How to Deflect All Work to Your Coworkers

We as product managers are often in positions where we have no direct power, however are forced to "lead from the back of the room". This often takes the shape of urging and questions about methods until we get the outcome we want or settle on an outcome where we stopped fighting or caring.

The one thing about leading from the back of the room through that people often overlook, no one looks to you for work to be done. With this shift in mindset or realization, you are never fully responsible for any output or outcome, only influencing the final decisions.

Continuing down this path and enhancing our skillset, we make a new discovery; we have the influence to also assign work from the back of the room. No one is looking to us to be driving any initiatives or produce the valuable work, so we are also empowered to make sure the folks around us are able to accept and complete as much work as possible.

If we're framing this from the standpoint of a North Star, we need to assume no work is put upon us so we can effectively lead from the back of the room and put thought around it instead of being in the front of the room where all work and eyes are drawn to. Our North Star would be no work, only influence.

Now, we potentially have a challenge - how to make it look like you are working? This is one of the biggest struggles of product managers who are transitioning into the "only influence" leaders but we have a solve: present other people's work.

Your dev, UX person, research and analytics teams all work near you from a product perspective. You have the ability to consolidate their work into one view and present it to leadership, who will be happy to see this.

What we, as product managers, are bringing to the table is something we call an "insight". An insight is a loose connection of data points that you, as a product manager, can "see" a resolution from and draw some connective line through to present to leadership and give them the idea that you're summarizing a lot of different trains of work and thought.

We'll have more on "insights" in an upcoming article "What are Insights and How Do you Pull Them Out of Thin Air?"

An effective product manager isn't deriving their value from the amount of work they're doing, they should be creating value by generating Insights that help guide the organization into making tactical decisions.

Thanks,

- (product) Management