Managing a team of Product Managers

Trade-offs of moving from PM to manager of a team of PMs

I’ve been leading a team of PMs for over three years, and during this time, I’ve learned enough in this journey to write several posts. However, I decided to start with a basic thought that isn’t as obvious to everyone: managing a team of Product Managers is completely different from being a Product Manager.

With these humbler words, I wish to illuminate and expose the trade-offs this opportunity offers: what will you gain and what will you lose if you get the chance (and decide) to move your Product career to the management path.

So…what’s the role like?

If sometimes it’s hard to describe what you do as a Product Manager, it’s a even harder to explain a job where you’re leading a team of PMs. What’s your day-to-day like? What’s the role description?

“So what is it you actually do?”

The best reference I’ve found when it comes to leadership in Product, is the one Joff Redfern (VP Product @ Atlassian) gives when talking about scaling product teams (check this podcast):

“The boats you build (your products) can only be as good as your shipyard is”.

Photo by Miguel Á. Pardiñán (Pexels.com)

That’s the best summary of what the role’s main priority should be: build your shipyard, not the boats. Priority numero uno. Let the Product Managers worry about building awesome boats, but provide them with the tools they’ll need for said job! Worry about their career path, focus on skill development, best practice sharing, learning, coordination and communication.

However, managing and developing a team can happen in every area, from tech to marketing. Here are some changes regarding product specifically.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Less time

This one is kind of obvious, right? You have more people in your team, more products, so you’re involved in more discussions. Your number of stakeholders grow. Between team meetings, coordination, status updates,…and, in some companies, politics and bureaucracy consume part of your day, too.

Plus, depending on your team’s size, one-on-one meetings can take a lot of your time. Read this to find tips to take them to the next level.

With all of this, you’ll have very few slots to “be productive”.

Less details

You’ll stop worrying about the little things, corner cases, and so on. As you have less time, you can’t concentrate on all the details of your products/product/area/components. Your focus is the shipyard. The bigger picture.

However, if you do worry and want to validate and review everything, you’ll become a very good bottleneck. My advice is that you let go. Trust your team to make good decisions.

You have a team, but don’t belong to a team

They say management is lonely, and the higher you go in your career the lonelier it gets. It’s partly true.

We work with teams (or squads) with people from different areas/departments: a bunch of engineers, lead by a technical lead; a product manager; and one or two designers. Some times, the team might even have a project manager, or someone from marketing,…depends on the goals they need to achieve and the type of product they’re working on.

These teams have a set of ceremonies that include everyone:

• A daily meeting or stand up, a quick catch up to arise issues, blockers,…and check on progress.
• A weekly meeting, that has more detail, and depending on the team, where they might discuss other subjects. It can also be composed of other activities, such as a retrospective or planning.
• Retrospectives. What the team needs to continue doing, what can be improved and ideas to do so. Open and honest feedback to help everyone get better and boost productivity.
• A planning meeting, to start a new sprint/week, discuss new features to be built, etc. Its frequency will vary on the squad.
• A weekly team lunch, to bond and talk about non-work stuff.

Of course, teams have the liberty to choose their own ceremonies and adapt them as they see fit. Even the managers of the team (Product Manager +Technical Lead + Designer) might have additional ceremonies: a pre-planning meeting, a monthly goal review,…whatever keeps the machine running smoothly!

All these meetings and ceremonies help the team create powerful bonds and be constantly aligned on the goals and products they build. And it works even better because everyone has a sense of “belonging”, they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves.

Considering this context, you see why managing a team of PMs is lonelier: you don’t have any of this ceremonies, and it’s harder to create that sense of belonging.

However, you can create them…read about the ceremonies of our team of Product Managers.

Tougher discussions

When you’re managing a product, sometimes discussions with engineers and designers (or any stakeholder, really) can fire up. But they’re about the products, and most of the time you can just go for the cheaper solution, launch, measure and iterate.

However, as a manager of Product Managers, discussions get tougher. You’ll stop discussing about the product, and start assigning “resources” (who goes where, who does what). This is tougher, because you need to consider that these “resources” have feelings, aspirations, and preferences.

My tip: talk to everyone involved in each potential change, discuss several alternatives, choose one and go for it. Decide fast and communicate fast and openly to avoid friction and uncertainty. If it didn’t work, you’ll be able to roll-back.

Beyond team configuration, there will be other tough discussions you’ll be having all the time: performance issues of people in the team, roadmap prioritization, killing features (or even whole products). And dealing with some stakeholders will be quite challenging…

Bureaucracy and Politics*

* This will depend on the type of company you’re working for

You’ll need to start budgeting tools for your team, workshops, conference tickets, business trips,…even discuss new hires with the upper management. You need to start speaking “business”.

Additionally, there will be more politics and processes to follow. Or even new ones you’ll need to define/create to help your company work better. Most times, we hate these “steps to follow”, but they’re a necessary evil to guide everyone, involve stakeholders, and eliminate friction.

Nevertheless…

…it’s an amazing job.

• You get to do way more, influence and impact more people, more products, more customers.
• You work with other brilliant minds to create new products.
• Your influence in the vision and roadmap of the company grows. A lot.
• Management is beautiful. As a PM, you lead. As a Manager of PMs, you lead leaders. Coaching others to become great leaders is one of the many challenges I face every day. And a personal favorite.
• And, even though it’s less important, it pays more.

You’re the coach of a football team. You get to decide the strategy, which play your team should run, the position and role of each individual. No, you won’t score the goals, you don’t get to play the game anymore.

Instead, you influence much more people, a wider range of the product, and it’s extremely rewarding to help others grow and shine. Set the vision, guide everyone in their process, give autonomy, help when required. Worry. Truly care about the people in your team.

My advice is that, if you love being a Product Manager, you should carefully consider leading other Product Managers before taking the leap, because there are a lot of things you do now that you’ll stop doing.

However, if you decide to do it, here’s the question that keeps coming to my head all the time when I retrospect how I’m doing as a manager of PMs is:

“What did I want my boss to be like when I was working as a Product Manager?”

Ask yourself that question constantly to retrospect how you can improve, and you’ll do great.