Lateral Leadership: A Practical Guide for Agile Product Managers

Agile doesn’t just change how teams work. It also changes how teams are led. Agile requires a radically different approach to leadership, one that puts business, design, and engineering at equal levels—where they must work as peers. This is called lateral leadership, but it creates a challenge for roles like product management. Agile leadership requires teams to align around a committed vision and support it in the best possible way without formal authority. And even though product managers lack the expert knowledge of their new peers, they have to succeed in their mission without the traditional safety net of hierarchical power.

Written by Tim Herbig, a product and business leader with experience at large-scale companies such as XING and Gruner+Jahr as well as multiple startups in the SaaS and social network space, this book will help define what it takes to master the challenges of being a lateral leader. It will guide you through chapters on strategic alignment with your team and individual alignment with other team members. By recognizing empathy and escalation as helpful tools, you’ll be able to maintain and strengthen your leadership role within agile teams.

"Lateral Leadership shows Product Managers how to lead without the explicit authority to do so. This book gives us a detailed roadmap for how to use empathy and alignment to better lead the people that make up our teams toward common goals, and build better products because of it."—Martin Eriksson, co-founder Mind the Product & co-author of Product Leadership.