YOUR NEW PRODUCT

The transition from an individual PM to a group PM will expose you to new dynamics, and new responsibilities which have less to do with products themselves. If you’ve just made this transition, you’ve just taken the first step away from singular focus on a product you own. Now you have people. As a result, one of your new key objectives is to maintain an effective, productive, and satisfied team. You’re still a builder, but now the team is one of your principal product outputs. This post describes how to think about strengthening and growing your team for long-term success.

MADE FROM PEOPLE

Effective product teams are made up of people. As a product group manager you have responsibility for that team and the people in it. Principally you must build, feed, and grow the following:

1. Your team
2. Your product
3. Your business outcomes

As an individual contributor (IC) product manager, you’re organized on a team of peers with other PMs. Teams are assortments of skills, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and focus. Each person is different, comes from a different location, work experience, and different areas of expertise.

Your perspective as a team member starts as an individual contributor. Over time, perhaps over several jobs, you form your own impressions of what you think works and doesn’t work managerially based on your personal experiences. As you mature in your PM career, you may grow into a group PM role which manages other PMs. This tends to occur upon mastery of your core skills and product area, when you show the desire and ability to lead others. It’s not for everyone. 

Many years back I recall working for a large public company and had a direct manager that refused to acknowledge my presence. He exhibited this behavior to anyone assigned to his team that he didn’t personally hire. This was pretty uncomfortable and I never forgot it. The negative example helped form my opinion to not behave this way as a manager.

Managing a PM team is a new frontier because you now also own the wellbeing, protection, and prosperity of a team of PMs reporting to you. That comes with the familiar product work of building the best product for customers, and more importantly answering the more open-ended question of where is the right product direction to go for the company and your team?

With challenging goals and a big charter, your team is one of the essential elements required to achieve it successfully. Even if you were a stellar IC PM in the past, you won’t be able to perform a teams’ level of output alone. You must build your team to get there. Building can be applied in multiple ways. Even if you can’t add headcount, you must still build your team with respect to skills and enablement. If you are expanding team deliverables and responsibility, additional team members may be required.

CONSTRUCTING YOUR PRODUCT TEAM

Building teams has several challenges. First, it’s rare that you get the opportunity to build a team net new. This is important, because the team you get by your promotion, or being hired, is not always the perfect, machine-precision team you may have envisioned. E.g. Perhaps you were hired to manage an existing team, or you were promoted from within a company to take on team management. That might even be a team you were once a team member of. Either way the team was already in-place when you started as their manager. You get it as it is; the good and bad. You can’t simply expect to blaze a new path and get 10 open reqs (requisitions).

Some exceptions may apply. To build a team from scratch, you’re more likely to be an entrepreneur building your founding team. In that case the founding team is hand-selected by you. Alternatively, you might be an intrapreneur building a new product idea from within a larger company. In this case you may be given the opportunity to choose your team from coworkers. Size constraints may still apply.

STRENGTHENING YOUR TEAM

Now that you have a team, privately evaluate how strong they are individually. Chances are good that each person has areas of strength and opportunity to get stronger in other areas. Don’t forget that you as the manager also have strengths and weaknesses. Use this evaluation as a tool to produce an even better team from the people you already have.

Before your first role in management, you may have a (mis)perception that a team resembles a group of equally-sized, equally-capable, uniform team members. That can lead to poorly-formed expectations from individuals who are all different. It can also lead to poor managerial thinking if they believe that all resources are fungible. In my experience, people don’t like being called fungible. I had a manager that liked to say this a lot about a decade ago and it felt gross.

The uniform resources mentality in my mind can be visualized like a brick wall. I.e. Your team members are homogenous, equally-sized bricks, which uniformly support each other. It sounds attractive, but this analogy doesn’t represent reality.

 

In my experience, extending the wall analogy, teams are more like a wall with different kinds of brick and stone set in a less organized order, but still creating a solid team unit. Unlike a brick wall, this wall has gaps and rough edges. It might even have open holes that let the light through. Team members come with different sized skills and contribution. Most people have weak spots in some area or another. This is common and not altogether bad; though it could be stronger if you start to fill the holes in.

