Sachin Rekhi

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product.

Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members. Given this, it’s worth spending time as a product manager thinking about how you can improve the various communications you have with your team.

I wanted to share some of the best practices I’ve observed on effective communication around the three high level responsibilities of product managers: vision, design, and execution.

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or... quite the opposite.

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more. Or you could be performing team activities including preparing a presentation on the updated roadmap or on-boarding new team members. Add to that the constant meetings and emails you have to attend and respond to each day. This doesn’t even include the many non-role related activities that end of filling your day.

My passion has always been in building productivity apps for consumers and small businesses. The productivity space is a tough one though with thousands of applications but very few breakout success stories. While many apps promise significant improvements in productivity, they often still fail to gain any meaningful traction.

At the same time certain applications do succeed and I’ve tried to discern what sets these applications apart from the numerous failures. I’ve concluded that for productivity applications, success comes down to the following value equation: the productivity gain from using the app must exceed the cost of the constraints imposed by it.

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority.

Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product. While I agree with this organizational design to ensure separation of concerns and specialization of skills, it leads to product managers needing the ability to influence others to help them achieve their objectives without the direct authority to do so.