Product Leadership Rules to Live By From My Experience at Pandora

6. Always Be Grooming New Leaders: Articulate the mission early in candidate interviews. Hire listeners that display intellectual curiosity. Offer high-performing PMs opportunities to onboard others.

Thinking about team management as a product: - Set up advanced listening mechanisms: help your PMs become better listeners- Keep your feedback loops healthy at all costs: Establish a consistent set of group and one-on-one meetings, ideally early in the week to help set the tone and get the team on the same page.- Your team should have a purpose as ... See more

5. Make Team Management Your Highest Priority Product: To be a good product team manager, you need to have been a successful product manager first. "As a group product manager, my job is to help PMs own their ideas, work with stakeholders, get people on board and amplify their insights. Our product managers are my products."

4. Don't Confuse Micromanagement with Miscommunication: Contextualize why it needs to be done in the first place.

3. Make Communication Your Path to Ownership : Communication is ... an opportunity to take or give ownership. Iterate how you communicate as much as it takes for everyone to understand the critical information.

2. Put Everything in Writing — Then Tier It : Executive summaries, wiki pages, PRDs, and launch plans are four types of documents that can aid in operational excellency.

1. Know Your Team's Dunbar Number : Building real relationships both broadly and deeply within the company while not overextending. Engineers should have a keen and current understanding of not only what the work is, but also the decisions behind each product feature. Context is king for cross-functional teams.

Six concrete tactics product leaders can use to not just build remarkable products, but talented product managers: