How do you manage people who don't necessarily report into you?

Question

Dana Barrett · Accepted Answer

You are 100% correct that the hardest part of a PMMs job is managing without authority. Often, PMMs rely on shared resources or centralized teams to get their job done. I have found three things work really well in managing without authority. They are all hard and take time, but they are effective.

First, invest the time in building a relationship with your cross functional partners. If someone knows you and likes you, they are going to be much more open to any feedback you have. They are also much more likely to prioritize your requests.

Second, create a shared vision for success. Every partner you are working with has goals and the best way to get them to prioritize what you care about is to find a way to show how working on your ask will help your cross functional partner reach their goals.

Third, if you cannot align your goals easily, you may need to sell your partner (and potentially his/her leadership) on your idea. Help them to see why shifting their priorities to support your initiative will drive greater value to the company or team than some of the other initiatives they are working on.

Jasmine Jaume · Answer

I believe that the ability to build relationships with stakeholders and influence others is key to being a successful PMM. As you've noted in your question, due to the nature of our role PMMs are often drivers of very cross-functional projects, which involves co-ordinating peers and potentially people more senior than you too.

Really, it comes down to all the classic relationship-building things:

* Build trust - spend time with the people you need to influence (and not just when you need something!), be helpful and reliable, do what you say you will, ask for their input and feedback, and look for opportunities to help them achieve their goals. This will all go a long way when you need their help with a project, need to give feedback, need them to help advocate for something etc.
 * Know what their goals are and what drives them, and then make it easy for them to understand how what you're asking for will help them achieve them 
 * Adjust your communication style - everyone has their preferred communication style. Some people love reading docs, some like to talk things through, some just want the 3 bullet highlights. Understanding how your stakeholders like to communicate will make it more likely you'll get your point through
 * Focus on the impact to the business, not why you need it - similar to the point about knowing your stakeholder's goals, you'll likely get a better result if you can clearly show how whatever you're asking for - a project to be prioritised, or feedback to be actioned for example - helps the business, because everyone should want the business to be successful. This also helps makes it less personal (you're not asking for yourself, you're asking for the business!)
 * Data, if you have it - if you have data, research or any kind of evidence that helps back up what you're asking for, that can make it significantly easier to get buy-in

Eileen Buenviaje Reyes · Answer

Product marketers often end up in the position of “dotted line” managers/stakeholders for many functions — design, writing, research (to name a few). What’s worked for me in the past is two-fold:

* Influence: For every function that feels like a “dotted line”, it’s important to build a close relationship with the leaders for those functions. This relationship enables you to freely exchange ideas, maintain alignment on priorities, operate efficiently, and set expectations between teams. If things between us go sideways, a strong relationship feels less like an escalation and more like a productive conversation. 
 * Action: For the individuals that partner closely with your team, treat them like an extension of your team. I’ve even gone so far as including them in my weekly team meetings. It gives them a ton of context, full transparency, and a regular touchpoint, so ideally priorities and plans can maintain alignment more seamlessly.

For the specific instance of giving feedback, this is where it’s important for Product Marketing to be included in the appropriate spot in a DACI. If we’ve aligned that PMM is the approver, our feedback should carry more weight than if we’ve agreed that PMM is only consulting. In either case, how you give feedback is just as important as what you’re giving feedback about. Feedback needs to be given with empathy (“I think you did this because of [X]”), curiosity (“Why did you choose [Y]?”), and flexibility (“I think [Z], but that’s not as important as [X].”). Whether or not you have authority, you must always have respect.

Evelyn Ju · Answer

Like most cross-functional work, the most important thing is to build trust and establish shared goals early on. Instead of delegating work, involve them in your process, provide them with proper context, and agree on timelines where applicable. They will be much more motivated to help if they have the same context and can be part of the journey. When giving feedback, make sure to provide the why and take a step back when necessary to ground your discussions around objectives, guardrails, and who should be the decision maker for what. There are going to be scenarios where you and your counterparts will disagree, but don’t be afraid to elevate the conversation and get different perspectives. Soft influence also requires understanding someone, so take the time to build a relationship that extends beyond a specific project.

