Building and growing along with your product

As Product Managers, while we manage our product and its roadmap, there is a tendency that we get too involved with it (sometimes emotionally attached). A roadmap is a simple document that you use to communicate with your team, management, stakeholders and even customers to show what you would be focusing in the next 12-18 months.

Your roadmap is flexible and not permanent; which means things change and they change because you stumbled upon a higher ROI impacting feature.

In all this chaos, we tend to forget that your growth as a product leader is part of this process too and by that I mean building your team and product. Make sure to include yourself in the growth of the team; and the most important lesson / advise here is that in order to grow, you have to learn to let go. Now you can relate to my roadmap rant in the beginning.

I have worked as a product manager in several organization as well as different teams within an organization. One thing I have realized is that once you get involved working with the team you start noticing patterns. You understand signs or identify things more quickly, like whether your product is on track, there is resource crunch, time constraint, etc. Lets just say you develop your sixth sense.

As you move up the hierarchy, your focus will shift. Keep in mind, building a team isn’t creating clones of you or the best performing team member. You should strive to become the creator of a framework that allows you and your team to have a system in place that allows them to make decisions to move forward - you are now a psychic.

It’s all about empowering your people to be self sufficient and critical thinkers.

tldr;

• To scale as a product manager means relinquishing control. When you grow, your product grows, your organization grows.
• You develop a sixth sense when you work with your team. As you grow put that to work and build a framework. Evolve as a psychic for your team.