Owners think about ideas and solutions from the lens of the greater good for the company.
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
As product management professionals, we often hear how we are "mini-CEO's" and "de-facto leaders". But what does this really mean? And how does this really work?
I think a better categorization is being an owner.
Owners think about ideas and solutions from the lens of the greater good for the company. Owners understand budgets, tradeoffs, and future-proofing. Owners think through their decisions, and plan for secondary and tertiary outcomes, and are not results oriented. They will be collaborative and inclusive, while still making hard (and sometimes unpopular) decisions for the greater good.
So how do we ensure we are acting like an owner?
As a product manager, you are likely already making tradeoffs all the time on behalf of the company. A good exercise is envisioning the company as your own, and the budget / burn is on you, being able to keep the lights on is on you, and make decisions from there.
Your roadmap should be a reflection of your annual product pillars, which themselves should be a reflection of company mission and priorities. To ensure your entire organization is aligned, being inclusive and collaborative during the planning phases of your roadmap is critical for communication. Collect feedback during the research phase, and set your priorities with a matrix like this:
Scoring should be dependent on company priorities. Burning money like crazy? Cost should have a multiplier. Maybe revenue impact too. Insanely competitive space? Maybe user urgency. You get the drift.
Then from your stack of priorities, as you're presenting the roadmap to the company, explain in words why certain features are ranked in front of others.
Example: "We chose to pick up feature 4 as the first project of the year, it's low LOE, we can complete it quickly to get us press and momentum, and motivate the team with a quick win."
"We will then pick up feature 1 which is a huge project with many cross functional dependencies. We believe we have descoped down to an MVP. We can save additional time by taking shortcuts X and Y, but here is the risk..." Then articulate things like complexity cost, tech debt, user experience. Give a recommendation that you don't take shortcuts, but get some consensus without going overboard, and then set expectation on timelines.
Do this enough times, and everyone, including your executives, will learn themselves how product managers are making tradeoffs. They will feel involved in your magic wand process, and generally will start trusting your decision making, as you will give the sense that you already have the company's back by making tradeoffs for the greater good. And before you know it, everyone will be looking at you like you are a true owner.