Product Management & Radical Candor
As a product manager, it’s vital you learn to lead the teams you work with through candid communication, inspiring vision, and authentic inspiration. There are tons of management, communication, and business resources available these days. It can be overwhelming. I know I’ve often felt decision paralysis when thinking, what can I do to develop over the next few weeks? Additionally, we live in a bite-sized professional development economy. Why read a book when there are 20-minute podcasts, 140 character tweets, and medium posts to read from your favorite product people (like this one 😉). But before I go any further, I recommend you take the few hours to read the entire Radical Candor book.
Here’s a definition from the Radical Candor organization, “Radical Candor is the ability to Challenge Directly and show you Care Personally at the same time. It will help you and all the people you work with do the best work of your lives and build the best relationships of your career.” To be honest, when I first heard the concept — it sounded like a big ol’ business cliche. After reading the book and diving into the concept, I’d argue it’s the opposite. Radical Candor can have a measurable impact on the way you work with your reports, teams, and bosses. And it will make you a better Product Manager.
People Management as a Product Manager
Great product managers will apply these concepts to their role. And it will improve relationships with their teams and the products they build together. But you may be thinking, “This is a management book. I don’t do people management. I manage products.”
It’s true that in most situations, PMs don’t manage the team they work with to get their product out the door. Most developers, designers, and quality analysts don’t report to product managers. And that’s probably a good thing. Yet, almost all product managers have to take a strong leadership role with their team. That leadership has a large impact on the team’s culture. And a team’s culture affects their ability to deliver delightful, problem-solving products.
As Martin Erikkson argues on the Mind the Product blog, product managers are NOT the CEO of their products. In fact, they don’t have much authority over anyone or any of departments they depend on to build products. He writes,
Truly successful product leaders embrace their lack of authority and lead their teams and the wider company through communication, vision, and influence. They focus on collaborating across the company, bringing together the best people to move the product forward, and setting those teams free to execute on their product vision.
Erikkson hits the nail on the head here. PMs have to lead, not dictate. Applying Radical candor can make an immediate difference in a PMs ability to lead a team through communication, vision, and influence. With that — let’s dive into some key concepts we can take from Radical Candor to become better PMs.
The Four Archetypes of Product Managers
The whole concept of Radical Candor is about caring personally for the people you work with so that you have the credibility to challenge them directly. When leaders combine these two attributes people and teams grow to their full potential. Before we talk about the ideal model, we should mention the alternatives. The image to the left demonstrates a scale of caring and challenging. Radical Candor splits these up and defines the personalities that fall into each quadrant. How do product managers fit into these 4 types of leaders?
The Ruinously Empathetic Product Manager cares about the individuals around them. This includes their team, stakeholders, leadership, and customers. They have taken the time to invest in relationships across the company. They’re generally well-liked folks. As long as things are running smooth, they are reasonably effective PMs. When you put them on a team with high performing individuals, good products will get shipped.
Yet, when problems arise as they do in product development, these PM’s effectiveness wanes. They resist giving direct feedback that feels too critical or awkward. They’ll let underestimation on a project go without a second thought because they don’t want to cause a stir. They won’t complain when other teams create blockers at the last second without proper communication. And instead of customer insights, strong personalities will often dictate their teams.
These types of PMs need to learn how to give real feedback and make tough decisions. If they don’t, their products and their careers will suffer because of it. Giving feedback on strategy decisions, product quality, and user experience are key parts of the PM role. Not having the ability to do so can lead to quick failure.
The Manipulative Insincere Product Manager doesn’t care about the people they work with. They are on the wrong end of caring and challenging. Personal success and career trajectory are their sole priorities. Instead of challenging their coworkers, they’ll utilize back channels and office politics. They simply don’t care enough about team level results or relationships. This will often result in divisive teams that are unpredictable and unreliable.
Product Managers that fall into this quadrant will burn bridges and miss out on the insights of other PMs, developers, and designers. They won’t last long in healthy organizations.
The Obnoxiously Aggressive Product Manager knows how to get shit done. But this productivity is often at the cost of relationships that might matter more in the long run. This type of product person is an office hothead and does not make an effort to show kindness for the people on their teams. They’re candid and real about any feedback that comes to mind. Hurting feelings is not a top concern.
Radical Candor actually says this type of aggressive PM is more effective than people pleasing and manipulative PMs. Kim Scott says in the book, “ If you can’t offer radical candor, the second best thing you can do is be an asshole.” However, this type of PM will wear down the hard-working people around them. At some point, their effectiveness and the product’s success will fizzle.
