High Agency Product Management
A key ingredient for breakout product success.
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
Entrepreneurs are often known to be “High Agency” individuals — people that can execute a vision despite all odds and despite all the naysayers around them. Eternal optimists and sometimes even borderline delusional, they live in a parallel reality where anything is possible. Jeff Bezos is a good example of a very high agency individual of our times, but there are many others —People we know and work with, people who are known to get stuff done despite all odds. My ex-boss from the last PM job I had was a super high agency guy.
People like Jeff are wired in a way where they are unable to believe stories of failure that others tell them. Instead, they believe that they are in total control of the narrative of the story — and they can ultimately bend outcomes to their favor.
I recently came across a widely shared Twitter thread related to this topic and since then I have been thinking about the specific personality traits that would classify somebody as having, or acting with, high agency.
More specifically, What enables some people to nurture such a high level of confidence in their vision and an even greater belief to execute on that vision? Execution is 100X harder. What is it that these people have that a vast majority of people do not?
If you take a closer look at such people — the answer is right in front of your eyes. It is their ability to persuade others to see their version of reality.
High Agency individuals derive their relentless pursuit of whatever it is that they are after, from their ability to influence people’s free will — and channel it towards achieving the end goal. In short, They have mastered the art of Persuasion and employ this superpower as their force field to distort realities.
A High Agency person can persuade you to see a vision for a better future or an amazing product, that will change lives. They can persuade you to sign up for things that you might otherwise consider impossible.
High Agency Product Management
In the context of Product Management, the ability to identify & persuade key stakeholders is what separates great Product Managers from the mediocre ones. In fact, High Agency is a must for a PM operating in a large matrixed organization with complicated reporting lines and org structures.
Why? Because Product Management, the function, demands it. Because that fancy “CEO of the Product” title for Product Managers is just that — a title.
In reality, on most days you fill find Product Managers hustling and driving clarity and coordination amongst several and often siloed departments — trying to move product development forward. In the process, are constantly challenged by stakeholders about the clarity of their vision, the effectiveness of their product strategy, understanding of the customer, confidence in their execution planning, assumptions around the ROI, and more. Furthermore, Product Managers are constantly competing for limited resources for the products they are trying to launch.
Given the expectations and intensity of the PM role, only very high agency individuals can persevere and take something from an idea to product reality in a reasonable timeframe. Throughout the product development process, the PM has to constantly remind, motivate & persuade stakeholders to align with, and subscribe to their big vision.
The Art of Persuasion
As a Product Manager, being able to sell your vision to stakeholders and persuade them to jump on board is key to getting things done and achieving that vision. But even before that, it is imperative to understand who you are dealing with before you can sell your vision to them.
Understanding the basics of people’s immediate and long term motivations, incentives, and immediate environments are key before you can influence people to do things for you. Moreover, people are increasingly busy, addicted to instant gratification, have shorter attention spans than any time before in human history, and have a lot going on than what is visible to the outside world. Understanding these aspects of fellow humans is key before aligning them with your vision.
Let us talk about some specific examples.
1. Getting your ‘Product Vision’ Funded
Imagine you are a Product Manager with a great idea. You are looking to get funding to go work on that idea. You will need to start with selling the vision to your manager, the Sales & Marketing Leaders, the CFO & CEO of the business. Selling your vision successfully and persuading people to fund your vision would involve you anticipating what they care about and structuring your pitch accordingly
For instance, when pitching a new product/feature/idea — you must discuss
The product/feature idea is something that solves a problem lots of people care about and there is demonstrable evidence to show that these people will pay for your solution — this is what your boss, the Product leader/director cares about
There is a demonstrable way to reach these customers at scale and repeatably — this is what the Marketing & Sales leaders care about
That your chances of executing your vision and succeeding at it are demonstrably higher than all your competitors — this is what the CEO cares about
That the returns are high enough to make it worth the investment, the opportunity costs, and the associated risks — this is what the CFO & CEO cares about.
