Managing Up, Part 4: How to Get the Professional Development Support You Need
Hello there, lovely product people! I wanted to share a quick note to let you know that this article is a little different from what I usually share here. While my blog typically highlights work I’ve already done (e.g. frameworks I’ve developed, podcasts or talks I’ve given, clients I’ve worked with), this post actually represents a work in progress. I’m in the midst of developing a talk and I wanted to share some of the content I’ve been working on. In other words, this is far from polished.
I hope sharing some of my thoughts here will help me refine what I’d like to say in my talk. And if you have any feedback on any of the content here—please don’t hesitate to let me know by sending me an email at info@petra-wille.de.
In the first post in this series, I covered why managing up is an important topic, introduced the ten boss responsibilities and the ships vs. shipyard metaphor, and explained why your boss might be struggling in these areas. Want to read that post? You can find it here. In the second post, we looked at a common situation product managers find themselves in: struggling to say no to different requests. We identified that this is linked to the boss competency of directional clarity and explored some ways you can help your boss develop in this area. You can read that post here. And in the third post in the series, we explored what you can do when you’re experiencing conflict with other people or teams. Read that post here.
In this post, we’ll be looking at another specific situation when you might need more support from your boss—when you’d like to develop your PM skills.
The situation: You need more support in order to focus on your professional development
This last situation is all about you feeling like you need more support to get better at your job.
How do you know if this is you? Here are some symptoms you might be experiencing:
You feel stuck in your current role or even in your career
You haven’t learned something new in ages but you struggle to find a topic that deserves your attention
It’s a boss’s job to create a product organization that people actually want to belong to, where PMs and other individual contributors on their teams know what’s expected of them, and where leaders hire and onboard new talent. Similarly, a good boss should be able to define what is a good product manager/designer/researcher and help you fulfill your role.
If you feel these areas are lacking, it’s an indication that your boss may be lacking in the Role clarity & ownership competency, and you can help by providing some development facilitation.
Some things to reflect on
Here are some things you could reflect on to see if there your boss has room for improvement in this particular area:
Is there a “definition of good”—a job/role description, a list of know-how skills, competencies, and/or clear expectations from your manager for you in your current role?
Is there a career ladder or career trajectory that you can use to create learning goals for yourself?
Are there regular check-ins (1:1s) where your personal development is part of the agenda?
Is your line manager actively coaching you towards your “Future Self” or have they encouraged you to find a mentor?
Is there company commitment towards employee learning and development in the form of trainings, training budget, Community of Practice, book clubs, etc.
Are you allowed to invest some of your working hours into learning new things, trying new frameworks, etc.?
In some areas your answer might be a yes, in others it might be a no. For now, stick with the nos and analyze if making them a yes could help your personal development. Wherever that is the case, you can follow our already proven managing up pattern: create awareness with your line manager, suggest various ways you can get what you need, and see what resonates with them. For example, if you find it relatively easy to find new development topics for yourself, having a written role description is unlikely to be your top priority.
Things to try
Now, assuming you identified your key problem areas, here are some things you could try:
Help your boss to understand why your personal development (and the personal development of everyone on the team) matters (your employee satisfaction, your job stickiness, improved performance). This is best done in a 1:1 conversation. Prepare well for it, maybe even write down your points as a pre-read email. Using a framework like the situation, behavior, impact (SBI) can make these conversations much easier. I shared an example of this template here.
Help your boss to talk about their “good,” to hand you the blueprint for the competent product manager you want to become. It often is the case that there is a written but not used definition of your role. If that is the case, review it together and ask your boss where they think you fall short or could learn more. If there is no written version, encourage them to first talk about what they think a competent product person does and then suggest putting it in writing. Or suggest using a publicly available PM Assessment like my PMwheel to get started. By the way, the PMwheel is a tool I created to help product leaders and individual product people assess their skills and identify areas where they may be lacking or need to focus more on developing. I highly encourage you to download this tool and go through it with your boss—it’s brilliant in one-on-one coaching situations.
Get your boss to allow you to invest some of your time into personal development. That is usually the easiest one to get sorted. Once you have a “learning headline,” a topic that you want to learn more about and some material at hand (preferably free or cheap material like books, podcasts, free webinars, talk recordings, etc.) just ask for their thumbs up. If they’d prefer for it to be a bit more formal, you could use the Future Self template to describe your AS IS and your TO BE states and how the learning activities will get you there.
If they don’t have the time or don’t want to invest in your development, they could still help you find a mentor or an ally. This can be a more senior product person in your organization, a paid coach, or a fellow product person from another organization. Your boss might have some great contacts you can reach out to. And sometimes all you need is a LI post from them and an introduction.
Ideally, your boss will assign you your next bigger challenge from time to time. This could be something like a more strategic product or a new initiative within the organization where you could apply some of the things you learned to get better. If this is not the case, introduce them to that concept and highlight the importance of “product wisdom applied.”
And finally, here are some people-development focused books to recommend for your boss, including Empowered, The Coaching Habit, The Making of a Manager, and my first book, STRONG Product People.
In the next (and final) post in this series, we’ll look at how you can bring all these lessons together and communicate in a way that will resonate with your specific boss.