How Delivery Managers Enable Product Managers to Ship Stellar Software

My journey into Product Management might not be considered typical, but then again is there a “traditional” Product Manager’s journey into Product? Starting off my career in product at a start-up meant that I didn’t get an opportunity to learn and work with other critical product roles that allow a team to ship great, valuable and sticky products. One of those roles was that of a Delivery Manager. As I got exposure to mature product organization’s processes, I truly understood the value Delivery Managers bring, how Product Managers can work effectively with them, and how the synergy between these two roles allows product teams to ship stellar products.

My Introduction to the Delivery Manager Role

Back in 2019, as part of a small Cincinnati based start-up, all Product Managers were expected to wear multiple hats a day, and some of the roles that we played were of the following:

• User Experience Designer & Researcher
• Client Implementation Manager
• Customer Success Manager
• Release Manager
• Technical Writer

Being a product manager at the start-up was exhilarating but also exhausting with the immense amount of context switching involved. As we grew rapidly, the product manager role evolved as we hired user experience designers and researchers, customer success managers and client implementation managers. There was finally an opportunity for the Product Managers to start focusing on core product management while leaving the extra responsibilities we had taken on to our talented new colleagues. The hard work sincerely paid off when VNDLY made headlines in the industry by being placed in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant consistently and also getting acquired by a Megacorp, despite being the newbie in the market. This brought immense joy and anxiety to many of my colleagues and I.

Joy ?? because our hard work was validated, appreciated by most in the industry.

Anxiety ?? because the start-up processes that we were all attuned to and thriving on were about to be replaced with seasoned, well-oiled processes meant for a much more mature product company. A big question that many colleagues and I had was, what would the new company expect us to do and how would our roles change?

As anticipated, the start-up team of Product Managers were slowly introduced and inducted into the new frameworks, processes and ways of working within the Megacorp. The Product Manager role was now going to be laser focused on the core product management craft, with other dedicated resources taking up the other responsibilities that we used to handle on a daily basis. As part of this change, the role of Delivery Managers was introduced to the core product triad — Product, Engineering and User Experience Designer & Researchers.

Change is never easy, and neither was figuring out how to effectively work with a Delivery Manager when you have never done so before. I had a little bit of a rough start adapting but here are things that I did along the way to ensure I was working effectively with my then counterpart, the most talented Steven Doebler. Before we dive deep into how Delivery Managers make life easy for Product Managers, I’ll briefly touch on their responsibilities.

What do Delivery Managers do?

At the core, Delivery Managers act as the singular intake person for the team, shielding the team from the outside noise and ensuring the team only receives vetted and reviewed enhancement and new feature requests. They work tirelessly to identify impediments faced by the team at the earliest, and work to resolve them to ensure on-time and quality product delivery. They communicate out the delivery timelines for the product team as well as ensure the agile operations within the team are smooth and efficient.

I really appreciate how succinctly Silicon Valley Product Group has summarized the Delivery Manager’s job role here. It’s definitely worth the read.

Value Delivery Managers bring to Product Managers

Provide crucial cross-functional visibility into the product organization

Product teams often fall into the trap of working in silos and have minimal interaction with teams operating in different areas of the application. One example I can think of is of a team responsible for the main sign-up and login page while the other team is responsible for providing reporting capabilities to logged-in users. It is not common for the product managers and product teams operating in these spaces to interact frequently. This is where a delivery manager can provide exceptional cross-functional visibility as they work across product teams, and are aware of the different features currently being worked on and how that might impact your product team’s internal decisions. As a product team, you may choose to deprioritize or delay some work until a feature is launched by another team. A delivery manager helps in communicating those changing roadmaps and priorities to product managers.

Keep stakeholders informed of the product delivery dates and upcoming features

Delivery Managers are the first layer of defense for Product Managers who get tagged on JIRA tickets or have the dreaded Slack message sent their way, “When will this feature be shipped?” Delivery Managers work meticulously to ensure all the stakeholders are kept abreast of moving priorities, and delivery date changes. This is not to be confused with larger and longer term roadmap changes that a Product Manager is responsible for communicating.

Ensure that high priority items coming in as escalations or bugs are added and addressed before the SLAs lapse

The product manager’s job is a tough one, especially with all the competing business priorities, customer commitments and to add to that mix — we also have high severity escalations and bugs. Delivery Managers can take the lead in interacting with support teams and customer success managers to understand what needs to be worked on in the short-term to help alleviate the problems faced by users. They also can communicate to the product team when a bug needs to be addressed within the set SLA. These might come across as small items, but it takes the cognitive load off the product manager and allows the team to work on the right things at the right time.

How Product Managers can work more effectively with Delivery Managers

# 1 Let go

A core trait of product managers is to adapt quickly to change and ambiguity. Let go of the need for control on all the things that you used to do in your past Product Manager role. One of those activities for me personally was having estimation conversations with the engineering team on features and individual tickets.

Let the delivery Manager drive these conversations with the stakeholders so that you can focus your time and energy on product centric work.

#2 Have regular syncs with the Delivery Manager

It’s your responsibility as a product manager to keep the delivery manager in the loop on all the things that you have planned for the product. Ensure that they are present at every roadmap planning and sharing meetings. They need to know what is currently being worked on, and what is upcoming on the roadmap so that they can work with the engineering teams to ensure that it is planned with capacity in mind.

I used to have a 30 minute weekly recurring meeting with my delivery manager, where we discussed high priority items, bugs with high severity or frequency, and discussed if the team is on track to deliver what was committed on the product roadmap. Based on this meeting’s clear and honest discussion, we were able to craft crisp messages for the product team when we communicated change in priorities or addition of features to the board.

Summary

Delivery Managers and Product Managers, when working together effectively, can divide and conquer almost all the basic questions from the different stakeholders like engineering, user experience, leadership and the customer.

I believe that each role has its own unique set of responsibilities that need to be worked on hand-in-hand to build impactful and on-time and target features.

Delivery Managers:

• When will the product get delivered?
• How can the product team deliver the feature in time, scope and with the quality expected without impacting team health?

Product Managers:

• Why is the product team working on this feature? How does this align to the broader organizational business and product strategy?
• What is the functionality to be delivered? What are the detailed requirements?
• Who will be impacted by this feature?

I hope this article gives you more insight into the role that Delivery Managers play in shipping stellar software, and how product and delivery managers can work better together! I would love to hear your feedback and comments on this.

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