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Practice of Product Growth

How to Multiply Your Impact as a Product Leader

As a product leader, and even PM, you can multiply your impact by helping constructively improve your team’s ability to deal with:

1. Unblocking themselves
2. Signing up for Action Items (AIs) they won’t complete
3. Being product, not feature, teams

1. Unblocking themselves

Teaching your team how to translate strategy into implementation without you multiplies your impact.

Things like:
▪️ Proactive compliance review
▪️ Empowering engineers & designers
▪️ Encouraging analysts to build platforms and dashboards

2: Signing up for AIs they won’t complete

One of the modern malaises in the Zoom-corporate world we live in is, everything sounds more important when we’re talking about it.

We think we have time for the AIs, but we don’t.

Model and encourage your team to say no to busywork.

3: Being product, not feature, teams

The more you empower your team to own issues of usability (design), whether the experiment was a success (analytics), and how to build the thing (engineering), the more they can succeed.

You have to allow them to fail to succeed.

Summary

Teaching your team to unblock themselves, say no, and being product teams will help fix many problems with your teams today.

It’s just easier to say than do. You have to present them with problems and context, not solutions and features.

By Aakash Gupta

15 years in PM | From PM to VP of Product | Ex-Google, Fortnite, Affirm, Apollo