Product Managers and Empathy

With over a decade of experience in leading product management teams, I've seen many different traits in product managers. Recently, I interviewed a lot of prospective PM's. Many of them said my biggest success was growing a business to x size or managing a business of y size. When asked about a biggest failure, most pointed to a lack of communication or a failed customer escalation.

At our core, Product Managers are paid to make decisions and to get everyone aligned to a particular strategy or tactic. With this in mind, one thing that I'd like to say I've come to value is product managers with empathy. These are product managers that take a world view on the products that they manage both inside and outside their organizations.

A product manager with empathy puts great weight in the decisions they take and balances timeliness with the amount of data needed to take an effective decision. Bigger decisions take more data and time and smaller ones should be transacted fairly quickly.

Now why do I say empathy is a good trait to have? One thing I won't comment on is having empathy for the customer. Building great products that people love is always something that all product managers want to do and probably one of the things that makes PM's very proud and puts the biggest smile on our faces.

However, let's look at our team that delivers these great products and point our empathy there. Let's start with R&D. Timeliness is critical. The end of a sprint and a PM who can't decide what to prioritize next or keeps changing his mind leads to two results: idle engineers or engineers doing whatever they think is best. As a PM with empathy, you should go into these conversations prepared because you know that you're either wasting the time of your team or losing their respect.

Some product managers have to make pricing decisions. (Disclaimer: I'm not saying this is a reason to set a price a certain way, but it is something to consider when making decisions around routes to market.) I've seen organizations say, we set our price for $10.00, but can't get our sales people to sign up and try and sell it. To have empathy with the sales guy who has a $1M quota, you understand why he's not so excited to sell the product. If this is your only route to market, and you have to leverage the sales force at hand as a PM you should make sure that the product is either very easy to sell or that you ensure the team has the full support needed to be successful.

To make a point around developers in a way PM's view themselves successful; "I grew a business from $100M to $200M" is a pretty powerful statement. However, what if product decisions taken caused a business to falter from $200M to $150M. I'd say that's a pretty big failure (although rarely easy to isolate it as just product decisions). However, is the biggest failure the loss in revenue or the lives of people who now don't have jobs? It really depends on how you look at it, but we as product management professionals should always be conscious of this for both big decisions and small and have at least a little empathy.