Death of Project management in Product management at Oda
A quick google search on “What is it that Product Managers do” will probably culminate in a list that looks something like this (based on this great medium article by Brent Tworetzky):
Strategic Thinking: Great PMs help teams find and prioritize high-potential ideas to work on.
- Sufficient Technicals: Great PMs thrive in their and their partners’ technical environments
- Collaboration: Great PMs help their teams perform at a high level internally and across the organization.
- Communication: Great PMs ensure that others successfully understand what they need to know.
- Detail Orientation: Great PMs help teams achieve high velocity and quality by paying attention to details that matter.
- User Science & Empathy: Great PMs employ user science to identify high potential user problems and successfully evaluate a product’s user impact.
- (and lots of other skills depending on which article you click into)
In other words: there is plenty of things for a product manager to do and for many (including myself) an impossible task to do everything at perfection. And if the expectations of fulfilling the above-mentioned skills were not enough to give you self crippling doubt, there has also been a sense of anticipation that the Product Manager also does a lot of project management for the projects within their product space.
Why project management is important in Oda
Some context on why project management is considered important in parts of Oda might be worth mentioning. At Oda, we build everything (with a few exceptions) ourselves. That includes everything from what the customer sees and uses in the frontend app to place an order, to all the algorithms, integrations, tools, and apps used by procurement, fulfillment, and delivery teams in the Logistics Platform (and everything in between).
Smooth rollout of changes without any downtime in our systems is always what we aim for, and for bigger projects, this is often a challenge. This is where great project management can make a difference: ensure our MVPs are tested, identify smaller bugs early on, get instant feedback from our users, plan training if needed, get in place any hardware or physical equipment if needed, coordinate with other parts of our logistics operation, be the first-hand support during launch, be the responsible communicator of the launch and many many smaller and bigger tasks. Many of these tasks could often be done together with people from other disciplines. A UX Designer is for example often helping in on getting user feedback from the MVP testing, but the project manager is the one who makes it happen.
Some challenges on ensuring great project management in Oda
After a recent rollout that my team was responsible for we faced many support requests in the aftermath of the rollout, ending up with some unnecessary downtime, extra work, and also a lengthy support period for our software engineers in fixing minor things. We believe their valuable time could have been used on other projects if the project management had been better. We performed a project rollout evaluation and identified three issues:
- Lack of sufficient deep training of the users
- Lack of clearly defined way of working for the process that the tools were developed for
- Lack in the preparations and raising awareness for the users before launch.
How we aim to ensure better project management going forward
Within the Logistics Platform at Oda, we have recently made some organizational changes to ensure that we are better rigged for great project management in bigger project rollouts. The wall between Product & Tech-teams and strong logistics domain development teams has been torn down and the cross-functional team building the technology now consists of another discipline: Logistics development. The teams now consist of UX Designers, Software Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Logistics Developers, and Product Managers. With the new setup, we can better allocate colleagues with the correct skillset and prerequisites for each project to succeed.
A lot of this responsibility that has previously been on the Product Manager’s shoulder is now given to people with strong domain skills and close connection to the end-users in the operation. We believe this increases the probability of a successful rollout and also ensures that Project Management is not a bullet point on the list at the top of this writing of things that Product Managers (should) do.
