Building Teams
I love the idea of building teams. I’m getting the chance to help do it in my current role. It’s funny too, because had you asked me 8 months ago if I could build a team effectively, I would said, “yeah, sure - no problem!”, and I would have been totally wrong.
It’s taken me some time to get a solid feel for it, and what the options are all about. I still don’t know all there is to know, but obviously a lot of it relies on where the company is headed, is there enough work to justify the role, how do you see the team scaling 2-5 years from now, etc, etc. These are the things that are learned in business, and why I truly believe working in start-ups (if you are passionate about it) a hyper-course in learning how a business works and functions. It’s incredible. Tiring, yes — but incredible. But, I digress.
How does this tie into Product Management? Well, in most of the books I’ve read on the topic, the authors seem to convey that “PM’s are held accountable for driving results with teams over which they have no direct control.” I’d love to see that concept change, and I don’t mean in a “I’m the ‘product manager’, meaning I ‘manage’ a team that has small level of responsibility for a product, no matter how small.” I mean in the truest sense of a PM.
The concept / notion that a PM doesn’t typically have a team of directs is bogus to me. Why? Because, they damn well should. The PM should be responsible for building cross-functional relationships (Marketing, Sales, Management), and their directs are matrixed through those relationships. Let me provide an example using the product analyst role. And, keep in mind I’ve never managed a product analyst(s), nor have a I built a team of them. This is all instinct and my own stupidity talking here.
Say you are a PM working in a company that has 5 products, a silo’d Marketing team, a silo’d support team (with dotted line responsibility to the CTO, let’s say), and a silo’d Sales team. In my mind, it’s the PM that should be building relationships with each of these groups — preferably the lead (director of mktg, vp sales, client support manager, etc…). Now, what does the PM’s team of product analysts offer? The ability for the PM (or the PM group) to be represented in more than 1 place at once.
I’m thinking this helps propogate a cohesive product message across the company, for one — and allows for a lot more ‘product mgmt work’ to be done in parallel. You are probably thinking, “Ok, but if my company had 5 products, I’d hire 3-5 product managers, and they would do that.” True — you could go that way. However, if you hire in junior-intermediate product analysts, you get potential future PM’s (and maybe even VP’s) for the company, cut down on cost (since you only have to have 1 PM stressing out like hell about what’s going on as a whole), and no “I’m in charge of that” / “what am I in charge of” discussions between PM’s.
In my mind, and I’m terribly biased, PM’s are important to the success of a product-centric company. Yes, everyone in the org needs wear their PM hat, and become aware of how the products are being improved and why market data/feedback is crucial, and how to get it. But, the PA example is just one of many (PA’s, tech writers, even product dev engineers if you buy into the whole ‘the product guy can be the program guy’ notion) where having a team under a PM is a good concept to explore. At least, to me it is — but I’m a huge geek.
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