Zen of PM - Getting the team up to speed

Getting the Team Up to Speed

Once you understand the context and are ready to focus on a specific opportunity, your job is to share your understanding with your team. If you are going to be impactful, itis only through sharing your knowledge, ideas, and understanding with yourco-workers. To do this successfully you have to create easily digestible ways for your team to understand the broad landscape and the frame that makes the opportunities clear, demonstrates their value, and provides clear priorities.Effectively communicating this is the key to helping your teammates understand how you got from “Our competitors are beating us and one of the biggest reason sis that they have a better three-year TCO” to “We need to enable customers to deploy our solution in four hours or less,” and why this leap makes sense.

A note of caution here. Do not fall into this classic program manager trap: You gather the information, grok the space, and come back to your team to report, “Hey team,I’ve figured it all out – here’s what we need to do.” Teams HATE that! Instead of following your well researched plan, they’ll probably end up tuning you out instead. We hire smart people and they want to share your understanding, not just hear your conclusions. To be effective, you have to share the context and the thinking that led you from the data to your conclusions before your team is going to get on board. In many cases, the process of sharing this information can actually help shape and refine your ideas… don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the collective brainpower of your teammates!

Recognizing this reality, great program managers take the time to review the information and sources they’ve gathered with their peers and feature teams, highlight key data points, and share their reasoning about how it all connects. Remember, the first role of the program manager is to frame the project in a way that the team can understand and use to set direction and priorities. Your role isn’t handing out decisions, it’s empowering the team with the understanding and shared framework to make these decisions throughout the life cycle of the product.