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👨‍🏫 Thinking like a Product Manager

Ahhhhh, the role of a Product Manager! One of the most important relationships you’ll have in your role as a Technical Program Manager!

For those less familiar with the role, Product Management generally involves defining product vision, strategy, and roadmap, and working closely with engineering, design, marketing, and other teams to bring products to market.

Its worth calling out that this is different from a Product Owner.

• Product Owners are tactical. They fit within the Agile framework and typically work with one or two teams in grooming the backlog, writing user stories, and removing obstacles for engineering team progress.

• Product Managers are strategic. They are focused on the strategic aspects of the product lifecycle. They define the product vision, strategy, and roadmap, and work across multiple teams (including marketing, sales, and support) to bring the product to market and ensure its success.

For the sake of this post, we’ll just stick with Product Manager (or the short-hand version, PM).

Practical Empathy

(In a previous post, Building Stronger Partnerships with Engineering Managers, I gave a similar preamble on empathy. For those who read that article, you can skip to the next section!)

Before we dive in…a word on empathy.

Empathy is a word my wife and I have been teaching our kids (okay…not all 3 of our kids, the 1-year-old might be a bit too young for the concept!).

We’ve boiled it down for them by explaining it like this: empathy is being aware of how someone else feels, thinks, or behaves.

In reality, teaching this to my kids is a hit-or-miss experience. But it’s magical when we see them actually slowing down to consider how another person feels.

As we have empathy for PMs, that too is a magical experience because the quality of collaboration and relationship skyrockets.

After all, building any relationship is highly dependent on the level of empathy you can practice.

What do PMs care about?

Okay, back to Product Managers (PMs)…

Let’s try to make a simple list of what PMs care about:

• Product Vision and Strategy: PMs define the product vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with the company’s goals. They are responsible for setting the long-term direction of the product.

• Customer Needs: PMs focus heavily on understanding customer needs and translating them into product features. They conduct market research, user interviews, and gather feedback to inform product decisions.

• Roadmap and Prioritization: PMs create and maintain the product roadmap, prioritizing features and improvements based on business value, customer impact, and technical feasibility.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: PMs work with engineering, design, marketing, sales, legal/compliance, and support teams to ensure the product is successfully developed, launched, and supported.

• Metrics and KPIs: PMs track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the success of the product and inform future decisions.

As you approach a PM for needed collaboration, it’s important to keep all these areas of concern in mind.

To boil it down in simple terms:

• Product Managers care about the WHY and WHAT.

• Technical Program Managers, you should integrate that into your efforts to define WHEN and WHO.

• (Engineering Managers supplement this with the HOW and a more granular WHAT)

Build Relationships through Curiosity

You can lean into empathy with a PM by asking simple questions to build the relationship:

• What is your vision for the product in the next 6 months?

• How do you gather and prioritize customer feedback?

• What are the biggest challenges you face in balancing the roadmap and technical feasibility?

• How do you measure the success of the product?

• Can you share more about the customer personas we are targeting?

• What are the key metrics you are focusing on this quarter?

• If you had unlimited resources, what would you change or add to the product?

Asking these simple questions is a way to build a relationship. It shows you have interest in their work beyond your own self-interest of the program.

Your goal with these questions is to see the world from their vantage point. Be curious.

When Should a TPM Partner with a PM?

So…when should you partner with a PM? A PM really should be capable of driving progress of an initiative.

But this becomes an issue when execution becomes so expansive and complex that it takes the PM away from their core of vision, strategy, market, customers.

Here are key scenarios when a TPM should partner with a PM:

Scenario 1: Complex and Multi-Team Projects

When a product initiative requires coordination across multiple teams, involves significant complexity, and has numerous dependencies, a TPM’s expertise becomes invaluable. Partnering with a PM in such scenarios ensures that:

• Seamless Integration: The efforts of various teams are integrated smoothly, preventing silos and ensuring that all parts of the product come together effectively.

• Resource Management: Efficient allocation and management of resources across teams, helping to balance workload and avoid bottlenecks.

• Manage Dependencies: Handle complex dependencies both within the project and with external teams or systems.

Scenario 2: High-Impact Initiatives

When working on high-impact initiatives that require meticulous tracking and reporting, a TPM can:

• Enhance Visibility: Provide detailed tracking of progress, risks, and dependencies, offering the PM better visibility into the project’s status.

• Facilitate Communication: Ensure effective communication among stakeholders, keeping everyone informed and aligned on the project’s goals and milestones.

Scenario 3: Complex Technical Challenges

When a product initiative involves complex technical challenges that require careful planning and risk mitigation, a TPM’s technical background and program management skills are crucial.

This allows the PM to:

• Leverage Expertise: Rely on the TPM’s expertise to navigate technical complexities, ensuring that the product is delivered on time and meets quality standards.

• Maintain Focus: Continue to drive the product’s strategic direction and alignment with customer needs, while the TPM addresses technical execution.

Collaborating with Product Managers

Building a relationship is great, but it doesn’t stop there.

Collaboration should reflect more than just a healthy relationship. It should reflect greater value-add than either of you can give individually.

Layer 1 Collaboration

Layer 1 collaboration are the fundamental and required points of collaboration that should be obvious.

These are the basics:

• Align on Product Vision: Ensure your program aligns with the product vision and strategy. Discuss how your work supports the broader product goals and any adjustments needed.

• Enhance Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitate better collaboration between PMs and other teams. Create forums or rituals that enhance communication and alignment.

• On-Going Execution: Regularly connect on status, solving problems and removing roadblocks together.

You cannot avoid these points of collaboration. They are necessary and useful. If you do avoid them, then program execution will immediately suffer.

However, be aware that they are self-serving for you, the TPM. There is a way you can build a much richer collaborative model with a PM.

Layer 2 Collaboration

Layer 2 Collaboration is the less obvious but powerful ways to collaborate with a PM.

• Program Documentation Clarity: Maintain a centralized, well-organized repository for all program documentation. Ensure it’s easy to navigate, helping the PM and team members quickly find the information they need.

• Execution Health Tracking: Create custom dashboards in Jira to provide clear visibility into team contributions and project progress. Keep the system updated regularly.

• KPI / Outcome Monitoring: Set up automated reports and visual analytics tools for tracking KPIs and outcomes. This makes it easy for the PM to report to teams and leadership stakeholders.

• Process Definition: Collaborate with the PM to define and refine processes unique to the initiative. Conduct workshops to identify pain points and continuously improve processes based on feedback.

Summary

Practical empathy is a useful tool to build relationships and add a ton of value in collaborative experiences. It looks like:

• Knowing what they care about

• Showing interest with curiosity

• Looking for win-win collaboration points

Partnering with a PM is essential when the scale, complexity, and cross-functional nature of a product initiative exceed the PM’s capacity to manage effectively.

By collaborating, TPMs and PMs can ensure that both strategic and executional aspects of the product are handled efficiently, leading to better outcomes and a more successful product.

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People to Know

🤝 Paweł Huryn: Author and Product Manager

Paweł consistently churns out quality content on the topic of product management on LinkedIn. This is one of his posts within the past few weeks that I found especially insightful to the framework processes of being a product manager:

Today’s TPM Resource

📚 The Product Growth Newsletter

Written by Aakash Gupta, the product growth newsletter is a well-reputed resource to dive into the world of product management.

After a long career in PM - rising to VP of Product at a Unicorn - Aakash has made the shift to writing about it. In particular, he writes about product growth. That is, the art of growing via your product.

(note: this is not sponsored, Aakash is just great at what he does)