#58: Build Trust, Not Dependency: How Product Managers Balance Relationship-Building and Delivering Great Results
Don’t mistake team lunches for alignment but they can help sometimes!
Today’s post is a collaborative article from Kax and Amy! 🎉
Hello friends! 👋
We met through our product management newsletters over a year ago. We decided it was time to write a collaborative article!
A lot has been said about the importance of building relationships when growing products. But what it really means is challenging for product managers. We see product managers at two ends of the spectrum:
The ones who think the many meetings they have to attend are enough to build relationships
The ones who over-rely on their relationships to do the work for them and wonder why they’re not getting positive outcomes.
Amy and I have been on the opposite but extreme ends of the spectrum. We both have struggled with balancing relationship building with delivering on our product initiatives. And we wanted to share with you what building relationships, the impact on our product work, and how to actually make it work in real life.
This article has two stories - one from Amy and one from Kax - and a conclusion on the sweet spot of adapting to each situation.
is the author of How to Build What Feels Good
Amy’s Story
The Beginning
“You are not meeting expectations.”
This is the opening to my annual performance review. I’m stunned.
For half of the review cycle, I was reporting to a skip-level VP after Mike, the Senior Director, left the company. I was expecting to hear positive feedback.
I said the first thing that came to mind “I will be laid off next month”. The silence stretched on for a minute.
“But Mike never gave me feedback that I wasn’t performing”, I said.
“You always need to ask for feedback”, replied the VP.
The VP went on to say stakeholders didn’t trust me and I didn’t collaborate enough. She urged me to speak to the stakeholders and get more feedback.
The Next Chapter
I was laid off.
My focus for the next year was finding a new product management job. There were few opportunities to work on collaboration and relationship building while job hunting.
I didn’t even consider finding a class on leadership or collaboration. I kept up my lone-wolf approach of working hard for myself. Networking seemed like a waste of time.
Early Changes
As I started a new product management role, I promised myself that I would listen more and always be friendly. That’s what I was missing when I was laid off - right?
These steps helped but it wasn’t enough. I watched people getting promoted around me. Organizational changes blindsided me. I had a lot of trouble anticipating what my manager wanted.
Some More Changes
I changed companies and moved to a more senior product manager role. I decided to make another change. I would talk to my manager and others one level up more than I had before.
This change helped me onboard and make my first deliveries.
But I forgot an important lesson - ask for feedback. I got my courage up and asked for feedback. I learned that my presentation and communication skills aren’t sufficient for a product manager who deals with customers.
I joined Toastmasters to improve my presentation skills. I studied leadership skills too.
These steps eventually earned a promotion to team leader. At this point, I needed to get more out of peer product managers. My new communication skills and leadership skills brought more product growth.
Due to the pandemic, company growth stagnated. As the company downsized, there were no opportunities to build cross-functional relationships. I moved to a new company and product role.
Reflection Finally Starts
I used all my newfound communication skills, friendliness, and leadership on my new team. Nothing worked. No one had time to talk to me.
I was back to the lone wolf product manager. My layoff experience taught me that the lone-wolf product manager approach was bad. What can I do?
I began to think about what I could have done differently to prevent that poor performance review. Maybe my performance depends on building relationships. How can I build relationships if no one has time to talk to me?
I decided to write my point of view on the new product I needed to bring to market. I scheduled 1-on-1s about my POV slides. I built relationships around these POVs. I asked for feedback and got suggestions to improve.
Finally, 2 jobs later, I realized the critical mistakes that led up to my layoff:
If I don’t communicate my value, the team doesn’t value me.
If you see co-workers as competitors, then your co-workers don’t trust you.
Strong relationships bring better results than going alone.
Kax’s Story
In a nutshell, I’ve had a very very opposite experience from Amy. My relationships have always been my biggest asset; building them easily was my strength. But I didn’t realize all these initially until I had an issue with one of my stakeholders that was not getting fixed.
Story time!
