Influencing without authority

Influence without authority

This is how I describe what day-to-day product management is like. I wish the whole “CEO of the product” thing was accurate, but mostly you’re just the “serf of product”. What this effectively means is that out of all the folks in an organization at a given point in time, PMs have the fewest tangible skills and add little to no direct value to the product (harsh yes, but also kinda true).

Our main job is twofold

1. make people do things for us
2. say no to things people ask us to do

These “people” are often more senior, more experienced, and more knowledgable than you are. Without a a leg to stand on, the main tools in my arsenal at the two extremes to get my job done are begging and threatening. Fortunately, there is a spectrum in the middle, and I’m going to spend the rest of this post describing the methods that have worked for me in the past. Here we go.

• Blame it on the powers that be
• Us versus them
• Punt to the future
• Build strong relationships

Before diving deeper into each of these, I want to clarify that my experiences are going to be shaded by the fact that I work in a very large organization with a product portfolio spanning multiple business units. If you’re a PM at a startup, your mileage may vary but for the most part, these methods are adaptable to most situations.

Blame it on the powers that be

Most early to mid career PMs are pretty far down the food chain in terms of big decision making ability. There’s usually a VP or Head of Product defining the overall strategy for a product, which PMs in the team must execute on and bring to fruition. When trying to convince my team of engineers that a feature is something we need to do, I usually rely on the social and political capital of my manager (or my manager’s manager or whatever the case may be) to push things past the finish line. Here’s what a hypothetical conversation might look like.

Me: “We should do this feature because it helps us stay ahead of our competitors and provides tremendous customer value. I have also conducted market research which indicates that this would be a valuable addition to the product that customers would pay a lot of money for.“

Senior engineer: “Yeah, that’s fine. In my opinion though, with my vast years of experience, I don’t think this feature is going to work. Here is every single edge case of why it won’t.“

Me: “Yeah you know what I agree (*note to reader: I don’t). But I ran this by Big Boss and she agrees that this is the right way to do this.”

Kaboom. Just pointing to the higher power goes a long way in convincing folks that don’t necessarily trust your measly authority. This works in situations where you have to say no to things too. Assuming that Big Boss is respected and/or feared, this usually has the desired effect. Is it ideal? No, the eventual goal is to be respected and feared yourself, but until you get there, fair game.

Us versus them

This might be a controversial one but hear me out. When you join a team, no matter how small or large, you feel a sense of community and something special that bonds you to your teammates. As PM, I like to use this to my advantage and pitch teams against each other in a mostly healthy way.

How does this work exactly?

Well let’s say I’m the PM for a messenger app. Another team that works on emoji keyboards has a request for my team — they need us to add some functionality so they can add new bitmojis. But I know my team is overstretched and our backlog is miles long with several higher priority items, so I push back. My team is watching closely and they see me fighting the noble fight on their behalf. The next time we need to ship a new feature, they’re more inclined to back me up.

This can be done at different hierarchies of teams too. One business unit versus another, one feature area versus another, one functional team versus another. You need to be careful about how you push back because you don’t want enemies and you’re eventually going to want something from other teams too. But when the stakes are low, for instance when you know that a feature that another team is asking for is not urgent and not that important to them, saying no is low-risk, high-reward. Similarly, when other teams ask for a feature you know is low-effort, encourage your team to do it. Favors are currency you can trade in.

Punt to the future

When objections are raised to something you want to do with the product, simply agree with all the reasonable objections to your proposal and punt them to a future date. Given how swamped most folks are, it will rarely come back to haunt you. Here’s an example.

Senior engineer: “The user experience you’re proposing doesn’t take into account the fact that over 10% of users don’t have iOS or Android as their mobile OS. What about them? Isn’t it unfair that they can’t use our bitmojis?“

Me: “I completely agree. For the MVP scope though, we should limit ourselves to iOS and Android users, and then improve the feature to serve the rest of our user base at a future date. Let’s revisit this in the next planning cycle.“

Do I actually plan to revisit this? Probably not unless something catastrophic happens because I know this is an insignificant portion of our customer base. But responding this way makes people feel like they’re being heard and if they really do care (which is a great thing), they will bring it up again. If they were merely disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, they will lose interest.

Build strong relationships

This is the most obvious of them all but it’s shocking how bad some people are at this. As a PM, you have to give more than you take. Be the friendly, approachable PM that people want to talk to. Smart, analytic PMs are a dime a dozen, but it takes time, effort and real interest to understand the goals and motivations of everyone you work with. This builds over time naturally, however it also requires active effort and caring. All the best PMs I’ve worked with have been great at this. A simple example: an engineer on my team was asked to speak at a conference and was feeling uncertain about the format of the deck she put together. I volunteered to help because a) she trusted me enough to confide in me about this, and b) I wanted to. That’s it, no ulterior motive. As a result of that, we have a truly great working relationship. By no means am I half as good at this as I want to be, but I learn by closely watching and emulating PMs I admire.

In conclusion, I want to note that this list is non-exhaustive. I’ve tried to capture methods that I haven’t heard or seen very often here, but the basics of know your shit and do your research still stand. I’d personally love to hear what works for you, so drop a comment if you’d like to share your tips and tricks for influencing without authority!

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