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: 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. Identify 1-3 small improvements (low hangin ...Read More

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 i ...Read More

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. ...Read More

If you are a new PM in an organization, my advice would be the following: 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. Make allies - Identify engineers, UXdesigners, and sales teams (B2B) that you connect with and validate your learnings periodically. Question status quo - Once you have a particular POV, ask questions if something seems wrong. If it's new learning, admit it, but i ...Read More

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 chan ...Read More