🗞️ #46: The not-so-sexy skills a Product Leader should have, insights on hiring, and 5 things to make you smile
👋 Hola friends! Welcome to my newsletter where I write about enjoying a career in Product Management, becoming your favorite version of a Product Leader, building a Startup, and all the human mess in between.
👩🏻💻 Hi I’m Kax! And I offer support through 1:1 coaching. I typically work with experienced Product Managers to support achieve their product and career goals. I also work with new Product Leaders to design their organizations, develop the skills of their product teams, manage the overwhelm of their day-to-day, and help them find enjoyment in their roles. If you’re interested, you can learn more about working with me.
In this issue we’re talking about:
The skills that Product Leaders need to have but nobody talks about
Insights from hiring managers to help you with your job search
5 things I’m enjoying these days that I’m sharing to bring a spark of hope, an idea, or even a smile :)
p.s. I’m still writing about the behind-the-scenes of building our startup Magical Audios, but to keep the newsletters from being too long, I’m sending those stories in a separate issue.
01 The skills that Product Leaders need to have but nobody talks about
A while back I wrote about understanding the role and responsibilities of a Product Leader.
As Product Leaders, our job is to:
Create a compelling vision and strategy that provides clarity of priorities
Take care of our team and provide the right environment for them to succeed.
Coach and Mentor the people in our team to help them become even better PMs.
And naturally, we need to develop relevant skills to be able to operate effectively.
There are the core skills that are “easier” to build up. Although the only thing easy thing about them is that either we already have them by default or there are a lot of materials that are readily available to help us learn them.
For example (non-exhaustive):
You need to have a pretty strong Product Management toolkit
And you must know how to help your team become strong Product People too (through hiring or mentoring)
You must know the domain space that your product and organization are operating in
You have to develop your strategic skills - both in thinking and defining one.
And then there are the more “administrative” or bureaucratic skills like setting budgets, understanding regulations and policies, etc that might impact your work
I call these the visible skills. Visible because these skills are written in the job description. Visible because these are what’s mostly given as development areas during growth talks.
But what makes Product Leadership hard even if you have these skills?
Because there are invisible, more human-related, skills that Product Leaders also need to learn and put into practice. They are not as talked about because the need to have them is not as obvious. And they’re not in the job description.
Pretty early on in my Product Leadership life, I learned the visible skills first.
But there were still many things that went wrong:
My team, my stakeholders, my leaders were still complaining a lot to me… about me! Even I was complaining about me!
Executing changes in our organization felt like getting my teeth pulled out. Without anaesthesia!
I was just constantly tired and frustrated until it made me resent my role and myself.
Raise your virtual right hand if that list feels familiar! 🙋♀️
One could argue that maybe I was just not good enough.
And in a way, that was true. That was because I was missing a huge set of skills that were needed to complement the “core skills” that a Product Leader should have.
Ok, Kax, what are these invisible skills you keep talking about?!
A lot of the work that Product Leaders do requires time. Time to think, time to research, time to strategize. But it’s hard to have time when you have back-to-back meetings. When everything on your to-do list was meant for yesterday and every 2 seconds, there’s a new fire that needs to be put out. So how do we gain time?
You need the ability to set your boundaries and protect them - so you can actually have time to sit down and just think! Or learn new perspectives that you can only do when you have time to gain new experiences.
You need the ability to delegate - to let go of some things that you might be protective of so you can actually free up your time (and give other people opportunities too! win-win!)
You need the ability to zoom out and look at things from different perspectives - so you can effectively call on your different experiences and learnings from other domains and apply them to your context. Without the bias that we may have built over time towards our current context.
“In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.”
And then there are the people-related skills. 90% of the work we do is through people or impacts people (or both, at the same time). People with wildly different, and sometimes opposing contexts, motivations, cultural backgrounds, and preferences. How do we influence change and action when people feel wired to say NO?
You need the grace to not take things too personally - so you can discern what is useful from the critical feedback you will receive. Getting hurt every time you receive feedback, or worse, thinking bad about the other person, is not sustainable for anybody. (I wrote about how to receive feedback with grace.)
The ability to give good give feedback especially when it’s critical - So you can give difficult feedback that may hurt other people’s feelings without constantly worrying about other people’s potential reactions. Not because you don’t care; but because you know that it’s important to give feedback, and you know how to give feedback that is clear, actionable, and kind.
You need to target your communication - Different people with different levels of understanding of what you/your team does need different information. For some, you will need to give more context. While for others, you will need to simplify the story. But getting this right increases your ability to influence decisions and behaviors.
And then there are the challenges that we, as leaders, face every day. Transformation efforts that happen every 6 months. Lack of budget for hiring or promotions. Conflicting priorities between teams that have dependencies with each other. Sometimes it’s enough to make us forget that it’s an extremely fun role! So how can we keep our balance and not want to punch people in the face 100% of the time?
Learn to identify what is within your control and what is not - Focus your energy on the things that you can do something about. You control your preparation, your implementation, your communication, and your reactions. This is important because when things don’t go your way, grieve but don’t wallow. Learn from the experience and then move on.