The Radically Candid Product Manager lives in the sweet spot between giving critical feedback, making tough decisions, and building healthy teams. They have all the empathy of the first archetype but don’t flinch when they need to give strong feedback. These types of PMs care about their team and build healthy working relationships. If someone on their team is struggling, they won’t hesitate to start a discussion to find the root of the issue. But they’ve done the hard work of relationship building. That gives them the credibility and trust to deliver this critical feedback. It’s a genuine effort to get back to quality work for the benefit of the individual, the team, and the customer.
Additionally, radically candid PMs create an environment where every single person on the team feels safe. Engineers, designers, quality analysts, business analysts, marketing folks, and the support team know this PM isn’t afraid to receive candid feedback. This leads to decisions that aren’t made based on egos. Rather, the team gathers relevant information to make the best decision promptly.
Tips for Being a Radically Candid Product Manager
Not even the best leaders in the world are 100% perfect at caring personally and challenging directly all the time. As a product manager, most of us have good intentions when it comes to communication. But we’re human and it can be easy to drift back to old habits. Additionally, personality plays a large part in this. Some people gravitate towards people pleasing. And some people don’t have a ton of empathy right off the bat. So, what are some tangible things you can start doing today as a PM to become more radically candid?
- Start by giving a damn about people. Do you know anything about the people on your team? Do they have kids? Do you know how long they’ve worked at your company? You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you work with. But it’s not hard to start investing in a healthy relationship with the people you work side by side with. If it’s too difficult to dig into their non-work life, start by taking an interest in their career goals. What are their specialties? What focuses within their discipline are they passionate about? What do they think are the biggest problems at the company right now? These are great starting places.
- Be real, direct, and quick with criticism. When an opportunity arises to give candid feedback, don’t wait for your next sync up in 10 days. Pull them aside and deliver your criticism then and there. When giving feedback, don’t use those classic cheesy compliment sandwiches. Don’t spend 5 minutes winding up and justifying just for a couple sentences of feedback. If you’ve built a relationship and credibility, they’ll be receptive to a concise and clear challenge. It may still sting a bit in the moment, but they’ll be grateful for it in the long run.
- Schedule some 1–1s. There is a ton of value in face-to-face time with the people on your team. Be mindful of each person’s individuality. Let them drive the content and structure of these meetings. That may mean each 1–1 may look different. Master the art of asking questions. Ask how they’re feeling about the team, project, and their own day-to-day. This will this help with building a strong relationship and make it easier for both of you to be candid. As a bonus, you’ll also get some amazing insights that will help you make better product decisions. Often times, people have great ideas but aren’t comfortable raising them in a larger setting.
- Build a radically candid team by being wide open to criticism. Leaders, of any sort, cannot be defensive of valid criticism. If you are, don’t expect to hear much more constructive feedback in the future. It’s imperative for your team to know you’re receptive to a candid environment. If this is evident, it’ll help the whole team get more comfortable with candor. You’re selling yourself short of opportunities to develop if you’re not getting these regular critiques from the people you work most with. PMs should be seeking feedback on their performance from both informal and formal mechanisms.
- Use retrospectives to get started with Radical Candor. Retros are the perfect place to build these types of skills with your team. If your team doesn’t utilize retros or something similar, get them on the calendar ASAP. If you’re already doing them, take a hard look at the structure and outcome. Are people giving candid feedback? Or is there a culture of fear about speaking up? Is there a sense that the team cares about each other during these sessions? Or are there passive aggressive comments flying off the wall? Are you making actual changes to process based on action items? Or is there just a lot of talk and complaining? There are tons of resources for getting started with retrospectives. Here’s a quick starter: https://luis-goncalves.com/agile-retrospectives/
Wrapping Up
Radical Candor is a communication and feedback framework. As a Product Manager, you can use it to influence your team’s effectiveness. It can create a culture of honesty that drives your team to work seamlessly together. This will help immensely in the pursuit of building great products together.
So — which of the four archetypes do you find yourself in? Are you a people-pleasing PM that needs to work on giving more critical feedback? Are you the aggressive PM that struggles with anger and needs to build some empathy muscles? Are you someone who doesn’t care AND doesn’t challenge? (I sure hope not). Wherever you find yourself today, there are steps you take to build Radical Candor skills and become a more effective product manager.
You have to start somewhere. Reach out to leaders in other departments and consider reading the book together. There’s also a ton of shorter form resources on the subject direct from the organization that I recommend. All you can do is start evaluating yourself and your team to begin moving in the right direction.
If you want to keep the conversation going, shoot me an email at austin@hudl.com or follow me a @nichols_austinj.
