Ceremonies of a team of Product Managers
The meetings and rituals we perform to have a high-functioning Product team.
I lead a team of eleven Product Managers. My philosophy is to provide as much autonomy and space for everyone to create and feel empowered of their own products and components, but we need to balance that with being coordinated so everyone is on the same page, we avoid doing the same work twice, etc.
The most basic thing we do, for high-level alignment, is to share goals as a team (even as an area within Telefonica). What we call our “Strategic OKRs”. Everyone has the same objectives and helps keep the product strategy of all teams aligned.
However, the challenge is to have Product Managers, that work in their own multidisciplinary teams, collaborate and join forces with other Product Managers. Coordinate all those different projects and ongoing developments that usually have no correlation whatsoever.
For this, the first thing I did is define my aspiration of how I wanted my team to behave as a team:
- Create a trusting environment, where everybody feels safe to share their thoughts and participate. Every vote counts as 1.
- Foster collaboration, a team of generous people, willing to help their teammates and build new products together.
- A team that’s inviting and open to others, constantly communicating and sharing information with whoever might be interested.
- Dynamic. In constant movement. A team willing to learn, improve, and adapt to our circumstances.
- Fun. Because we have one life and spend too much time working, and we can’t make it boring.
With that in mind, these are the meetings and rituals we currently have (and will surely continue to iterate).
Our ceremonies
Team meeting
90 minutes | weekly
Main goal(s): communication, coordination, team participation
This is the most basic “team alignment meeting” all teams would have. All Product Managers get together in order to share features that are still in the development phase, in order to gather feedback and iterate. We share our doubts, open our products to discussion, and give visibility of what we’re working on. We also review data and communicate relevant updates that involve our team.
Besides our team of Product Managers, we invite people from the Design team, QSys, Tech, Analytics, Documentation…anyone who can benefit from joining, even if they don’t participate much, is more than welcome.
Our template script for this meeting is:
- Relevant announcements: team changes, stakeholder updates, new organizational structures, OKR communication, HR announcements,…whichever subject is relevant for the whole team on a more strategic level. It doesn’t take more than 5–10 minutes most weeks, but occasionally, we might have something important to discuss that could hoard the whole meeting.
- Data Review: 10–20 minutes of interesting facts or highlights we find along with our Digital Analytics team. Product performance analyzed from a data perspective. We share with the rest of Product Managers the learnings, as they’ll surely be relevant for everyone because we’re working together to build the same product.
- Coordination: most Product Managers will talk during this slot. We have so many updates we had to start timing each intervention: 5 minutes + 5 minutes of questions and answers. It helps us in two ways: 1) we cover more stuff, and 2) PMs train their communication skills, as they need to share something concisely and having to think what they want the rest of attendees to remember from their pitch.
- Kitchen Talks: in this slot we discuss dates and topics we all think should be shared with the rest of the company (these talks are open for anyone that wishes to attend and happen in the company’s kitchen — hence the name). PMs can announce when they’ll present something, or propose that somebody else shares something they think would be interesting for our engineers, designers, etc.
- “Working Together” subject proposals: we’ll cover this meeting with more detail below, here we just suggest and agree on the subjects to discuss in said meeting.
- Misc: other non-work related announcements, suggestions or issues (such as: Beers on Thursday to celebrate Miguel’s birthday!).
We have a shared GDoc to write these down, that also serves as a “history of discussions”, and everyone is encouraged to add and share what they’ll bring to the meeting beforehand, so everyone can access (helps remote workers follow the discussion).
What this meeting is not: a status update meeting. We don’t share updates of all projects. Our goal is not to discuss “delivery”, is to talk about our product to make it better as a team. We used to do it, but we don’t anymore.
We’ve struggled a lot to balance our weekly team meeting. We changed duration, content, time limits…we had interventions that weren’t timed; we added remote-friendly options; people from other areas to showcase their projects, areas,…After “only” a couple years, this is one of the meetings that adds more value to our team of Product Managers, even if it takes 90 minutes of our time each week.
Working together
60 minutes | weekly
Main goal(s): collaboration, co-creation
The first idea for this meeting was to create a space where all PMs could sit down in a room to work and grab whoever they needed to ask something from them.
Even though attendance was set to optional from the beginning, we immediately saw the value of this forum because all Product Managers are usually sitting and meeting with their own multidisciplinary teams and we don’t get that many opportunities to sit together as PMs and collaborate. We’ve discussed data definitions, received a basic analytics course, reviewed goals,…
However, as with everything we do, we’ve iterated this meeting. Whilst our team meeting happens before lunch time, this one is in the afternoon. That’s why we discuss in the morning what we want to focus the meeting for. This enables everyone to have a one-hour weekly slot that they can use for whatever they want. It’s highly encouraged to block it even if we don’t end up having the meeting, or that PM isn’t required for whatever it’s going to be discussed. Either way, you get an hour to borrow from your fellow Product Managers, or an hour to work on pending stuff (which we need more often than we like to admit).
