Episode 84: Dear Melissa- Answering Questions About Picking Up Bad Habits, Prioritizing Inbound Requests, and How Product fits in with IT and Project Management
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about the importance of hiring a more experienced product leader to help more junior product managers steer clear of bad product habits, how to organize and manage an influx of ideas from different stakeholders, why product shouldn’t be part of the IT organization, and where project managers fit in a product led team.
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Q: What are the chances of a junior PM unintentionally developing unhealthy habits without the ongoing regular guidance of an experienced PM? What are key signals that might indicate it's time for me to ask my leadership team to bring in a product leader?
A: A lot of people join companies looking for their first product role and find themselves coming in and taking over everything, [which] can be really overwhelming when you don't have someone to learn from and you haven't had a lot of experience as a product manager. It’s pretty easy [for a junior PM to pick up bad habits], but it's also about forming your own habits. If you’re out there researching all the time on how to do your role, you’re not really doing product management. That’s one way to indicate to your management that you need to bring someone on. “Hey, this is how much much of my time I have to spend learning all of these things and not necessarily doing product management because I don't have somebody to ask - if I had somebody to ask or somebody to guide me I'd be able to learn it a lot faster.” That’s a really good pitch for leadership.
Q: Any tips for setting up a structure for managing ideas?
A: As you scale, ideas start coming from everywhere. This is a problem I see in a lot of companies. You want all these ideas but it can definitely be overwhelming. I’ve seen people create Google forums where they’re like, “hey, drop in your requests and we’ll look at them” and sometimes that works when it’s a smaller company, but at scale, you start losing the information… There are a lot of tools out there like Product Board, Pro Pad, that allow people all over the organization to submit ideas, and also puts a structure into those requests about what information is required to prioritize it. It then gives them the transparency to see where their ideas are getting prioritized… so that’s a good place to start.
Q: Why shouldn’t product be part of the IT organization? What are the key talking points you would hit when trying to convince the company that products should be its own organization?
A: It sounds like you're going through a transformation, and the fact that you said IT organization is hinting to me that you’re working in a legacy business that didn’t start with software, hence the transformation. In those businesses, they typically do not see software as revenue drivers, they see them as cost centers… So when they’re prioritizing things or thinking about technology, a lot of times it’s to streamline and cut costs. It’s not to innovate and create potential revenue drivers in the organization. Product management is a function that bridges the revenue driving and business sides into technology, so when product management gets absorbed into IT, there are a few things that happen. The product side typically follows a technology strategy because you have a CIO or CTO overseeing everything - this does not work. Product, [which is] a strategy on how the software furthers the business objectives, always needs to lead the technology strategy so you can figure out what to build to get there. When it’s reversed, I see a lot of bad things happen.
Q: Does project management or the business analyst role belong in a product lead or empowered product team? If a large company is undergoing a transformation, where would you see people who have traditionally played the role of project manager or BA succeed?
A: Project management is a little hard when you do a transformation. There tends to be less project managers after transformation because the teams are more autonomous and they're prioritizing their own work, they're figuring out what to take on. Typically, we put program managers who could be project managers on large initiatives across departments or teams where there is a lot of coordination needed… I’ve seen some project managers go on to make some great product managers… You need to be a good project manager to be a great product manager but the scope goes bigger. You also need to understand the business and your customers, and you need to bring that critical thinking in… If you can do that as a project manager, I think transitioning into a product management position is definitely the way to go.
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of dear Melissa. This week. We've got some exciting things for you. We actually had callers. So that telephone line that you hear in our little introduction, it's actually true. We do have a telephone line and you can call me as well and leave me a voicemail, letting me know what you want answered. So I love to hear your voices. Uh, so if you go to dear melissa.com, you can submit your questions as well to me, and look for that voicemail option. But today we've got three questions that we're gonna get into. One is about how do I convince people to hire a more experienced product leader? How do I convince management to do that? We've got one about how do we deal with all of this influx of ideas from all over the company and what do we do to prioritize them and show transparency there. And then the last one too, we're gonna talk about transformations and why product shouldn't be part of the it organization and what do we do with project managers after we transform? So without further ado, let's hear our first caller.
