What pointed recommendations do you have on gaining influence as a new member of an organization or as a junior product management team member?

Your ability to create value quickly will depend on how quickly you can identify the problems and gaps in ways your organization operates today, and demonstrate progress towrds fixing them. Here's how you can do that:

1. When you join an organization, schedule introductory 1-1s with a wide variety of stakeholders in your first couple weeks, and ask everyone about what problems they wish they'd see fixed. After 10+ conversations, you'll see clear patterns.
2. Identify 1-3 small improvements (low hanging fruit) that you can deliver on quickly. Note that for a product manager role, often the best value add you can bring is not about shipping something, but an improvement in product org processes, sharing learnings, improving collaboration with engineering and design etc. So don't just look for roadmap quick wins, but rather how might you make your teammates more successful - this will allow you to capture a broader set of improvement ideas.
3. Deliver and communicate the delivery of 1-3 improvements within your first 90 days on the job. This is important - your reputation will be formed quickly, so you want to create value quickly too. I have see many folks making a mistake of picking up a giant, challenging problem early on that is exciting but will take years to deliver on. Don't do that - focus on small, albeit potentially less exciting items, and get them done. And once you get them done, don't be shy to share it - let the team know you have solved a problem based on their feedback.

Before gaining influence, you have to gain your team's trust. One question I love to ask when I join a team is: "What are the biggest challenges the team experiences? How can I help?". Gather this information from many members of your team and people the team collaborates with. Usually, I can derive a list of action items based on their answers, and I can suggest a few more things that I can do to help. In this initial conversation, focus on what you can do and not what you think they could change. Then follow through on your action items, using your best judgment and discretion if there are sensitive topics. This simple process allows you to learn more about team challenges, demonstrates your commitment to the team, and will help the team improve. This leads to increased trust, which leads to increasing your influence. 

If you are a new PM in an organization, my advice would be the following:

1. Be curious - learn as much as possible about the customers, users, features, and the system. Talk to as many people as possible and arrive at your point of view.

2. Make allies - Identify engineers, UXdesigners, and sales teams (B2B) that you connect with and validate your learnings periodically.

3. Question status quo - Once you have a particular POV, ask questions if something seems wrong. If it's new learning, admit it, but if the question helps the team uncover some kind of oversight, you have done a massive favor for your team. Note - Keep in mind, in a company with a history, there are many reasons why things are done a certain way and the team probably looked at many possibilities before going down a particular path. 

4. Grunt work - Finally, do all the grunt work you can. Every document you write to a demo you give reinforces learning and establishes you as a product leader within your group. Attend all the meetings where engineers are talking about technical solutions, of course, if time permits. PMs often tell me they don't care about how engineers build stuff, but going through those discussions helps you appreciate the engineering effort and gives you a system-level understanding.

The job of PM relies on influence, not on ideas.

As a young PM, I always suggest to focus on building influence small steps by small steps. Get small wins. So as a PM start by achieving things, pick one thing and get it done in a short amount of time. And repeat it. This will tremendously help you in gaining influence.

I find that there are 3 basic traits that a team looks for a product manager to provide in any project:

• Create Clarity - Does the product manager have the ability to disentangle the many signals a team may be sorting through and help everyone get aligned on a plan or point of view?

• Generate Energy - Can the product manager effectively create momentum the team needs to get a project done? In early career stages, this is often the daily mechanics like running the stand-ups, prioritizing the bugs in a timely fashion, quickly and decisively resolving open questions and so on are all things that help a team build energy and momentum towards delivery

• Deliver Results - It’s important to show that you have the ability to put points on the board - both individually and through leading your feature team. Knock out some items that have been on the backlog for too long, help see that stubborn feature thats been stuck in development for too long thru to delivery. 

If you can show to the team multiple examples of being able to do the above 3 core capabilities consistently and repeatably, I expect you’ll build trust and influence with your new team well.

Ultimately you need to have impact and demonstrate to those around you that you can create value for the organisation. You should identify a problem or opportunity, create your hypothesis on how to solve that problem and test it. Document and show others that you are learning and that your learning leads to better product decisions and better business outcome.

I think the most important thing to think about when you think about influence is you can only influence people based off of things that they actually care about. So how do you figure out what people care about? You can watch how the organization behaves, you can read past information, you can also just go out and talk to people and to find out what do people actually care about in the organization, what are they focused on, what are their goals, what are they worried about and things like that. Because if you treat the organization the same way that we try to treat customers from as a product perspective, it actually helps you understand how to actually how to speak to them, how to solve their problems and things like that. And at the end of the day, after that, influence becomes pretty easy and trivial because then you understand how to speak their language, how to solve problems that they care about that you can help solve with, how to help them reach their goals and those sort of things. So I think that might be just one giant recommendation, but I think it's probably the most important one.