Building Product Team — The Orbit Shift

Every successful company goes through the interesting and challenging phase of scaling up. What makes it interesting is the ever-changing contours of problems ahead of everyone in the team. In an interview with Reid Hoffman, Marissa Meyer talks about her experience of scaling up at Google:

Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot at Google. One of the things he said was, at every order of magnitude (1, 10, 100, 1,000, etc) — expect every process to break. You would need to change the process each time at each level of scale.

I saw this happen all of the time with all of our processes: our hiring process, code deployment, etc. We would go one step further and everything would break.

If you are part of an organization that is scaling up, you would have experienced this first hand. As the organization scales, you have the opportunity to scale with the organization i.e. take bigger and more complex responsibilities to support the scaling process.

As professionals and organizations scale, they encounter certain stages in their respective lives where they have to make a substantially big leap in the way they operate. These transitions are akin to an interplanetary spacecraft abandoning its existing orbit to maneuver to a higher trajectory. During an Orbit Shift, the spacecraft needs to be monitored and steered with utmost precision as they are highly susceptible to losing direction and control. Similarly, professionals and organizations need to be deliberate about managing themselves as they are undergoing an Orbit Shift.

I have seen two occasions in my career where I experienced Orbit Shifts:

1. The transition to Product Management
2. The transition to becoming Manager of Product Managers

In this post (and the subsequent ones), I would like to journal my thoughts on the second Orbit Shift.

The transition from PM to Manager of PMs

It’s been well over a year since I transitioned from being an Individual Contributor Product Manager to a Manager of PMs. Boy, it has been an interesting journey. After several missteps, I feel better positioned to manage this role.

It appears that the key to this transition, or for any transition, is being deliberate about identifying and executing the tasks that come with the new role.

Every year, thousands of professionals transition from an Individual Contributor (IC) role to a Manager role where they are responsible for leading one or more individuals. As I was making this transition, I realized that while there is a vast amount of content (books, podcasts, blogs, etc) focusing on leadership, there is hardly any good content available to help one with the transition into a leadership role. In the next few weeks, I would like to articulate my learnings from the past few weeks here.

What is the primary responsibility of a Manager of Product Managers?

While a Product Manager is responsible for the conception, creation, launch, adoption, and growth of their Product, the Manager of Product Managers is responsible for all that and more.

The primary responsibility of a Manager of PMs is the conception, creation, launch, adoption, and growth of the Product Management Process in their organization.

Depending on the maturity of the organization and the maturity of the Product function within the organization, the Manager of PMs may have to focus on different aspects of the Product Management Process.

What is the Product Management Process?

To put it simply, the Product Management Process (some may call it Product Playbook) is the structured, repeatable and scalable Product Management practices.

As the Product function grows in number in an organization, the manager of PMs is responsible to ensure the effective articulation and implementation of the Product Management Process. They are also responsible for constantly reviewing and updating the Process.

Product Management Process broadly comprises of the following:

• Growing team numerically — Identify areas within the company where PMs aren’t paying the required amount of attention and fill these gaps by adding more people to the team. These people can be from outside the company or transition from a different team within.
• Growing team qualitatively — Work with the team members and facilitate learning and growth. Managers have to create deliberate spaces for feedback conversation such as regular 1:1s.
• Planning and execution — Chart out plans for the organization with different time horizons — Vision (1–2 years), Roadmaps (3 months), OKRs(3 months), Sprints (1–4 weeks), etc. Ensure that the ownership and timelines for the tasks are assigned and communicated.
• Establishing best practices — Document and communicate Product Management best practices for activities such as spec writing, sprint planning, support team training, project planning, tool evaluation, etc.
• Buck stopping — Ensure high-quality decision making and speedy removal of roadblocks for the team.

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about some of these in more detail. Looking forward to your feedback on your experience of dealing with this transition. Do you feel I have missed any aspect of managing PMs here? Please let me now.

P.S. — Why do I write?

1. To journal my thoughts and dwell on it.
2. To seek inputs from readers like you and widen my thoughts.
3. To get better at writing.