Dear Melissa, You inspire me to become a great product person every day! I'm building out the product org in a place that's traditionally been sales-led. From your experience to date, what is the probability of a junior PM unintentionally picking up on bad or unhealthy habits without a more experienced PM or product leader there readily available in an org to guide and coach them? What are some signals you would recommend I look out for, which might indicate it's time for me to ask my leadership team to bring in a product leader?
Well, thank you very much for that. So you are a junior product manager and it sounds like you're kind of figuring this out as you go that's that happens to a lot of people. I think a lot of people join companies, uh, looking for their first product role or jumping into it and find themselves, uh, you know, coming in and taking over everything. And that could be really overwhelming when you don't have someone to learn from, and you haven't had a lot of experience as a product manager. Um, I've run into a lot of people who, you know, ask me that question. They say, should I become the first product manager at a company, get my foot in. Um, or they wanna be the only product manager at a startup or a smaller company, uh, because they think, oh, we'll get equity or I'll have control over everything, but it's incredibly hard when you don't have a structure for yourself.
And when you don't have a lot of experience doing it, it's totally fine if you've been doing this for a long time and then you jump in and, you know, get your hands dirty. But, uh, it's a very different thing when you're starting out in your career. So you're asking can junior PM unintentionally pick up bad habits? Uh, yeah, it is pretty easy to do that, but it's also about forming your own habits. So if you are out there researching all the time, trying to figure out, like, how do I do this role? What's my structure. How do I go into it? If you're doing all of that, you're not necessarily doing product management. So that's one way to indicate to your leadership team. You need to bring somebody on, Hey, this is how much, much of my time I have to spend like, learning all of these things.
Um, and not necessarily doing product management because I don't have somebody to ask. And if I had somebody to ask or somebody to guide me, I'd be able to learn it a lot faster. I'd have more supervision, they'd be able to come back and give me feedback on these things. And we knew that we were going in the right direction. So that's a really good pitch for, um, leadership. Uh, what about, you know, also looking at signals, are, are you not sure sometimes about what's the next step to take? Are you not sure about how to handle things with leadership? Um, that slows the company down. Those are the types of things that I would, you know, let your leadership know that you think you could be improved on too. So another way to convince the leadership that you need, some help as well, if there's a lack of a roadmap or a strategy that satisfies them, if they're asking for it constantly, or you feel like they're confused, or they're looking for more transparency, that's a really big gap that happens in a lot of companies that don't have adequate product leadership.
So that's something to look at, see what their problems are, where they're struggling with product and say, Hey, like an experienced person could fill this in pretty easy. Um, but that's not necessarily my job. You might also wanna look at the skill levels of a product manager going from like junior to senior and show them like, Hey, I am a junior product manager. This is a scope of what I'm actually capable of. And this should be the only scope of what I'm capable of. Um, we need to bring somebody in who can do these pieces, which is like road mapping strategy, interfacing with executives. Like I'm gonna be really good at working with the developers and, you know, putting the features out there, documenting things, breaking down the work with them, working with the design team so that we can, you know, get to testable prototypes.
All of these things are in my wheelhouse, but these things over here are not. So that's a good way to also show like, Hey, you're being stretched thin. We need somebody to come in here and help fill these gaps. So I'd really take that approach when trying to convince them, um, if you're incredibly worried about your career though, picking up on these bad and unhealthy habits, right? Uh, there is some merit to figuring out some of this stuff on your own. And I don't, I wouldn't be too worried about yourself right now. If there is some commitment from your leadership to bring in a product leader, um, try to find communities where there's other product managers to bounce ideas off of, Hey, I'm trying, this is this the right way. Or do you have a better approach for this? Uh, those people can help steer you in the right direction right now.
