This article is part of a series on Product Management.
Each Product Manager (PM) brings her own style to the table, and it impacts the product.
By style, I mean beyond skillsets and professional background. Given — there is considerable variation between PMs regarding competencies. Some have stronger technical skills, others stronger interpersonal, some are stellar marketers, other rockstar data analysts. Some excel at Project management and organization, and others thrive in the creative spaces of the job. But let’s put all that to the side.
By style, I mean the amalgam of personality characteristics and traits, both intrapersonal and interpersonal. And mindset. For example, one PM may look at a daunting new urgent crisis and feel nervous, and another PM in the same situation may feel ‘ooo, now things are getting exciting’. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ style. And there are complex interactions between a PM’s style and how that style is perceived and interpreted by those who interact with the PM.
Anecdotes of Product Manager Style
Let’s leave the realm of the conceptual and delve into considering some wondrous PMs I’ve worked with (obviously using pseudonyms). I’ll describe what I noticed, and hopefully that will provide a sense of what I mean by style. Then, I will try and connect the dots regarding how each individual style impacts a product’s outcome.
Madison, the General. One is Madison. She prefers working independently. Authoritarian is an apt adjective for illustrating how she relates to others, like an army general. She follows the market obsessively & will skip team meetings to invest time reading long reports. Her powerpoints contain roadmaps but she never commits to a timeline. Her epics are terse. She runs forward with her product, even when other parts of the company are hiccupping & lagging. Her devs know they have to do it themselves, rather than wait. She will cut corners wherever she can, and focus on delivering. She knows how to grant authority and delegate responsibility. She is powerful, focused, and will do whatever it takes to bring about victory, success.
Chris, the Chiller. Another, as an artist, would practice something between graffiti art and cubism. Let’s call him Jason. Jason is a big picture person, attacks the main blocks of a feature. Great at separating the wheat from the chaff. Prioritizing comes easy to him. He takes ownership of large flagship features, and invests less in things that are lower impact, or less interesting. The details he leaves to those who will work them out. This gives a lot of leeway to his developers and designers. As music, he would be jazz. He likes collaborative work. Brainstorming with system architects and other PMs, developers too. Then he moves features forward even when they are more ‘raw’ and less ‘well cooked.’ He assumes he will have to make changes, and doesn’t mind if the customer will have to ask for them. You won’t find nitty gritty details in his Epics, and his stories might be a few words, or a link to a bigger broader document. His background is not technical; he defers to RnD frequently and focuses on business requirements. His business requirements are based on general experience and rationalizing, not steeped in market research or quantitative analysis. He prefers ‘cold calls’ and hallway encounters over preset meetings, and will catch you in the office to finish working on something. He feels completely comfortable changing feature requirements the night before a planning session, based on a last-minute conversation with a system architect. He has charisma, will ask sincerely how you are before delving into the work. And he stays cool. Even when others would freak out, he sends out vibes of, it will all be ok.
Isabel, the Impressionist. If Sam the PM were an artist, she would be an impressionist. She’s detail oriented. Hyper, mega detail-oriented. She excels at being comprehensive, not missing use cases, considering consequences of product decisions and requirements. Connecting the dots between dependencies and technical infrastructure. She has a strong technical sense that also underlies her functional business requirements. Her Epics & Stories have multiple sections and subsections, each with multiple bullet points that make use of bold and underlines. Developers don’t have many questions when she is done with handoff. She sends multi-thread group emails to get feedback about which term to use for a particular parameter in an API. Getting it right matters to her. She will work late into the night over these details. It seems she takes joy in drilling deep into her particular product. Her MVPs address edge cases, incorporate validations, and cover a long list of errors and negative flows. One of the consequences of her style is that she is always back-logged with work. She does most of the work herself, waits until all is ‘well cooked’ and only then shares it in a meeting. In those meetings, she takes pride in having thought out ‘defenses’ for objections or challenges raised.
Rory, the Reggaeman. Relaxed. Unphased by stress. Hakuna matata. Decisive, but open to changing his mind. Ear to ear smiles. Macro vs. micro — he is on the macro side. The big things need to be in place, and he will make sure they are in place, firmly and with unwavering hands. The small details, the nitty gritty — he trusts they will have a way to work themselves out. He has a keen sense of knowing what he needs to know, and no more. He hates unnecessary meetings. Even the necessary ones he despises. He would rather meet in an informal setting, and talk for 55 minutes about things unrelated to work, and then when there is good rapport use the 5 last minutes to nail down the key core items. He can be fierce fiery confrontational and demanding when he needs to be, but he usually doesn’t. No one suspects him of asking for too much, or demanding work that is unnecessary.
Hadita, nerd power. She believes in tools and in processes. She can list PM techniques and knows when to apply each. There is no one more organized. Her records are in place. She knows how to quantify everything. She has crafted the art of planning. Developers love working her since everything is so organized. Her stories are COLOR-CODED, for crying out loud. Relaxed, she is not. Spontaneous? No thank you. When she says end-to-end, she means it. She will make mockups herself, even if there is a designer. She will draw up proposals for system architecture for her products. She has a keen sense of office politics, and knows the score. Everything is calculated, ideally in advance. She knows how to make friends, and is not scared of making enemies either. She takes care of her people, her developers. She digs into the nuanced, the subtle. She knows that here way is right, even if the rest of the team are going in a different direction. She knows how to make work-life balance, how to keep everything in check, everything in the right place. She would excel at being a librarian, but it would bore her. She takes great pride in doing immaculate work, and can give reasons and explanations of why something didn’t work out — usually due to someone else’s actions or inactions. She gets passionate about work, and about interpersonal interactions at work. She cares. Sometimes too much.
Daria, the Darling. She is more intuitive. What she knows, she knows very well, and she knows the industry. She will fight for her dev. team. She does not shy away from defending, or from pointing out what needs to improve. But there is seldom a malevolent sting in her critique. She loves life, and brings that love into work. She knows how to connect to other people sincerely. To laugh. She knows how to ask for help when she needs it, and will give help generously when asked. She does not believe in being calculated, but prioritizes being present, being transparent, being down-to-earth, being upfront with the challenges at hand. Like this, she is able to tackle tricky problems.
How PM Styles Impact Product?
We explored some PM styles. So, does this impact product? Well, because (1) development teams respond to different leadership types, and because (2) one’s orientation and perception filters what to focus on.
Dev teams respond to leadership types. Daria the Darling’s dev. team, for example, may voluntarily generate a superior creative technical solution, because Daria invites the space for that. Contrast that with Hadita nerd power. Her teams are spoonfed a bit more, and there is less ambiguity in the expected solution. So they may not even consider trying to propose or pursue a solution other than what was defined for them. Madison the General’s team may be driven to come up with a solution that was not dictated, but the solutions they come up with may be optimized for short term delivering value, at the expense of elegant and robust long-term solutions.
Focus. It is not hard to see how focusing on major building blocks of a feature, and not the nitty gritty details, may impact the way a product turns out. Take Rory the Reggaeman. He basically leaves the details to the developers. Contrast him with Isabel the Impressionist, who doesn’t miss a detail. Rory’s product will probably ship earlier, but Isabel’s will cover more edge cases when the product does ship.
Conclusion
Style matters. Products are experiences that are consumed, and the origins and forethoughts of those experiences trickle down to impact the end-user. What’s your style?
Thanks for reading.
About this Series
This article is part of a series on Product Management. based on my experiences.
About the Author
I’m a UX Designer turned Product Manager, with experience in startups, freelance, and international B2B companies. Writin
