Progressing in your career to higher level roles often means the levels of complexity that you are dealing with increase. I’ve found the best product and marketing leaders are the most effective because they’re handling their levels of complexity in ways that produce value to their organization. You will know someone handles levels of complexity well from working directly with them and seeing it yourself or hearing from others how good that person is at breaking down a complex problem or opportunity in a compelling way and influencing people to solve it.
Individual Contributors Remit:
- Weekly Tasks
- Manager Communication
- 1-3 Stakeholders
Leader’s Remit:
- Direct Team & Cross-Functional Team
- Stakeholders and Peers
- Multi Year Strategy & Quarterly Execution
The contrast in these two remits shows the added complexity a leader takes on. Each bullet requires leading & managing more people. The strategy is critical to nail down and get support on, then the execution needs to be done by others and you need to find effective ways to check in and add feedback. You will also need to pick the places where you get your hands dirty which has to be chosen wisely.
When my remit started to get broader, I was pretty bad at managing layers of complexity. I was able to lean on my expertise in my domain which helped but I had to learn a lot of important lessons and still am regarding management, relationships, and strategy. Here’s a few:
- You can’t do all the execution anymore. Practice delegating and specifically asking for things. It’s okay to be really prescriptive and let people give you feedback to pull back.
- Ask really thoughtful questions to get better answers.
- Set up a mechanism for weekly project updates that are used in weekly discussions to highlight progress and blockers. Makes convos more fluid.
- Set up 1:1s with key people and have 1:1 docs to riff on ideas during the call…it is good to put the notes in a place both people can read them.
- Have a robust weekly/daily planning process for yourself. Allow room for flexibility but stick to getting the high leverage stuff done each week.
- Prioritize high leverage tasks in a week such as strategy document, project document or test spec.
- Don’t be all business all the time. At the end of the day, it’s about the relationships and skills you’re developing that is important.
- Make time to innovate and think.
I remember early in my career working on a client project that was going off the rails a bit in terms of many deliverables on deck and there was a bit of chaos brewing. The client lead came into the room where myself and a team member were trying to talk out what’s going on. The leader diffused the problem and simplified the actions with command. That’s a micro moment but great example of a leader handling levels of complexity well (multiple team members, multiple deliverables, and the clients success and happiness).
What have you found to be helpful in managing levels of complexity in effective ways that add value?