Read: Have better meetings with a cute PANDA.
Now that everyone is remote, it can be a hassle to get everyone online at the same time, so instead she has experimented ditching the stand ups and instead moved it to Slack. Getting better at it, but learning from it.
She’s also thinking about how feedback can be tricky, in particular outside your core team. How does this work in a virtual-first world? Again, according to Lisa, you need to invest in building the relationships.
One recent small change with a positive impact that Lisa mentioned is regular end of week celebrations within the core team to mark progress.
In closing, Lisa also touched on the key motivation for most product leader: To be a part of building something super valuable.
Learn more about Lisa
You can meet Lisa in our product management community and also connect with Lisa on LinkedIn.