The Product Manager Rotation Game

You might have come across this position plan for Product Managers and noticed that they are supposed to be in the middle of everything:

? 2011 Martin Eriksson @ mind the product

Product guru Steve Johnson puts Product Managers between Sales, Marketing, Development and the Executive team (see https://youtu.be/J8F2_ZtoCzk). So if Product Managers are in the middle of everything - you can game them!

Turn, turn, turn!

Product Managers work with lots of different teams and departments. And while they work with one team they have to (virtually) turn their backs towards other departments. This might be only for a few hours but it happens and it needs to happen. The "neglected" department heads, team leads or stakeholders can agree with the other heads and stakeholders on a Product Manager Rotation Game:

1. Wait until the Product Manager works with a different department. Then start yelling and pushing for features which are of high importance for your team.
2. The moment the Product Manager turns towards you for working on your demands, another stakeholder has to start screaming for Product's attention.
3. If you do this in a defined order with a certain frequency it's possible to make the Product Manager - virtually and literally - rotate.
4. Increase the speed.

The result of this game is a Product Manager in high-speed idle run. They will be under constant pressure without any useful output.

It's not a game, it's reality!

If you're a Product Manager - do you have the feeling that you went through this already? You might be right! This game is the brutal reality in some companies - especially startups. If it's "Execution First" there are always a thousand things to do and remember. While you're working on a high priority task people will ask or shout about other tasks. And if things don't turn out as expected it's easy to blame the Product Managers because they might or should have been involved in whatever went wrong. They are in the middle of everything, so they touch all the wheels and have to keep all of them turning - correct?

Game improvements

Product Managers have their tools and one is called "Prioritization". If you concentrate on one task and are able to bring it to a defined "level of finalization" you will be able to ignore it for a while and concentrate on the next task. Overall you will be at least 30% faster than the Product Manager who switches tasks all the time. The lost time is the time it takes to get into the new task and catching up on necessary communication around it.

But there are ways to destroy every good prioritized plan:

• "We're agile": If priorities say that you need to wait for the Product Manager's attention, play the "Don't be so corporate" card: "We're a startup, we have to be agile" - so the Product Manager better starts turning, in your direction! Who cares about other high priority tasks for other departments?
• "It's just a four hour task": Try to bypass the Product Managers. Directly go to the Development team. If they are inexperienced they might accept your change request. That has the advantage of missing documentation of your changes. So if the release or the whole tool breaks - it's not your fault! The developer is just too stupid. And if the Product Manager would have thought about your request, checked dependencies, created tickets, queued your request in a defined manner for development, organized translations and QA for the finalization - who can tell afterwards if that would have helped? And with all that unnecessary overhead it wouldn't have been a four hour task any more!
• "I downloaded it already from the internet" ... and the stock image/code snippet/library/tool just has to be integrated. And integration can't be so hard because you saw it working on that other website. Details like licenses, copyrights, API implementation, CSS adjustments, Javascripts influencing or even breaking each other, thoughts about scaling or later updates of that external code - pffft, who cares?
• "My feature is still the most important one - for me!" If four departments have their features prioritized there will naturally be a feature with "Priority 4". Unacceptable! Just ignore the prioritization that was done in that totally intransparent meeting you skipped because you would have needed to discuss about the boring feature requests of other departments. Just continue nagging the Product Managers about the importance of your feature and how ignorant they are not to help you increase sales by 200% or 2'000'000 € per month or ... (put random number and unit here). Make it clear that they are keeping you from doing your job thus they are not doing their job!
• "The Product Manager's job is to say No." The No - of course - is not a valid answer to your feature request. For such an important request that would just be ridiculous! Every idiot in the company understands the importance of your feature request. If the Product Managers don't they simply don't think in favor of the business and company. Tell them to take ownership also of business goals. They surely didn't!

Burn, burn, burn!

The Product Manager Rotation Game might be funny for you but you can be sure of one thing: It's not funny for the Product Managers. Depending on their standing in the company they might

• quit for a new job. Then you can regard the game as won. Ready to grill the next Product Manager? Who needs Product Managers anyways? You can do it yourself!
• keep fighting for an organized and prioritized specification and development process with defined releases. Worst case they might succeed. Then you should start looking for a more agile company that values your ideas more. Good luck with that!