Jamil Valliani

A great product manager starts not by convincing people of value, but by listening and exploring problems faced by their customers and team members. So, start with understanding what challenges your partners are facing - they can range from engineering-specific issues to business performance. Pick a few of these problems that seem approachable and explore them deeply, partnering closely with the people on the team responsible for them. Then deliver an improvement. It does not have to be a complete solution - but a measurable improvement that you were able to design and implement with your partners. Getting points on the board together and celebrating a shared win is the best way I see product managers that are new on the team quickly establish their value and build reputation as a strong team member.

Using a clear, published framework that aligns to the organizations broader goals or strategy is important to prioritizing any set of work. Without this, it will be difficult to build confidence with your team that decisions will hold up and they won’t have the context required to make sound decisions in their execution of the tasks they are assigned. A prioritization framework doesn’t need to be complicated - in fact its often better if its so simple that it can be committed to memory. In many cases the best discussions I’ve had with my leaders focus on aligning on the prioritization framework over a whiteboard, with the output often being a simple bullet list or table calling out the characteristics of projects that will fall into each bucket. It’s also advisable to test your prioritization framework by running a few examples of actual work items and seeing if the team leads align on how the framework is applied and the priority outcomes for each. Setting the framework is usually simplistic when running a small team with clear goals or OKRs, as those can easily map directly to the priority framework you define for the team. As you take on more strategic roles where there are difficult calls to make balancing resources across competing priorities, I’ve found that the “Core Context” model by Geoffrey Moore helps me form my first cut at a priority framework for delivering on that strategy. 

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.

The “soft skills” are often what separate the good from great product managers. In particular: * Curiosity - An insatiable curiosity about your customers, partners, fellow team members, technology and just about anything that comes your way helps add arrows in your quiver you can use when tackling the wide range of daily challenges product manager takes on. * Story Telling - Central to a product manager’s success is the ability to influence key parties to deliver an outcome. Whether its influencing the customer to use your feature, the engineering team to build something, the product manager ultimately has to craft and deliver a clear, energy-infusing narrative that touches on logic and emotion to compel the party to deliver the desired behavior. * Hustler Mentality - Great product managers consistently deliver results even in the most constrained environments. They do this by being scrappy, resourceful and opportunistic - using great judgement to figure out where they should spend their energy, thinking creatively about how to marshall the resources they have, and steely resolve when tackling blocking issues. They do not resort to victim mentality. This is not to say that specific technical or writing skills are not important. However there are many flavors of PM where “hard” skills required vary. But the above needed soft skills tend to remain consistent.

Setting a fast-paced rhythm and providing predictable touch points are the two practices that a product manager can heavily influence that can impact team velocity. These two concepts are related: a rhythm gives teams in your organization a common pattern they can align to. Everyone knowing that the team operates on sprints of the same length, with a common calendar, how decisions are made and communicated in a common way, a clear way drivers, approvers, and contributors are determined and documented for projects - all feed into a sense of rhythm and predictability. I call out predictable touchpoints specifically because they provide some level of control on the thrashing that organization leadership can inadvertently cause when interfacing with the team. By setting the touchpoints at the various levels of leadership in advance, and providing clarity on what will be reviewed and decided at each touchpoint, its easier for the product manager to isolate which areas of the team may experience change and keep other teams more focused. Lastly, it's important to work with your engineering and design counterparts to keep a constant investment in agility operations and tools. The faster each discipline can do their daily tasks, the more agile the overall team will be. This can range from providing time for developers to adopt AI code generation tools, optimizing a CI/CD pipeline, resolve long-standing operations issues that are costing time, and so on.