AMA: Booking.com Group PM-Technical Platforms, Sanchit Juneja on Influencing the C-Suite

This answer is most often sought by PMs looking to jump to the next career level

Trust is earned. So if you as an PM want to establish yourself as a go-to, reliable person for your manager/stakeholder. You'll have to consistently demonstrate the skills sought in you. 

Establishing trust can also be sought by projjecting yourself as a Subject Matter Expert and going out of your way to tackle the most difficult problems within your org

As you grow in the org this moves from your typical 1:1 structure to a more nuanced, influencing style which cannot be demarcated as such in an answer.. Suffice to say being a problem solver at hand, on a day to day basis is what being an PM is-> if one can manage that, everything else flows organically

Managing a team can be , simultaneously, the most rewarding and most frustrating aspect of your career, hence choose wisely

For most, managing people becomes a forced transition in search for personal growth-> this is very dangerous, coz if you can't manage people (and people are idiosynchratic) than you and your reportees end up having a bad experience

Carrying forward on the question above, it is imperative for you, as the mediator, to make the stakeholders seek common ground. Practically, this could involve a common session with. both of them exxplaining the pros and cons of their polar opinions. As always, it is you 3 against the problem and not one against another. Can't stress this enough,Being a manager neccesitates being an empatethic individual

Even beyond C-suite, a PM should tailor his/her message to the audience. A typical mistake aspiring leaders do whilst communicating with the leadership is get too much into nitty gritties and details, whereas an CXO, by virtue of his position, needs the information and his action points as succinctly as possible.

Breaking away from this trap is key to being an effective communicator

Product Management, or to a large extent-most managerial roles, are dependent on influencing people with/without an official heirarchy. Specifically, to become a more influential PM, one must have high level of empathy and always seek to find common ground with your stakeholder--it doesn't matter if the stakeholder is the CTO or an Engineering Manager or a newly-minted dev.  

For most,It takes a lot of time to train the empathy muscle and hence this is a learned capability

Unlike our parents' generation, it is highly unlikely we are going to have 40 years of continuous career in a single org. Also , unlike our parents' generation, skill-sets and job definitions are highly dynamic in the industry, hence being in a state of always learning is a neccesity.

Being abreast wirth industry trends, and personally invested in your growth is requited in one and all