As a product manager you’re an asshole until proven otherwise. Every engineer I have spoken with has a horror story about a product manager. Product managers are often proponents of feature creep, and at the same time asking the team to move faster. As a product manager, I can attest that resisting the urge to add features is difficult. But, the best product managers I have seen actually see it as their job to destroy backlogs, and to find the most direct path to validating specific market assumptions. They don’t focus on making the team move faster through a mountain of tasks. They see their job as defining the least amount of work to drive the most value.
A common scenario
A product manager walks into a room and discusses a bunch of features with engineering. Most aren’t needed, but are felt to be needed.
Then every day for the next month, the product manager peaks around the corner and says, “why aren’t we done yet?”.
Engineers believe product managers are saying they aren’t doing a good job in these situations. Engineers, in turn, don’t trust the product manager and look at them like the guy in the picture below: a talking corporate head.
If you are a product manager you have probably been seen as this person at one time or another. I know I have been. Creating mountainous backlogs and trying to make your team move faster through the tasks causes a ton of harm. It creates a lack of focus within the team.
Make your team efficient: Build less, accomplish more
When a team is half way through a mountain of features there are more problems than engineering being frustrated with a product manager. Business can’t deliver to clients fast enough and becomes anxious. Engineers become overly stressed.
A product manager should diffuse this tension.
The best product managers I have seen understand that their job is to guide the team so they can efficiently validate their most important market hypothesis. This equates to making the team build less.
A product manager’s job is making the team build less, and accomplish more.
They should help qualify which market assumptions would have a large positive impact on the business, what the minimum solution could be, and then cut down the feature set until it hurts.
As I’ve tried to get better at being a product manager over the past year an advisor recommended a tactic I do each week. Take thirty minutes and clean the backlog of tasks your team has created. Review all of the tasks your team has committed engineering resources towards and ask, “would we do this if we wanted to build the least amount possible to validate X assumption?”
Cut as much as possible. If it starts hurting to cut tasks because you feel like you need them, you are on the right track. The truth is, you probably don’t need them.
I’ll be posting follow up notes on different tactics I use to help the team build less at URX. I’ll also post screw ups, because those are more fun to read about.