And I think that will help you when you're thinking about your career. And also remember there's always an opportunity to learn, like what doesn't work well <laugh>. Um, so if this is your first step in the first place that you are starting from that's okay. Like some of my first jobs were in places that didn't do product management super well. And I learned throughout my career, as I kept going to other jobs in other environments, like, Hey, the things that I learned in that last job didn't work. And here's why, but I'll also say some of the things I picked up there are the different ways of working. Um, you know, they came with me and they had a place in time in other, in other places, I feel like being able to recognize what's wrong is just as valuable as being able to recognize what's right, when you're doing good product management.
So there's, it's not all of a loss. If you find yourself picking up some bad habits, it's just recognizing that those are bad. And being able to see that when you move on or go somewhere else or, you know, do your research into looking at good product management and understanding why, why doesn't this work? Why should I be picking up different habits? Why should I be doing things differently? If you can have that deep insight into your work, that's gonna set you up on a really good path. And again, I tell this to everybody. If you find that your company is not supporting you in your growth as a product manager in your career, they're not giving you what you need. It's time to find another company. And once you have that product management, you know, job title in your, in, in this place, uh, that will open up doors to you.
You'll be able to move somewhere else. But I would look, if you're gonna switch jobs, eventually look for a place that does have a strong product leader for you to learn from at least somebody who's above you has experience. I always research everybody on LinkedIn. I try to figure out what their past experience is, where do they work? What have they done? What were the outcomes? Anything like that is gonna give you some good insights into what you're gonna be able to learn from them. That's just as important as the type of company you work for. So, definitely look for that, but I would try talking to your senior leadership right now, deeply understand what problems they have with product and spin that into, Hey, you could solve these problems. If we had a product leader like here, I printed out a competency matrix on product management from junior to senior.
Here's what I can do. Here's the stuff I can't do. And those are our gaps. And that's why we need a product leader. That's how I convince, uh, executives to hire CPOs all the time. I show them, I listen to what's frustrating them. And then I show them like, Hey, this is why, right? Like you just don't have somebody to fill in this gap. And once they see that work, oh my God, they love it. Everybody gets really excited. So that's the approach that I would take. And, you know, maybe lean on some other people in the organization to help you with that too. You don't have to take that all on yourself.
All right, next question. We get ideas and requests from all sorts of sources. Customers, business unit stakeholders, and the sales team to name a few. Sometimes even executive leadership. Currently, we don't have a good process for how those ideas get submitted, what info is required, how we sort through those ideas, prioritize them, who is involved along each step of the way, and what happens once we do or don't prioritize and idea / request. Any tips for setting up a structure for this?
Oh. So as you scale ideas start coming from everywhere. So this is a problem that a lot of companies have, and that's okay. You want all of these ideas, but it can definitely be overwhelming. And I've seen people, you know, create Google forms where they're like, Hey, drop in your requests. And we'll all look at them in a form. And sometimes that works when it's a smaller company, but at scale, you start losing the information that you're talking about. Like what's required. It gets a little messy. It's really hard to prioritize. So there's a lot of tools out there now like productboard, product pad that allow people all over the organization to submit the ideas. And it also lets you put into a structure, a structure into those requests about what information you need to be able to prioritize it. It then gives them the transparency to see where their ideas are.
Is it getting prioritized? Is it not? Is it matched up against the objectives and also allows people to see the roadmaps and what's coming up so that they understand if their requests are in line with that. So that's a good place to start, you know, maybe taking on one of those tools and letting people put in those things. But this is also the reason why we have product operations. Uh, and I know I, I harp on product operations all the time, but this is, this is one of the things they actually solve. So product operations helps streamline all of these, this feedback and they can implement those tools for you, provide the structure for it. Um, so that you don't have to do this, like off the side of your desk, because as a product manager, you want to be able to see the ideas that are relevant to you to figure out, do I need to go with them, but it's actually not your job to set up the whole structure for that.
On a smaller team, that's something that maybe a product leader would do. Um, but as you scale, if you are on a larger team, you're gonna want somebody to be able to do this because it's gotta scale across hundreds of people, thousands of people sometimes. So how do you make all that stuff work? Uh, they also product operations, also interfaces with places like sales, uh, and customer support and make sure that they understand what questions they should be asking when there are issues so that they get prioritized faster. They help surface up all of these things to you on a higher level, with bigger initiatives, they help surface that up or bring it to, um, you know, product leaders so that the executives can see where those things are going. All of that stuff gets a lot streamlined, uh, more streamlined than it would, uh, without somebody just owning it.
