Product Managers in some top tier companies have a big ego, along with high competitiveness / combativeness specifically against other PMs in the company1.
So if you are trying to convince another team to do something, a nice trick for you as a PM is to get the negotiation to happen via the EMs / TLs (or at times the Designers) of the 2 teams rather than leading the negotiation yourself with your Type-A combative PM counterpart on the other team.
This might be non-standard at your company, and it will require you to operate more behind-the-scenes than might be the standard way of doing inter-team work at your company, but it will yield better outcomes than the standard approach of 2 Type-A PMs butting heads.
What prevents some PMs from practicing this technique, even though the most talented PMs already know it works, is that they don’t care about product / team outcomes as much as they profess to. They do care about outcomes, of course, but they care a lot more about something else, something that’s more ego-centric than business outcomes.
This is an uncomfortable truth. And those who find it unbearably uncomfortable will instinctively manufacture a dozen clever objections against this truth. Which brings me to my final observation here:
The smarter the person, the better the excuse.
-Shreyas
A few past subscriber posts you might have missed:
This tends to be especially pronounced among Group PMs, Principal PMs, and Directors of Product in top tier companies, less so among IC PMs.
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