Dear Product Leaders (i.e. Directors, Heads, VPs of Product, CPOs),
I’ve worked with quite a number of you, and that you all have quite unique issues you’re facing. However, I’ve noticed a common thread – you have one issue that, to some degree, all product managers are facing, but as your roles carry more impact, that issue’s impact is equally more critical:
You just don’t have enough time.
Calendars of Hell
Image Credit: James Lee on Unsplash
Whenever I look at your calendars, I usually cringe – double-booking, triple, sometimes quadruple or more, long meetings, back-to-back (do leadership people even use bathrooms?).
“Oh, I just have all of them in there, sometimes those things end early/start late/get moved around.”
“When I’m double-booked, I just try to attend whatever or as much as I can.”
This of course is also an issue for me when e.g. trying to schedule some 1:1 time, but also more importantly for all of your direct reports – and ultimately for yourselves.
Of course, the easy advice to give here would be to “just cancel all the unimportant meetings” – but as leadership people usually aren’t overtly stupid, this is far easier said than done.
Especially strategic meetings with other C-suite/senior management personnel can’t just be canceled – and while those tend to be a substantial time drain, changing a senior management habit is a challenge that’s bigger than one product person.
The Headless Army
The fallout from that unfortunately usually is that your reports get left behind.
At this point, I’d deem it important to clear up a common misconception:
There’s a leadership trend that ‘leaders need to just trust their people and let them do their best work’ and to ‘just get out of the way’ in order to ‘empower their product managers’, and if they don’t, it’s micromanagement.
This is wrong, because it’s a dangerous conflation.
Supporting your direct reports with what they need to succeed is not micromanagement.
Empowering your direct reports can’t be achieved by keeping your hands off.
Consider growing plants – they’re usually fine to grow by themselves, they don’t need micromanagement on how to do so, but if you don’t provide them with the necessary irrigation and fertilization, they will die.
(’Micromanagement’ for plant growing of course also exists in various ways, but that’s a different avenue of discussion.)
Pun very much intended. Image Credit: Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Associates and ICs can either use your guidance, or are even explicitly asking for it – maybe in some cases because they’re lazy, but mostly because it’s your responsibility to thread everything together.
Your reports should be in charge of their respective areas, but they are specifically in their position because that’s their responsibility, and bringing all of their contributions together is yours.
This doesn’t mean that you have to do all that work – ultimately, you could enable all of your reports to collaborate among each other without you needing to frequently intervene, but that won’t happen by just taking your hands off and saying “you are now empowered to figure it out among yourselves”.
You need to teach them. This is your expertise.
(What exact approach to teaching you want to use is up to you, of course – but one thing’s clear: you are the master of ceremony to all collaborative efforts among your reports.)
This isn’t quantum physics – but it tends to be time-consuming. Which is the main reason why it gets left behind.
Broken Interface
Symbol image. Image Credit: Laura Rivera on Unsplash
On account of that, you’ll probably have your reports doing their best to figure things out among themselves – but, again, they’re not the experts at that, so the learning curve unfortunately is usually rather gradual.
This might not present itself as an imminent problem – until management wants to know what the heck is going on in the product and/or engineering department, a quite frequent demand.
They’re going to ask you first (as they should), and if you’ve been so busy attending a ton of meetings that you haven’t heard from your reports for a while, you’ll start scrambling.
“Hey, so do we have an updated roadmap?”
“Can everyone please update their Jira until Friday?”
“So management wants to know what’s happening, so I’ll be setting up 1:1s with all of you – please prepare an overview of your current projects etc.”
If you’re writing these asks to your group after having left them alone for a while, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll get poor results.
You might be frustrated, thinking something like “How is it that difficult, why can’t they just get it right” (which unfortunately is primarily your fault, or rather, responsibility).
But you’re pressed for time, so you’ll just do your best to roll everything into something that seems viable to satisfy management’s queries.
Lumbering Along
So the org usually lumbers along like this – somehow stuff gets done, but it’s always underwhelming and inefficient.
Then, management might be okay with your update.
This satisfaction might be short-lived, as the manual effort you and your reports have conducted would need to be repeated for the next update, which we all know is going to be due soon.
You might even be thinking – ‘why is it so time-consuming to just get an update’, and subsequently realising ‘if I were more on top of everything continually, this would be easier for me, and of better quality’.
The Trap: Too Busy To Be Efficient
You’ve definitely seen any one iteration of this comic. Image Source: Alex Ewerlöf on Medium
To make a radical, meaningful change here would require a quite substantial and abrupt departure from the aforementioned habit.