So that's why I think product operations is really important. Uh, Stripe actually started with this. So they had a lot of feedback coming from sales and customer support, and it wasn't making its way to the product managers. So, uh, they started by streamlining that whole process. Being able to bring the most important ideas down to the product managers, helping set up a way to prioritize it, using different systems, putting those systems in place, those, um, tools out there like I talked about so that the product managers understood what the feedback was from sales, sales was putting it in the right format so that they could actually, you know, understand it. And then the product managers were communicating what was prioritized and what wasn't prioritized. So that sales actually knew, and they knew what was coming up and they could communicate it back to their people.
Pendo also did this as well. So there's a lot of good case studies out there about, you can go read a lot about Pendo doing this. Uh, Christine was running the product operations function there. She writes a lot about it. She's been on the podcast, um, on podcast talking about it as well. So that's a good place to go look at that too and see how they did it and get some tips from that. We will also have this in our product operations book, which will hopefully be coming out by the end of the year. So go to product operations.com and sign up for our mailing list to get notified when the book is out and we will have a bunch of those case studies in it. And we will talk about how to set up those teams and why they're really important to the company.
All right, last question. Hey Melissa, Big fan of the show and your book and really looking forward to the Product Ops book to drop later this year. Two questions for you... 1. Why shouldn't Product be a part of the IT organization? What are the key talking points you would hit when trying to convince a company that product should be its own organization 2. Does Project management belong in a product lead company or empowered product team? Especially if this is a company undergoing a transformation - where have you seen people who traditional play the role of Project Manager or BA succeed? Thanks
All right. So it sounds like you're going through a transformation and the fact that you said IT and not technology organization is kind of hinting to me that you are working in a legacy business that didn't start with software, hence the transformation and in those businesses, they typically do not see software as revenue drivers. They just see them as cost centers and I've worked with a ton of them. Um, the people who work in IT probably continue to see it that way and executives continue to see it that way. So when they're prioritizing things, or when they're thinking about technology, a lot of times it's to streamline and cut costs, it's not to innovate and create potential revenue drivers, um, in the organization.
Now you might have a lot of that scattered here and there, but I'm sure that there's a lot of confusion about how that all comes into place. Now, product management though, is a function that bridges the revenue driving and business sides into technology. So when product management gets absorbed into IT, there's a couple things that happen. Uh, one, the product side typically follows a technology strategy cuz you have a CIO or a CTO that is overseeing everything. This does not work. product, which is a strategy on how to software can further a business objectives always needs to lead the technology strategy so that we can figure out what to build, to get there. And when it's reversed, I see a lot of bad things happen. I once worked with one company where the CTO was leading a technology strategy that was not in line with the product strategy, technology leading product over here.
And they spent tens of millions of dollars building this huge platform that they thought you know, was going to help scale. The infrastructure had all the APIs in the world to go into it. And it was just a lot more modern tech. The problem is they spent all that money and all that time, like years building this thing and the product teams never absorbed it. They didn't use any of this new platform. They kept working with the old, because it wasn't, uh, updating the parts of the system they needed to achieve their business objectives. So the product team's got this roadmap about how do we hit our business objectives? What features do we need to build? What do we have to build for our customers? And the technology team is not in line with that at all. They're out here with a whole platform strategy of what we're gonna rebuild into that.
And they've prioritized it in different ways. So all the new stuff was built around things that didn't matter to the product teams and weren't going to deliver on business objectives. So that just became a huge mess. Like it just, um, it was fantastic technology and we needed that type of platform, but it was not prioritized correctly. So we actually had to stop everything reset, do a whole new strategy, all of this stuff. And it was a big waste of time and it wasted a lot of money as well. So that's why we don't want, uh, technology leading product. We need to remember like the whole reason we build technology and software is to hit business objectives and customer objectives. So if you're not leading from that place, what are we building? Right. That's the build trap right there. Um, another thing that you really wanna look at too, is that product is not just an IT skillset.
