I always say that having kids and managing people have a lot of similarities. You need to mentor them, grow them to become the people or professionals that you want them to become, set boundaries, help them get along with each other, attend to what they need from you to succeed, and so on.
Today I want to address a specific similarity between having kids and managing people which is the need to help them stay focused and actually do what they need to do. I have three daughters. Two of them are old enough to get ready to school all by themselves, and despite the fact that they know exactly what they need to do, it is very rare that they simply wake up and do this. Here is an example: I wake them up at 7 AM. The first thing I’m always asking them to do is bring me their lunch boxes so that while they are theoretically getting ready all by themselves I can prepare their food for the day, as well as get their little sister ready for her own daycare. Sounds simple right? There is no reason that lunch boxes wouldn’t be in the kitchen by 7:05. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth (sigh…).
After spending about 10 minutes lying down, getting ready to getting ready, they finally get out of bed. In the corridor, they run into their little sister. She is adorable, I’ll give them that. So they start playing with her. I then run into them again and remind them that I need their lunch boxes. Usually, they don’t even hear me or at least pretend not to. I need to actually stand there and stop them from running around to even get enough attention to say again that I need their lunch boxes. If I just say that and walk away lunch boxes wouldn’t be there at all. I need to stay there and make sure that they actually do what I just explicitly told them to. It’s not that they argue with me that lunch boxes are not as important as playing with their sister. But she is here and it’s so hard to resist her, that they think they would be able to fit everything in regardless. They might not see the bigger picture, which includes me needing to get ready for work too, for example.
If you have kids at the right age this probably sounds familiar. Now, even if you don’t, replace in the above story kids with product managers, replace getting ready to school with delivering a major release, bringing the lunch box with building a roadmap, and the little sister with a salesperson. See? I told you that it’s similar!
Managing product people resembles managing managers more than individual contributors. You expect them to manage themselves with everything that they need to work on, and you also want to give them the proper freedom to do so. But that’s where the crux lies: within this freedom, everybody wants things from them, and all of these things are truly important. The problem is that not all of them are equally important, but when people ask you time and again what about X, it’s easy to forget about prioritization and what you already promised to your manager. After all, they give you freedom, right?
If this sounds familiar, here are three ways to help your people stay focused on the most important things and not lose their way into the chaos that everybody else creates around them.
Have a Clear Product Strategy
It is much easier to stick to a plan when you understand where you’re going and why. Having a clear product strategy that translates into a simple-to-understand roadmap is one of the best ways to make sure people are aligned on priorities. Furthermore, since strategic roadmaps often take into consideration efforts from multiple departments and not just a technology roadmap, they create better alignment as well as commitment throughout the organization. If everyone in the company is aligned on priorities, these individual priorities fall in line as well.
To get to this level of alignment everyone in the team must understand what is it that we’re trying to do here and why. It’s not enough to say things that make sense, for example, we want to increase retention. The important question is why to focus on retention compared to all other things that you can do. So the real power of a product strategy is not only in aligning everyone on what you are doing but also in aligning everyone on what you’re not doing. It’s a good idea to have both listed explicitly.
Discuss Priorities Regularly
Having a product strategy and a road map is not enough. Like with my daughters, who understand the overall priority – they need to be ready for school on time – other things show up. It’s not that they don’t want to get ready on time, they simply want more to play with their little sister (can’t blame them, I’m telling you). For product managers, these other things can be things like urgent sales calls, sprint planning that took longer than they thought, a burning support issue, and I’m sure you have many more examples. That’s why it’s important to discuss these priorities on an ongoing basis and actually help your people make the right decisions in real-time and not hear about them when it’s too late and the consequences are already there. One of my favorite ways of doing so is using the daily scrum questions with the product managers. Ask each of your team members at least once a week what did you do last week, what are they going to do this week, and where they need help.
Another way that I use from time to time, especially when my product managers raise a flag that they cannot handle their priorities and they’re overloaded, is to simply create a list of everything they need to do and help them organize it into a plan that they feel that they can achieve and commit to.
Both of these methods are a discussion and not one-way communication. You are helping them stay focused on what’s important for you, for them, and for the company. It’s the discussion that matters most since that’s where important gaps in understanding and alignment are revealed. It’s also a great opportunity for you to share the bigger picture of what happens with what they are working on. For example, if they are helping you prepare a roadmap presentation for the next management meeting, sharing when that meeting happens and that you want to review it and compile it into your own deck beforehand would dictate a certain deadline that they need to be aware of. This is much better than “I need it by Monday”, since when they understand that it’s a real deadline because of external dependencies it’s easier to stick to it.
The Simple Email That Changes Everything
Every product manager I ever managed knew that at the end of each week they have to send me a very simple email. The format was a bullet point list of everything that either they personally or the team that they work with are working on. Each bullet included the name of the item and an ETA (e.g. improved login page – ETA 6/9). This in and of itself allowed me to look at everything on their plate and make sure nothing is missing. On top of it, it allowed me to know when to expect certain deliverables – either product deliverables like features or product manager deliverables like a draft for a certain presentation. They would send the same email every week. Whenever the ETA of a certain bullet changed, they would need to strike through the older ETA so that we see that it changed, and put the new ETA instead, together with a few words explaining why it changed (e.g. new design mockups – ETA 6/9 7/10. Deprioritized because of the mobile app bug). I deliberately kept it as a bulleted list and didn’t create a full format table or document for it. You want to keep it succinct. You have to be a great communicator to be able to say exactly what you mean in fewer words but I expect no less from my product managers.
This email has so many benefits, and I’m not going to get into all of them right now. It is one of the mechanisms that we elaborate on in the CPO Bootcamp as part of the team management section. But in the context of helping your people stay focused, even the mere fact that they have to send this email every week requires them to be mindful of deadlines and priorities on an ongoing basis. My product managers told me time and again how helpful this format was for them to be able to manage themselves properly.
My mentees sometimes tell me that prioritization is hard. my answer is usually that it’s not that prioritization is hard. It’s just that as a product manager, your job is not to prioritize between things that are unimportant and those that are important. Anyone can do that. Your job is to prioritize between things that are all very important, and that’s really hard (but it’s also your job security, we won’t get replaced by robots soon ?). Feel free to use this quote, and make sure that when your product managers need your help in prioritizing things that are all very important you are there with them to help them succeed.
