Who do you align yourself with to gain momentum in the leadership organization?

Answer

6 Answers

Influencing the C-Suite

Derek Ferguson

GitLab Group Product Manager • 10mo

Building the right alliances is fairly critical for building your own organizational capital and driving change. Find the right people to ally yourself with and don’t be afraid to engage with them. The most successful PMs I’ve seen have made an effort to get to know people at levels higher than they are and understand what these leaders care about. Your direct manager is your most important ally, but that mostly goes without saying. Outside of that relationship, here are a few others that I've f ...Read More

353 Views
Poorvi Shrivastav

Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 4y

Alignment is a function of trust, respect and growth. I do not practice aligning for the sake of gaining political clout in an organization. I often start with a well rounded set of individuals - peer leaders in the same function, cross-functional leaders in other parts of the organization, a set of mentors, and of course my team and working partners across engineering and UX and develop and invest in these relationships. In short, I maintain an advisory group in the company, to which I can go t ...Read More

1,043 Views
Aindra Misra

BILL Director, Product Management (Data, AI, DevEx, Identity) | Formerly Twitter/X • 1y
It's a 3 to 4 way alignment to help you succeed as a PM
- Your engineering team who helps build your product vision
- Your PM team who helps with shares your portfolio (This is only relevant for PM leaders)
- Your customers who would use your product (it can be internal customers for technical/platform products) or external customers for growth PMs
- Upper management (Commonly referred as "Managing Up") - It can you your PM leadership, eng leadership, customer team leadership (for internal customers)
417 Views
Jacqueline Porter

IBM Product Management • 2y

I usually align myself with other parts of the organization's metrics and OKRs rather than a specific person. When you are supporting others' metrics they are accountable to, you will have their attention and commitment to accomplishing a shared objective together. If I align with a single person, this often means when that person leaves I need to find a new relationship to build. Rather I tend to focus on helping the entire group accomplish what they need to get done (by supporting it with Prod ...Read More

422 Views
Nicolas Liatti

Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D Category • 2y

Early in your career the only person you need to influence for getting promoted is usually your manager.

As you grow and try to reach the C-Suite, there is not 1 single person to influence. What matters is the impact you are making. And in order to make impact at the company level, you need to influence and get aligned with a lot of different people from other orgs such as marketing, sales, etc. It's by influencing indirectly all those people that you will achieve impact and gain momentum.

438 Views
Carrie Zhang

Square Product Lead • 2y

I don’t think we should try and align with certain people. Product development is about solving customer problems. So fundamentally I think we should deeply understand our customers’ struggles and figure out how we can use technology to help them. Additionally, we need to put that in the context of company level strategy and priorities. You don’t want to work on something that the company doesn’t care about. If you can clearly articulate how you are aligned with customer needs and company priori ...Read More

423 Views