Playing to Your Strengths With Thomas Arend
Practising product management involves continuously making decisions that impact users and companies serving those users. Relying on good mental models to make these decisions can help PMs make better decisions on average, avoid common pitfalls and build better products. To learn about useful mental models when building, growing and leading products and teams, I’m talking to leaders working on different products at a wide range of companies. This blog includes edited notes and reflections on those conversations.
I recently caught up with Thomas Arend, a Senior Director of Product at Johnson & Johnson. In his 25 years in product, he has led product teams at Facebook, Airbnb, Google, Twitter, SAP, IBM and Mozilla. Here are the edited notes from our conversation. We covered a few topics and, for the sake of clarity, I’ve split these notes into two articles. Enjoy!
Playing to your strengths as a leader and product manager
In a sentence: Know where your unique contributions to a team are and focus on maximising your contributions there, relying on your team to drive results in other areas.
Having interviewed thousands of product management at previous companies, Thomas typically asks candidates two questions:
- Why do you want to be a product manager?
- What is your unique contribution to your team?
In addition to being useful gauges of a candidate’s understanding of the role and their values and competencies, the second question is something every PM should probably ask themselves. What unique strength do I bring to my team, and how can I play to that strength to increase the output of the team?
If my critical contributing skill is my technical understanding, I can make significant contributions to a team working on a complex technical product that requires a deep understanding of the tech. In a team working on something that requires less in-depth technical knowledge, the same strength may not be as valuable. For example, if you’re a PM joining a team with sufficient engineering resources and your key contribution is your ability to contribute to the code stack with quality code, there might be a poor team fit.
Let’s instead imagine that your core strength as a PM is understanding and championing the needs of the user. In many teams, this is a perspective that needs to be continuously surfaced. In this case, the team will benefit from your focused efforts on promoting the needs of the users. If you spread yourself thin by trying to do a bit of everything, likely, you won’t do anything well. It’s okay to focus on your strengths and rely on other team members to drive success in areas where they excel.
This line of thinking is as useful for hiring managers as it is for PMs who are wondering how to improve outcomes for their current or a new team. Asking yourself what your key contributions should be, and how they impact how you work as a team, will help you better define what type of product manager you want to be and how you want to influence and lead.
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Originally published at https://www.axelthomson.com on June 23, 2020.