I was having a hard time getting alignment with one of my stakeholders and the issue was escalating to my manager’s level. Let’s call them Bob.
“I don’t have the same issue with my other stakeholders, so clearly Bob is the problem!”
I was young, ambitious, and hell-bent on making sure this problem didn’t reflect poorly on me.
My then-manager asked me to think about potential reasons why my other stakeholders were much easier to align with compared to Bob. And Bob being an ass was not a valid answer.
In the end, as you have probably correctly inferred, I had a very good relationship with my other stakeholders while I had none with Bob - which was understandable because Bob was new to the company.
When that clicked, the world was my oyster!
The benefits of having good relationships across our organization (in different levels included) are plenty.
As for me, I’ve reaped the following benefits:
Getting alignment and buy-in in initiatives or cross-team dependencies is 100x easier.
I’ve had senior leaders sponsor organization-wide initiatives that I would propose (or in some cases, they’d ask me to lead them).
I became the go-to person for certain topics which really helped my credibility and personal brand within the organization.
Conflict became easier to manage. Because I was having frequent conversations with people in the orgnization, conflicting priorities and ideals were easier to talk about and rarely resulted in an escalation (note: that this benefit came later on. See downsides below)
And because of those 👆+ the results, I got to move to the Head of Product role later on.
But how did I build these relationships:
I had 360 conversations with my stakeholders. This means I involved them early, kept them up-to-date on progress, shared results, and did it all over again. I also believed that if I wanted them to trust me, I had to start trusting them.
I got curious about what other people were doing in the organization (including people I didn’t necessarily work with directly) which sparked interesting conversations moving forward.
I also got to know the people beyond their jobs. Who they were outside of work hours, what were they into, and if they also liked the shows I was watching. This made the connection more genuine and in a way, the work more enjoyable.
I guess you can say that I invested a lot of time in this. Personally, connecting with people has always been one of my values so prioritizing building relationships came to me naturally.
But of course, everything has a downside.
In my case, I over-relied on my relationships. And doing so had its own consequences, especially at the beginning of my PM career,
Things took a lot of time! Because I was involving my stakeholders in so many steps, some decisions took longer than necessary just because every communication can become a possible entry point to negotiation.
Pushing back was tough. Because I was getting so much out of my relationships, this made me hesitate to push back or make tough decisions because I was afraid of “damaging the relationship”.
Relying too much on my relationships for customer/market insights. This is tough to admit but I got lazy. Because my co-workers were rich with input from their own domains or functions, I ended up relying on those vs. doing my own homework of looking at data or talking to customers. Which compromised my own understanding of the users we were building the product for.
Some Thoughts and Feelings.
At the end of the day, I will always advocate for building relationships internally.
Especially as you become more senior in your role, your growth and influence in the organization can be limited by the lack of these relationships. Various product leaders have weighed in on the importance of having relationships as a factor for one’s promotion.
But relationships can only bring you so far unless you do the work. Balance it out with having a clear strategy, cross-check their input with evidence from research, and don’t lose sight of having scalable systems for you and your team.
Our Conclusion: The Sweet Spot Between Trust and Results
As Amy and I shared, relationships are critical to a successful product career. They open doors, foster collaboration, and can even shape the trajectory of our growth. But as we’ve also shared, relationships alone aren’t enough.
Building trust with your team and stakeholders is essential, but trust should complement strategy, not replace it. The key is finding that sweet spot where relationships amplify your ability to deliver impactful work, without overshadowing it.
So, whether you’re starting from scratch like Amy or over-relying on your network like I once did, the key is to balance relationships with action. Build connections, but always back them with results.
Here’s to building trust, not dependency—and finding balance along the way.
Thanks, Amy! ❤️
Thanks Amy for writing today’s post with me! I loved putting our stories together!
Amy Mitchell is a Principal Product Manager at Dell. Subscriber to her newsletter Product Management IRL or follow her on Linkedin.
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If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.
❤️
Kax
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