A time saving approach for product managers — ‘Delegate and Facilitate’
A product manager is always gasping for time. Between the endless meetings, PMs hardly find time to do any strategic work.
This is a question I often think to myself — How can PM’s get back more time for strategic work?
I have been a following number of tactics over the past few years to free up more time for strategic work.
Some of these tactics can be grouped under a common theme — “Delegate and Facilitate”.
In this article, I would delve deeper into the “Delegate and Facilitate” approach and suggest examples on how you too can make it a part of your routine.
‘Delegate and Facilitate’ — What does this mean?
It implies ‘delegating’ more to your engineering, design, marketing , support and analytics counterparts and playing the role of a ‘facilitator’.
*Delegate isn’t used in a hierarchical sense of offloading tasks to people junior to you. It means leaning into your team member’s strengths and letting them own tasks and processes they would be suited for.
Why this approach?
Without clear boundaries, it becomes difficult for product managers to understand what work falls in their domain and what does not.
This causes PMs to take on too much work. Often, these are operations heavy tasks and PMs don’t add much value. Worse, PMs might even impinge on a teammate’s authority and cause resentment.
The premise of the ‘Delegate and facilitate’ approach is simple — A Product manager works with domain experts — engineers, designers, marketers, and support teams. A PM should not try to “own” the work that domain experts can be leveraged for.
How does a PM decide what to delegate?
Well, you keep the core and delegate the rest.
What’s the core?
Core signifies the “core responsibilities” of a product manager. This includes:
i) Talking to customers and identifying user problems — PM should focus on prioritizing the problems that will drive maximum business impact
ii) Observing technology trends to formulate a strategy to build differentiated product capabilities
iii) Aligning the entire team on the problems to be prioritized for development
What’s the non-core?
Any other task that doesn’t fall in the core can be considered non-core. In such tasks, the PMs should try and find team member’s they can partner with, to offload some of these tasks.
What are some examples of ‘Delegate and Facilitate’ approach?
Delegating to engineering
- Engineering lead running the daily standup meetings — PMs can join if they have to review development work or answer some pending questions (Instead, have more 1:1 meetings to build deeper connections).
- Looping in the engineering lead at the design phase — Instead of having a design<>developer handoff, prefer continuous communication between designer and developers. This takes off the burden of making every design and project scoping decision on your own. Engineers bring a diverse perspective and help you take decisions quicker and better.
In addition, resist the temptation to step on the engineering lead’s turf. For example, don’t try to tell engineers on how to build something or how much time something would take to build (let them come up with effort estimates).
Delegating to Design
- Designers doing the initial wireframing — Usually, I do not share wireframes for the features. The primary reason is that it could influence the designer’s approach to the solution. Instead, I focus on articulating the customer problem, sharing customer quotes and driving cross-functional alignment on the problem.
- Designers leading the UX writing process —If you don’t have dedicated UX writers, copy writing might fall on product managers. Designers should take the lead in the UX writing and PMs can review the output (UX writing refers to success/failure communication, zero state communication for features etc)
Delegating to Support
- Support team taking the lead to analyze the support tickets and identify patterns
- Leverage support team to document product behaviour/feature details in help articles/google docs — This frees up time you would spend answering product queries from sales and other customer facing teams.
- Support team can also be a valuable ally for managing product feedback when you don’t have a dedicated product operations team.
Delegating to Analytics
- Product Analysts writing the SQL queries and scripts to fetch data — PMs simply can’t be writing code. You need to convince your company to set up an analytics team to do this. (*with no code tools — if fetching data becomes possible via plain english, then PMs should be game for this)
If you are working at a startup, you might ask — How exactly do I delegate when I don’t have enough people in my team?
I hear you.
At small organizations, PMs do have to do a lot of grunt work.
But the situation eventually changes as your company grows in size. You should be ready to take advantage of these changes.
Until then, try to minimize the time spent on grunt tasks by splitting work with your team members.
‘Delegate and Facilitate’ — How it helps you and the team?
By leaning more into your teammates expertise, you allow workload to be more evenly distributed and build a better team. Also, you don’t want to be the “know it all” who wants to be in-charge of everything.
Besides, you free up time and mental bandwidth to do work that’s your core job.
Conclusion
Letting go is hard.
But product managers do need to get better at the art of letting go unecessary responsibilities. Otherwise, you will keep on jumping from one task to another. This will lead to frustration, disillusionment and unhealthy relationships with your co-workers.
So, its time to take a deep breath and start figuring out what tasks will you “delegate and facilitate”.
References
- https://uservoice.com/blog/delegate-product-management-responsibilities
- https://medium.com/@alexjp/delegating-the-five-impossible-jobs-of-the-product-manager-8afc0ef967ab
- Shreyas Doshi’s post on delegating to your engineering counterparts — Link (Read the comments as well)
