How to manage product managers without micromanaging - Mariah Craddick (Executive Director of Product, The Atlantic)

Don't know. Sometimes the product management role can feel really vague and kind of like, you know, you never quite know if you're doing it right. So many times I've seen the pitfall of, you know, product managers who are really good at being product managers struggle in this, like, people management role. My team really like me. Yeah. But is that enough? If they like you, then maybe you're not challenging them enough as well. Maybe in the moment that conversation is uncomfortable, but in the long run, like, more times than not, they express so much gratitude. At Amoraya, I am currently executive director of product at The Atlantic. But I got my start not in product, but as a journalist. That's gonna be a day where, like, nobody can schedule a meeting. It's probably the one day a week that product managers are gonna be able to go heads down and actually, like, execute on things. Hi, Rania. Welcome to the Product Experience Podcast. It's great to be talking to you today. Yeah. Thank you for having me. So we're gonna have a chat about how to be a better manager of product managers. But before we get stuck into that, it'd be great if you could give us a quick intro to who you are, what you do in product, and your kind of origin story. Like, how how you came to be where you are today. Yeah. Absolutely. So like you said, I'm Mariah. I am currently executive director of product at The Atlantic. But I got my start not in product, but as a journalist. So I went to journalism school, came out, did my stint in the newsroom, and quickly kind of learned that it maybe wasn't the best fit for me. But I was really interested in figuring out, you know, how to make it so that more news organizations were, sticking around and could be successful and thrive. Especially, this was the era of, you know, early days of social media. The Internet was changing everything, and a lot of newsrooms were not yet really understanding even who their audiences were. And so I ended up, you know, coming out of the the reporting role and moved into more like audience development and marketing roles still within news organizations. Just trying to again understand, like, who are these people? What do they do? Why are they subscribing? Why are they canceling? Mhmm. And always kind of curious about why the people on the business side never really talked to the newsroom side. And so this is a big divide and a big conversation always happening in the news industry about how there's a delineation of church and state between newsrooms and the quote unquote business side that has, you know, been put there purposefully to kind of protect the newsroom from sales influence, advertising influence. But as we've started to introduce new roles in the Internet era, like product, we've mistakenly …