How One Sr Product Manager Transformed Cross-Departmental Relationships by Taking Ownership

That's a good one. Um, I think uh at tenable, uh, when I came in and, and said, hey, we need to start doing user interviews. Um, Uh, and, and start talking to our customers. Uh, some of the pushback I got was from the account teams, the CSM and, and enterprise sales, who, who said like, no, no, no, I don't put product in front of customers. Um, and when I started digging, I realized like that relationship had been soured, uh, over the past year or two. Like there just was not a good relationship between the orgs. Um, So, as I started repairing it personally so that I could get my shit in front of customers and answer my questions, um, I started doing more of that for the org. So I started taking some junior PMs and bringing them along with me, uh, training them on how to do user interviews, talking to them about the pitfalls of like, where you can mess up a relationship, how to do your pre-flight with the account team, uh, to talk about sensitive subjects, stuff like that, um, things to avoid. Uh, and I started Kind of training them and, and taking this relationship repair to an org level, uh, uh, where the entire product org was getting a better relationship with the entire uh sales and CSM orgs, um, by, by starting to repair that, uh, and that was something that, that I think like. Anyone would have told me it was not my job as an IC. Um, but it, it just, it seemed like the right thing to do, like, to, to help out other PMs on my team to help us build better products by getting access to customers, uh, and make sure that those customers are getting the things that they need. Um. It, I, I, I didn't really make like an explicit choice of like do I wanna go do this thing that isn't my job, it just felt like the right thing to do.

I mean, I started taking it on for me, cause I needed that data to make good. You know, good, uh, uh, decisions. Um, I started with the coaching because I enjoy doing coaching and It was a skill I wanted to build and get better at on my path towards managing people. Um, and I started repairing the, like, broader relationship because nobody else was going to do it. Um. I'm not sure anybody else knew how or realized it was a priority, or thought that it should be.

Um, well, I haven't directly managed anybody, uh,

no, no. Um, I'd say what I learned was uh about building trust between organizations within a company, um. The approach to that is not rocket science. It's like, have conversations, deep conversations, talk to somebody, build trust with a single person by understanding what they're afraid of. Like, what happened in the past? Why don't you put product managers in front of your customers? Well, like PMs in the past said stupid things where they promised stuff that they couldn't deliver. OK, well, like, what if I don't do that? Um, And then leveraging that into getting almost referrals to other people in that org like, oh yeah, Steven is good in front of customers. You can put him in front of customers and just kind of building outward from an individual relationship, uh, to, to repair like oride things. It's, it's one by one, I guess. That'd be my takeaway.