With great responsibility, comes no power...

Leading Without Authority

Do most of the conversations about leading without authority begin and end with “Make sure people like you, and act with integrity, and people will do what you say?” Not very helpful advice, is it? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Here are some more useful perspectives on how you can lead a product team made up of your peers. This advice is especially helpful for all of you who are not the CEO of your product…

Meanwhile, in product news, we share three new products that help you become more effective in testing, writing, and keeping track of your to-dos. And if you weren’t efficient enough, we look at a new feature that will make opening up one of your favorite tools not so daunting.

Deep-dive: Leading Without Authority. Product Managers find themselves in a pivotal yet challenging role. Charged with the task of bringing innovative products to life, they navigate a complex web of technical challenges, stakeholder expectations, and team dynamics. Yet, what sets their role apart is not just the breadth of their responsibilities but the nuanced art of leading the product teams that they work with – often software developers and user experience professionals – even though those colleagues traditionally don’t report to the Product Manager. Our own Mike Belsito explores this topic in-depth.

Product Managers Must Lead Without Authority. As a seasoned product manager, Warren Smith often faces challenges leading cross-functional teams without having direct authority over team members. Success hinges on the ability to inspire, influence, and drive collaboration among team members. The art of leading without authority is an essential skill for any product manager seeking to maximize team productivity and deliver exceptional results. Warren explores practices product managers can use to effectively lead without formal authority.

Two practical strategies for leading without authority as a Product Manager. It’s almost a cliche now, that product managers don’t have direct reports, but they ARE directly responsible for the success and launch of their products. It’s a cliche because it’s still true and still hasn’t changed in the tech world. Garrett Rysko introduces two tools that help you lead without authority. One helps you visualize who holds influence over your product’s success and what drives them. The other helps you use that visualization to win.

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To reward those who are ready to take action now and join us in Manhattan on April 17-18 for the New York Product Conference, we’ve got something special for you. But it’s only available this month.

Register this month, and you’ll be invited to Sean Flaherty’s half-day Influencing Without Authority workshop taking place the day before the conference (an extra $700 value).

Altogether, that’s $1,545 in total value for just $695. But this deal is only available to you this month.

This Week’s Video

Influencing without Authority. Product Managers have all the responsibility — without any authority. Some of us have learned to lead under these circumstances — with strategies that have worked well, and others with mixed results. In this discussion, we chat about this topic with someone who has led both with and without authority throughout his career, John Vars, CEO of Mixhalo. You'll learn what's worked well for John as he's navigated this challenge throughout his career — both as a product person and, now, as a CEO.

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.

On the pitch...

Ever watched a soccer match and seen that one player who's not the captain but somehow gets everyone hyped and ready? That was my 11-year-old son last weekend. He's on this new club soccer team, and even though he's the new kid and not officially in charge, he was out there getting his teammates warmed up before the game. It’s something he’s done before with his local travel soccer team. But I was a proud dad seeing him take it upon himself to do the same for his new club team, even without the “captain” status. It was a great reminder how in life – and certainly in our roles as Product Managers – you don’t need a fancy title or direct authority to truly lead.

As Product Managers, we’re often in the mix, working with teams where nobody technically reports to us. But here's the kicker – we still gotta get things moving, right? It's all about influence, not authority. It's like being that player who, without wearing the captain's band, gets the team fired up and focused.

Leading this way is kind of an art. It's about knowing your team, what makes them tick, and how to get them jazzed about what we're doing. It's all about being genuine, and caring about the team and the game, not just the scoreboard. When we lead by example, listen, and connect with our team, we can make magic happen, even if our business card doesn't say "boss."

We had a great conversation earlier this week with Jocelyn Davis, Author of The Art of Quiet Influence – and this notion came up a lot in our conversation. It’s worth a watch – whether you’re on the pitch or at the office.

P.S. If you’re looking to dive deeper on this, you may be interested in our Leading without Authority half-day workshop in New York City. If you register for the New York Product Conference this month, you’ll get access to this workshop as well.

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Want to find bugs before your customers do? Continuous reliability platform Antithesis helps catch those bugs that escape even the most thorough testing efforts. The product continuously searches your software for problems within a simulated environment where you can reproduce every problem, allowing you to debug even the most complex issues. Don’t view using Antithesis as a reason not to test at all. Consider it a safety net to catch infrequent, and potentially catastrophic, bugs. Use AI to help you right write… wait… Do you appreciate the help you get from grammar and spelling checkers but think those squiggly lines mock you or get annoyed having to make a bunch of individual fixes to your grammar gaffes? Fixkey, a new native macOS application offers an alternative. With one shortcut, Fixkey will intelligently rephrase entire sentences instead of requiring you to click on each correction. Let’s just hope you didn’t intend to write in the passive voice. One list to rule them all? Do you find track your to-dos in multiple places, which usually means you lose track of them? A new app, Superlist, may help you bring order to that chaos. Superlist is not just a list of tasks, and it’s not just a place to jot down notes. It's both. Superlists give you a way to structure your thinking and transform it into actionable steps. This app not only helps you keep track of tasks, but its organization features and integrations with calendar apps help make sure you complete them. Ever fear opening Slack after you’ve been gone for a few hours? Slack AI catches you up on lengthy threads and unread messages. Slack is launching a bundle of AI features, which should save you from wading through dozens of old messages to get up to speed on what you missed. The caveat is the features are only available on enterprise plans. Apparently, teams at small companies don’t go into deep rabbit holes in their chat apps.

Influencing Without Authority As A Product Manager. As product managers, you get to lead and guide your team, without the power to tell them what to do. This skill of influencing without authority is critical, and it requires you to build up your influence to ensure that the team is working toward the same goals. Nishant Rawat shares some strategies for becoming a more influential product manager.

Leadership Without Authority on Steroids. Product strategy starts with the goals. To create a solid product strategy you must understand the company goals. More than that — you must help the company break them down and make sure they make sense. Noa Ganot answers two questions related to that idea that gets to the heart of leading without authority: why product leaders must be involved in the business goals, and why you have leverage there.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.

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