7 Lessons from my 7th year of product management

The transition from summer to fall has been a little rougher than usual this year, and so I found myself reluctant to really dig into this blog post. And yet, there was some thing about actually sitting and reflecting that I knew I had to do, potentially, because it’s been such a busy season.

While last year’s themes were confidence and resilience, this year’s theme was unequivocally “disruption.” I don’t want to discount the amazing things that happened, including a promotion to Principal Product Manager, but a number of other things came my way — a large reorg that impacted my team and the trusted reporting chain that had been built over the better part of a decade, the unexpected passing of a colleague, rapidly shifting priority changes, and a second significant reorg a few months later that changed how our team worked together.

Nerdy side note: the one on the left has committed his weight forward, and the one on the right is slightly forward, but more balanced. The one on the right may have an opportunity to pivot into a forward throw.

In any sparring round that involves throws, there’s a strategy martial artists practice to simply survive. You focus on keeping your hips under your shoulders, and your feet under your hips. In this way, you keep your gravity centered and make yourself harder to throw. Similarly, modern skyscrapers are often built with a tuned mass damper, which counterbalances typhoons and earthquakes.

This year, I’ve had to call upon all of my resiliency resources to frequently realign myself so that I don’t feel off-balance. I’ve had to intentionally invest in myself in order to be present for others. In previous years, the environment I was in encouraged me to flourish; this year, I’ve had to be very mindful about setting in place healthy boundaries and practices that will, in the long term, equip both myself and my team to perform.

With that context, here are the 7 lessons I learned this past year.

Note: I’ve linked the entire series at the bottom of this post for reference.

#1 Take care of people first

As I mentioned in my introduction, my organization has experienced a high level of disruption this year, which manifested itself in a range of emotions, everything from absolute devastation (unexpected death of a colleague) to confusion and stress (reorganizations).

The leadership on my team is people-first, especially in times of emergencies. One of our engineering directors basically dropped everything to shepherd his reports through the grief of losing our colleague. In times of loss, stress, personal crises, medical emergencies, and more, the only thing we can do is recognize that there are more important things in life than work. And we have a responsibility as leaders to slow down and just be with people.

This was one of the first years where I felt like I could actually help our organization by partnering with our leaders to participate in this level of care and support. I am incredibly thankful that our entire team deeply shares this value.

#2 Define what is in your control in order to drive clarity for things out of your control

One of the first significant projects after I returned from my sabbatical last year was incredibly complex, involving multiple workstreams, multiple technologies, multiple squads, multiple product managers, multiple service dependencies, and more. The initiative had to get done, but everyone was already incredibly busy and unable to come to consensus on how we were going to deliver this initiative. After a few weeks of this, I finally decided to draw clear boundaries around what I could control — what my team would deliver.

I sat down with the requirements from other product managers, and clearly detailed in my own requirements defining what our team would deliver and how it would behave, and what was out of scope and in the purview of a partner team. And over the course of a number of alignment conversations to sign off on the approach, we all reached clarity on what the scope of the initiative was, what the touch points were, and where the risk to the project was.

I stated what my team would do in order to drive discussions and decisions, and ensured we had a single source of truth for how the system was going to work. This documentation helped others who onboarded later in the process to understand the approach and handshake points.

#3 Great ideas come from all directions

Late last year, I sat down for a presentation from one of our architects to talk about an approach he was interested in taking in our platform. I didn’t quite know why I was invited and wasn’t sure how it was applicable to what I was doing, but I attended anyway.

After the presentation, I walked away with my interest piqued. “What if,” I thought to myself, “I could make a business case for this? What would the impact be for the end user? What about for our business?” And the more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

To make a long story short, this initiative sparked interest in a lot of people, and pursuing it has led me to connect with people all across the company. All I did was listen to an idea and approach, and really consider it. I’m hoping we’ll be able to share more about this in the years to come.

#4 Surface hard topics out of a place of love

I am, by nurture, non-confrontational, and it takes a lot of emotional effort to surface hard topics. However, I’ve learned through hard-won experience that sometimes, the choice to enter into potential conflict is absolutely critical for the well-being of the people around me. If it means surfacing hard truths or simply disagreeing with a premise, I’ll do it if it means either the people around me or our users benefit.

