Managing your boss (and your boss's boss...)

Working with company leadership

The ultimate sign that product managers are not the CEO of their product may be their boss, their boss’s boss and all the other leaders of the organization. How you interact with all of those folks - how you manage up - plays a big factor in how effective you are as a product manager. Here are some different perspectives on how you can manage up to build effective relationships with the leaders in your organization.

How to sell your ideas up the chain of command. You have a great idea—a product tweak that will save your company money, a process change to increase your team’s productivity, or a plan for heading off a looming crisis. There’s just one snag: You’re not sure how to approach your boss about it, or worse, you’ve tried and failed to get the attention of higher-ups. Ethan Burrris explains the two factors critical to a successful pitch: having the confidence to make your suggestion and knowing how to frame it to get the best reception from your boss.

(via @HarvardBiz)

Succeed at work by learning how to manage up: 8 tips for doing it well. Showing initiative and leadership skills is necessary if you want to be effective as a product manager, but you have to show the right balance with your boss. You want to show that you can take charge, but you also need to work well with others. Navigating this balance means managing up. Managing up is a key skill that serves leaders and individual contributors at all levels. Karen Grant explains what managing up is, how to manage up effectively, and what the benefits are to doing so.

via @betterup)

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What to do when your competitor raises prices

Remember when I wrote about Netflix raising its prices in last week’s newsletter? (Don’t worry – weeks are long these days, you can check it out here if you don’t). Well, apparently its competitors like HBO Max noticed. And they’re loving it.

Now, Netflix’s standard plan is a hair more expensive than HBO Max’s ad-free plan (if a hair costs fifty cents, anyway). As quoted in a recent article on The Verge, the chief executive at AT&T (HBO’s parent company), John Stankey, said, “We said the market was going to come to us on pricing, and lo and behold, we are no longer the high-priced offer in the market.”

A few quick takeaways…

1. Your competitor isn’t always right. HBO Max felt that its ad-free plan was priced appropriately – even though it was a couple of dollars more than Netflix’s standard plan. It didn’t force itself to match its competitor’s price. Instead, it was steadfast that the price it settled in on was right for its business.
2. You don’t always have to react immediately to actions your competitors take. HBO’s reaction (at least for now) isn’t to raise its prices in turn. It isn’t reacting to Netflix. Instead, HBO set a proactive pricing strategy and is sticking to it.  
3. Some things are just worth paying for. Netflix aside, there are loads of other streaming options at less expensive prices – such as Peacock, Hulu, and others. But HBO’s premium programming and advanced features (like 4K support) are reasons that HBO believes justify their price. And subscribers seem to agree – as it added its most new subscribers ever last quarter.

Latest Slack Activity

Managing Up - Lessons from scaling teams at Credit Karma and Lyft. Many people use the phrase "managing up" to mean influencing your boss or other leadership to support you and your projects. Instead, "managing up" is about driving and maintaining alignment among your goals, your manager's goals, and the organization's goals. Matt Greenberg, Valerie Wagoner, Dor Levi, Anne Lewandowski explain what managing up is not, the mindset shift you need to manage more effectively and common upward management challenges and tactics for overcoming them.

 (via @reforge)

The fine art of managing up. Managing up is an important skill that improves business outcomes and benefits your career, whether you’re early career or a senior director.
Managers need input from their team members in order to succeed. Katie Taylor explains that, at its simplest, managing up is about proactive communication. But in more complex scenarios, there are specific tactics you can use.

(via @Atlassian)

From the weeds to the board room—How design leaders shift from managing down to up and out. When working with executive design leaders in organizations, Peter Merholz often hears that design managers and directors dive into the weeds too quickly. They don’t know how to best spend their time, and where to focus their attention. Interestingly, Peter hears something similar from C-level people about design executives—they’re too focused on their team, and not the organization. Peter’s observations about product designers shifting to managing up also apply to product managers.

(via @peterme)

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