Unfortunately, the trap here resembles the overly-tired analogy with the square-wheel cart and the “we can’t stop to change for round wheels, or else we won’t get there in time as per our previous plan” people – to properly clean house, you’d need to trim quite a bit of fat, but all of the individual meetings, requests etc. have their own little justification, urgency or pressure why you can’t lay them aside as a preliminary measure.
No Front
Now – don’t get me wrong.
Quite a few (product) leaders are really good at leading, prioritizing, owning the process among other things.
But the reality is that a lot of leaders aren’t seasoned or educated in that field, they’re rather deeply experienced ICs, in management positions for different reasons.
And – the problem is, you might assume that any criticism in your direction is an insult to your professional aptitude, or even your intelligence.
It absolutely isn’t.
You might think that you know what you ideally should be doing.
And there’s a good chance that you’re right!
…you just can’t find the time to do it.
The Solution: Get an Assistant (But Not a Secretary!)
So – yes, you could solve this on your own.
Radically clean house, cut all unimportant meetings, own top-level product strategy and planning, and coach your reports into superstar ICs.
But – you’re probably not going to do that.
Again – no offense.
As I mentioned initially, this tends to surpass one person’s capacity.
And – we all know, product managers are notoriously bad at forecasting, tracking and managing their time allocation (we all should be rigorously using a ticketing system, but that’s a different TED talk).
That’s why you should do what everyone else does in that situation – get an assistant.
I know – you most probably can’t use a ‘regular’ assistant, such as a secretary. And that’s not what I mean.
You need someone who’s also very experienced at product management. And/or people management. But not interested in taking your position.
Step 1: Increase Bandwidth
Imagine if you could hand off some meetings, or projects, or initiatives to an assistant.
You could prevent a delivery shortage, but free up some of your bandwidth to work on your own modus operandi while you have your assistant representing you in stakeholder meetings, preparing reports or coaching your team.
Step 2: Structural Review & Plan for Change
Alternatively, you can have an assistant shadow you and present a plan or recommendation on how to specifically move forward (e.g. ‘cut meetings X and Y’, ‘set up format Z with group A’).
Plan this out properly, and then follow through on it.
Step 3: Execute and Finish (or Repeat)
After you’re done applying your measures, make sure to check whether they’re working well (or not).
Ultimately, this is supposed to be a fixed-term exercise – you’re not supposed to have someone do superfluous tasks in perpetuity, you’re rather supposed to use the extra hand to clean house and run a leaner, more effective setup.
However, it is possible that you didn’t get it right the first time – then you could repeat the process until you get satisfactory results, or you could also repeat it regularly, as a type of audit.
How Do I Get an Assistant?!
Can you tell what type of people I’d recommend as your assistant?
- Experienced
- Not at risk of competing for your position
- Available for fixed-term engagements
You guessed it – senior product management freelancers.
There’s a number of great freelance/fractional product talent out there that you could hire on an hourly basis. A specific briefing such as “I need to sort out the amount of meetings I’m in, and need a second opinion” or “I need someone to implement collaborative framework XYZ with my group of 6 product managers” is even rather easy to quantify.
Expensive?
Yes, this will cost you some money.
But – first of all, this would usually not come out of your pocket, but out of your company’s budget.
And – if you’d like to explore the cost-related effects of other options, here’s a quick overview:
- Hiring an intern: That’ll actually end up costing you more because you’re training them for a while, and they won’t be able to contribute during that time. Also, they don’t bring the required expertise. Interns serve a vastly different purpose and game plan.
- Hiring another employee: Aside from that usually being more expensive and the inherent conflict of interest (employees usually like keeping their jobs), there’s not a lot of FTE talent out there keen to be hired as a full-time assistant.
- Rawdogging it: As I said, you can try it on your own, but there’s a reason why most people don’t…
- Use AI: Similar to ‘hiring an intern’, that’ll ultimately cost you more time than you’re already spending (AI tools could be part of your change plan, though).
So, there’s my recommendation:
Get an Assistant
Did you read all the way to here because this was helpful to you?
Did I zone in on a problem you’re facing right now?
Or did you read it all because you utterly disagree with me and rage-baited yourself?
Are you keen to have a good old-fashioned keyboard brawl in the comments section?
Either way, looking forward to your feedback – send it to me on LinkedIn, find my LI link below 👇
Do you know someone who could benefit from reading this post? I’d much appreciate your share and recommendation – and hopefully they will, too!
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