Your Boss is Your Champion 🏆
A great boss is willing to go to bat for you. They are like a coach who wants to see you succeed.
Of all the relationships you have in a workplace, the most important one is with your boss. This is obvious on the face of it, but it’s difficult to achieve in real life.
When working, it’s easy to paper over important issues as the employee-boss relationship can be complicated, biased, and emotional. When interviewing, it’s also easy to devalue the boss relationship and focus instead on your interview performance or the job responsibilities.
But for your immediate success (interviewing and getting an offer) and your long-term success (retention and success in the company), this relationship is key.
A Good Boss is Your Champion
Your boss should be your champion — the one person in the company who likes you, trusts you, and believes in you the most. This person should be willing to fight for you, to stick up for you, and to “go to bat” for you.
You need a champion right away, even if you don’t know it. During the interview panel after the virtual onsite, the panel meets to discuss your performance. These decisions are hard, especially if they are all 3 out of 4 stars and like “yeah this person is great but not stellar.” This is when your champion speaks up and makes a strong argument for you.
After joining, you still need a champion for your continued success, retention, and happiness. You need a champion in your work life. Otherwise you will slowly diminish in time, resources, and attention. If you don’t have a champion, you better find one quickly or get ready to leave.
A Good Boss Wants to See You Succeed
No individual contributor can succeed on their own. People need a variety of resources from their manager to succeed:
- Time: Time and space to finish a project.
- Money: To fulfill external demands, to feel valued, to pay for a certain tool or vendor, or to hire people to help.
- Help: Advice, time, and expertise from someone to finish part of a project, especially from another team.
- Appreciation: Constant positive reinforcement in a public forum. Inspiring words to latch on to when times get rough.
- Attitude: A sense that the boss is trying to get you (1) to (4), no matter whether they are 100% successful or not.
The overall sense is that you and your boss are on the same team. Your boss is not your opponent. Your boss is your coach. They don’t just evaluate and give you new tasks. They encourage you, support you, and want to see you succeed in your role.
Your Champion is Your Foundation
Your champion is the foundation upon which you do your work.
Every project or task is a risk. In product management, every PRD (product requirements document aka a proposal for a new software feature) is a risk. It’s small investment of design and technical resources to build something new, in the hopes of changing user behavior.
My champion is the foundation upon which I can take risks and make decisions.
Product managers (and any employee really) make a number of big and small decisions everyday. If I have to second guess every decision based on what the boss might say, then I cannot work effectively. This will lead to slow progress and low morale.
If instead there is alignment and effective motivation by my boss, then this is my foundation. This is the “core” upon which upon which I build software features and value for our users.
How are decisions made?
A good example of management is the way decisions are made and communicated in a company. For product managers, it’s whether a certain PRD or initiative that I am proposing gets approved or not. It can also be whether the boss can effectively argue for more resources (see the earlier section), such as help from another team for a complex project.
Personally, I’ve seen poor decision making in the following:
- Opaque: Not transparent on the reasoning behind a decision.
- Slow: Takes a long time to make a decision.
- Second-hand: Not invited to the decision-making meeting in the first place to make my argument directly to the decision-maker.
- Not logical: Based on emotion or what “important people” think.
The end result, as in whether I “win” (the project is approved or we actually get help from another team) or whether I “lose” (the project is rejected or we don’t get help) actually doesn’t matter that much. Though of course I hope to win more often than I lose. Even winning vs losing is a overly simplistic metaphor.
What’s important is that I see that my boss is fighting for me. That they believe in me and they are making a genuine effort to get more resources to see me and my projects succeed.
Just like any athletic match, we don’t win every time. That’s fine. Not every PRD/proposal gets approved nor does every product launch succeed. As long as I have my coach in the background doing their best to support me, then I can pick myself up and try again next time.
You can tell the difference
Finally, you can tell the difference between a manager who is gaslighting you and someone who is genuinely fighting for you.
Actions speak louder than words.
When you hear some reassuring words in a 1:1, that is good but ultimately it doesn’t mean much. At the core that is basically just “Oh, he’s having a bad day. Here’s some nice words and a story to help him through his rant. I don’t have to do anything real in response.”
However, when your boss compliments you in a public meeting, when someone pitches your idea in front of others, when someone puts a little bit of their own reputation on the line to get you the resources you need, then that is much more impactful.
You can tell when someone is fighting for you. That builds trust and loyalty. If I don’t get that from my boss, then I can continue working … but it will be with one foot out the door. Because life is too short to live and work with people that don’t believe in you.
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