I’ve been building social capital at my company for quite some time now, and I realized this year that you sometimes have to spend it when things are particularly challenging.

One of my former managers (you know who you are) once told me that you can either lead from a place of love or lead from a place of fear. If I choose the path of leading from a place of love, my actions have to be motivated by wanting the best for those around me. And sometimes those actions mean surfacing the things no one wants to talk about, even if it comes at the potential for personal or reputation cost.

#5 Make a time and a place to reflect and pursue organizational growth

About a year and a half ago, I became incredibly convicted that our product management team needed a retro. As a new organization working with a very large, complex team, we had a number of challenges. Frustrations and inefficiencies were beginning to wear us down, and we needed a place to express them to each other and find productive solutions.

Sure enough, once we started this, the team began to work together instead of independently. We instituted a quarterly retro and a periodic standup share out, where we talked about what challenges we were solving as PMs, where our wins were, and where we were blocked. Not only did it help us gain visibility into what others were doing, we could sometimes problem solve on the spot and connect dots across our ownership areas, ensuring we worked as a unit.

This type of reflective practice has been incredibly powerful in building unity and solidarity, and also has helped surface friction points so that we can build the right amount of process and communication to address them.

#6 Constraint breeds creativity

I was invited to lean into community building with my team this past year, particularly as some of the reorgs brought together some teams that hadn’t historically worked in the same organization. Hybrid and distributed work have also meant that you only get to know the people you work with day in and day out. At the same time, we’ve had limited budget to actually craft these types of team building experiences.

But these types of constraints simply mean you have to get more creative about how to bring people together. After all, building relationships has very little to do with the amount of money you spend and more about the shared experiences you have. I started investing in our community at the beginning of summer, and people still talk about the photo scavenger hunt, the potluck picnic at a local regional park near some nice hiking trails, and a recent trip to volunteer at a local food bank.

This stock photo was pretty close to what our team was doing at a recent volunteer opportunity at our local food bank.

It doesn’t take that much to make people feel like they know another person from the broader team. All you need is intentionality, creativity, and the investment of time to provide a way for connections to thrive.

#7 Invest in relationship in order to get things done

I like to joke sometimes that there’s a “shadow network” of people who get things done at my company. There’s a web of relationships that come from shared commutes, former teammates, coworkers of coworkers, social media connections, volunteer events, committee service, ERGs, site events, and more. And while these loose connections seem like they don’t matter, at times, they do.

Just this past year, I’ve been able to connect multiple people with critical information they’ve needed to get their job done. I’ve been able to leverage previous working relationships to ask for support for an initiative. One functional team formed incredibly rapidly just by building upon these long-term shared connections.

I learned that you never know which relationships will help you to succeed or when, so you should invest liberally. Pay it forward, and help others to succeed. Build that social capital, because someone might hold open a door for you, suggest you for an opportunity, or be a listening ear when you really need it.

Despite the negative connotation of the word disruption, I don’t see this past year as a bad year. It was filled with learning, laughter, joy, connection, satisfaction in good work, and the letting go of things I couldn’t control. Disruption forces you to reconsider your values and foundations, to evaluate whether they still hold true, to express them clearly and firmly, and to tap into the convictions you develop as a result.

As a result of the depth of change this past year, I’m finding myself surprisingly more confident in the models of organizational culture I want to develop for any future team I manage, and I’m learning deeply from the role models in my life. I more firmly understand how an organization’s history influences how it approaches problems, and have stronger opinions on how I want to approach healthy collaboration and problem solving.

I’m well into my eighth year of being a PM, and I’m eager to see what this upcoming year has to offer. As a field is plowed before the seeds are sown, my hope is that the disruption we’ve faced this past year manifests itself in a field that produces abundantly. And my wish is that I can approach the task of helping to cultivate this field with thoughtfulness and love, with a deep appreciation for those within.

Here’s to the next year.

Elaine is a principal product manager at Adobe. You can find her on Threads at @elainecchao. All statements in this essay are her own and do not reflect the opinions of her employer.

• Last year’s reflection
• Fifth year reflection
• Fourth year reflection
• Third year reflection
• Second year reflection
• First year reflection
• Six month reflection

Photo credits:

• Man in black t-shirt and black shorts doing push up by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
• Man in red t-shirt holding white plastic bottle by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash
• Sunflower field during sunset by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash