I joined accuRx, a health-tech scale-up that builds communication software for the NHS, in October 2019. I came from having worked in NGOs and academia; meaning accuRx was my first exposure to working for a tech company as well as in product.
I’d held leadership positions in the past, run vision writing and planning sessions, line managed, and knew how to build a high performing team on the principles of trust and fun — which all greatly helped get me going those first few months as a PM. However, the ceremonies of agile development, managing software delivery, and writing OKRs were all very new to me. I was fortunate to be surrounded by brilliant people such as accuRx’s CEO, Jacob (my first line manager at accuRx), and an incredibly well-versed product person, Matt, who had over 10 years of experience in product! I remember sitting in meetings with Jacob and Matt, watching them talk, and not being able to comprehend how they could possibly have such fleshed out and innovative ideas (something I’m still really impressed by, but feel less mystified over).
About six months into my time with accuRx, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. At the time, accuRx’s software was used across the UK in about 60% of primary care (I remember our party in February 2020 when we popped champagne and ate banana bread celebrating hitting 50%). The pandemic put incredible pressures on healthcare systems, which needed to revolutionise how they delivered care; from predominantly face to face appointments to completely reliant on video consultations. Healthcare staff are incredible, and they rose to the challenge. Within a couple months, accuRx’s software for sending sick notes digitally, allowing patients to submit digital photos of their physical ailments, and the ability to conduct video consultations without patients needing to download an app — was being used in over 97% of primary care in the UK.
During those months of mayhem, two more incredible product people joined accuRx; Jen and Benji. I was still constantly impressed with how well Matt and Jacob understood our users, how they could articulate their problems, and how they would think of different approaches and solutions. Jacob especially never shies away from challenging the status quo for how healthcare is being delivered in the UK, and Jen and Benji seemed to have this mindset second nature. I was pretty hard on myself during this time, because I simply didn’t feel I could ever be part of their league. I was working so hard, and my schedule was so packed, I just didn’t see how it was feasible for me to do what they did (and still sleep at night!)
It was now about a year since I joined accuRx and we’d normalised to a new way of working during the pandemic (it was still pretty intense with remote first meetings and most people working at home — but at least it felt more sustainable). Benji was my line manager, and on a Friday night at 7pm the penny dropped and I sent him a Slack message that read: “I realised that the difference between a PM vs senior PM is NOT: senior PM = everything the PM does plus a bunch of extra stuff.”
When I look back at this message it doesn’t feel revolutionary, and I’m sure Jacob, Matt, Jen and Benji had all told me something to this regard in the months leading up to it — but there’s a big difference between understanding something logically and emotionally.
Three months later I was promoted to Senior Product Manager at accuRx.
Now, what I will share below is based on my experience, with my background, the skills I had coming into my first role in product, the environment of accuRx, and the intensity of acceleration because of the pandemic. If you’re a product manager looking to make the leap up to senior, your list may look different to mine — but you will have a list of things you have to stop doing to make room for the new responsibility you will be taking on.
Conducting all the user research for my team
When I first joined accuRx, my product team was me and three engineers. We were tasked to bring an early prototype of a secure healthcare survey for asthma to national rollout (we called ourselves “The Asthmanauts”). This meant my role was to do all the discovery, design, and user testing of product changes before they were ready for the developers to take on.
In those first weeks, I would spend my days back to back speaking with users. This was pre-COVID so we could also go out to practices in and around London to test things out in person with healthcare providers. I would finish my day of calls and travels back and forth to clinics, and then spend the evenings writing up tickets for the backlog to be discussed in the next sprint planning. It was exhausting, but fulfilled — because my ear was on the ground and I felt like I was really getting to know the users we were trying to serve.
About a month into this, I was meeting with Jacob and Matt and they wanted to start talking about “what’s next” for my team. I hadn’t put any mental time into this beforehand, and felt overwhelmed. I’d been so busy with my head down in the field that I hadn’t come up to look at the roadmap of considerations coming next.
