#39🐲 Core PM Skills - What is to be a Product Manager with ADHD? Part 3
Putting aside our ego and meeting people where they are to be a better PM and be in choice.
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog that explores ADHD, product management, and the complexities of a neurodiverse life. In each issue, I help you navigate the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
Part 14 of the Book of ADHD Product Management, a guide to navigating the basic principles of product management and ADHD.
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This is part 3 of “What is a product manager with ADHD”. Check out part 1 and part 2.
A PM has to practice 4 things
Be a multiplier to your stakeholders
Navigate the unknown
Write, present, talk, juggle, de-escalate, whatever needs to be done
The first to get blamed, the last to be praised
🌋Takeaways
PMs have to juggle all kinds of work with stakeholders but the key to getting them done is learning how to meet them where they are instead of clinging to what you feel.
Make choices, not emotional reactions
My gifts of ADHD give me strong emotional reactions, deep empathy, and the ability to learn new things. It’s up to me to choose when to best use them as a PM.
⭐Introduction
Write, present, talk, juggle, de-escalate, whatever needs to be done
I’m back but still recovering from covid. Apologies if the story is longer than usual.
As a product manager, you set the product direction and perform the catch-all for all the tasks others won’t do. A product release often requires the coordination of different teams like sales, customer success, engineering, finance, and marketing, just to name a few.
Each group has its own priorities and agenda which sometimes aligns and doesn’t with yours. You do your best to keep your product direction as intact as possible as you set expectations and compromise with your partners to get to release.
You negotiate with the boldness of someone with everything to lose and backed with almost no authority over others. It’s a fun game.
This often means you’re the catch-all to get things done that others won’t. If product marketing doesn’t have time to create a go-to-market plan for you, then guess what, you’re creating it. You put on whatever hat is needed to launch.
It can be frustrating and fulfilling to be the catch-all. Regardless of where your experience falls, I think there’s a key learning.
The key to successful catch-all work is learning how to put your ego aside and meeting your partners where they are.
🐲The responsibilities that come with being “Write, present, talk, juggle, de-escalate, whatever needs to be done”
As a product manager you “own” a product. To me, this means you have the ultimate responsibility to get the product or feature released.
There’s a lot of ego that can come with “owning” a product. Especially at a place like Amazon, the word gets thrown around constantly between teams and co-workers. Folks often say they own “x, y, and z” as a way to establish authority and boundaries for others.
An intro conversation between PMs might sound like “Hi, I’m Rawi, I own everything that Tableau touches in Amazon. What do you own?”
I really didn’t talk like this as a PM at Amazon but I did a lot of work with Tableau. I managed the largest deployment at Amazon by user count and spent. It had 200k+ unique users a year and I spent 8 figures on Tableau in my 3.5-year tenure.
We had 1.5 people managing a deployment with 10k+ people worldwide who could be logged in at any given time. I had to be the engineer, PM, product marketing manager, customer success manager, and purchaser. I had constant meetings with people who loved Tableau and those who wanted to see it gone from the company.
When I met with people who wanted to get rid of Tableau, I had to learn how to meet those folks where they were. I won’t go into detail about who these people were but let’s say one group wanted to save money and one group made a Tableau competitor in Amazon. They really didn’t want us to be using Tableau and didn’t like my plans to renew Tableau for another 3 years.
💰Putting ego aside and talking about money and features
At first, I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see my perspective on Tableau. The customers are happy, it serves its purpose and the cost is minuscule in comparison to the ROI we get from it. Why do you have to fight me on this?!
I had to put aside my own ego of being the largest Tableau owner in Amazon and learn how to meet these folks where they were. That meant changing my story from “This is why Tableau is so great” to what they cared about.
In the case of the group that wanted to save money, I did a migration cost analysis to move to internal platforms. It was going to cost us a lot more to move than it was to stay on Tableau for another 3 years. Did they want to pay for the headcount and costs for it? Nope, purchase approved.
For the competitor team, I did a feature comparison and identified the missing features needed for us to migrate key content. I gave them a list of requirements and an ideal roadmap on how we would migrate. If they wanted us to move, this is what we needed and in what order. It was up to them to do what they wanted with that info. I was open to change if they were open to improvement. I didn’t hear from them after that.
In the end, I got my wish to spend more money on Tableau and renew our contract. I was successful because I realized that my stakeholders needed to see my product from a perspective they cared about. I had to learn to put my feelings and perspective aside and talk in the terms they cared about. The story makes it sound easy but let’s talk about how my ADHD got in the way and helped.
🦚The Gifts of ADHD
I didn’t know I had ADHD when this happened. I just remembered feeling so frustrated and angry during the process.
My thoughts ran hot:
“Here’s this paper that justifies why we need to expand and renew Tableau. Did you read it?”
“Why are you ignoring our customer input? Everyone wants this”
“Have you tried the alternative platforms you’re recommending? They don’t work”
I was so fixated on my perspective that being asked to look at it from a different perspective by the stakeholder teams brought up anger and dismissal.
The ADHD gift of having deregulated executive function of flexible thinking and emotional control was not helping. I couldn’t look at my idea from a different perspective and I couldn’t bring myself emotionally to confront the possibility of not buying Tableau. I was cognitively and emotionally blind.
I had to learn to use my other ADHD gifts. The one that helps me deeply empathize with people and to learn new things. I was lucky to have a teammate help me reset myself and what we had to do.
I learned to empathize with the cost savings group and not see them as an adversary but as a partner. Learning how they looked at the product helped me better how to measure the success and usage of my product.
I deep-dived into learning a new technology to understand the competing product group. I saw moving to them as an option, instead of an emotional reaction of “I would never do this”. I explored their product as an option and defined the requirements and cost. I removed the emotional reaction and replaced it with a plan that could be executed or not. It became a choice, not an emotional reaction.
My gifts of ADHD give me strong emotional reactions, deep empathy, and the ability to learn new things. It’s up to me to choose when to best use them as a PM.
✨Conclusion
In reflecting upon this story, I think I might replace the word “ego” with an emotional reaction. It’s easy as a PM with ADHD to ride high when things are going well. Then when you hit the unexpected roadblock, it’s easy to fall into emotional lows and stay there.
What can help you keep moving forward though is the focus to meet others where they might need you to be. To listen to their needs and yours with an open mind and feelings.
Give yourself the opportunity to surprise yourself and others instead of digging in on your idea or feeling. It’s hard but I often learn more from recovering from my lows than from my sustained highs.
🐼Want to learn more, talk to me.
⏭️Next Week
What is a PM? Part 4 Navigate the unknown