It's not just about telling developers what to do. It is a business skill set and it understands how to leverage technology, right? It's technical, but it's not technology. So these people are deeply in tune with what we're doing as a business, how we make money, what our customers need. And they're translating that, uh, to work better with the technology team to deliver that. So it's a business function at the end of the day. And that's what, you know, uh, I see like a lot of companies going through transformations, dismissing Silicon valley companies. Um, and it's fine. Like you're never, not never, but like you're not gonna be exactly like them. But the thing that Silicon valley companies get that a lot of companies going through transformations don't is that technology is your business at a certain point, right? Like it's, it's what differentiates your business.
And they treat it that way. They treat product and technology like a revenue driving part of their organization. Uh, they don't just see it as a cost center. They see it as a way to innovate and do more, right, than they possibly could without it. And that is what's missing. I believe from the mindset of companies that go through transformations, they need to understand how they can leverage these things to make themselves a hundred times better than they ever were and prioritize it and understand it and hire the right people that can actually do that. So that's really what I think of when I think of product management and I've seen it done well in organizations that have done transformations. Like I think the capital one credit card team does product management extremely well. Like they get it, they see it as a revenue driver, they understand the implications of what they can do.
There's a lot of really good product management in that organization. So that's a good place to like look up to. I N G also understands that product management is a business driver. They understand that technology is a way to harness and improve their business, great case studies out there as well on how they see technology and how they, um, have conducted their transformation appropriately. So that's why I believe you need a chief product officer, even in these largest organizations. Um, the biggest thing that I see missing from organizations that are huge and doing these transformations is that there is no defined product portfolio strategy that stretches across the organization. And that means that prioritization is really hard across different teams. It also means that you are usually duplicating things in different departments that could be streamlined and leveraged. And if you put all those things together, sometimes it'd be more powerful from a data perspective of what you can deliver to your customers.
So that's why I really advocate for having a chief product officer, not just a CTO to help think about how do all of these things and all these platforms come together to produce better outcomes for our business.
Your second question on project management, um, project, management's a little hard when you do a transformation, there tends to be less project managers after transformation because the teams are more autonomous and they're prioritizing their own work. They're figuring out what to take on. So typically we'd put program managers who could be project managers on large initiatives that cross departments or teams where there is a lot of coordination needed. So let's say like you are doing a mass initiative. That's just gonna take many different departments, many teams, many product managers to get it done. And they don't all report to the same person. That's where I would bring in a program manager to help coordinate that help streamline things, help make sure the communication's not lost there so that they can really lead that.
Um, I've also seen some project managers go on to make great product managers on things like integrations or adapting third party software, things like procurement, um, you know, procurement of third party software and making sure that they integrate into your systems and you have all the requirements out there. Uh, they make usually great product managers for that too. And those things need a lot of project management to get done. So there definitely is a place. I think a lot of project managers can be great product managers. If they remember that it's not just about time and money and cost, which are essential. You need to be a good project manager to be a great product manager, but the scope goes bigger, right? You also need to understand the business. You need to understand your customers and you need to bring that critical thinking in to figure out should, should we build things?
Not just how long is it gonna take us to build things and how do we do this? So if you can do that as a project manager, I think transitioning it into a product management position for you is definitely the way to go. Um, there are other places in the organization that need project management too, not just technology, those types of places, uh, you might wanna migrate into during a transformation as well. But typically when you start moving more into agile processes, you do see less project managers in the technology teams.
That's it for dear Melissa this week. If you have questions for me again, leave me a little voicemail. I love hearing your voices. This was really fun at dearmelissa.com. And if you like the podcast, make sure that you subscribe, uh, anywhere that you're listening to this, and I'd really appreciate it. If you could leave us a review on apple podcasts that always helps people find us. And you know, I would mean the world to me, if you could actually do that. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.