The newly minted manager of product managers was struggling. It absolutely was the start of the entire year and one of many issues that he’d to accomplish on his set of tasks was to set up annual goals for his team.
This manager was from the project management background. In his first pass at creating goals for his team this training really found: all of the goals had regarding meeting dates. Clearly there’s more to being a product manager than this.
He was facing a revolt from his p-management team when I was introduced to see if I really could broker a remedy to this problem. The manager had a valid have to manage to manage his p-managers, but additionally they had a fair expectation that they would be measured predicated on exactly what a product manager does, not on just what a project manager does.
I stated out having a consult with the manager who was simply wanting to produce the goals. It proved that he really didn’t have an obvious comprehension of what product managers do. In summary, he viewed p-managers as kind of a “super project manager “.The only problem with this is that the business had project managers who worked on every product’s team. Clearly there had to be something different in what those two sets of employees were doing.
I then took some time and met with the p-managers themselves. It turns out that they were all busy doing exactly what you would expect an item manager to be doing: studying markets, guiding product developers, and putting out fires.
After having collected most of the available information, I brought the manager and his team back together. I started this meeting out by finding the time to explain to the manager the role that product managers played in his company.
Right or wrong, I used the analogy of a puppet master (you know, those old-time puppeteers who controlled the puppets by pulling on strings connected with their hands and feet). I stated to him that the role of the p-manager was not really much to complete things, but alternatively to make sure that things got done. P-managers are like information hubs. They make sure that the right information extends to the proper person at the proper time so that they’ll accomplish a task.
The difference between a p-manager and a project manager may be murky at times. However, I remarked that if the p-manager told the project manager to build a 3-wheeled car, the project manager would be sure that the automobile got built punctually and on budget. However, when the car flopped in the marketplace, it would be the p-manager’s fault because he’d said that the 3-wheeled car was what the entire world needed.
That which was needed here was a brand new way to evaluate product managers. Others have discussed this topic and they’ve focused on having the product’s requirements correct. I believe this is important; however, the p-manager’s job does not end there.
What I told the manager and his team was that a better way to evaluate product managers is to concentrate on the four areas a product manager actually controls. These all have to do with the up-front work of determining what product to create, creating the product, and then ensuring that the item is a success once this has been made.
The four areas include: familiarity with industry, providing a well understood business strategy, empowering the business with product tactics, and directing the creation of product related content. Every one of these areas has a lot of room for individual performance metrics to be created that can be used to judge how well a p-manager does his / her job.
P-managers, exactly like every other employee in an organization, have to be evaluated to be able to determine if they’re carrying out a good job. The problem is that nobody really seemingly have develop a great way of accomplishing this.
P-managers aren’t project managers. Which means that the standard management metrics of delivering an item on a given date and keeping it on budget, don’t really seem to utilize to p-managers.
Just what a p-manager does is more or less all “behind the scenes “.We deal in relationships once we get people to do different things at different times. We’re an information hub that provides the right information to the proper people at the best time.
A much better method to evaluate product managers is to target on the four areas that the p-manager actually controls: familiarity with the marketplace, providing a well understood business strategy, empowering the business with product tactics, and directing the creation of product related content.
The performance of a p-manager may be measured. However, you must be very careful to do it with regards to what a product manager does, not just what a project manager does. After you establish the appropriate metrics to measure your p-manager by, you’ll have the ability to determine exactly how successful your products will be.
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