What are we using this meeting for if its attendance is optional? Here are some examples:
- Product discussions: sometimes during our weekly, one of the interventions from a PM requires deeper debate. We take these of the morning’s agenda and take them to the “working together” session.
- Roadmap alignment: every 3 months, we build our quarterly roadmaps, and this meeting is useful for us to coordinate on the things we want to do as a team, or the projects that require several teams to work together.
- Co-creation: occasionally, a PM will grab others because of their knowledge, experience or expertise to help them with a specific problem.
- Best practices sessions: recently, we started also sharing tips around particular issues that we’ve identified together (more on that later). In further posts I’ll give more details about our best practices regarding time management, handling meetings, working with Project Managers, or documentation complexity.
Team lunch
60–90 minutes | weekly
Main goal(s): team building, bonding, distraction
This one is the simplest, but I didn’t want to leave it out because to me it’s really important. No one is forced to come, but I try to never miss it.
We get away from the office and take our minds off work, connect personally, and get to know each other. To me, this is crucial in order to understand everyone’s motivations and emotional behavior. It helps me know who needs to be pushed and asked for more, who needs praising, or even if they’re going through a rough patch. Connections and bonding are, in my opinion, key to leading a team properly, but so says research on the matter… :)
To Product Managers, to the team, it’s great, too. It helps teammates know each other and creates powerful bonds, which leads to collaboration and better understanding of each other’s needs. It builds the team as a whole. It generates a team spirit that will make everyone try to help each other out whenever they’re needed to.
Team retrospective
4 hours | quarterly
Main goal(s): improvement, team growth, build trust
Once per quarter, we all get together to say out loud the good things we do as a team and need to keep doing, identify issues, and come up with ideas to improve or solve those issues.
I’m not going to go into much detail regarding the retrospective: how to prepare it, which exercises we run, how we manage timings and frustration,…but if you wish to know more, you can read this article.
I will say though, that this retrospective is key to what we do. Alongside our quarterly evaluations, it’s our tool to check our team’s health and motivation, as well as come up with ideas together to improve our processes, way of working, product philosophy, or collaboration with other areas. These retrospectives, and the initiatives we implement from these discussions, are the equivalent to shipping a product, measuring and iterating.
With evaluations and retrospectives, we measure how our team is doing, implement new initiatives and iterate them, and keep improving based on the “data” we extract from the next evaluation and retrospective.
We tend to use an entire morning and go to lunch afterwards. Even though the retrospective is a PM-only meeting, for the quarterly lunch we do invite the people from other areas with whom we work more often (project managers, data analysts, engineering managers, designers,…), as it’s a perfect chance to connect personally with other people in our company!
“Work-gin” together
Unlimited time | quarterly
Main goal(s): team building, bonding, distraction
Once per quarter, we retrospect, we eat together, and we enjoy a drink together. We take the afternoon off and enjoy. For all the hard work during the past three months, we celebrate together the triumphs and failures. And…first round is on me.
This one is the silliest of all. But I had to add it because it’s a pun (which I do too often) and because it’s my way of saying thank you to my team with a small gesture.
BONUS TRACK: working remotely
We’ve always been a team open to remote work. As a father of two, it gives me a lot of the flexibility I sometimes need due to unexpected illnesses, odd school vacation days, long commutes,… So working remotely isn’t new to us. However, during these past confinement weeks, we have identified some other things that can help building a team.
- In-meeting mini-break: for long meetings (for example, our weekly team meeting), we started a 5-minute break so everyone can stand up a little, drink some water, or go to the restroom.
- Cameras on: we do this so we don’t loose the human touch remote work usually fails to bring. You see your teammates faces and can connect and see other people instead of blank or black screens.
- Share documentation beforehand: either linking documentation in a shared agenda, or via email, it allows everyone to see what will be discussed during the meeting. Some people have weaker internet connections, and this can be very helpful for them.
- Roadmaps can still be aligned. Read how we did it here!
- Breakfast: from time to time (every 2–3 weeks) we’ve organized a breakfast to eat “together” remotely. As with team lunches, the goal is to talk about things other than work, connect, bond. Talk to other humans!
- Beers: the afternoon alternative. These happen more often and we don’t make them exclusive to Product Managers. Everyone is welcomed!
What are you doing differently? Let us know!