Here’s what you can expect in this process. It will take several iterations to successfully persuade the key leaders in the business to buy into your vision. Each stakeholder will have questions and then some more questions. They will point out things that you perhaps did not think about. You will have to go back to the drawing board a lot and come back with better, more succinct responses.
You must keep these conversations very focused to receive an objective evaluation based on facts. You must come across as somebody that knows what they are talking about, that understands, and acknowledges the risks and rewards of your endeavor.
2. Building the Right team
Once your idea is funded — you will need to find the right people that have the skills to materialize your vision. But just as important is for the builders to buy into your vision.
Your idea most likely requires software and hardware engineers to get off the ground. If you didn’t know this already, this is a group of people with skills that is in extremely high demand today. If you want the very best builders to work on your product vision, you will need to persuade them on why spending time to make your vision a reality is worth their while.
What is the key to influencing builders?
Influencing anybody to pursue a certain path — even when they have the choices to not do so — involves understanding and speaking to the individual’s immediate motivations and helping them visualize the opportunity to be a part of something big and meaningful. This is no different for product builders.
In other words, the builder needs to be able to relate to your vision and be able to answer the question
“What’s in it for me?”
Based on my own experiences as a programmer/product manager as well as my observations dealing with hundreds of engineers and developers around the world, here are some key motivators for product builders, engineers, and software developers to consider, to help you think about persuading them to join your mission.
Tell them about the greater sense of purpose to your vision that will get them excited every day to work on it.
Let them know that they will have autonomy in choosing the technologies that they think are best suited to build the product
Make them aware that this is a chance to work on a new technology/skill that they will learn in the process of building your product
Introduce them to the credentials of the engineering team leader and their career growth prospects in the team
Let them know that they will work with a highly efficient, but at the same time a very FUN team!
Other factors such as Competitive remuneration, Office perks, Flexible hours, etc.
To really build a great product, you cannot have simply coin operated people in your team.
You see, every new project or idea brings with it lots of excitement, as people flock to sign up in the hope of working on something novel and exciting. But then rubber meets the road as you move into the execution phase — the “messy middle” as some call it — when seemingly unending problems start rearing their ugly heads and complexities galore.
This happens with the best of teams. A lot of Product Managers and product teams start to get frustrated with having to constantly navigate the complexities and the endless unknowns. With the wrong personalities in the team, this will result in poor team morale, missed deadlines, and budget overruns.
It is at this time when a High Agency Product Manager will be cogent, reinforcing the vision often, and motivating the team to push forward despite the impediments.
3. Execution in the “Messy Middle”
The messy middle is just that — very messy. I am talking things like setting up the back end plumbing of the billing systems, dealing with taxation policies, setting up customer support systems, internal financial reporting, standing up analytics engines for metrics, marketing, and sales copy, promo videos, and much much more. I have experienced this “messy middle” every time we’ve brought a product to market — be it building SaaS products or launching Smart home hardware, and now building Oil & Gas Automation products — Little details will often get very gnarly.
The key really is to put your head down, persevere, and execute on these little details one day at a time.
A pro-tip to successfully navigating execution challenges is to anticipate them early— and start to develop a deep understanding of your organization’s departmental structures, internal workflows, priorities.
High Agency Product Managers will build relationships with people outside their immediate teams. These relationships help the PM to engage with departments and have very focused and efficient conversations, helping deliver business context, and persuading stakeholders in Finance, Legal, Accounting & Corporate to clear the launchpad for your product to take off. This is exactly the same for the most resourceful founders of startups.
Being persuasive does not mean being unreasonable or pushing team members to achieve what is not realistically possible. Instead, it’s quite the opposite. It means to demonstrate and remind stakeholders of what is indeed achievable, is worth accomplishing, and then lead from the front to make it happen.
To end this long post, I will say that while it's cool to be able to persuade people to get your stuff done, but its also a very fine line you are walking. The most important thing to remember is that you have to be genuine about it. You do this wrong, and you are simply a sly coworker trying to act smart.
High Agency Product Managers are force multipliers, very often the difference between achieving mediocrity vs breakout product success. May you hire them, may you develop them, and may you retain them.
And if you are a Product Manager reading this, I hope you already are one 😎.
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
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