A Product Manager’s Guide to Breaking & Rebuilding Technical Foundations, Part I: Defining Scope & Direction

At Personio, the Munich-based-turned-international tech start-up, we’re focused on one core purpose: enabling better organisations. We’re doing this by building a platform that digitizes HR processes, giving HR professionals more time to focus on what matters most: their people. And as Personio continues in our current hypergrowth journey, one thing is for sure — working as a Product Manager here never gets boring!

Lately we’ve been tackling one specific barrier that is holding us back from reaching our full growth potential: the monolith. The monolith is the foundational codebase that our product was built on, and in order to continue successfully on our hypergrowth journey, we need a strong foundation that supports the team and product growth. This means taking on the monolith, breaking it down into smaller pieces, known as microservices.

As Product Managers, our first step was to adapt our focus for this technical enhancement and understand how we could enable and support the development team to build this foundation together. For many PMs, this also meant taking a step back from doing what we love most — solving customer problems by launching new features — which was challenging. That’s when four of us Personio PMs decided to band together, creating a group where we could share our challenges and learnings from each other. And now, we’re sharing these tips with you! Our hope is that you can apply them to any future challenges you may face, be they quick projects or large-scale initiatives that stretch across multiple teams and months.

We’ll each contribute to this three-part series, starting out with Part One: Defining Scope & Success. Enjoy!

Setting the Direction

This is an interesting moment in the organisation. While Product Managers are focusing on technical topics, engineers are excited to build something new. Most of them are eager to dive deep into the code, learn new technologies, and apply that knowledge to solving our customer’s problems.

As a Product Manager, you have the responsibility to support your team by creating focus. This starts with having a deeper understanding of the problem and asking relevant questions. There are a few questions that help in the process to co-create with the team:

• What is the problem that you’re trying to solve?
• Who are we solving this problem for?
• What makes this a priority?
• What is the preliminary impact we expect to have?
• What do we currently know about this problem?
• What do we need to answer?

Once this focus is defined, it’s time to start thinking about possible solutions. At this point in time, there’s no need to nail down each detail of the solution. Instead, now is the time for high-level topics. Those discussions will help the team to understand what everyone sees as a possible solution and discuss what should be considered out of scope. Most of the time, it’s more important to know what we are saying “no” to than what you say “yes” to.

Defining Success

After everyone is aligned on what is in and out of scope, it’s important to understand what success will look like. Once the technical foundation has been completed, how do we know if we are successful? What should we aim for? The answer to these questions helps to understand what is the needle that we need to work to change and what is the impact that we expect to have. This enables us to create a common goal of what we want to achieve together.

Now that the team is aligned on which direction to head, your responsibility as a Product Manager will be to maintain this focus. This means making sure that everyone in the team is moving towards that singular priority, focusing on only one thing at a time and consistently saying “No” to anything outside of that priority and scope.

What Comes Next

Being confronted with the need for deep, technical re-works of your product foundation might scare you at first. You’re looking at a rocky road and, especially if you are more used to and motivated by working on customer-facing enhancements and new features, it can feel like you are questioning the value you as the PM bring to the table.

At the same time, it’s a great opportunity for you to expand your horizon and learn a lot of new things, both in terms of the technology powering your product as well as in terms of working in a complex and interdependent environment with strong stakeholders around you.

To get there, the first step is always having a deeper understanding of the problem. After having this visibility, it’s the right time to think about solutions always having the end goal in mind. It’s an important step to co-create with the team what success will look like to set the right expectations and have a common understanding of the value.

In Part II of our Product Manager’s Guide to Breaking & Rebuilding Technical Foundations, we’ll dive into how cross-team dependencies can affect the project and how to manage them. Until then, if you’re interested in learning more about what it’s like to work in Product, Design, and Engineering at Personio, head to our careers page!

This article was written in collaboration with Aljosha Klein, Katja Hähnlein and Rory Ryan 🌻