Data platform product management leader
This is the conclusion of my data platform product management series.
The other posts in this series are:
Key customers for a data platform
Data platform product goals and typical North Stars
How to succeed as a data platform product manager
Please let me know your thoughts on this series and more importantly, if you are on a similar journey, let’s connect and exchange notes on how to be more effective in our roles! (You cand find me on LinkedIn or respond to this or the other articles in this series.)
What does it take to become a great data platform product management leader?
Please note, this is not so much about general leadership and management, but more from the perspective of growing in the data platform product management career. This post goes into what to expect as you grow, and what is expected of you in a leadership role.
Alignment galore
As you would have gathered from the thousands of words I have written in this series, one of the biggest challenges for a platform product manager is aligning with multiple entities to become successful.
Your role, not just for yourself as a leader but also for your team, is to have a healthy relationship with the same set of partners as your team. As a leader of the team, you are also creating solid partnerships with the leadership of the other organizations and functions so that you can influence them whenever a top-down need arises.
Another set of alignment challenges will be with your direct leadership and getting their buy-in for your strategy and prioritization decisions, especially around large boulders of work and more so if they are platform-driven initiatives or strategies.
Finally, you are going to have to form great bonds with your direct and indirect customers to communicate the high-level roadmap and upcoming features and benefits, as well as to get feedback on your existing products and product managers in your team. These bonds will also help you help your product managers in terms of linking upcoming business outcomes to data platform products and features.
Team showcase
As a leader you need to get out of your team’s way and let them do their thing. You become their showcase. This showcase can come in many forms:
- Organizing a rhythm of product demos and strategy walkthroughs with direct and “diagonal” leadership to make them aware of what’s coming and why
- Create customer business reviews with various functional departments so that direct and indirect customers can see their requests come through in the form of products and product features and they can provide feedback into the roadmap
- For internal products, there is no or a very stretched product marketing department. Your role is helping your team sharpen their product marketing skills by setting explicit goals around blog posts, product talks internally and where possible, externally, etc.
Air cover for tough decisions
One of the most important things for a product manager is to develop the muscle to say no. It is extremely easy, especially in internal products, to keep saying yes to new features, which will eventually burn your engineering team out.
Your role as a product leader is to give your team the guidance and the air cover so they feel empowered to say no to feature requests, even if they come from leadership.
In fact, it is critical that the executive requests are treated like other requests and evaluated for ROI and business impact before they get prioritized, otherwise such requests will derail the roadmap completely.
Product managers need to have the courage to challenge something that is tangential to their strategy and planned roadmap. They will demonstrate it more confidently if they know their leader supports them and you as a leader need to make sure they are aware of your support.
Other considerations (these may not always be applicable):
- Provide feedback to engineering team leaders on their organization structure and the fit/skillset of the engineers. For example, having too many data engineers in a team which is building software products and services.
- In some cases, the platform product leader is also assigned management of software and licensing budget for certain products. If so, you will need to partner more closely with finance, procurement, legal, privacy, information security, and other departments involved in software procurement and installation.
Growth Ceiling
Within the product management world, it is unlikely that the platform product management leader will lead all product management in an org. This is partly tied to the fact that data platform products don’t directly make money and it is much easier to promote a product leader who helps one or more of the company’s strategic business goals.
In some companies, the data platform or a software platform is also plugged directly to external customers and in turn helps the company’s top line. These companies are more of an exception, and product leaders there may rise to the top of the ladder.
It is important you realize that your growth prospects have a ceiling when you are in the platform or the data platform product management world.
I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all doom and gloom. To be clear, there is tremendous growth potential in the platform product management area. It’s just that you must be realistic about how far your journey can take you.
How do you navigate your career then as a product management leader (or someone aspiring to be one) in the platform world?
I would suggest you be open to expanding your charter beyond the core platform and infrastructure work. Understand how the company makes money and start influencing other parts of the org. When the opportunity arises, step up and expand your charter. This business domain experience will be beneficial to demonstrate that you can scale your expertise in multiple domains.
Once you can demonstrate proficiency in managing multiple domains, you will be well set to grow into a VP of Product of a Chief Product Officer (CPO) role.
Other characteristics which I think will help you be an excellent product management leader are:
- Deep understanding of technical concepts: I know I am being repetitive, but I believe you need to be very technical to succeed as a PM and eventually as a PM leader
- Curious about the bigger picture: It is quite easy to get pigeon-holed into being a platform or a “back-end” PM but if you are looking to stand out among the crowd, one way is to be perpetually curious about the bigger picture — what is the journey of data across the enterprise, and how can you make that better? What are the pain points of the company’s external customers which data helps solve?
- Focus on solving end-to-end problems: You will have developed a superpower if you combine the curiosity of learning more about the business and the understanding of how data is able to solve some of those problems. As part of a “horizontal” domain, you have exposure to all the parts of data’s lifecycle in your company. This gives you the visibility to influence changes like no other PM would have. As a leader, you can surface these issues and start figuring out how the organization can solve them, and of course, how one or more platform capabilities can help address those problems.
- Program-y by nature: Finally, you must realize that you are not going to be able to draw a thick line between product management and program management. A lot of the work in your area will be program driven. Addressing the end-to-end problems will of course result in kicking off one or more programs and as a driver of those problem solutions, you may end up doing a bunch of program-y work. That’s fine. Showing your ability to transform and change how an organization works is more important than being pedantic about functional boundaries.
Gratitude
If you made it this far, thank you. I hope you found this series helpful. Please provide your feedback here or DM me on LinkedIn.
I would love to chat with you and exchange notes if you are a PM or PM leader in data platform or software platform area. I will keep this series fresh as I learn more from others’ experiences.
Back to the first post in the series.