Unlike when I started in PM 16+ years ago, on-demand training has become remarkably easy to find and attend. These can be in-person or streamed. On my team today, I look for and recommend courses for different team members. Depending on your company benefits, you may already have personal cost-free access to LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, or other learning provider.

 To complete the wall analogy, you can strive to achieve the type of wall found in Machu Pichu from the Incan civilization. These are composed of very sturdy, perfectly-fit stones which fit seamlessly together; no holes or gaps present. Each stone is unique and differently sized. This analogy represents an ideal. Since your team members are different, by augmenting their weak spots, you can fill in the gaps in the wall; making the whole stronger. In reality you may never close all the gaps. However, by working on it, you get a stronger wall every year as your team members grow to edge out the gaps.

SHAPE BY DESIGN

Growing a team should first be preceded by some deep thought as to what you want to end up with. PMs should be very familiar with goal-setting. Team design is no different. With limited time in a day or a year, what will you ask your team to spend growth time on in addition to the daily blocking and tackling? Where do you want to be when the year is over? This will be different for every team.

Sometimes the right team design includes pruning out team members. After having tried to grow, fit, advise, mentor, reset, and more, you may find that a team member just isn’t succeeding. You may decide reduction is the right step. Firstly, look in the mirror. Did you hire well? Did you set your employee up for success? Did you enable them? What could you have done to prevent getting to this place? After ensuring you mutually can’t do more, you may have to consider removing someone from the team. This is a failure outcome for the manager and the employee. It can be painful, but it’s better for your team’s health.

PLANNING FOR GROWTH

If you’re a senior executive, something you’re likely to frequently hear in business reviews is, “We need more people.” For many teams, your ability to execute and grow is correlated to headcount. Every company is a little different, however for established companies the following axioms remain true: 

1. People cost money
2. Companies run on budgets
3. Budgets take planning

 Getting more people therefore, means planning ahead in the company’s budget cycle. Of course, you will have had to do your homework justifying the needs and benefits additional people will provide. These budget cycles are usually yearly.

Demands for people aren’t always conveniently aligned to yearly budgeting however. New projects and new market demands appear all the time. Let’s say you were budgeted for three hires this year and you just got a new unforeseen project that requires a fourth person. That headcount comes out of that budget of three regardless if you had other plans. Have no budget? Well you can wait until next year, or you can start using your powers of organizational persuasion to ask for someone else’s budgeted req. This can work, but you may have to negotiate to make that happen.

Another alternative is attrition. If someone leaves, you can usually backfill them. This gives you an option. If you choose to use that person elsewhere, you still have one fewer person in the team they left. Tough decisions.

In any of these scenarios, I advise getting to know well in advance who owns the budgets and who the gatekeepers are. Make friends with them. This isn’t a disingenuous activity. Get to know the people in your org, and the surrounding orgs. This will help you. This includes the executive support staff. They often do the processing work on behalf of execs.

A habit I’ve cultivated is asking selected peers and more senior executives for 1:1s. They don’t even have to be in your organization chain. They can be as often as you agree upon. It’s easy to do and over time you form a relationship. This only has upside. At worst, one will simply ignore your request or not have time to meet.

A final option for staffing is contractors and outsourcing. These both still require funding, but this can sometimes come from a different variable cost budget vs. a hiring budget. This still comes out of a budget however so be prepared to justify the spend and value you expect to gain just like a full-time employee (FTE) hire.

INTERLOCKING PIECES

Teams are made of people, and people are all different. You can’t simply swap one for another. Hire and aggregate the strengths you need, then invest even further in your team with time, training, cross-training, and mentoring to make them stronger. Your team and your results will continually improve.

Lack of investment to growth leads to stagnation and eventually attrition. Ambitious people aren’t happy to sit still for long. They want challenge and they want to see the fruit of their labor. Undesired attrition is hard to overcome because it’s irreversible and it’s not the lowest performers who quit. You can replace people, but you can’t transactionally backfill multiple years of specific domain knowledge about product, processes, people and more. Fortunately this can be discouraged by focusing on your team. If someone great does leave for a better role you made them ready for, then this is a bittersweet success.

If you’re a new product team leader your new job is management. You will still work closely with product, but first you have a team to take care of. They need you in this capacity and you need them as team members. Make the team stronger by thinking about the team along with the individual members. Draft the future state you need and work to get there daily.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.