This post was mentioned on Twitter by StewartRogers: [blog post] Authority vs. Influence http://budurl.com/d6mb #prodmgmt…

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.”
Margaret Thatcher

Fundamental to leadership is enablement. I.e., the best leaders are those who empower and enable others. Leaders provide people with tools, process, information, cultivation of their strengths, and even emotional support.

But there is another critical ingredient to enablement. Great leaders themselves need enablement. It sounds romantic to assume that leaders singlehandedly pull themselves up by their bootstraps and overcome all obstacles. The reality is that leaders excel when they are empowered with the same types of ingredients they provide to the people they lead.

Thus it really has nothing to do with authority or management as some sort of formal, carrot-and-stick power. It has everything to do with a corporate environment that enables product managers to lead. When executives don't understand product management, when they don't understand that the typical departmental structure serves as an obstacle to effective product management, product managers are not enabled.

The goal was to talk about the necessity of leadership, and how to go about gaining influence, so the product manager could lead. We already do these activities. And, these activities are the same activities that we would do when we align our team to strategy.

Product managers do not have authority, so manager is definitely the wrong word. In a corporation there are three people who lead matrix teams: the CEO, the product manager, and the project manager. The latter two have no authority. Notice that we do not call the CEO a manager.

The authority issue generates many comments and tweets about how product managers are too distant from their metrics, and lack the means to affect those metrics. That is victimhood that starts with the word “manager.”

I've seen too many product managers fail to manage and beyond that fail to lead. These product managers focus on their product owner tasks and lose sight of the big picture. These product managers get stuck in the reactive mode and never escape to become proactive. This of late. The product managers I worked with back before the dot boom were proactive, and not reactive. They led. They didn't manage. IT people manage themselves. They need leadership, not management. And, product managers need to get away from the reactive and get on with the proactive. Being proactive reduces the need to be reactive.