A PM superpower: turn your cross-functional team into product thinkers.

A core part of a product leader’s job is getting your cross-functional team on the same page. This usually means, at the very minimum, communicating and getting alignment on the vision (the “why”) and roadmap (the “what”).

In an ideal scenario, there’s no confusion or disagreement, and the team is off to the races!

But the reality is that a lot of time and effort is needed to bring folk along on both the “why” and the “what”. The relative priority of features needs to be debated. User stories need to be detailed. The component pieces of each cross-functional team’s work need to connect to the broader vision.

One way to make this process (and others) way smoother, is to empower your non-product teammates to think like product thinkers.

When successful, this is a PM superpower, and pure gold for your team’s output and overall success. But how can you do this, especially given the multi-faceted nature of the product skillset?

One way to start is by developing a shared understanding of key metrics: what drives them, why we chose them, and how to define them. This a high-leverage place to focus initially to instill product thinking among the team.

From a tactical perspective, I think about this as having two steps: make it real and bring them in.

Make it real

Every cross-functional team brings a unique way of thinking. Engineering and data science tend to be more analytical, whereas design and product marketing resonate more with storytelling and user personas. Product leaders need to adjust communication accordingly.

For instance, if you’re presenting to cross-functional audiences, make sure you have room to detail multiple perspectives on a given metric’s rationale — e.g. “we’re going to aim to drive weekly active users by 20%, which ladders up to the company-wide 10% growth target. What does this look like from a user point of view? For a given user, let’s call her Michelle, there needs to be a compelling reason to return to the app more frequently, perhaps to send a message to her friend.”

Essentially, when discussing metrics, make sure to do it in a way that resonates with both highly analytical and highly qualitative thinkers. This is nuanced, but highly effective.

Bring them in

Product leaders can establish rituals to include cross-functional partners in the metrics-thinking process. One of my favorites rituals is pre-launch predictions. Prior to a product launch, gather predictions of outcomes from all team stakeholders — e.g. how much will X metric move by, 10%, 20% etc, and why.

This is a fun, high-ROI ritual. Providing a reasonable hypothesis with your name attached to it requires understanding the user behavior, the feature in question, and how pliable the metrics are relative to the change the feature can bring. So, just making the prediction requires some rigor.

But, as often happens, there’s a wide array of predictions from the team, which presupposes that some are wildly off! When the results come in, it’s humbling for those whose guesses were an order of magitude off. But, like most such experiences, it’s a great learning opportunity.

What it looks like when the team has shared product thinking?

Investing in product thinking for your cross-functional team pays enormous dividends. What does is look like when it happens?

Engineers, data scientists, and marketers use the same language when talking about priorities, metrics, the underlying assumptions of user behavior, and the highest ROI opportunities. There’s little confusion around what to prioritize and why. Julie Zhuo calls this “mindmelding”. It’s delightful!

And, when you don’t have it? There are various interpretations of who the target customer is. The north star metric is unclear. Engineers think a feature will drive 10% improvement but the lead PMM thinks it’ll drive 2X. This back and forth easily consumes hours of meeting time, and the team’s output suffers. I’ve been there. It’s not fun.