Being able to inspire and lead without being a line manager is a key part of the product management toolkit.
Strong product leaders are often defined by how well they have mastered the art of leading without authority. They set strategy, define roadmap items, and direct work, all without many of the people they work with day to day reporting into them.
But not everyone is a natural, charismatic leader. So how can PMs lead effectively, without being in charge?
In our opinion leading without authority comes down to building trust by
- Clear thinking: having a logical strategy and being able to communicate it
- Delivery: executing on what you said you would do, in a timely manner
Doing these two things will help you build trust, up, down and across the organization. It sounds simple, but in practice it’s hard to do.
This article is available as a private workshop. Find out more at Hustle Badger for Business
What does leading without authority mean?
Leading without authority is the ability to set direction, deliver consistently and become a trusted member of the organization.
It’s not about formal authority badges, ordering people around, or rejecting business needs. It’s about the collective over your individual preferences or beliefs.
You can lead without authority by being a respected, and valuable member of the team who helps make other people’s lives easier by working with them to achieve the company’s goals.
They don’t need to understand your reality but they do need to trust you.
Example mental model
❌ ’My CEO doesn’t understand how product management works!’
✅ ’Dont worry. I will make sure we deliver.’
Leading without authority comes down to 5 components:
- Strategy: developing a clear and credible plan
- Accountability: delivering what you say you will
- Trust: building confidence in your ideation and execution
- Relationships: building strong bonds
- Tone: acting professionally
Let’s go through them now.
Strategy
Good strategies need to be grounded, credible and clear.
Here’s how to achieve it:
- Building credibility: making a believable plan
- Structuring and layering your thinking: ensuring your plan is built on data
- Linking to company objectives: staying consistently focused on results
- Sharing your thinking: being clear with your team
Building credibility
Strategies have to be credible. They need to demonstrate a solid understanding of the business, customer needs, existing solutions, historic successes and failures.
This is regardless of whether you’re a new joiner or an existing hire. However it is especially key for new joiners, since you’re not sitting on a bedrock of institutional knowledge that has been absorbed by everyone around you.
However, no matter how long you’ve been in a company, the bottom line is that your plan needs to be built on sources of credibility that create trust.
Sources of credibility:
- Data: novel analysis that drives new insights
- Speaking to users: qualitative analysis
- Process mapping: cross-functional touchpoints & gap analysis
- Embedding in another team: getting hands on with real problems
New insights are immediately interesting to stakeholders. But more critically, only by generating unique insights are you able to elevate your status from executor to strategic though partner. If you only harvest insights other teams already have, you’re simply playing back to them what they already know.
By using these techniques to identify and generate new insights, you elevate your status beyond delivery. All of this helps you earn and maintain credibility.
Data
This is about filling gaps in company understanding that lead to actions that support the business goals.
Examples of novel analysis can include:
- Identifying user behavior knowledge gaps: for example, where people drop out in the funnel, or which features drive increased engagement
- Linking it to revenue outcomes: for example, identifying funnel drop offs for valuable user segments, or understanding if incremental features contribute to revenue
New data insights demonstrate hard skills and strategic thinking. Novelty shows what you uniquely bring to the table. They’re also intriguing and often spark great conversations.
Hustle Badger Guide to Pirate Metrics
Speaking to users
Qualitative user research is another great source of data. It’s also rare for it not to generate new insights.
Examples of speaking to users include:
- Site visits: physically visiting the businesses and locations where your software is used
- Joining sales calls: either in the acquisition phases, or once someone is converted
- Inviting people to conversations: ideally to watch them perform an action and describe it, or with some worked hypotheses you’d like to test
Hustle Badger Guide to Qualitative User Research
Process mapping
Sometimes businesses already have great data and a solid, up-to-date bank of user research. In these scenarios, process mapping can be a major lever.
Examples of how to do this effectively include:
- Cross functional customer journey maps: mapping touchpoints the user has across marketing communications, sales, the site, and so on
- Gap analysis: creating or reviewing a service blueprint and finding divergence
Customer Journey Mapping Course: learn the technique and populate your own template in ~1 hour
Embedding in another team
This can feel daunting: we are all busy people who have a lot of other things to do. Or there can be barriers: maybe the leader of the team isn’t keen on the idea.
But if you can achieve it - and often people are very happy to allow you shadow their teams - it quickly builds your knowledge base. It helps you understand what other teams in the company struggle with in their day to day.
Examples of this include
- Commercial: features that the product squad feel proud of are pay to play in the market; users are confused by the sign up journey; pricing doesn’t land
- Internal operations: customer service teams are wasting $xx per year on responding to bug queries; sales have had to invest in people to help users onboard and use the product day to day
This is a highly effective way to build trust with other functions: by investing time in understanding their reality, they’re more likely to trust your decision making.
It can feel hard to make the time: but try to plan for it as you would plan for a vacation.
