Influencing People
Stakeholders, leadership, communication, and influence without authority.
Influencing People: Rally people around the team's work.
This is the fourth of the four competency areas in The PM Competency Model, and in my experience it is what separates the PMs who do the job from the PMs who move the org. The other three areas, Product Execution, Customer Insight, and Product Strategy, are about figuring out the right thing and getting it built. This area sits on the uncomfortable fact underneath all of them: you cannot do any of it alone, and you cannot make anyone do anything.
#My point of view: a PM's power is borrowed, never owned
Here is the first thing I tell new PMs. You have no authority. You do not own the engineers' time, the designer's calendar, the budget, or the roadmap of any team but the slice you have been handed. Everything you "get done" is done by people who do not report to you, who could ignore you, and who often outrank you. So the job was never to command. It is to make people want to point their effort at the work you believe in.
That is why I do not think of influence as one of the things a PM does. It is the whole job, wearing different hats. Discovery is influence, because you are getting users and the team to tell you the truth. Strategy is influence, because you are getting executives to bet on a direction. Execution is influence, because you are getting a cross-functional team to move in sync. Take the influence out and what is left is someone writing documents nobody acts on.
This is the framing I push back on most with new PMs. CEOs hire, fire, and direct. A PM does none of that, so you earn followership or you get nothing. I unpack why I reject it in Leading Without Authority and What Is Product Management.
#The three competencies
This area breaks into three competencies, each with its own note and named behaviors drawn from my model. There is an asymmetry worth noticing. Two of these are about influencing outward and upward, and they start on day one. The middle one, leadership, does not apply at the junior levels at all.
| Competency | What it covers | The behaviors |
|---|---|---|
| Stakeholder Management | Aligning everyone your work touches | Internal Stakeholder Influence & Alignment · External Stakeholder Management · Org-Based Communications |
| Team Leadership | Managing and growing people | Coaching & Performance · Team Impact · Product-Wide Influence & Leadership · Resource Management & Hiring |
| Managing Up | Leveraging senior leaders | Strategic Influence & Alignment · Executive Communications |
Unlike every other competency, Team Leadership is rated "Not applicable" at the APM and Early PM levels in the matrix I use. It only begins, informally, once you are a Later PM mentoring others. You influence people for years before you ever lead them. I get into that leveling quirk in the note itself.
#The supporting notes
The competencies are what you are measured on. The rest of this domain is the craft underneath them: the specific skills of moving people.
| Note | Why it's here |
|---|---|
| Internal and External Stakeholders | Mapping who you're influencing and how each type differs |
| Communication | The skill I rank first for any PM, full stop |
| Executive Communication | BLUF, business framing, brevity. Talking to people short on time |
| Storytelling with Data | The story is the unit of persuasion; data is the ammunition |
| Leading Without Authority | Influence over control, the reality behind the CEO myth |
| Cross-Functional Collaboration | Building trust with engineering, design, data, and GTM |
| Coaching and Feedback | Giving and receiving feedback; the gateway to leadership |
| Hiring and Building a Product Team | Sourcing and evaluating for character and competence |
#Where influence connects
Influence is not a separate phase. It runs through every other area. Your stories are only as good as your data fluency. Your stakeholder alignment is enforced through decision rights. The leadership behaviors here flow straight into the coaching domain (The Manager as Coach) and the career ladder, because the entire manager track is this area, scaled up.
#Continue Reading
- Communication for why I call it the number one PM skill and how I think about it.
- Leading Without Authority for the core operating reality of the job.
- Stakeholder Management for the first competency, aligning everyone your work touches.
- The PM Competency Model for how this area fits with the other three and the full ladder.
- The Product Career Ladder for how influence escalates from APM to CPO.