Managing Other Product Managers Part 2: Meaningfulness at Work

This post is part of a series about how product managers can increase their value velocity. See the intro post for an overview and links to other topics.

If you’re managing other product managers, and you want them to maximize the value they are delivering for the business, you need to make sure to pay attention to four major areas:

1. Empowerment: Are the PMs empowered to deliver in their swim lane?
2. Meaningfulness at Work: Do the PMs have an understanding of why their work matters?
3. Psychological Safety: Are the PMs operating in a psychologically safe environment?
4. Continuous Improvement: Do the PMs have a structured process for continuous improvement?

In my previous post, I discussed Empowerment. In this post, I will provide some practical guidance about how to be a great manager to PMs in the area of Meaningfulness at Work.

Meaningfulness at Work

Intuitively, you probably know that when people care about the work they’re doing, they end up doing better work. This obvious-seeming instinct is supported by numerous work studies, including Google’s influential Project Oxygen research and also some of the work studies that underpin Agile and Scrum. When people find meaningfulness at work, they care more, and they deliver value at a higher rate.

And yet, so many managers of PMs don’t bother or don’t know how to support meaningfulness in the day to day work of the PMs on their teams. This is a shame and a big missed opportunity. As a manager to PMs, you must spend time thinking about your PMs, and what matters to them, and how their work impacts the business and the outside world. You must find ways to credibly support the things that matter to your team on a regular basis. If you do, you can help your team find more meaningfulness in their work, and they will be more content, and their value velocity will go up.

One of the reasons that managers shy away from talking about meaningfulness at work is that, when done incorrectly, it can feel like BS. “Complete those TPS reports and you’ll change the world!” Well, sure, BS doesn’t create meaningfulness and doesn’t motivate. In fact, some managers may find it easier and safer to act disaffected. “Yeah, we all know these TPS reports are dumb, but we have to do them. Let’s just try to get through them, okay?” I can tell you: disaffection is not the winning path. If you tell your team that their work is unimportant, they will treat it that way. You must put in the effort to find an honest way to talk about the meaningfulness of your team’s work.

Okay — so how do you do it? For each PM on your team, you need to think through and find a way to discuss personal meaningfulness and work meaningfulness. Supporting personal meaningfulness requires one-on-one focus and attention. Supporting work meaningfulness can be done team-wide.

Personal Meaningfulness

The PMs on your team spend a good chunk of their lives doing their jobs. Why do they do it? The answer is different for each person, and can include a mix of reasons, such as:

• Supporting the lifestyle and activities that they care about
• Providing for loved ones
• Building toward something that matters to them
• Doing work they are proud of

These are some of the main reasons that work can be meaningful for a person. As a manager, I encourage you to think about each person on your team and ask yourself: what is personally meaningful to them? The better you know the answer, the better you can support that employee.

If you don’t know what is individually important to a particular employee, I do not recommend directly interrogating them about it, which can be creepy or inappropriate if done incorrectly. Rather, I encourage you to have an ongoing, low-key discussion with your employees about what matters to them, and to specifically open the door every once in a while with comments like:

“I’m always interested to know what matters to the people I work with. For me, one of the things that motivates me personally is [insert your own real reason here]. I’m certainly interested in hearing what motivates you, if you ever feel comfortable sharing it.” Plant the seed, and give it some time to grow. Learning about your team is an ongoing and long-term project.

Once you know what’s meaningful to an employee, you can find ways to support those things, and this will make them feel more appreciated and satisfied, and their productivity will go up.

As an example, if you know that someone is very family focused, you can make sure they know that they have flexibility to do family activities during normal work hours. If someone is focused on getting to the next stage in their career, you can help them find a course or event to attend that will move them ahead. If someone is focused on personal recognition, you can find opportunities for them to showcase their work to the broader team.

When your team members feel supported at an individual level, they will deliver for you.

NOTE: for a deeper discussion of this topic, and so many other important related topics, I highly recommend the book Radical Candor.

Work Meaningfulness

Your goal in this area is to communicate to your team why their work matters in a way that doesn’t come off as BS. This is harder than it seems, and requires dedicated reflection about the nature of the work the team is doing, and the impact of that work.

I recommend you make sure you regularly address three different levels of work meaningfulness.

1. Team

Human beings have a natural instinct to want to be part of a winning team. It is important, as a manager, for you to find things you genuinely believe are special about your team and to talk about them, while including some specifics. Examples:

“The work this team has done on project [x] is really impressive. It was a hard project, and we got it out on time and it’s being really well-received. I’m proud of what we’ve done.”

or

“It’s been a tough few months but this team has really come together. Particularly when that high priority outage happened, we all rallied together and addressed it. It was tough but we did it together, and we learned from it.”

The stories you tell must be true. What is really special about what this team has done? Think over the things your team did that are aligned with the values of the company, or that were hard, or that were important. Find the truth, and share it with your team. It won’t sound like BS, and they will appreciate it.

One thing you should avoid doing is encouraging “hero culture”, such as congratulating your team for staying up all night to deal with an emergency. That sends a bad message. It’s better to focus on the great work your team did to prevent an emergency in the first place.

2. Company

It’s important to regularly tie the work that your team is doing to things that matter to the business. When teams feel like they’re working on something that matters, they tend to do better work. Teams that are working on things that no one cares about tend to do worse.

If you can tell your team: “The company hits its goal of adding 100 new customers last quarter and our component was directly responsible for half of those”, it’s a very powerful and rewarding message. When you have statements like that to share, consider including your manager or other leaders or peer groups in the communication, so your team is recognized even more broadly.

There are, however, occasions when your team may be working on items that are not the primary focus of the business. How do you motivate a team in a situation like that? The answer is to find what is genuinely impactful about the team’s work, and highlight it to them. Maybe their work is important to keep legacy customers happy, or to test out a theory that someone has, or just to keep the company running smoothly.

As a manager, you need to find an honest way to discuss the value of what your team is doing, such as: “The revenue we get from legacy customers is what allows this company to invest in its pivot. Our work to keep those legacy customers happy is crucial to the success of the business.” Or “The money that we save by upgrading this hardware is money that we can use to build important stuff next quarter; we are giving the company much needed oxygen and it’s important.” As long as you find a narrative that you personally believe is true, it won’t come off as BS to your team.

3. The Outside World

It’s extremely validating for teams to hear how their work impacts people outside the company. You should regularly bring quantitative info (e.g. “Our customers have saved a collective 2000 hours of grunt work thanks to the feature we built”) and qualitative info (e.g. “I spoke with ABC Manufacturing yesterday and they told me they’ve been able to expand their operations specifically because of the new feature we built. They’re hiring more people in good jobs, and it’s thanks to our work.”)

These kinds of stories from outside the building are priceless because they really show how the day-to-day work that the team does, which may even seem mundane at times, is really making a positive impact for real people in the real world. From time to time in my career, I’ve been able to have a customer come meet with the team directly and just talk about how they use the product and how the product has helped them, and it has always been extraordinarily impactful on team satisfaction and productivity.

It’s your job to support meaningfulness at work for your team

If you put in the time to support meaningfulness, your team will be happier, and they’ll do better work. There is no trick here. You need to care about what matters to your individual team members, and you need to be thoughtful about how your team’s work impacts the company and the outside world. And after all that caring and thoughtfulness, you need to find credible ways to talk about it on a regular basis.

Up Next

My next post is another one for managers of product managers, focused on the very important topic of Psychological Safety.