I’ve been listening to 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People by David Yeager. This is a well written book that draws on a wide set of research from many domains. While it’s written for educators, it delivers a powerful message for product managers, coaches, and anyone trying to lead a team through complexity. The premise is simple: people do better under leadership that pushes them and supports them.
Yeager outlines three types of leaders:
- Authoritarians demand obedience and control, often through fear or status.
- Protectors try to shield people from stress, sometimes at the cost of growth.
- Mentors set high standards and create the conditions for others to meet them.
That mentor model — expectations + support — hits hard if you’ve ever worked in product.
Mentorship isn’t optional for PMs
Unlike traditional managers, product managers don’t lead through authority — they lead through influence. We’re responsible for outcomes, but we don’t directly control engineering, QA, or UX. That makes trust, clarity, and follow-through more important than hierarchy.
In practice, though, many PMs don’t step into that mentorship role. Some stay detached — setting goals but avoiding the details. Others focus on being well-liked or overly protective, hoping to keep the team comfortable rather than challenged. And some hesitate to engage too deeply, especially if they don’t feel “technical enough.”
But when PMs stay too far removed, the team feels it. Momentum stalls. Standards slip. And it becomes harder to earn the kind of trust that allows you to influence decisions — especially in high-stakes or high-friction moments.
Mentorship doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means showing up, staying engaged, and helping the team get where they need to go. That includes setting a clear bar, staying curious about the work, and jumping in when something’s off track. Not to take over — but to make progress possible.
The trap of authoritarian leadership
Early in my career at InterVideo, I worked under a classic authoritarian leader. He wasn’t warm or collaborative — but he knew his market, he was relentless, and he ran his team with strict control. Monday morning meetings started at 8:00 a.m. sharp. If you veered off-topic, you were shut down. If you pushed back, you might get kicked out — and many were, including senior leaders.
And yet, those meetings worked. They weren’t just efficient — they set the tone for the week. We aligned quickly. Everyone left clear on priorities, cross-functional issues, and what needed to happen next. In terms of structure and speed, it was one of the most productive operating cadences I’ve seen.
But over time, that approach wore people down. The environment became tense. Infighting increased. Trust across teams eroded. Talented contributors left, and morale declined. Eventually, the authoritarian leader himself was let go.
It’s often said that authoritarian leaders can “get stuff done.” That was true at InterVideo — until it wasn’t. The lack of psychological safety, collaboration, and shared ownership caught up with the team. And when it did, the whole system unraveled.
The protector problem: when ambiguity becomes a liability
I’ve seen far fewer protector-style leaders in my career, but when I have, the results weren’t great. These managers tend to avoid stress — for themselves and for their teams. They try to shield direct reports from deadlines, hard conversations, or organizational friction. It might come from a good place, but the impact is almost always confusion, misalignment, and delay.
What’s missing is direction. I’ve reported to managers who never set clear goals, never established standards, and rarely gave useful feedback. That kind of ambiguity doesn’t empower teams — it paralyzes them. Productivity slows, priorities shift constantly, and eventually the team becomes unsure what success even looks like.
It’s ironic, because so many senior product roles explicitly call for people who can “work with little direction” or “thrive in ambiguous environments.” Here’s a sample from recent postings:
- “Demonstrate initiative and be capable of self-managing with little direction.” – Fiserv
- “Work autonomously in an ambiguous environment.” – Amazon
- “You take charge with little direction and have a ‘get things done’ attitude.” – Walmart
- “Experience solving problems in an ambiguous environment with constant change.” – Disney
- “Navigate ambiguity with confidence.” – Productboard
As a PM, yes — you need to be self-directed. But in a matrixed organization with multiple PMs, a total absence of standards leads to chaos. At the individual level, it’s frustrating. At the principal level, it’s destabilizing.
A protector might think they’re creating psychological safety — but more often, they’re creating indecision. And teams feel that gap every day.
Mentorship in the wild
If authoritarian leaders crush collaboration and protector leaders avoid hard truths, mentors do something harder: they engage. They don’t shy away from expectations or discomfort — but they stay close enough to the work, and the people, to help teams succeed.
At QMetry, I was leading the redesign of a core enterprise SaaS platform. The roadmap was ambitious, and the integrations were messy. Some engineers were early in their careers, others were experienced but stuck on certain assumptions. What they needed wasn’t more ambiguity — or more pressure. They needed context, challenge, and support.
Sometimes I had information they didn’t — not because I was more technical, but because I’d sat in customer calls or parsed through competing requirements. I didn’t push through by force. I asked questions, stayed patient, and challenged ideas when needed. And because we had trust, the team was willing to reconsider and move forward — even when it was hard.
At Seagate, leading a hybrid cloud platform, the dynamics were different but the need for mentorship was the same. We had strong engineers, but a lot of organizational drag. The work required clarity, fast decisions, and a shared sense of why we were building what we were building. The more I leaned into the details — not to control, but to unblock — the faster the team moved.
Mentorship isn’t about hovering. It’s about staying close enough to guide the team when it matters most.
There were times when I had more context than they did — not because I was smarter, but because I’d been in meetings they hadn’t, or had insight into the customer pain points they weren’t exposed to. But that context only mattered if I had enough trust to influence the team. I didn’t say “trust me, I know better.” I asked questions. I listened. I waited for the right moment to challenge an assumption or suggest an alternative. And because I’d already established high standards and built real relationships, the team responded.
At Seagate, I took a similar approach with our hybrid cloud platform. We were building something new, with cross-functional dependencies and a lot of legacy inertia. Once again, my job wasn’t to control the engineers — it was to help them succeed. That meant jumping into data models when needed, surfacing use cases they hadn’t seen, and staying grounded in what our users actually needed. We had to deliver fast — but never at the expense of clarity or collaboration. That balance only worked because I’d earned the team’s respect, not demanded it.
Why this matters now
There’s a tendency in tech — especially in high-growth or high-pressure orgs — to default to authoritarian tactics. Deadlines are tight. Teams are lean. “Toughen up” starts to sound like a leadership principle. But it’s a trap. Stack ranking, public takedowns, arbitrary pivots — these things break trust. And once trust is gone, influence dies with it.
A mentorship mindset flips that. You still set high expectations. You still make hard calls. But you do it in a way that makes your team better. You create space for disagreement. You coach through stuck points. You show people what good looks like — and help them get there.
I’ve worked with brilliant engineers, designers, and QA leads who knew far more than I did about their own domain. And I’ve seen what happens when a PM pretends otherwise — they get ignored. But when you lead with humility, consistency, and standards, something else happens: people listen. And when you push back, they’re willing to look again.
Final thought
Mentorship isn’t just for people with direct reports. It’s not a performance review checkbox. It’s a leadership posture. Whether you’re managing a team, working cross-functionally, or coaching your kid’s soccer team, the same truth holds: the best leaders set a high bar and help you reach it.
I’m only halfway through 10 to 25, but it’s already been a great reminder. Good leadership isn’t always complicated. Sometimes it’s just forgotten.