Managing Up in Product Management

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Today I want to discuss how to effectively manage up as a product manager without becoming a political operator, a yes-person, or a blocker to your own team.

Senior stakeholders hold the keys to your funding, your headcount, and your strategic runway. If you don’t know how to speak their language, they’ll second-guess your work, question your priorities, and quietly hand influence to someone else.

The most impactful product managers are great at translating between teams and executives.

Too often, Product people only engage with stakeholders for status reports. They think it’s about showing the work. It’s not. And I'm sorry to break this to you, but if that's the only type of interaction they want with you, they don't value your contributions. And you're not maximizing the value you can add in your role.

You need to show them you’re thinking at the right altitude, at the right time, and through the right lens.

Your success depends as much on managing executives as it does on building great products.

So let's talk about how to do it.

Takeaway 1: Managing up doesn’t mean sucking up

Let’s get this out of the way. Managing up is not brown-nosing. It’s not about flattery or agreeing with everything your VP says.

We want to manage expectations, build trust, and make it easier for decision-makers to support your work without needing to micromanage it.

You need to understand how your executives think. Don’t bring problems. Bring options.

When discussing your work, you want to give a crisp summary, a clear recommendation, and enough context for the leader to weigh in without having to dig for answers.

Don’t overload with detail. The idea is to translate complexity into clarity.

Executives don’t want every Jira ticket. They want to know if what you’re doing is working, if you’re learning anything important, and if anything needs their attention.

If they feel surprised, blindsided, or like you’re hiding bad news, they’ll stop trusting you. And the next time you need their support, it won’t be there.

Takeaway 2: Your boss doesn’t care about velocity

You know what’s not helpful in a one-on-one with your manager? A laundry list of what the team worked on last sprint.

That information is useful at the team level. It’s not useful at the strategy level.

Your boss wants to know: Are we on track to deliver what matters? Are we seeing any early signals of risk? Do you need help unblocking something? Are we focused on the right outcomes?

Too many product managers mistake busyness for progress. You end up in meetings walking leaders through every A/B test or arguing over button placements.

That’s noise. The signal they need is how your work connects to the broader strategy and whether it's delivering impact.

Instead of saying, “We shipped X and Y and Z,” try saying, “We made progress toward the retention goal by reducing onboarding friction. We’re seeing early signs that drop-off is improving, but we still have a few weeks of data to collect. If the trend holds, we’ll hit our Q3 target. If not, we have two alternate paths we’re ready to explore.”

That’s how you talk like an owner. Not a ticket tracker.

Takeaway 3: Don’t show up with problems unless you’ve thought through tradeoffs

Every product person has been there. A partner team misses a deadline. An engineer resigns mid-project. A dependency creates a massive risk to your roadmap.

You bring the issue to your manager, expecting sympathy and support. What you get is a raised eyebrow and a, “So what do you want to do about it?”

The reflex to escalate is fine. But escalation without thought is a red flag. It tells your leadership you haven’t done the work, or that you lack the experience to know what to do.

Before you bring up a risk, explore the options. What are the tradeoffs? What are the implications of waiting, shifting scope, or realigning resources? What’s your recommendation?

It’s okay if you don’t have a perfect answer. But show that you’ve thought critically and taken responsibility for navigating the tension. Just give them something to react to. At least you'll show up with an informed opinion.

Executives want to see that you’re operating like someone who owns outcomes and can overcome some adversity. I'll be blunt here. If you come off as someone that just owns tasks for execution, they won't respect your perspectives on anything meaningful.

Takeaway 4: You’re a translator, not a megaphone

Product managers sit at the intersection of design, engineering, marketing, and business. That comes with a responsibility: translation.

When you speak to leadership, you’re not just repeating whatever "the team" said. You’re interpreting it. You’re filtering for relevance and clarity.

If the team is debating whether to use a feature flag or a separate deployment path, your job is not to relay that argument verbatim. Your job is to frame it as a question of speed versus safety and propose a path based on the risk profile of the work.

Likewise, when leadership gives feedback, you don’t just throw that feedback back to the team like a flaming bag of vague opinion. You unpack it. You ask questions. You bring back specifics. You advocate when you need to. You buffer when it’s unhelpful. You make sure the team stays grounded and focused, not tossed around by every exec drive-by.

Translation is an undervalued skill. It requires empathy, context, and judgment. But it’s what separates good product managers from great ones.

Takeaway 5: Use your updates to shape perception

One of the quietest ways product managers lose trust is by failing to manage perception. You think things are fine. You’re confident in your direction.

But the people above you don’t feel informed or involved. You think, “They know I’m working on it.” They think, “I haven’t heard anything in three weeks. Should I be worried?”

Don’t assume your work speaks for itself. It doesn’t. People are busy. They fill in gaps with their own assumptions.

Regular updates don’t have to be long. They have to be useful. A three-bullet Slack message every Friday. A monthly playback with your leadership team. A brief comment on strategy docs explaining how this decision connects to the big picture.

And don’t just focus on what happened. Focus on what you learned, what’s coming next, and where your leaders can help. Be proactive. Anticipate the questions they’ll ask. Preempt them with answers.

When you do this well, your leaders start to think of you as someone who has it under control. Someone who communicates like an owner. Someone they don’t need to chase. That perception gives you cover, support, and air cover to lead.

In Conclusion

Your job isn’t just to manage the backlog, run sprint rituals, and ship features. Your job is to align people across levels and functions toward outcomes.

That means making decisions, managing tension, and communicating clearly in every direction, including up.

The product managers who grow fast and get the toughest assignments are very rarely the best at taking notes or Jira hygiene.

They’re the ones who make their leaders’ jobs easier. They know how to distill complexity. They know how to bring solutions, not noise. They know how to keep stakeholders aligned without creating chaos.

They make the invisible work visible.

And that’s how you build trust, get promoted, and earn real influence in your organization.

Start small. One better update. One clearer summary. One moment where you bring a tradeoff instead of a complaint. Then keep going.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.