Roopal Shah · Answer

It starts with aligning on common goals - what I find people get lost is in the "how" we get there. In business, we can all agree on goals that are like motherhood and apple pie - like revenue or cost savings. Hard to argue with those. Once you get aligned on that, then start with understanding what the recommended path is to get there. It could be what you're pitching or it could be something else. As long as you stay grounded in the shared goal, the rest is a lot easier, in my opinion.

Christy Roach · Answer

You’re right that as PMMs it’s often impossible for us to get our work done without work from another team, often multiple other teams. Part of my advice for doing this well is a critique of the way you’ve worded your question. I don’t see myself, or my team, as “managing” people who don’t report to me. We’re partnering with them. We should have shared goals, a shared vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, and equal motivation to get it done. If we don’t, that team is just doing a favor for the product marketing org and that work will get quickly deprioritized if something more pressing to their role comes up.

The work for a PMM is to create those shared goals and that shared ownership up front, so that the entire team involved is motivated by and committed to the work. You do this by understanding how your partner teams measure success, what matters to them, the pressures they have on their role, and the metrics they’re responsible for. Then you figure out how the project you're proposing can also help them reach their goals and impact their focus areas. Sometimes that means the scope of the project may need to expand slightly to make it impactful for all parties, but if you’re willing to do this up front, the entire project usually runs more smoothly.

Sometimes, that’s not the case and you really are asking a partner team to take on additional work that won't necessarily help them in their own roles. In that situation, you need to make clear upfront what’s needed, get buy in that they’re willing to commit to the deadline, and usually offer something in return in exchange for their help If you’re always the one asking for favors and never helping out other teams, you’ll find that people’s willingness to work with you will dry up pretty quickly.

In terms of how you manage this tactically once you’ve gone about work I mapped out above, the most important thing is having a shared source of truth for your work (unsurprisingly, we use Airtable for this), having the right level of check-ins schedules so you’re staying in sync, and being clear about roles and responsibilities so everyone knows what's expected of them.

Daniel Waas · Answer

You will need to win their respect and trust. To do that you need to...

* know your stuff
 * be humble
 * give ample positive feedback
 * understand their agenda and help them advance it
 * take personal responsibility for everything that goes wrong, and emphasize the team contribution over your own for everything that went right
 * criticize in private, while using "I" instead of "You" statements but be unmistakably clear in your feedback. Don't leave room for ambiguity and always criticize the work, not the person)
 * don't take yourself too seriously
 * be ready to admit mistakes 
 * make friends (helps if you listen more than you speak, ask tons of questions, remember their name, likes, fun facts, etc.)
 * deliver a high say/do ratio
 * be nicer than the next guy
 * make it easy to work with you (write better briefs, give better feedback and do it faster, work with them to find reasonable timeframes, descope, etc.)
 * leave time for fun and lighthearted remarks. Don't be all business.
 * do nice things (recommend them for a shout out award, post a public thank you, send a thoughtful small gift, send their boss a glowing review when they did something well)

Lisa Dziuba · Answer

Managing people who don't necessarily report to you can be challenging, as you may not have the same level of authority or control over their work.

So you start with building relationships first. We work with people, and people are driven by emotions. So the main step in achieving a smooth collaboration is gaining trust, both on personal and professional levels. It comes to:

* Understanding one another's needs and goals
 * Transparent communication
 * Keeping your commitments
 * Providing regular feedback
 * Actively listening and expressing support for your peers' ideas

Building strong relationships will help you understand people's perspectives, needs, and concerns, and will also make it easier for you to provide guidance and support. While being a kind and reliable coworker will make it much easier to collaborate on an emotional level.

All those tactics will lead to gaining "non-official" authority that as result will allow you to manage without a manager title 🙂

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