I added a meeting to my calendar… and my team is thriving!
Before we start, I want to tell you about the composition of my team. It is structured like any regular product team, with a slight difference. The team is composed by a Product Manager, a Product Designer, a Tech Lead, and several software engineers. Additionally, we have an extra position in our team, the “Process Owner,” which is closer to the physical operations of the company. Since we work on tools to help our logistical processes, and our products are not purely digital, close contact with the constraints and limitations of our logistic processes is very important. Instead of the famous product trio, we have a “product quartet”.
Now that you have a better insight into our team structure let me tell you how we became more efficient by adding a new weekly meeting to our calendars.
Shortly after I joined the team, my manager advised me that building good relationships with these 3 profiles (Process Owner, Tech Lead, and Product Designer) should be one of my top priorities since it would be crucial for long term effectiveness, alignment, mitigating internal conflicts and maintaining morale within the team.
Building good working relationships with your team members is critical for the success of your team and for your success as a Product Manager.
So I started bi-weeklies individual “catch-ups” with each of them, and they did the same with each other. And for the better part of two years, this format worked really well for us, as we got to know each other’s personalities, shared context and concerns about the product, and gave each other important information about the tasks. This allowed us to better support and work together because we knew where everyone stood.
Later, however, these meetings felt less about building and maintaining our good relationships and alignment and more about giving status reports and asking for information. The Tech Lead would tell me about a technical problem. I would ask the PO for her opinion on alternatives and then talk to the Product Designer about how it could affect our user’s experience. In the end, I would need input from all of them for most matters, so I would ping-pong between them for a couple of days, between 1on1s and Slack messages.
It was a huge time waster, mainly because the best outcomes always happened when we were all together and could discuss things in “real-time”, building upon each other’s comments and feedback. Why would I repeat the same question to 3 different people when we could just have a 5 minute conversation and get it done? I decided to get everyone in a room once a week to align on any topic that required our inputs.
The first meeting felt like a disaster that lasted twice the time it was supposed to, and halfway through it, we realized that we had divergent views on something crucial to the quarter’s objective, which was frustrating since we were halfway through the quarter. But we didn’t give up on those meetings and kept doing them. We talked about our different views until we reached a consensus that made sense for everyone. Once we had a common alignment on the subject, we left with clear next steps and even ended up changing our team’s focus because we realized we were not doing the most important thing.
Fast forward a couple of months, and this is our product quartet’s only standing meeting. All one-on-ones (between us four) were removed and are only done as needed. This saved us 6 hours a week and created a much more cohesive and aligned team, even though the number of products we manage has grown.
Before we part… I am not advocating that you shouldn’t have one-on-ones! Having them was key to building trust with my colleagues, which unlocked many opportunities. At this point, it made sense to reduce them for my team since we all have a good working relationship outside. And whenever we feel the need, we will add them on an ad-hoc basis.