User research as a senior PM
As a Senior PM, I love attending user research sessions. I still make sure that I go to at least one every week so that I stay in touch with what our users want and how they think. However, I work with a full time user researcher (Katie, she’s incredible) whom I trust completely to collect the insights we need, validate our assumptions, and tell me when something we’re getting ready for development isn’t quite right.
As a Senior PM, often I don’t know the “right’’ answers (and I am no longer the person who gets to go find them), but I am responsible for ensuring the people that do know are involved in the important conversations and decision making to lead our team to the best outcome.
Running (or even attending) every meeting
As a product manager, I felt a great sense of responsibility towards ensuring all the ceremonies of our team were run well, in an engaging way, and hit the meeting objectives. This often meant I was constantly stretched (especially in times of planning) to prepare for, and deliver, every: vision exercise, OKR review, sprint planning, retro, stand-up, backlog grooming, ways of working discussion, Show & Tell presentation, team social — you name it! Especially during the start of the pandemic when all our meetings switched to remote, I would spend many late nights making sure slide decks for the next day were ready to go.
Meetings as a senior PM
As a Senior PM, I involve my whole team in running meetings — and my team often comes to me proposing new ways of doing things. We rotate running stand-up every day, and I take my turn same as everyone else on my team. This means if I go on holiday for a week, I’m not scared that things will fall apart without me.
At the point where you know what you’re doing and are comfortable leading all your team’s meetings yourself, you are probably ready to start handing this over to others. Often this will mean more work for you at first; providing mentoring, reviewing slides, and fixing things if they go array. But in the long run it means you have an up-skilled team, who are more self-sufficient and not completely reliant on you for all leadership.
As a Senior PM, you are responsible for the outcome of your team’s meetings, but you do not have to be the one and only person to make them happen.
Allowing every request to hit the backlog
Now this one is really tricky, and after 18 months I still don’t feel like I’m a pro at it. But as a product manager, I often let any and every request (regardless of where it came from) become a ticket in our backlog. Be that something a user said off-hand during a feedback call or an idea thrown around on Slack.
Now, capturing and acknowledging ideas is really important as it can help you track patterns and come up with new innovative solutions. However, having every idea in one and the same bucket makes it really difficult to indicate priority. It can also be really confusing for the team when they’re looking at the backlog and trying to understand what needs to be picked up next as this doesn’t encourage focus or reducing context switching.
Wielding a roadmap as a senior PM
Now, as a Senior PM I’m a bit more strict with our backlog, but I ensure that ideas from different channels don’t get lost. I aggregate data on Dovetail (our user research tool), create Notion pages, and put together slide decks. I set myself reminders to keep up on reviewing these in regular intervals — and I bring the items that become priorities into backlog grooming.
One of the best tools in your PM arsenal for helping keep on top of, and communicating, priority internally in your team and externally to your wider company is your product roadmap (which is separate from your backlog). What makes a roadmap so powerful is that you can create columns and lanes that suit your team to capture ideas stratified in different categories.
When I was transitioning from product manager to senior product manager, I didn’t necessarily know or expect any of these particular changes — but I knew there would be a change. In order to make space (both time wise but also mentally) for the additional strategic responsibility and longer-term ownership of your product, there are certain things I needed to let go of.
Throughout the past year and a half, my team has also grown and matured. A more mature team has very different needs than a younger team, and this has had an impact on how involved I have needed to be. The more comfortable you are with each other, the easier it is for you as the PM to take a step back since the foundations of trust have already been laid.
Now as a senior PM, if I were to start in a new team that doesn’t know each other (and where I didn’t know the products or users as well), what I would do would be different than what I do now (and likely more similar to what I was doing as a new product manager). However, with experience comes familiarity, and being able to recognise (and project) the steps means I may be able to go through the journey faster.
What I’ve learned about product management is that there isn’t a formula to follow (Read Product Manager You Are… a janitor, essentially) but a big piece of being successful in the role is sensing what you, your team, your users, and your product needs (and then trying to figure out how to give it to them!)
If you’ve made the leap (or are working towards it), I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
