The Ability To Navigate

Products are developed, provided, and enhanced by people, and effectively leading them is crucial to achieving product success. But leading stakeholders and development teams is hard: It requires product managers and product owners to overcome six leadership challenges that range from lacking tra...

To succeed in handling a large set of people, one must try to keep the stakeholders and the dev team stable. Also, one can increase the ability to deal with disagreements and learn to resolve conflicts.

One must agree on shared goals and outcomes and a sense of shared purpose.

The development team and stakeholders are often more than nine people—the maximum number of individuals line managers are commonly recommended to lead. What’s more, the dev team is cross-functional and may include UX and UI designers, developers, and testers, alongside other roles. The stakeholde...

To be a successful leader and contributor, carefully manage your time and adopt a sustainable pace. Look after yourself and do not overcommit. Do not take on tasks that are not part of your role. Do one thing at a time and avoid multitasking. What’s more, do not de-prioritise your leadership work...

Most digital products are developed using an agile development framework like Scrum or Kanban. While an agile process offers great benefits for product people—for example, the ability to validate UX design and features at a very early stage—it constraints how you can lead the development team. 

In order to build trust with the stakeholders and development team members, follow these tips:

• Empathise with the individuals and make an effort to understand their perspectives, needs, and interests, for example, by practising active listening. 
• Speak and act with integrity: S...

To maximise the chances of finding the right people, team up with the Scrum Master and engage with line management and your sponsor.

A great technique to acquire the right people is self-selection: Clearly communicate the roles you need to fill and the skills people will require. Then let ...

While guiding people can be challenging on its own, you also have to actively contribute to getting the product out of the door. The latter includes carrying out product discovery and strategy work, updating the product roadmap, and prioritising the product backlog. You therefore play a dual role...

Unlike a line manager, you usually don’t manage the development team and stakeholders as the person in charge of the product, and the individuals don’t report to you. You consequently don’t have any transactional power: You cannot tell people what to do; you cannot assign tasks to them; and you a...

As the person in charge of the product, you should shape its vision; you should lead the effort to create, validate, and evolve an effective strategy; you should guide the development of an actionable product roadmap; and you should work with the development team on the product backlog to determi...