Another PM Presented my Work. WTF?

This post originally appeared in my newsletter on Aug 4, 2024

In this edition we talk about a situation that does arise every so often in our careers and can elicit some strong reactions. Our team's work being presented to an important audience on our behalf without really our consent. This topic was picked up on the product management subreddit and it garnered some great answers.

Q: I was added to a meeting where another PM was presenting my work to senior leaders. I asked about it and he acted like it was normal, no shame about it whatsoever. I’m pissed and feel like it needs to be discussed further. The person hasn’t touched this work and it’s quite an interesting feature. What would you do?

Like many of the questions on the excellent Product Management Subreddit, this question definitely remind me of the few times in my career where something similar happened and when at times I was the PM being asked to present a feature I had not directly worked on.

Here are a couple of suggestions I have leveraged when this happened.

1. The first thing to do before jumping to action is to understand the context of the meeting in really two parts. Part 1 is to understand who is the audience of this meeting, as in my experience the higher level the attendees are, the more likely IC and even middle managers will get a non-speaking part. For example, typically a C-level of managing committee level meeting will have a very specific and few numbers of individual who are selected to speak.
2. Once we understand the attendees, there exist an opportunity to learn and listen. Seek out the person that setup the meeting or your manager to try and understand how the speaking parts were assigned and what was the why behind those decisions. A reminder that in both large and small organization, one should never underestimate the power of chaos in companies big and small. Most thing if not all don’t have much mal-intent, they are just a function of org dynamics.
3. The main portion of your response (once you understand the context) would be to take the initiative and seize the momentum created by your team’s work and feature being presented. Follow up with the meeting attendees and start telling your feature and team story. Remind them of what is the problem space you are going after, why users should care and what is up next ie launch, iteration, testing etc. Define how you will measure success and set an expectation as to when they can expect an update which can be via a meeting or email / slack.

If the Shoe is on the other foot

If you are the leader presenting the work to the audience on behalf of a peer, be an advocate for them. A/ be clear as to what you are trying to communicate in the meeting B/ clue in the team and C/ make sure you recognize them in the setting. Lastly I tend to try and make sure there is an opportunity for that team to directly interact with the meeting attendees going forward

It’s important to remember that there can a wide variety of reason for this happening and the most important part, more than being heard or your ire being known is to understand the why, so that you can formulate a plan or a set of actions to address.