Learn to care just enough - it sounds harsh but it’s not. There is such a thing as caring too much. This is when boundaries become hard to keep, disconnecting is impossible, and things are taken more personally. You end up flipping the world upside down to get the results that may not even within your circle of influence.
And then there’s not caring enough. This can sometimes lead to a lack of proactivity, not digging deeper to understand contexts, bulldozing situations/people to get what you want, or thinking the worst of other people.Learn to regulate your nervous system - The leadership job can be stressful. We eat uncertainty for breakfast. But knowing how to adapt to our ever-changing environment and the pressure that comes along with it, is a very critical skill to have if you want to deliver good results and not end up in front of our therapists because work is giving you nightmares.
I can probably go on and make a list of 100 things but then, I will never publish this issue until 2026. 😂 But the moral of the story is this:
Being a Product Leader requires more than knowing how to create a strategy and negotiating budgets. It requires self-awareness; so we can course-correct when we’re harming ourselves in our journey to good leadership.
A lot of the things we’re supposed to navigate are often outside of our control. And that’s ok. We can try as much as we can — to get our intended results, but there’s no need to compromise our well-beings when the results are just not there.
Being a Product Leader is a fun job but it is also a challenging one. It’s a role that requires us to put on many hats all at the same time. But we need to wear those hats. And not let those hats wear us… often down.
Take a breather.
Separate yourself from your situation.
Give yourself time to rest and think.
Ask for help as much as possible.
And sometimes, let go.
You’d be surprised by the many answers that are actually waiting for you on the other side of rest.
This post has been inspired by a conversation I had with one of the Product Leaders I look up to, Caroline Ragot, SVP in Koa Health. About the things we don’t talk about regarding leadership, because it’s not sexy.
***
Hey there new Product Leader, if this post resonated with you and you recognize yourself and your challenges in the story above, I’d love to be your partner-in-crime to work with you to navigate your day-to-day challenges, feel more in control of your time, and have more energy to be proactive and enjoy your role. And ultimately make you stop wanting to punch people in the face.
I still have 2 1 more open slots for my 1:1 coaching services beginning in August. If you’re ready to prioritize your needs, be more strategic in your career, and invest in your long-term growth, book a call with me and let’s discuss how I might be able to support you.
Or Learn more about my coaching here.
02 Insights from hiring managers to help you with your job search
In the last few weeks, I’ve had a few mentoring calls with PM job-seekers (experienced PMs and career-switchers alike) to discuss their job-search strategy and how they might tweak it; so they can land more job interviews.
I’ve also had some conversations with hiring managers and recruiters on what hiring looks like for them these days.
So let me share some insights that came up during these conversations so that you can take what might be useful for your job-search strategy.
Having a wide network gives you better visibility of roles that people you may know (or people they may know) are hiring for. While they will typically write a post about it on Linkedin, those roles are not always listed on the Linkedin job board. Sometimes these roles, because they’re not listed on Linkedin (yet), will even have a smaller pool of candidates. So start building those relationships, if you haven’t yet.
For example, I had several recruiters reach out to me for help to share a role they’re hiring for because they barely got any applications. And a hiring manager who asked if I knew anybody who might be a fit for a role she just secured budget for but haven’t even published yet.That being said, Product Manager roles exist outside of stereotypical “tech” companies. Consulting companies, Fashion brands, Electricity companies, etc are also looking for PM roles (and designers too). So companies you might not expect to be hiring for PMs could surprise you. Instead of just looking at LinkedIn job listings, check out where your friends and their friends are working. It might spark some inspiration for where your next role could be.
Be visible. And I don’t just mean to be "findable” on Linkedin. But yes, please have an updated profile. But also create a personal brand for yourself. A lot of people find this cringe-y. But think of it this way, just deciding to interview somebody, is a matter of confidence. Recruiters/hiring managers will pick out a profile that gives them evidence that they’re worth investing their time in for a conversation — out of the many profiles they’ve received. If all you have given them as evidence is your CV, you’re doing them a disservice. Having a strong personal brand that reflects your strengths, your thought processes, and what it might be like to work with you can increase your chances of being considered.
Let me leave you with this thought, the best time to look for roles is when you’re not looking for one. While there’s no rush or pressure to have a new job lined up, get your job system in order. Build a brand, build relationships, and experiment with your narrative to find out which will resonate with recruiters/hiring managers. The best position to be in is to have recruiters/hiring managers come to you, especially when you’re ready to move on. But they can’t do this if they can’t find you or if they don’t know anything about you.
Hiring has always been a matter of positioning yourself well with a dash of good timing, good connections, and tons of patience.
And there’s good news!
03 5 things I’m enjoying these days that I’m sharing to bring a spark of hope, an idea, or even a smile :)
If you enjoyed this post, why not forward it to a friend who might enjoy it too? 🫶
And If you reached the end of this issue, I’d love to read your thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions in the comments. 🫶
💙
Kax