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Management is one of those things that looks easy from the outside and reveals its full complexity the moment you start doing it. The job is deceptively simple to describe: help your team do great work, grow as individuals, and achieve the outcomes the business needs. The execution is a career’s worth of learning 🧑‍💼

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What management actually involves

Creating clarity - your team needs to know what success looks like, what their priorities are, and how their work connects to the bigger picture. Ambiguity is the manager’s fault until proven otherwise. Regular 1:1s - the foundational management practice. Not a status update - a conversation about the person, their development, their blockers, and what they need from you. The best 1:1s are led by the direct report, not the manager. Feedback - specific, timely, and focused on behaviour rather than character. Feedback withheld to avoid discomfort does the person a disservice. The skill is delivering it in a way that lands as helpful rather than critical. Developing people - understanding what each person wants to grow toward and creating opportunities to stretch them in that direction. Coaching is the tool; development is the goal 💡 Removing blockers - the team shouldn’t be navigating organisational friction alone. Part of the manager’s job is clearing the path.

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The new manager trap

The most common mistake new managers make is continuing to do the work themselves. It’s faster, it’s familiar, and it feels productive. But it’s not management - it’s individual contribution with a title change. The shift is from doing to enabling. Your output is now your team’s output, not your own. Julie Zhuo’s The Making Of A Manager is the clearest guide to navigating this transition - honest about how hard it is and practical about what helps 🙌

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Managing product teams specifically

Product management sits in a matrix - PMs work across engineering, design, data, and the business without managing any of those people directly. That’s leadership without authority. When you do manage PMs, the challenge is different from managing engineers or designers. PMs tend to be opinionated, ambitious, and comfortable with ambiguity. They need clear outcomes and genuine autonomy to figure out how to achieve them - not detailed instructions. Petra Wille’s Strong Product Communities addresses this directly - how to build an environment where PMs grow, share, and hold each other to high standards. Lesson learned: the best manager I ever had gave me almost no instructions. She was clear about what success looked like, removed blockers fast, gave me honest feedback, and trusted me to figure out the rest. I didn’t appreciate how rare that was until I had worse managers later.