As the Product Manager (PM), you think that things are going great. You understand the customer pain point you are solving for and have clearly defined your Product vision for the solution. The team moves forward to build the solution but something isn’t right. You keep getting the same questions about things that you assumed were agreed earlier. Most worrying are the questions about why are we doing this in the first place? Eventually, you hit a wall and everything grinds to a halt. What happened?
Misalignment is like driving with the foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. You can work as hard as you want to clarify the details but you can’t make progress. Somebody somewhere disagrees with you and doubt has crept into the project team. You are not fully aligned and now you have to take several steps back to build or rebuild alignment. The detractor(s) can be a project team member like your engineering partner, a stakeholder in a different functional team or a leader in the organization. The only way forward is to align everyone involved on why you are doing the project and what the right solution is. Working Backwards is the process you should follow and this starts with aligning on a document such as the Press Release and FAQ.
The Working Backwards process is designed to drive alignment across the team and stakeholders on the customer pain point and the Product vision that solves the pain. The iterative approach to writing documents like the Press Release and FAQ requires you to meet repeatedly with team members and stakeholders to align on the direction. Alignment is often about trust and believability and the interaction and communication that you drive through the Working Backward process helps you to build trust. Ultimately, the Press Release should be reviewed with everyone up the reporting chain, as high as possible in the organization and with representation from all departments impacted by the new product or feature. Yes, you should align with the CEO if possible.
The goal is alignment but that doesn’t mean consensus. Consensus means everyone agrees with the direction. When aligning on a Product vision it is not necessary to get everyone to agree. Clearly, there are people in the organization that are the ultimate decision makers and those people need to agree. However, it is sufficient to have others who disagree with the direction but commit to it nevertheless in the interests of moving things forward. The key is that this disagreement and commitment is explicit. People need to state their disagreement and explicitly say that they agree to commit despite their disagreement. If you know that someone disagrees with the direction, change the direction or get the explicit commit.
Who do you need to align with? Start with your core team which generally includes an engineering lead, engineering manager and UX designer. Then work through the reporting chain of each team member - VP Engineering, VP Product, VP Design. If you are aligning on a significant new product or feature then keep going to the C-Level - CTO, CEO. Make sure to incorporate feedback after each review to ensure that you bring people along on the journey.
Why is it so important to align with senior leaders? Why can’t the team make decisions autonomously? Building new products and features requires significant investment from the organization. The Product Manager has a responsibility to seek feedback and input from the wider organization on how they are investing the organizations limited resources and is accountable for the impact and results of executing their Product vision. The PM is responsible for convincing others that they have the right solution to the right customer problems. The benefit of alignment is that if the project later hits roadblocks, the PM can go back to the people that they already aligned with to get help in removing roadblocks.
Once you have achieved alignment on the Product vision described in your Press Release and FAQ, you need to ensure that you maintain alignment through the execution and launch phases. Keeping alignment through complex projects requires exceptional communication. You need to communicate clearly and regularly to keep stakeholders informed of progress towards the vision. Goals and milestones need to be explicit and progress needs to be clearly articulated on a regular (weekly) cadence. A regular status meeting should be established where a plan with milestones is reviewed and status updated.
In summary, one of the key responsibilities of a Product Manager is aligning everyone in the organization on priorities, pain points, roadmaps, strategy and Product vision. When it comes to developing a specific new product or feature the PM should follow the Working Backwards process which is an iterative approach to align people around a written document that details the problem being solved and the Product vision. The PM needs to work hard to maintain alignment throughout the development process from ideation to launch.
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