I’ve been thinking lately about the famous “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” article by Ben Horowitz. It was written 20 years ago and is still a great summary of how we should work as product managers.

What’s the equivalent once you move on from writing user stories to managing product teams? What are the good traits and the bad ones? As you grow in your product management career these questions become even more important and it’s very easy to get lost. Here’s my proposal.

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In the list below I’ll use directors as a shorthand for Directors of Product Management. I’m using this term generically to describe a manager of a small or medium team of product managers, potentially including a few group managers.

Good directors understand their number one goal is to have a high-performing product management team. Bad directors continue to work on product requirement documents and continue to drive day-to-day engineering discussions. Good directors understand their impact is multiplied by their team. Bad directors only think of their direct impact.

People Management — Good directors value people management work and are proud of their coaching skills. Good directors establish good OKRs and actually review them on a periodical basis because they know alignment is critical. Good directors always keep their 1:1s because they see them as the best opportunity to coach. Bad directors cancel 1:1s because they have to fight the latest fire. Even worse directors don’t even schedule 1:1s or set OKRs (alternatively they set them at the beginning of the year and use them to give you a bad performance review at the end of it). Good directors ask their team for feedback. Bad directors never give feedback during the year.

Focused, Strategic — Good directors are focused on results and hold people accountable for them. They empower the team with tools and freedom to do great things. Bad directors think they always know better and micromanage. Bad directors are only reactive and constantly ask you for last-minute urgent requests. Good directors are organized, follow a strategy to maximize impact, always have time for their team, and double down on customer meetings and market understanding.

Team Culture — Bad directors don’t think of their replacement or are actively trying to prevent one by making themselves tightly lodged in the organizational structure. Good directors always coach the next generation of leaders that can take the reigns at any time. Good directors are always thinking about their team topology and how to best organize it. Good directors are deliberate about the team culture and how to guide it. They understand that each individual is unique. Bad directors take culture for granted.

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Leadership Style— Bad directors get all the credit for the team’s work and are constantly fretting about how to project a perfect image. Good directors put their team first and ensure they’re the ones that get the attention in executive meetings. Good directors don’t fret about looking stupid when they ask simple questions — those questions sometimes uncover deep problems.Good directors are good listeners.

Sharing Information — Bad directors don’t pass the information down, they hoard it because information is power. Alternatively, they don’t realize how important it is to share information, especially for remote teams. Good directors make a point of keeping track of the all the relevant information for their team and are constantly keeping them updated via slack, email, or team meetings.

Trust — Good directors understand that there are more than one ways to solve a problem. They trust their people to make good decisions. They also understand that mistakes happen and they are great learning opportunities. Bad directors re-write presentations until they reflect their view. Good directors acknowledge and appreciate their team in meetings. Bad directors are quick to punish mistakes.

Success as a director of product management is very different than success as a product manager. Your #1 goal is to have a high-performing team that’s driving major impact initiatives for the business.

If you’re a great product manager that’s a hard shift. You’re used to creating brilliant product requirement documents and creatively solutioning with the engineering team. That’s probably why you got to be a director, but that’s not your role anymore. Your role is to help people be highly effective in their job, grow and develop. And that requires a completely different set of skills. The saving grace is that your impact gets to be multiplied many times over, so buckle up and be the best director of product management that you can be!

Further reading: The best book I’ve found so far on this topic is Empoweredby Marty Cagan and Chris Jones. Marty and Chris do a great job breaking down all the components of the job and calling out what’s important and what’s not.

P.S. Story originally published on Medium on March 25, 2022.